Infamous (9 page)

“Not sleeping again?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” A.J. said again, shaking his head at his mother’s inability to see the glass as anything but half-empty. “I’ll talk to you later.”

He hung up his phone with a snap, and sat in his truck for a moment, wondering where Jamie was—eager to ask him about those diaries. Although how would Dr. Carter know that they were really written by Melody? Maybe there was a sample of her handwriting somewhere, on something that
was
documented. A church certificate she’d signed when she’d married Quinn …

Maybe this was going to be easier than he’d thought.

He turned off his truck and climbed out. Time to find that main production trailer and make sure whoever was costuming the extras gave him boxers. Or else Alison would make him go commando.

Which—although he’d never admit it to Jamie—had a certain undeniable appeal.

For one hair-raising moment, I thought I was in hell.

And then I thought that somehow, in the short time that I’d been gone, A.J. had been in a horrible car accident.

But then I realized that there was only one vehicle burning, and it wasn’t his truck. In fact, the kid’s truck wasn’t the only thing of note that was nowhere to be found.

The entire town of Jubilation was off the map.

Of course, I then realized that
it
wasn’t gone—I was.

Somehow I’d gone off course. I’d thought myself up to Alaska, to Rose’s office, and found out that she was reading an old favorite,
The Small Town Physician’s Guide to Mental Disorders
. It was open. Schizophrenia.

Not exactly the kind of thing I wanted to tell A.J. when he was already in a dark mood, so I’d decided to save my latest prove-the-ghost-is-real effort for another day.

Which is when I thought myself back to A.J.—and found myself here, instead.

There was a dead man in that car. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did.

You don’t get a rule book or an orientation seminar when you return to the world of the living. You just know what you need to know.

One could argue that an instruction manual or at the very least a mission statement could be useful on the journey, but it was not a stretch for me to have to go on faith, so most of the time I got by all right.

When A.J. had asked me how I did what he called
that popping in and popping out bullcrap
, I told him that I just thought about where I wanted to be, and I’d go where I was meant to go.

But this time, something wasn’t working right, because I sure as hell didn’t want to be here.

I didn’t know the dead man, who no longer had a face. But the rest of him was as ornately tattooed as a circus sideshow freak.

Another fellow—tall and dressed in black—was standing back, next to some kind of gas can and a hiker’s backpack. I didn’t recognize him, either. He watched the flames and smoke rise into the cloudless afternoon sky as he spoke on a phone that looked far fancier than the one Rose had given A.J.

“Wayne’s head exploded all over the backseat,” he told whoever he was talking to. “I’m torching the car right now. I don’t know what kind of ordnance that was, but you gotta get me more. It was a mess, but the message was received. The fuckwad crapped his pants
and
pissed himself.” He laughed. “Yeah. Both at once. He’ll get the money. It’ll be the first thing he takes out of his next paycheck. Count on it.”

It was all magic to me—telephones that you could carry around with you and talk to other people, out in the middle
of nowhere, like Kirk with his communicator having a conversation with Scotty back on the
Enterprise
.

The future had truly arrived, but this man, with his long brown hair coming out from its ponytail, and his face sprayed with poor, dead Wayne’s blood, wasn’t any kind of hero from outer space.

As I stood there watching him, he tucked that phone between his shoulder and his ear while he took off his shoes and his socks and his black shirt and dark-colored denims, stripping down to a pair of teal blue briefs.

No doubt his clothes were covered in evidence. Killing a man, even with a gun, is powerfully dirty work.

“It’s not a big deal that she saw us with him,” he said to whomever was on the other end of that phone, adding, “No, no—would you relax? There’s going to be nothing to find. Wayne’ll be a cinder before the car is found.
If
it’s found. I’m on the fucking dark side of the moon. And like I said, his head evaporated. His teeth are gone, and the fire’ll take care of fingerprints. Hold on.”

He put the phone down as he used his shirt to wipe his face, wipe his hands. Then he opened his pack and pulled out a bottle of water and a small towel and used that to wash up, too. He tossed it all—clothes, bottle, towel—into the inferno before picking up the phone.

