Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (12 page)

“What the hell are we going to do?”

This was going to be the hard part.

“You should go home.”

“A soldier never leaves his unit. My grandfather taught me that much.”

I kept my eye roll on the inside of my skull.

“Look, Jeremy.” I used his real name, the way my father used my first and middle names together when I was in trouble. “We’ve just entered a brand new and very horrible world. One that you shouldn’t be anywhere near. We’re getting you on a flight tomorrow morning…”

PMA pulled out his wallet.

“Why?” I asked.

I soon got my answer. He took out his ID, his driver’s license, and he ran into the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. This time, I allowed my eye roll its moment in the sun as he proudly came strolling out with a smirk firmly in place.

“You can’t put me on a flight, I don’t have ID. You can’t put me in a rental either. I’m sticking with you and on Monday, we’re going to track down that Michael Winters cocksucker.”

“That’s a premature assessment, we don’t know if he actually sucks cocks or not.”

“Ha ha.”

“I can tell you’re not really laughing.”

Was it dinner time yet? I was hungry and desperate to stop this goddamn conversation. I grabbed the empty ice bucket. It was at least time to start drinking.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah,” I said as I headed for the room door. “I figured that out. That’s why I’m going to get ice.”

When I came back with a full bucket, I found him practicing his MAU moves again. At least he kept his pants on this time. I poured myself the first drink and took one of the pain pills. My jaw hurt like a son of a bitch from the punch I had received in the saloon and the rest of my body ached anew from my collision with the floor. Things hurt bad enough just from getting old, I didn’t need all this on top of it.

But I did need to try and find out who Michael Winters was.

I fired up the Chromebook and took a sip of Jack, feeling thankful that General Kraemer had found a way to get that name on paper before Not-Quite Connors used his chest for target practice.

The first Michael Winters that came up on Google was an actor who had been on the TV show
Gilmore Girls
. I wouldn’t mind a weekend with Lauren Graham, but that had little to do with the fact that this wasn’t the guy I was looking for. Nor did I believe the Michael Winters who was an orthodontist in Seattle had any relevance to the many, many,
many
issues at hand here.

The third Michael Winters I found was the one.

Michael Winters had been in the Army Rangers, just like Robert Davidson. He was in Afghanistan and served under General Kraemer and Colonel Allen, just like Robert Davidson. And unlike Robert Davidson, I knew where he was.

Corporal Michael Winters was discharged in 2007, according to army records. A medical discharge. A search on his full name, Michael Malcolm Winters, put him in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I paid the fee to the creepy online service that tells you where everybody including your grandma is and got the address. We’d have to do a little backtracking, but luckily, it would only take five or six hours of driving to get up there. Hopefully, he would actually be there – and not already dead like the other two guys I tried to talk to. In any event, I’d find out on Monday.

For now, nobody knew where I was, not even Howard - and there was no real way for anyone to track me down, thanks to my new David Muhlfelder identity. So I let myself relax a little. It had been a long day and I was just starting to realize how tight every muscle in my body had been for the last few days.  The kid was still practicing his moves, but I thought he deserved an update.

“Monday, we go to Milwaukee.”

“That’s where this guy is? What’s his deal?” he asked in between pants.

“He served with your uncle in Afghanistan. Your uncle was his commanding officer, if I’m reading things right.”

“He must know some shit.”

I agreed. “He must know some shit.”

We didn’t really have a handle on what shit he must know, so we let it go after that.

After I finished my drink, I started to feel human and wanted to continue the trend. So I decided there was no harm in stepping out a little here on the outskirts of St. Louis - I thought the kid and I needed some outside time after what we went through in Branson, some touch of normalcy to maybe relax us a little. I knew I did. I was tired of drinking with a sweaty eighteen-year-old in anonymous hotel rooms.

We found a place where we could eat at the bar, a barbeque place that was pretty good. We ate our ribs, used some wet naps to wipe the sauce off our faces and had some more Jack. I just kept ordering drink after drink and, when the bartender was looking the other way, I would slip some to the kid. Feeling anonymous in a dark restaurant packed with locals made us feel like everything was a little bit better – or at least far removed from everything we’d been through the last few days.

“So,” the kid said, a little tipsy. “We just gonna hang out here in the sticks?”

“You got any other ideas?”

“No.”

He took another drink. He seemed irritated.

“Everything all right, PMA?”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t very convincing.

