Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (7 page)

They flipped by in order like a slide show...

The big house in the middle erupting into a giant ghastly fireball.

The sky filling up with giant toothpicks, which I quickly realized were all that was left of the house.

A rusty metal mailbox with an American Eagle on it landing on the hood of my car with a huge thud, leaving an equally huge dent.

A black SUV smashing savagely into the passenger side of my car like a heat-seeking missile.

A grinning nasty face, a face way too happy considering what was going on, behind the wheel of the SUV ramming into me. And a face that was oddly familiar.

My car flying around from the impact until it came to a stop facing the opposite direction of the way it had originally been going.

My airbag deploying as everything went black, my last conscious thought being that the grinning horrible face looked exactly like that of…Chuck Connors.

Chuck Connors?

In the words of Jules Nelson, “FUCK WHAT FUCK FUCK FUCK?”

I woke up in the ambulance, which was tearing down the state road with its siren blaring. I moved my hands and feet to make sure everything was still in one piece.

The EMT guy was looking at me in confusion.

“Chuck Connors?”

“You saw him too?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t see no Chuck Connors. You woke up and said Chuck Connors. Who is Chuck Connors?”

“The Rifleman,” I muttered. Wasn’t it obvious?

“The what?”

“Didn’t you ever watch
The Rifleman
as a kid? Lucas McCain?”

“No offense, mister, but I weren’t no kid when you were a kid.”

I still felt the heat from the explosion. “What happened to that house?”

“Only word I got is they think it was some kind of gas leak. Shame, old army guy and his wife both got killed.”

That woke me up.

“You was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But how’d your car get so banged up?”

“Nobody got the guy?”

“What guy?”

“Chuck Conn…never mind. Nobody else was around when you pulled me out?”

“No sir.”

“Chuck Connors?”

The local Booneville lawman was probably as old as me and sported a long grey moustache over his craggy face. His gut hung over his belt to such an extent that I was pretty sure he had even less fun shopping for pants than I did.

“Yeah,” I said, “The guy whose SUV hit me looked exactly like Chuck Connors.”

“
The Rifleman
?” he said in disbelief. Thank God I was with someone from my generation. “He’s gotta be dead by now, huh?”

‘Yeah,” I said, sitting up on the examination table. I was a little banged up but nothing serious, according to the very young doctor that had checked me out earlier. I pushed back at Doogie Howser and declared that surely I had a concussion from the car crash or the blast, but Doogie said no, I must have fainted, no head injuries. I guess, emotionally, I just was a delicate flower after all. Now the doctor was gone and the sheriff wanted to talk to me.

“So you’re telling me a guy who looked the Rifleman deliberately banged into the side of your car just as the house blew up.”

“That’s what it felt like.”

“That don’t make sense. Why would this man do such a thing? Especially in the middle of that horrible explosion. Most likely he was panicked and lost control. Most likely.”

He nodded to himself. He solved everything in his head and that was good enough for Booneville.

“But he took off.”

“Well, he was probably as scared as you were.”

“Who says I was scared?”

“Doc said you fainted.”

I was leaking manliness every second I stayed there. Especially since I was wearing this stupid paper patient gown from which my ass could instantly detect which direction the air conditioning was blasting from.

“What were you doing down here, anyway?”

“Was going to visit Colonel Allen.”

“Good man. That was just a damn shame. Moved back here a few years ago after serving his country. His family was from around here originally, y’know. Gas Company’s got some explaining to do.”

He sat down and I think he farted. Maybe he was focusing too much on gas.

“Well,” he went on, “Thanks for talking to me. Just wanted to see if you noticed anything unusual while you were driving up there. Besides Chuck Connors.”

He shook his head and smiled. And remained seated there, like he was waiting for someone to build a Waffle House around him and bring over a cup of coffee.

“I wanted to get dressed?” I eyed my pile of clothing over on a small table.

He got the message and got flustered. “Oh. Oh!  I am sorry, I’ll get out of your hair, Mr. Bowman.”

“Before you do,” I said as he struggled to get up and I walked over to my stuff, “I’d like you to let me know if you find anything out about exactly what happened with the house.”