“I’m back,” he said, then listened to whatever his co-conspirator in a first-degree murder was telling him. He sighed heavily before saying, “If that happens, then yeah. We’ll kill her, too. Does that make you happy?”

I stepped closer to him, because now they were talking about killing
her
. Killing who? I wanted to know.

But I couldn’t hear more than a buzz as the other fellow spoke, then, “Yeah, don’t worry, we’ll make it look like an accident. Look, Jesus, it’s not a problem, Loco, so don’t turn it into one. I’ll call you when I get to Tucson. All right? All right. Be cool. Talk later.”

With that, he hung up the phone and threw it, too, into the fire.

And walked right through me.

“Jesus!” We both said the same thing, at the same time.

I’d moved even closer in my attempt to hear who this Loco was, still trying to hear his end of the conversation, hoping at least for the dead man’s last name—or better yet Mr. Tall-with-a-Ponytail’s name.

Instead, I’d gotten the unpleasant sensation of temporarily cohabitating the same square footage of earth with him.

I could see where it might be nice to do that with a lover who’d been left behind. It felt both hot and cold—at least it did to me. And it tingled and buzzed.

No doubt it had felt as freakishly bizarre to Wayne’s executioner, because he jumped and said, “What the hell …?”

And then he swatted the air around him, but I was well out of reach by then.

In fact, I didn’t dally. I headed back toward Jubilation, homing in on A.J., but taking a slower, more conventional route this time.

You might call it flying, but it’s not quite, because I don’t have a body to use to ride air currents and sail above the ground. It’s more like taking the astral projection scenic route, with the Arizona desert unfolding beneath me.

I paid attention, counting the miles that passed, somehow knowing when they did, aware of the direction that I traveled with a sense of absolute knowledge that would’ve come in handy back when I was alive.

I arrived in Jubilation just as A.J. was stepping out of a trailer, with what must’ve been his costume for tomorrow’s shoot covered with plastic and on a hanger.

He glanced at me as I came in for a landing, but he didn’t break stride, so I hustled to keep up.

“Forty-seven miles outside of town,” I informed him, “due northeast, a car is on fire, with a murdered man named Wayne inside. Lotta tattoos, relatively short of stature, and much shorter now with his head blown to hell. The killer is a tall man, about six foot four, long brown hair in a ponytail, scar beneath his left eye. He was talking on the phone to someone he called Loco.”

A.J. stopped walking and looked at me. “Are you kidding
me?” he said. “Now we’re going to be caped crusaders and fight crime?”

“Hell, no,” I said, laughing at the idea, but sobering up real fast. “No, no, son, that’s not why I told you—in fact, I don’t want you near that man, he’s a bad one, he was talking about killing again, which is why I want him caught. All I need you to do is dial nine-one-one for me and report the fire, and the fact that the man in the car is named Wayne. You don’t need to tell ’em who you are. It can—it
should
be an anonymous tip.” I pointed down the street. “There’s a pay phone outside the Circle K. You can do it from there.”

Hugh finally pulled up outside of Alison’s apartment at ten to four in the morning. She’d been waiting out front in the darkness, tapping her foot, her production bag over her shoulder, cup of coffee in hand.

“You’re late,” she told him as she climbed in on the passenger side of his Jeep, “which means I’m late.” She closed the door behind her. “I’m in—go!”

Gears ground and the Jeep lurched, and because Alison was juggling her coffee with the seatbelt that she hadn’t yet managed to fasten, she spilled nearly the entire supersized cup of hot liquid down the front of her shirt when the stupid, stupid lid came off.

“Ow!” she said. “Hot, hot! Shit!
Shit!”

Hugh braked to a stop, and grabbed a squeeze bottle of water that was sitting in the cup holder—where she should have set her coffee down when she’d first gotten in—and sprayed her.

But the top of his bottle apparently wasn’t on securely either. It popped off and she was hit, first in the face and then in the chest by a stream of icy cold water. It came simultaneously with Hugh’s heartfelt apology and laughter. “Oh, no, I’m so sorry!”

She was drenched, but at least she was no longer in pain. She wiped her face as he continued to laugh. “Sorry!”