“What’s the deal? C’mon.”

“You think I’m a joke.”

“No. What makes you say that?”

“You call me PMA. Like everything I’m trying to do is stupid. At least I’m tryin’, dude.”

“I’m sorry, kid, I’m just not much for self-help programs based around acronyms.”

“You think the martial arts stuff is dumb too.”

“I think Andre Gibraltar is kind of dumb, okay? Anybody who screams his sentences has emotional problems or Tourette’s Syndrome.” Of course, as soon as I said that, I remembered the woman I was involved with fit that particular description, but the realization amused more than disturbed me.

The bartender strolled over, wanting to crash our party.

“Andre Gibraltar? That guy’s bad ass, you see his fight last month against Leonardo DiGrime?”

“Shit!” yelled PMA. “That was sick!”

The two of them actually high-fived.

Yeah, when I was a kid, I thrilled to the wrestling exploits of Bruno Sammartino, Gorilla Monsoon and Chief Jay Strongbow. But I figured out it was all fake by the time I was thirteen. Maybe this UFC stuff was for real, but to me, it was the old shit wrapped up in a new tattooed, shaved-head package.

The bartender moved on to a new customer, leaving PMA glaring at me.

“
He
thinks Andre’s pretty cool.”

“He’s a bartender, kid, and you’re better than that.”

“You’re not my dad.” He took a big swallow and almost coughed it up.

Dad. Ah-ha.

“Hey – isn’t he in Chicago?”

“Northern suburbs.”

“You know, Chicago’s kind of on the way to Milwaukee.”

“I know.”

“How long since you’ve seen him?”

“Five, maybe six years.”

The cloud around his head was growing darker and darker. I knew the cloud well. My theory about most men is that to understand them, you have to understand how they were with their dads. It’s called modeling – as you’re growing up, you look to the closest thing around you with a dick and you pattern yourself accordingly. And you do it unconsciously, so that when you start to display that person’s worst qualities, you have no idea where they’re coming from. And that’s when you start to get real angry.

I was no different.

Every kid expects his parents to be perfect and every kid gets angry when they find out they’re not. Yeah, parents deserve some blame for their kids’ shit, but they also deserve some praise for what went right. It really depends on which way the scales tip, when all’s said and done. And some sins are easier to forgive than others - in my case, and probably in PMA’s too.

He went on about the last father-son reunion.

“It was this one time when he came to see my Mom to get some money out of her. He pretended it was about seeing me. But it wasn’t. It was about the fucking money.”

“Did you like your dad?”

He paused, like he wasn’t used to being given permission to answer the question honestly. Probably nobody even ever even asked.

“Yeah, I did,” he finally said. “When he was around, he was funny. He loosened things up, which my mom needed, trust me on that shit. You remind me of that part of him, kind of.”

Okay, I had obviously had too much to drink, otherwise the next words that came out of my mouth would never have made it past the thinking phase.

“Let’s go see him. It’s right on the way and it’ll kill some time.”

His eyes widened. “Nah, dude, he doesn’t want to see me. That’s crazy.”

“You think Chuck Connors shooting at us wasn’t crazy?”

I didn’t want to torture the guy, but I wanted to give him a choice. If he was going to see his dad, I thought it might be good for him to have an emotional Sherpa with him who could help him safely ascend the peak of parental disappointment - and provide the necessary back-up if he should fall along the way. Boy-to-man was a tricky transition and if the right person wasn’t in the mix, it could end in disaster. And, okay, maybe it was the Jack talking again, but I felt like I was right for the job, even if I had never had a son of my own.

Of course, maybe I wanted one of my own.

Maybe I was desperate for a different outcome than the one I had with my own kids. Maybe that’s why I was volunteering for this assignment.

“Let me think about it,” he said. Then he looked at me as if he just discovered something about me he didn’t know until this moment.

“You have kids, right?”

“Two daughters.”

“And they don’t talk to you.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t get that. You’re not that big of an asshole.”

That was the nicest thing anyone had said about my parenting skills in a dozen or so years. But since it was said by someone who had never seen those skills in action, it was hard to get on board with his assessment.

The kid drank from my glass again – just as the bartender turned and saw him do it.

“Hey, hey, enough already. You want me to lose my license?”

The kid gave him a look – then took another gulp from the glass. He was in a mood. And suddenly our happy friendly bartender was too.