“Or if I see Chuck? Hey, you know they still show a whole bunch of those episodes on one of the cable channels, on the weekend, I believe. He was a big guy, huh? You know he played pro baseball and basketball before Hollywood?”

I yanked out a card from my wallet and gave it to him. “Yeah, I did.”

He read the card. “Lost and Found. Max Bowman.” He looked up. “You some kind of detective? Like Jim Rockford?”

“Sort of. I used to be with the CIA.”

All that fainting stuff washed away with that disclosure. Now he was looking at me like I was some sort of ancient Babylonian God.

He leaned in with a whisper. “They didn’t blow up the house, did they?”

“No, sir, I don’t believe so. Please hang on to the card though, okay? In case you find out something?”

He nodded solemnly. And stood there staring at the card for a few centuries.

“I still need to get dressed.”

“Oh! Yes, yes, of course, have a good day, Mr. Bowman.”

He was gone and in another minute or two, so was I.

I was awake.

If I had been asleep for the past dozen years, well, the extended nap was over. My eyes were wide open and my brain was on fire. That’s because the house blowing up and Chuck Connors ramming me from the side a few hours ago were far from the scariest parts of what was going on.

What was truly terrifying was realizing how closely someone had to be monitoring me for those two things to happen at the exact moment I arrived there.

Whoever was behind this obviously had to know where I was going the whole time. But that was something I hadn’t told anyone, not Howard, not Angela, not the General, nobody. True, Jules had texted me the addresses out of my computer, but she didn’t strike me as the “traitor within” type. Besides, again, whoever was tracking me had to have known
exactly what time
I would show up there. I don’t think Chuck Connors was sitting there for days on end with his motor idling.

So how would someone know all those little details?

There were three ways and they all related back to Mr. Barry Filer. Which meant I had to destroy those three ways and do it quick.

First, the burner phone he gave me to call him. It probably had tracking spyware built into it so my location was always an open secret, even when I turned it off at night. That’s how good that shit was these days. So, when the rental company delivered my newest replacement vehicle to me in Booneville, I placed the burner behind the back left tire of the car and backed up over it. Then I ran the car forward over it and then backed up over it one more time. I put the contents in a Ziploc bag, sealed it up and threw it in a dumpster outside the Quick Mart.

The second thing giving away my movements was my new and beloved endless benefactor, the credit card. It, of course, created an instant paper trail of where I had been and what I had been doing there. I drove north back to Lexington, where I stopped at the first big national bank branch that I could find, CitiChase Wells Fargo Bank of America. I parked, went in and withdrew as much cash as the card would allow. That turned out to be two grand. Then I left the bank, ripped my beloved new credit card in two, wiped a couple of tears and threw it into a sewer grating outside the bank.

Call it a shitty Viking Funeral.

The third and final thing was the flash drive. I called Jules at the office where, by this time, it was close to quitting time for her.

“It’s me,” I said.

“OHMIGODOHMIGODOHMIGOD!”

Pause on my end.

“It’s still me.”

“GET EXCITED, BOZO!”

“I think I’m excited enough after what I’ve been through.”

“No, no, no, moron! Tuesday after next! There was an opening! I scheduled the surgery!”

Pause on my end.

“Is that okay?” she finally asked. “Please tell me it’s fucking okay, please, please, please.”

“Well, I hope it is.”

Pause on her end.

“HOPE??? Oh, FUCK me in the ass if we’re down to hope!!!”

“We don’t do anal, remember? Look, I need you to do something important for me and no, it doesn’t mean you get a third nice dinner.”

“Talk about a preemptive strike.”

“You need to go to my apartment after you get off…”

“And how do I get off without you here?”

“You go to my place, you go into my office, you unplug the desktop computer and you pull out the flash drive that’s sticking out of the front.”

“Sounds real exciting so far.”

“Then you take that flash drive and you physically destroy it. Use the hammer I have in that drawer in the kitchen, whatever, smash the fucker…”

“I’ll pretend it’s your penis…”

“Then go out and throw the pieces in the East River.”