“Drive,” she ordered him.

He put the Jeep back in gear, still snickering, but hesitated. “I think you might want to go back inside and change.”

“What I want,” Alison told him curtly, “is to not be late.
Drive.”

He hit the accelerator.

She looked down at herself, surveying the damage, and realized the impetus behind his suggestion. Because her tank top was white, it was now transparent. “Oh,
shit,”
she said.

“You want me to turn around?” Hugh asked.

“No,” she said, digging in her bag. She’d brought a spare cotton button-down shirt, just in case one of the extras needed a change. While it was true that both the head of costuming and the extras wrangler would be on hand, she’d learned it took far less time simply to carry a shirt or two with her.

It was long-sleeved and about the size of a two-man tent, but she pulled it on, exasperated. She always wore overshirts to protect herself against sunburn during the daylight hours. This predawn shoot had been her one chance to be both outside and cool despite the temperatures in the mid-eighties. But it was clearly not to be.

Now to handle her second problem: What to do about her lack of caffeine. “Has craft services been moved up to this location?” she asked.

Hugh looked at her as if she were a moron.

“Stupid question?” she asked as she reviewed the schedule.

“Very. The coffeemaker’s got its own generator,” Hugh assured her. “I don’t think Henry’s slept in four days, and without coffee to mainline, he’d be weeping and babbling.”

“Good to know,” she said, as she pulled her schedule from her bag and reviewed it.

This morning they were filming part of the scene in
Quinn
where Kid Gallagher, after winning the deed to another man’s mine in a poker game, shot the man in cold blood, then heartlessly threw his widow and young children off the property in the middle of the night.

They were filming the final shot of this scene first, taking advantage of the promise of a colorful sunrise. Later tonight
they’d film the first part of the scene—the harsh predawn confrontation between the Kid and the distraught miner’s wife.

A movie’s scenes were usually shot out of order. Somehow the actors coped, but Alison found it disconcerting. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to it.

“I didn’t sleep much last night either.” Hugh glanced at her as he downshifted to make the climb up the trail and into the mountains. “I got an email from Kent. He was sorry he missed me yesterday, and hopes I’m well.”

“He has a lot of nerve.” Alison looked up from her notes. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Hugh said, even though he shook his head. “But I spent the entire night composing the perfect email back to him. Which I ended up not sending because the real perfect response for this situation is silence.”

He was quoting her own words back to her, words she’d said to him just a few days ago, and she smiled. “Ah, grasshopper. You have learned well. My job here is done.”

He pulled to a stop in the parking area that was not quite at the end of the rutted dirt road. Their headlights illuminated what looked like a wagon trail, going even farther up into the hills.

“We’re supposed to walk it, from here,” Hugh told her, reaching into the back to grab a pair of flashlights, one of which he handed to her. “Although, you got the memo, right? With the warning that snakes like to move around before the sun comes up …?”

“Snakes?” Alison repeated, and the word came out a little bit louder than she’d intended. She said it again, more softly this time, but no less intensely.
“Snakes?”
She’d opened the car door but now froze, her right foot in the air as she peered out at the ground. “No, I didn’t get the memo—I’m wearing sandals. Why didn’t I get that memo?”

“That’s not good. You can’t wear sandals out here.” Hugh went around to the back of the Jeep and rummaged around. “Luckily, I have an extra pair of boots.”

He pulled them out and brought them over to her. “Luckily?” she echoed.

They were big and black and rubber—the kind of boots you might be wearing as you came in the kitchen door, shaking rain off your slicker and saying,
Grab the younguns, Ma. Crick’s a-rising
.

Alison’s cell rang. “Why didn’t I get that memo?” she again asked Hugh, who shrugged as she dug for her phone in her bag. It was the intern, Paula, calling, so she opened the phone. “Paula. Perhaps
you
know why I didn’t get the memo
about the snakes!”

“I am so sorry,” Paula said, which was her constant refrain, as Hugh mimed the message that he needed to get moving up the trail. He vanished into the night, the little bastard. “I don’t know, but I will certainly look into it for you. In the meantime, please God, tell me you brought an extra shirt.”