“Did you hear me? Put the damn glass down.”

I put an arm on the kid to stop him from perpetuating his idiocy, but the kid pulled it away and drained the glass dry. And that meant all the male bonding between PMA and the bartender was quickly torn asunder.

“Get the fuck out of my place – NOW,” said the bartender said.

“No!” the kid yelled. “I – am – going – to – DOMINATE!”

The bartender pulled out a big flat wooden stick for some counter-domination.

“What the hell is that?” the kid laughed. “I can kick that stick right out of your hand – Gibraltar-style!”

“Is that so?” The bartender smiled and moved down to the part of the bar where there weren’t any bottles behind him. Then he held up the stick and extended it out from his body to make it easy.

“Okay, tough guy. Give it a try.”

“Hey, PMA, time to go…” I said, throwing my CIA credit card on the bar. I turned to the barkeep. “Cash us out here, huh?”

He smiled and shook his head. He wanted a show. I turned and saw the kid had backed up to the back wall. He was actually going to try this.

“Jeremy, NO!” I yelled like he was a dog and I caught him in the petunias.

Too late. He made a running start into his leaping kick.

He flew through the air – and got about halfway over the bar. And that’s where he ran out of momentum.

He basically landed on his dick. A few glasses that sitting on top of the bar flew onto the floor with a crash.

“AWWWWWW FUCK! FUCK FUCK!” the kid shrieked, as he tried to remove himself from the top of the bar, where he was doing the most painful split I had seen in a while.

I turned to the bartender again and tapped on the credit card. “Like I said, cash me out. Put the glassware on the bill if you want.”

But he was laughing too hard to hear me.

Saturday morning.

There was a noise outside the door to our room – loud enough to wake me up.

It was still dark outside and darker inside. I looked around the room. Everything was quiet and still. I decided to try and get back to sleep.

That’s when Not-Quite Connors kicked open the door with his cowboy boot, jumped into the room and landed in a shooting crouch.

The kid got up from his bed, to do what, I didn’t know, but Not-Quite Connors let twelve shots fly and they all went into the kid’s heart, shredding his chest much like General Kraemer’s.

PMA fell backwards onto the floor as the blood poured out of his chest and onto the faded hotel room rug around him, where it formed a rapidly-spreading scarlet stain. I sat up in bed as Not-Quite Connors reloaded and grinned maliciously at me.

But something was different about him this time.

Before, he had been clean-shaven, but now he had some kind of moustache-beard sideburn thing going on. I wondered if I had a move left to make as he finished reloading the rifle. But then, when he was done, he simply lowered the rifle, holding it in one hand at his side.

“He’s all yours,” he said as he quietly turned and left the room.

That’s when I woke up.

The worst nightmares are the ones that start with you waking up in your bed. When it starts in what you know to be real, you’re tricked into believing more deeply whatever insanity that follows. And I believed, Lord, I believed.

I let my head snap back to reality and then turned to see, happily, that the kid was alive and well and sitting in his bed.

But I still heard shooting.

I glanced toward the television. PMA was watching
The Rifleman
.

It was Saturday morning, the time when, every week, one of the cable channels showed four hours or so of old episodes, episodes where the Rifleman would shoot five or six bad guys, then go home and teach valuable moral lessons to his forever-traumatized son, who had already seen more killing at the age of ten than Genghis Khan had after the Mongol invasions. I silently groaned. Not the best way to start our day. The episode cut to commercial as I went into the bathroom for my morning penis draining – and also to rub a cold wet washcloth over my forehead. That nightmare had been a real bastard and it took me a while to shake it.

When I finally came out, the kid turned to me. He was just in his boxers, but sweaty. Apparently I slept through Kung Fu time.

“I thought you might want to skip practice after last night.”

“If I hadn’t been drunk…” he said with a scowl.

“Yeah. Anyway, can we change the channel? I think I’ve had enough of Chuck Connors.”

He stared at the TV a moment.

“It’s so weird watching this show. That fucker in Branson looked just like the real thing. His face was kind of different, but, shit, he was as tall as Lucas McCain,” he said in such a way that I couldn’t help but think that he had a nightmare too. And Lucas McCain, which was The Rifleman’s real name, was indeed tall. Real Chuck Connors was around six foot five, six foot six, if I remembered right. He had at least four inches on me – and so did Not-Quite Connors.

