Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (14 page)

“I’m a little loopy.”

She looked into my eyes. Oh shit. She kissed me. And I let her. It went on for a little bit.

I’m not the best-looking guy in the world, but I wasn’t the worst either. I knew there was something happening between us, but I kept telling myself I was nowhere in her league, that I was imagining things.

But apparently I wasn’t. In the D.C. restaurant, I guess she was serious about me being in her wheelhouse. Normally she’d have an open invitation to mine, but this wasn’t the time or the place – I was already more involved than I should be with the Davidson clan. Plus, I was also in too deep with Jules, who I’m sure, if she were here and realized I had just now gotten to her name in my internal deliberations, would be slapping me so much harder than Angela had that my head would fly off my neck and into a nearby wall.

Which would save her the trouble of strangling me with my own intestines.

When the kiss was over, Angela looked up at me and asked, “I shouldn’t like you, should I?”

She felt good in my arms, but no.

“Let me put you in the bed, Angela.”

I walked her towards the bedroom.

“What are we going to do there?” she wondered aloud.

“Not that. I already have a girl.”

“A singer that doesn’t sing, right?”

“Yeah, but that’s about to change.”

“Is she pretty?”

“She’ll do.”

I gently guided her to a landing position on the bed.

“Am I pretty?” she asked, half-out.

“Too pretty for me. And maybe too young. I’m going to be sixty in a year and a half, you know.”

“So will I…in eighteen...”

Her eyes were already closing. I took off her heels and put some covers over her. She was already gone. She had to have been most of the way there when she kissed me.

It was after two. I found a spare goose down pillow and a blanket in the closet and headed over to the sectional couch for what wouldn’t be a very restful sleep. For one thing, there was this pesky erection I was lugging around with me. I could make that go away, but what I couldn’t stop was the sadness I felt for the lonely woman sleeping by herself in my bed. 

I was getting way too involved with this family. Maybe because I hadn’t had one of my own in too long a time.

“Does Andrew Wright have a limp? Right leg?”

Angela was still in the bedroom and I assumed she was still asleep. Meanwhile, Howard had taken it upon himself to give me a call from his new burner to make sure I hadn’t gotten into any more trouble. He was oddly cheerful.

“I don’t know, but I’ll check it out,“ answered the new, suddenly-helpful Howard. “I also looked into Montana. You said all those SUVs had plates from there? Well, Dark Sky’s corporate headquarters is here in D.C. But they have a training facility in Montana named Black Sun…”

“…in Montana.”

“A couple hours north of Missoula.”

“We used to track a lot of crazies up in that area, didn’t we?”

“Still do.”

“Black Sun,” I wondered. “What’s that all about?”

“Don’t know.”

Pause.

“So nobody’s come after you to try and come after me?”

“Very, very quiet.”

“Thanks for not saying ‘Too quiet.”

“You’re welcome. So – you’re going to Milwaukee tomorrow?”

“That’s the plan. You going to talk me out of it?”

“Not yet.”

How did our talks get so congenial? We wrapped things up and got off the phone.

My Waffle Spa bathrobe and I couldn’t do much until Angela woke up, so I checked out the vintage record player. I had been reading about how all the cool kids loved vinyl these days - me, I just remember the giant scratch that fucked up
Come Together
every time I played Side 1 of
Abbey Road
, rendering an already-incoherent song off-the-charts nonsensical. I really couldn’t fathom what the hipsters were thinking going back to this stone-age technology. Maybe they should give hand-crank phones another whirl while they were at it.

I went through the albums and found one lone Sinatra, one of his last on Capitol,
Nice ‘N’ Easy
– it was towards the end of his magnificent run with arranger Nelson Riddle and featured mostly remakes of old ballads from the Columbia days, but it still went down okay, even though Frank’s voice had lost most of its syrup by then. I put it on and the title track, the only original song, started playing its gentle intro. I started thinking that might make a good song for Jules when she got her pipes back in shape. Which sent a huge wave of guilt crashing over my insides.

I grabbed my special Howard-sent phone and dialed.  And of course, I woke her up. It was Sunday and it was before noon.

“Haah?” she said sleepily. Did I mention she wasn’t a morning person?

“It’s me.”

A beat.

“David…Mal…Mil...Melfinger?”

“Close enough.”

“You’re going to give me a heart attack…where the fuck are you? Let me guess…you can’t fucking tell me.”

She wasn’t awake enough to really build up a good head of angry steam. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen until this call was over because, God knows, I had provided her with enough coal to fire up that particular furnace.

“No, I can’t. But I just wanted to let you know I was okay…”

“Wonderful. By the way, did you want to know if I was fucking okay? Because I’m fucking not. Because my fucking boyfriend is God knows where doing God knows what. Jesus, Max.”

“When I can tell you more, I will. I don’t know who’s listening to what.”

“Well, here’s a question that should be safe. Have you had any more romantic dinners lately?

That’s when Angela decided to come out of the bedroom in the suite’s other provided Waffle Spa Bathrobe and say, in loud clear tones so I could hear her across the room, “I’m going to take a bath!”

I quickly nodded to Angela that she could do anything she wanted, but I was kidding myself if Jules wasn’t going to notice that line of dialogue being shouted at me in a female voice.

“A BATH? Who, pray tell, is taking a GODDAM FUCKING BATH? MUST BE A DIRTY WHORE WHO NEEDS TO GET CLEANED UP!”

“Jules, c’mon, it’s not…”

Call disconnected.