“You know it’s not a river.”

Oh, here we fucking go again.

“It’s a saltwater tidal strait, everybody who ever made a map should be fucking ashamed of themselves, just watch the way the water moves, the way the direction completely CHANGES day-to-day, in no way, shape or fucking form is THAT fucking slice of shit-ridden water…”

“Jules…I’ve heard this before and I don’t have time to hear it again.”

Pause on her end.

“Is it really this bad?”

“I gotta go – just promise me you’ll take care of this.”

“I take care of everything, cowboy.”

“I know.”

I said a fond goodbye and hung up.

The flash drive - that’s what really got me. Boy, had I been a stupid son of a bitch. A whole flash drive with only one itsy-bitsy document on it, what the fuck did I think that was all about? No doubt it also contained more hidden spyware, which, when I shoved it into my USB slot, installed itself into my home computer and transmitted everything that I did with the PC over the internet back to whoever was watching me. Which meant they could see the document Jules had opened at my behest and see which two addresses I was planning to visit. By this point, they had also probably copied every single file on my desktop, not that there was anything all that exciting on it. It may have been like closing the barn after the horses got out, but I wanted the thing out of my computer because I didn’t want to take any more chances. It was obvious I didn’t have a real big margin for error moving forward.  As a matter of fact, I needed to lower the odds against me and that would require some heavy-duty help.

With my new rental car, my third so far on this trip, I drove around the city until I found what very well could have been the last remaining pay phone in Lexington – outside a dilapidated 7-11. I used it to make a collect call to Howard’s office on his direct line.

“Yeah?”

Thank Christ he was there.

“Howard. Me.”

“A collect call? You can still make those? Where the fuck are you?”

“Are we on a secure line?”

“You’re asking
me
?  Remember where I work? I’m always on a secure line. What’s going on?”

“A lot.”

I didn’t want to tell him about the explosion. With any luck, nobody knew about it yet, since Booneville wasn’t exactly at the center of the media universe.

“Such as?”

“I don’t want to say too much, but I need a big favor. Remember what we did for Jerry Mendelsohn back in 2002 or so?”

“Yeah.”

“I need that done for me. Like yesterday.”

A pause.

“Jesus, that’s a big ask. I don’t know. You’re not…”

“Howard, this is serious in ways you can’t imagine.”

He sighed.

“Let me see what I can do.”

“I need it in the morning.”

“Jawohl, mein fuhrer. I’ll send a courier.”

“Perfect. Tell him to meet me…”

I looked down the street. I saw a familiar yellow and red sign.

“…at the Denny’s on East High Street – Lexington, Kentucky. I don’t know the address, but there’s probably just one. Nine a.m. tomorrow. Can your courier make that?”

“Yeah. He’ll make it.”

“Nothing to anybody about talking to me or where I am. The courier shouldn’t even know my name.”

“What the hell is this about?”

“As usual, I wish I knew. But you have to do one more thing for me.”

“Okayyyyy…” The “y” trailed down to the lowest possible note on Howard’s scale. That meant he was worried about how deep
he
was getting into my shit.

“I’m not fucking around, Howard. You know me. I don’t hit the panic button often.”

“All right, all right, just fucking tell me.”

I fucking told him.

When I was done, I went to a nearby CVS and bought a small pad of paper and a pen, along with a bottle of Coke Zero. I wrote down all the numbers that I might need that were stored in my iPhone, then I did to it what I had done to Mr. Barry Filer’s burner, just in case they were somehow tracking my personal phone too. Losing that iPhone hurt worse than losing the credit card. I had three Words with Friends games going with Jules that would never get finished.

Oh well. That bitch always won anyway.

I returned the rental and took a cab to an Embassy Quality Express Whatever Suites near the Denny’s I would be visiting tomorrow morning. I checked in with cash and a phony name. I unlocked the door to the room, entered with my Banana Republic shopping bags, sat down on the bed and exhaled. It had been a long day filled with unwelcome surprises, including the deaths of two people I never even got to meet. But it was just about over. The sun was going down and I had done everything I could do before the courier arrived tomorrow morning. Since my body was still aching from the crash, I took a few of the pain pills the doctor in Booneville had prescribed to me, washed them down with some Jack, laid down on the queen bed and watched half of a bad movie on HBO before I finally fell asleep.