Anxious to change the conversation, especially after my twisted sleep visions, I asked the kid if he wanted to get some breakfast. He was quiet a moment. Then he had a question of his own.

”You really think we should go see my dad?”

In the words of his mother Angela, “Hmmm.”

“Look, kid, my opinion doesn’t count. I know almost nothing about this guy. But maybe seeing him after all this time might help you settle any lingering questions you have about him. Plus I’ll be there - so if he is an asshole, I’ll be available to pin his arms behind his back while you punch him in the stomach.”

That made him laugh. I didn’t make him laugh often, but when I did, it was golden. Yeah, I thought he should go, but I felt a little guilty for it, only because I had realized somewhere in the middle of the night that his dad probably knew a little bit about Robert Davidson – after all, he used to be his brother-in-law. Since any information about the guy was scarcer than a temperature below eighty degrees during a Miami August, I wanted to talk to anybody who could maybe fill in a few blanks. I hoped I wasn’t encouraging PMA to have a reunion with Dear old Dad just for that. It was hard to sort shit out when everything was all mixed up in a ball.

“We should go,” he said, nodding to himself.

“It’s your call. One question - do we know where the fuck he is?”

“Yeah, I Googled him on your laptop.” Pause. “He’s got a gallery. In the Chicago Arts District.”

A gallery? Really?

The show came back on the TV. The Rifleman was confronting some shady-looking dude in a bar. And then he said the magic words…

“If anything happens to the sheriff, you answer to me.  I don’t care where or when or how, you answer to me.”

The kid looked at me like lightning was parting his hair. Except for the part about the sheriff, that’s exactly what Not-Quite Connors had said to me in Branson. It was an easy guess that the psychopath was a big fan of the show – now we knew just
how
big of a fan.

I grabbed the remote and turned off the set. There were enough bad vibes in the air.

It was about a four-hour drive to Chi-Town, so we grabbed some breakfast at a nearby Denny’s for old time’s sake and hit the road. I was at the wheel, since, at the moment, the kid’s license was working its way through the St. Louis sewer system. I felt a little better, so I only popped one pain pill instead of two that morning. My jaw was still really sore, but I could deal with that. Besides, I wasn’t expecting any surprises for the time being. If I could get Not-Quite Connors and his newly-acquired facial hair out of my subconscious, I might even be able to feel good.

I thought about calling Jules, who was probably bouncing off the walls at either her place or mine this weekend. I had told her I’d be gone a day and it was rapidly turning into a week - plus I suddenly had a new name and no way for her to get ahold of me. Her surgery was still more than a week away, so I had to figure this would all be resolved one way or another by then.

PMA was quiet for a long time. Then, he started talking.

“I remember him teaching me how to paint.”

“Your dad.”

“Yeah. I was really young, six or seven. He showed me how he mixed the oils and everything. But I didn’t have the talent for it. I couldn’t draw a straight line. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to me after that.”

“That was about him, not you. Trust me. Everything my brothers and I did disappointed my dad, because everything in general disappointed my dad. He looked for disappointment the same way a cat looks for tuna. Your mom treat you okay?”

“Yeah. But she’s always pissed off about something.”

“I can see that.”

We drove on a little bit.

“You’re divorced, right? Did you ever get remarried or anything?”

“No, but I have a….a friend. A singer who can’t sing.”

“Why not?”

“Her vocal cords got fucked up. She’s having surgery Tuesday after next. I’m supposed to get back home and nurse her back to health.”

He stared straight ahead at the endless interstate.

“Maybe she’ll have to nurse you back to health.” He wasn’t joking.

“10-4, good buddy,” I replied because I sometimes said very idiotic things when I wanted to cover up the fact that I was shitless.

The Chicago Arts District was a collection of lofts, studios and galleries near the lower west side of Chicago. A hundred years ago or so, an immigrant family ran a dairy in this neighborhood. When the area fell victim to urban decay, one of the offspring began installing galleries as a way to turn things around. The whole thing had worked out so well that entire blocks were now devoted to artistic pursuits. Not the kind that I could pursue, because I’m worse than the kid. I not only can’t draw a straight line, I can barely draw a crooked one. When I was a boy, I tried to copy Beetle Bailey cartoons until my fingers hurt, but sometimes pain does not beget great art - or competent Beetle Bailey knock-offs.