I’d have to fix the damage another day, I couldn’t tell her enough to calm her down, if that was even a possibility. Besides, I had a new distraction to attend to. There was someone else now banging on the hotel room door. Which was just what I didn’t need, another surprise visitor.

I got up and went over to the door, where I again peered through the peephole.

Huh.

I opened the door and PMA hurried in. He looked as mad as Jules sounded.

“I’m done. Done with him.”

Muttering to himself, he walked in a crazed circle around me as I shut the door. Then he stopped and noticed the room.

“Holy shit - how much did this place cost?”

“What happened with your dad?”

Suddenly in a good mood, he heard Sinatra and looked over at the record player.

“Vinyl? Cool!”

I thought about offering the counter-argument involving my old
Abbey Road
album, but let it go. “What happened with your dad?” I asked again.

The kid got angry again. He sat down like a bowling ball falling into foam and laid his head against the back of the couch. After a moment, he told me how yesterday, after I had left, his dad had screamed about all the CIA atrocities committed over the last five decades and how they had basically fucked up the life of everybody in the world. A.J. had a point - the only lives he fucked up were the ones in the immediate area. Anyway, A.J. then made him watch every CIA conspiracy video on the internet and accused the kid of being a tool of the military-industrial complex like his grandfather.

Wanda finally told A.J. to leave Jeremy alone and just spend some quality time with him. But the kid had had it. He went to the guest room after dinner and stayed there. When he woke up in the morning, A.J. was still pissed off. He told the kid that he was his only son and no son of his was going to be a stooge of an imperialist, fascist and several other ists government. The kid ran out of the house and took a cab over here with the few dollars he had left in his wallet.

“Sorry about all that,” I finally said.

“What the fuck,” he answered. “You were with the CIA. You don’t seem like such a bad guy.”

I frowned. “I was glad to get out, Jeremy. To tell you the truth, I was glad to get out. My dad was CIA. He was in at the very beginning, he got into the OSS during World War II. Worked under ‘Wild’ Bill Donovan.  I was raised to be an Agency man, so I became one, and I couldn’t have been more of a fucking idiot. When you build your life based on somebody else’s idea of what it should be, sooner or later it all goes wrong. In my experience anyway.”

“So you’re telling me I’m a fucking idiot.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you what happened with me, okay?”

He took a deep breath and let it go for the moment, as Sinatra asked the musical question,
How Deep is the Ocean?

“Can we get some breakfast? Wanda served some vegetarian crap last night and I’m starving.”

I sat down on the couch near the hotel phone. “Yeah, I’ll order some up. But you should go ask your mom what she wants.”

He gave me a weird look. “My mom?”

Oh. He didn’t know.

I told him about what happened. The mad was back with a vengeance.

“That douchebag called her? He told her where we were?”

He got up and marched over to the bedroom door and opened it.

“Kid, wait, she’s…”

He went inside and a moment later, there was a surprised lady scream. Then there were some words, some very intense words from which I got the mood, but not the substance. The kid came out again after a couple of minutes.

“She just wants some granola and yogurt, with a coffee.”

“I just want you to know nothing happened between me and your mom.”

His only response to that was, “She wants skim milk for the coffee if they have it.”

A half hour or so later, after Angela was done bathing and I was done showering and shaving, we were all dressed and sitting around the lovely round dining table in the elevated portion of the room, enjoying a wonderfully expensive breakfast. Actually, it was more of a tennis match than a meal, as I sat with Angela and PMA on either side of me. They were facing each other across the table, lobbing quick strokes back and forth as they argued in the style of the old Monty Python Argument Clinic sketch.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m
not
.”

“Yes, you
are
.”

“No, I’m
not
.”

“Yes, you
ARE
.”

And on and on.

Angela was demanding the kid come home with her. The kid was insisting he was staying with me. Clearly, it was up to me, New Improved Dad, to be the tie-breaker of our newly-formed dysfunctional family.

“Personally,” I began very carefully, looking at Angela, “I think Jeremy should go home with you. The problem is, he flushed his ID down the toilet, so I’m not sure he can even get on a plane.”

“You don’t know anything, do you?” she asked me in a bitter tone. “All he has to do is fill out a form and provide his address and the last four numbers of his social. TSA will verify his identify and let him through.”

Well, I did know some things, but I didn’t know that.

The kid looked down at the expensively-tiled floor. He had gotten through about half of his steak and eggs and then quit. He knew he was beaten and there was no way to make him feel good about it.

“I can’t believe my fucking father ratted me out.”

“That’s probably the best thing he’s ever done for you, believe me,” Angela quickly responded.

I knew this needed to be over. I was going to miss the kid, but I would be a horrible New Improved Dad if I let him continue on with me.

“You need to go home, kid. Let me deal with this shit alone.”

“Thank you,” Angela said to me without a smile.

“You’re welcome,” I answered with one.

We said our goodbyes outside the hotel as the doorman flagged down a cab for Angela and the kid. Angela and I exchanged a few looks that indicated last night happened, but nothing more. As the cab drove off, I had mixed feelings about it all. I was glad I wouldn’t have to worry about PMA’s butt anymore, but I liked having the company. There weren’t many people I could say that about in the world, because I usually preferred being alone to dealing with others’ ideas of where I should be and what I should be doing. But we worked together well. We were like the poor man’s Batman and Robin, united in a battle for justice against the forces of evil.

We had military purity.

Yeah, I was jumbling up a lot of metaphors, but that was water under the bridge and the fair was about to move on. I went to the valet and gave him the ticket for my car, then dug a five out of my wallet to tip him when he came back with it.

It was time to go to Milwaukee.