Thursday morning.

I woke up at seven-thirty, shocked that it was that late and I had slept that long. I hadn’t even had dinner. Clearly, my body was screaming for sleep and the pain pills had helped me get it. Now I had to get it together so I could get down to the Denny’s well before the courier did at nine a.m. I pissed, showered, shaved, got dressed and went out the door.

The Denny’s wasn’t all that crowded when I arrived, so it was easy to get a booth with a good view of the door. I had to be ready for whoever walked through it, since there was always the chance Howard was a part of the problem, in which case it would be somebody a lot more hostile than a courier. I hated to think like that, but I had to. Of course, if they were sending some kind of assassin after me, I wouldn’t be able to do much about it, since I was neither armed nor dangerous. But if I could see him coming, I would at least buy me a few moments to make a run for it. And I’d know where to run. I had checked out where the back door was. 

I checked my nice new silver watch. It was only eight-twenty and I was starving, so I quickly got my order in and the waitress hustled back with my Coke Zero to kick things off.

I’m not a coffee person, maybe because my mother was a full-on addict. When I was a kid, I would find her half-finished cups of java all over the house. She would forget she was working on one cup and immediately pour another, just like a nicotine freak who lights one cigarette before the one he’s smoking burns all the way down. Because of this, everything in our house smelled like stale coffee. When you made a call on our old-fashioned rotary phone, you got a contact high from the fumes left behind on the mouthpiece.

Anyway, that had been the least of her problems and, for that matter, mine.

My body still hurt like a son of a bitch from the shock of the crash. I was wishing I had taken another one or two of the magic pills when I woke up, but I couldn’t chance being groggy with all that was happening. I plowed through my eggs and pancakes in about five minutes flat and waited. I remembered this was what people had to do before smartphones, just sit. And sit. And sit. All I could do was scope out the locals at the other tables and wonder what the hell was next for me.

Nine a.m. finally rolled around and the cavalry was nowhere in sight. General Davidson and John Wayne would not have approved. I tensed up. More and more I was sweating over who was coming to greet me, because I was growing increasingly worried about Howard’s role in all this. He was acting very un-Howard-like, and if he wasn’t on my side anymore, the ground would give beneath me very quickly. I just had to keep reminding myself that I had been deliberately kept alive so far for some reason. Hopefully, that would continue to be the official policy of Whatever-the-Fuck-This-Was-About Incorporated.

It took two more Coke Zeros and another half-hour before I saw the courier come in through the door. And holy shit - this was one scenario I definitely had not considered. He was an assassin, all right. But he didn’t kill humans.

No, this motherfucker killed tires.

I saw him before he saw me, and it was a good thing, otherwise I think he would have spun around and run all the way back home. I stood up, walked over, took Jeremy Davidson by the arm and marched him out of the Denny’s. He looked at me, realized who I was and turned white. Good sign. That meant he had no idea he was meeting me either and he was just fulfilling a random assignment.

I led him around the corner of the Denny’s to a side street with nothing much on it, except some vacant lots and a fire hydrant.  We got about a block down that street, when I stopped and turned to him. We stared at each other a moment. He was too scared to say a word, so I frowned and grabbed the sealed, stuffed package that he was carrying under his arm. I began to tear it apart as he looked on.

“So – you’re CIA now?” I said by way of making conversation.

“Summer job,” he said breathlessly.

“Family connections, I take it?”

He looked away sheepishly. Meanwhile, I got the package open and inside was what I wanted to find. My new name was David Muhlfelder and I had the driver’s license, passport, and credit card to prove it. There was also a new phone with encryption software included and another thousand dollars in cash. Thanks, Howard. I stuffed it all in my jacket pocket and threw the packaging in the trash. The kid was still standing there in his overpriced jeans and t-shirt, looking unsure of what to do.