Of course, from what I heard from the kid, his dad was hardly Rembrandt either – which is why it was hard to believe he had his own gallery. To me, he seemed the type who would have conned some heiress into marrying him and whisking him off to a sleepy Caribbean beach town. But maybe we had all underestimated the talent of A.J. Longetti, father of Jeremy and ex-husband of Angela. Maybe he had found his groove.

We parked on Halstead, the street where the gallery was located, and walked up the sidewalk looking for his address. It was a charming neighborhood, filled with renovated brownstones and young hipsters swarming coffee shops. I felt out of place – but the funny thing was, so did PMA, who seemed somehow both younger and older than his peers. On the younger side, he didn’t quite know how to connect with his peers, probably because he was an only child and never had siblings around to shake him out of his own head. On the older side, he carried too much of the burden of his lineage with him.

“This is it,” said the kid. And he was right. We were at what was labelled The A.J. Longetti Gallery, a very small space in a building filled with tiny start-up galleries. Longetti’s storefront was different from his neighbors’, however. Like the late, great Pancho’s Tacos back in Washington D.C., this gallery had its windows covered so you couldn’t see inside from the street. It didn’t take long to find out why – just the length of time it took to open the door and have a quick look.

Incredibly and ironically, the very type of art that had caused the demise of A.J. and Angela’s marriage was now the source of A.J.’s success. Yes, the walls were covered with large framed photos of naked women with painted torsos. There was one on her side with her back to the viewer – she had the Chicago River flowing down through her ass. There was a version of the one PMA had described to me, with the fruit bowl on her stomach and her breasts as the apples – looked like McIntoshes. There was another model bent over, with the elephant mascot from the Republican Party on the right side of her ass and the donkey mascot of the Democrats on the left. And then there was the one cosmic cutie who had the Crab Nebula expanding out of her vagina.

I was surrounded by below-average art attached to above-average female bodies.

So far my favorite was the one featuring two female butts side-by-side illustrating the four stages of the butterfly’s life cycle, one stage per cheek. Now there was a pupa I could get into.

The kid and I exchanged a bewildered glance that was interrupted by angry shouting from the back corner of the gallery. A small brown-haired and immaculately groomed woman who could’ve passed for Helen Gurley Brown’s younger, thinner (yes, I said thinner) sister was loudly abusing a bald and spectacled forty-year-old man in black slacks and white shirt whose posture seemed to be trying to project authority.

“This is ART. Who the HELL are YOU to say it’s PORN?”

The posture wasn’t getting the job done.

“Do you KNOW how much MONEY I have? Do you KNOW how long I can keep you in COURT?” she continued as he backed up against the wall.

I turned to the kid. “I think your dad has a new girlfriend.” He nodded as if he had already figured that out.

The bald four-eyed man hurried past us on his way out the door, while the woman glared at us as if we were working for him.

“An artist MUST be ALLOWED to SHOW HIS WORK!”

“I’m not arguing,” I offered.

She approached me and softly put a hand on my arm. I looked at her face up close and tried not to shudder. Maybe I was wrong on that younger part - her face looked like an ancient chimpanzee’s with skin so overloaded with Botox that it resembled the kind of plastic they used to make Barbie’s skin. 

“I am sorry. That gentleman is the landlord of this gallery. First he made us paper over the windows, now he is saying this sort of work doesn’t belong in an environment that’s devoted to serious art.” She wound her anger back up and let it fly. “And WHO is HE to determine what is SERIOUS art???”

That’s when the artist himself, A.J. Longetti, stepped in from the back room. He was small and squirrely, with a shaved head and olive-colored skin, wearing a NO FEAR t-shirt, cargo shorts and sandals.

Oh, and lest I forget to mention, weird facial hair. The kind I had seen in my nightmare. It wasn’t a good omen that it was on his face instead of Not-Quite Connors’.

“Wanda! Wanda, Wanda, Wanda! You are a WARRIOR PRINCESS!”

A.J. hurried over to the woman’s side, bent her back over and shoved his tongue down her mouth. She giggled as though she were seventeen and just got asked to the prom. He released her, then she straightened up and smoothed back her hair, which hadn’t been disturbed in the least due to the ten pounds of hair spray holding it in place. Then she turned to us.

“A.J., these two…”

A.J. cut her off. He was at least a good enough dad to recognize his son.

“Jeremy?”

He gave the boy a giant hug.