Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (24 page)

Even Herman was like, what the fuck?

“I can’t do it anymore,” Robert almost whispered, as he continued walking towards us. “I can’t.”

It was a nice sentiment, it was the timing I was questioning.

Herman got up on his knees, rifle in hand. He had enough bullets in it to do the job. Then he got up onto his feet with a grunt, reflecting the physical strain. The blood from the wound I had given him was started to seep through his shirt. He acted like it wasn’t happening. He aimed the rifle Robert’s way with a sinister smile.

“Then leave the killing to me, Robbie. I’m happy to do it.”

“You always were,” said Robert, tossing his gun to the side.

“We were the elite,” said Herman with a touch of pride. “Our fathers were the elite. You destroyed it.”

That’s when I saw the kid coming up behind Robert and picking his discarded pistol up off the ground. I couldn’t yell at him to stop or I would have given Herman another target. Fucking PMA, why couldn’t he stay out of this shit?

“We were SICK FUCKS,” replied Robert, continuing to walk forward, leaving the grass of the park for the pavement. “Sick fucks killing for the sake of killing. I can’t sleep because I see their faces at night. Every night. The faces of the people we killed.”

“Allow me to end your suffering,” Herman said with dripping sarcasm.

He raised his rifle.

“Go ahead, Herman!  Blow the rest of my face off!” Robert shouted back at him.

I clenched the pistol in my pocket. I wasn’t so crazy about killing either, especially shooting a guy in the back. Like Herman, I had watched too many bad Westerns.

“Robert, duck!” PMA yelled. “I got him!”

Oh Jesus.

Robert turned, but he didn’t duck. He yelled at the kid, “PUT IT DOWN!” and blocked the kid’s shot, so the only thing he could hit was his uncle. The two of them started shuffling around, with the kid trying to get around Robert and Robert blocking him every time.

“Jeremy, you don’t want to do this!” exclaimed Robert.

“Somebody has to do this!” was the kid’s response.

“Not you!”

The whole thing was infinitely amusing to Herman, who actually chuckled. Which left it up to me.

“Herman, I still got a few bullets here,” I said to his back. “Put down the rifle.”

Herman, aiming straight at either Robert or the kid, I couldn’t tell, simply said “Fuck you,” and slammed down the rifle’s lever.

And then came a big surprise, Herman’s second bad one of the night.

The gun barrel blew up.

Herman screamed in pain – his face had powder burns and the end of the rifle barrel was split apart like a noisemaker. And I realized what had happened. Herman’s rifle was shoved in the mud when he fell – and the end of the barrel was stuffed with wet dirt. Which blocked the shot and blew up the end of the rifle. 

Herman, momentarily blinded, staggered back, spewing venom.

“You’re a fucking coward, Davidson! A fucking pussy, your father fucking knew it! A fucking pussy bitch!”

Robert wasn’t having it. He shrieked some animal war cry and ran at Herman, who was blindly backing up against the sea wall. Robert ran into him with such force that they both fell back over the fence, down the embankment and into the flooded East River, which was raging like the Mississippi.

PMA came running down the hill, falling a couple of times in the watery mess, getting right back up and barreling down the watery walkway to the edge where the two men had fell.

He looked down over the sea wall for a while, then turned back to me.

“They’re gone. I don’t see them.”

Then he looked me over.

“Are you all right?”

I asked him, “What do you think?”

My apartment had become a hospital ward.

There was me with my broken leg in a cast and there was Jules with her bandaged head. Yeah, the good news was I didn’t get her killed or even brain-damaged, she was going to be all right. I could tell nothing was wrong with her head just by watching her dance between being pissed off at me for luring a tomahawk-wielding maniac into the building and being giddy about having a great story to tell on Facebook.

Our nurse? PMA. I paid him to stick around and help out for a few weeks, even though I think he would have done it for free to avoid going home. It wasn’t good with him and his mom, especially after what had happened in the aftermath of the events in Lighthouse Park.

As I had laid there by what was left of the lighthouse, soaking in the flood waters and waiting for the EMTs, I wondered what story I was going to tell to explain all this. And I went back to John Ford, the General’s favorite filmmaker and my father’s. I knew exactly how he would have handled this plot development.

He would have me pretend that I didn’t know Robert Davidson had just been killed for the first time. Instead, I would tell the cops that the dead man who had washed ashore on the Queens side of the East River next to Herman Wright was Richard Kurtz, an operative who worked alongside Herman at Dark Sky. Why not? Andrew Wright no doubt had Kurtz’s identity planted in the intelligence files just for this happenstance. So I could preserve the lie that Robert Davidson was a war hero who had been dead for a decade. After all, America needs its myths to continue to grow and thrive.

But I called bullshit on the whole idea.

When you don’t tell the truth in situations like these, you institutionalize deceit and corruption as the norm. You perpetuate the illusion, like the government tried to do with Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, that war is always glorious and heroic, that there is no down-and-dirty side, that military purity is, in fact, pure, when in fact war is a bloody, messy business that can’t help but get sidetracked into savagery.

I wasn’t going to be the guy to prop up the lies that had already caused so much chaos and death.

So I told the cops that Robert Davidson was, until a short time ago, alive and well and had escaped from the Dark Sky compound. I told them that Herman Wright, son of the king of the spooks, had come here to kill him as well as me so we would keep our mouths shut. Of course, the kid backed up everything I said. When the authorities verified he was the General’s grandson, that certainly helped.

The resulting national headlines and internet chatter did the damage Andrew Wright feared. Congress put a temporary hold on Dark Sky’s funding until a full investigation into their activities could be completed. Now that the beast had been dragged out into the light, now that they knew that Wright’s psychotic son was a part of the murder spree and had personally killed General Kraemer himself, they could no longer turn a blind eye. So Andrew “Uncle Andy” Wright was forced to resign from his DOD position and disappear into the shadows for a very lonely, sad and disgraced retirement.

And all of that becoming public knowledge caused Angela Davidson to feel deeply humiliated and betrayed – by her own son and by me.

She didn’t understand that we were doing her a favor. That the only way to shake off a family legacy that, in the end, was more destructive than productive was to break the cycle and be who you were meant to be, rather than who your forefathers and/or your foremothers wanted you to be.

Robert Davidson had finally found the strength to break his cycle when he heard his father was dying. He broke out of the Dark Sky compound and drove one of the base’s trademark black SUVs night and day to get to Virginia Beach, to try and have a final reconciliation with the General before it was too late. Unfortunately, when he arrived, the old man was already sinking into his final coma - and, when Angela told him PMA was with me, he knew we would both be targeted before the ink on the death certificate was dry. That’s when he probably realized there was no second chance for Robert Davidson - and that’s when he came to Roosevelt Island to protect us from whoever was coming after us.

What he hadn’t expected to do was save his nephew from beginning his adulthood with blood on his hands. It was a sacrifice that maybe brought him some peace at the end, because he had freed the kid to live his own life the way he wanted to. Jules liked PMA and spent a lot of time talking things through with him, which was good, because he needed some counseling from someone who could hold a touchy-feely conversation, which left me out. And, I have to say, she gave him good advice when she wasn’t calling all the other members of his family fucking assholes. Go to college in the fall, she told him. Go do what you want to do. And maybe dump all that Andre Gibraltar crap in the garbage.

Break the cycle.

I had to do the same. I had to let go of all the past damage that involved Allison and the girls. I wasn’t perfect, but Allison had made an extra effort to keep the kids united against me and she was very good at it. Andrew Wright had done me a perverse favor of sorts by forcing me to look it all with cold, clear eyes and realize everything that happened was because I had been too young and dumb to make a good choice when it came to women. I had lost all my money and almost my mind trying to make things as right as I could without staying married to her, and I had come up empty. It was time to move on. 

Which is why I was allowing myself to be happy with Jules for maybe the first time ever. It was a good time for it. As her vocal cords healed, she was getting more and more excited. She tried singing a few notes here and there and said she hadn’t sounded that good since she was twenty. She was working on getting a gig next month and then, she boasted, she would show me what fucking singing was all about. I told her from what I had heard coming out of her mouth, she better start practicing a lot more. Then she told me to hop off her tits and leave her alone.

Our love was here to stay. 

As for my future, I decided I should take advantage of my recent publicity blitz and expand my client list beyond…well, just Howard. So I was studying for the test to get my Private Investigator license. I could no longer dabble in the self-defeating business – I needed to try and be a grown-up at the age of 58. Jules was all for it as long as nobody else with a tomahawk showed up at my place.

To apply for the P.I. license, however, I needed to get a reference – so I gave Howard a call after my interview on
The Today Show.
I began by asking him if I looked a little less pale on the boob tube. He was shocked to hear from me. He had it in his head that I would never talk to him again after Andrew Wright forced him to knuckle under to the notion of fucking me over. I told him I understood and I felt the weight fall off his back by the way his voice lightened. I didn’t feel wonderful about what had happened, but I was willing to let the damage heal over time. We always had a complicated friendship, but it was a friendship and it would endure.

And besides – like I said, I needed the reference.

As my leg healed, I did my P.I. homework while cable news played in the background. As usual, there was a lot of sound and fury about how we should put some troops in the latest Middle Eastern problem country and straighten shit out, even though it seemed to always be the worst possible solution to what was essentially tribal warfare that had been going on for thousands of years. It wasn’t our culture, it wasn’t our right and it always made things worse.

And that brought me back to John Ford, who sometimes did get it right. I remembered the scene General Davidson had been watching when I had my one and only meeting with him, where soon-to-be-retired cavalry officer John Wayne and Native American elder Pony-That-Walks agreed on the idea that old men should stop wars, not start them.

Unfortunately, it was still an idea whose time had not come. But maybe, someday, when I looked at my nice new silver watch, it would be that time. 

Max Bowman will return in

Blue Fire

A missing comic book genius. An all-powerful hallucinogenic designer drug.

Max Bowman is haunted by both of them – and he just might lose his mind as a result.

When Max takes on the mission to find the long-lost creator of cult superhero Blue Fire, he ends up secretly dosed with a chemical that upends his sanity just when he needs it the most. Now he’s got to contend with zombies on the Upper East Side, a cult run by a clueless pawn, a hipster rapist who knows her way around a knife, a secret CIA spook program left over from the Cold War and powerful old enemies who are out to destroy him – all while trying to keep his mind from crashing and burning for good.

The old comic book superhero used to say, “For good to be purged of evil…Blue Fire must endure.” But now it’s Max Bowman who must endure – and he’s as far from a superhero as you can get.

-------

Blue Fire is coming soon – get the latest updates and notification of release date by liking the Max Bowman Facebook page at
www.Facebook.com/MaxBowmanBooks
.

About the Author

Joel Canfield is a ghostwriter, screenwriter and just plain writer who has written many nonfiction bestsellers. This is his first work of book-length fiction, if you don’t count the three novels he wrote in his twenties that he set fire to a long time ago. He lives with his wife and occasional writing partner Lisa Canfield and dog Betsy in New York, New York.