Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (9 page)

He nodded and shrugged at the same time. He shrugged a lot when, at the same time, he was agreeing or disagreeing with something. I suppose there was nothing teenagers loved better than to appear noncommittal about things they cared about the most.

“I am fond of him,” he said. “He hasn’t been happy. And he’s been sick. I want to do something for him.”

I walked up to him and stopped a couple inches from his face. I knew he and his PMA weren’t kidding about following me. Maybe I could shake him on the road, but maybe I couldn’t. And I really didn’t want to be worried about what the circumstances would be when he might show up again. Maybe it was better to control the situation. I didn’t know. My head was killing me and I knew I should take some more of those Jesus-sent pain pills. But that would mean I couldn’t drive. The interstate isn’t a good place to go ninety mph when you see three of everything. But he could drive for me. I’d get some rest and some strength back.

I was too weak. The PMA of it all overpowered me.

“Take out your fucking phone.”

He took out the fucking phone.

I told him to text his mother and tell her that Langley was keeping him busy for a few days out in the field, like he suggested. Text her that he wouldn’t be able to call, but he was okay, she shouldn’t worry.

And after I told him all that, I saw the fire light up in his eyes.

He was going with me – and he knew it.

After PMA texted his mom, I also had him call his supervisor at the CIA and tell him I needed him for a few days. Not that the supervisor knew who I was, but you don’t get to know everything when you work at the CIA, especially when you’re only in charge of the couriers. After the kid made the call, I took his phone from him and told him he’d get it back when we split up again. Again, I was taking no chances.

We took a cab to another rental car place, where I’d be getting my fourth vehicle of the trip with my new phony David Muhlfelder credit card. In the cab, I told PMA how Mr. Barry Filer’s flash drive had given away the addresses of the two people I wanted to meet up with and he instantly understood the problem.

“They’re going to know we’re coming.”

PMA was right on the money, but it wasn’t fun hearing it said out loud.

I tried to reassure him and probably myself. I told him about how I had asked Howard on the pay phone to act as the middleman with General John Kraemer, who had been the late Colonel Allen’s commanding officer in Afghanistan and the second lead I had planned on talking to. Of course, with Colonel Allen’s sudden demise, the General had now advanced to the first position, lucky him. Kraemer was also retired and lived on the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri. As I wanted to avoid seeing another old soldier blown sky-high, I asked Howard to contact him and set up a meeting with me some distance away from his home and in a very public location. Time and place could be the General’s call and I wanted to do it Friday if possible. That would be tomorrow.

I also told PMA he was going to have to drive today.

“How do I know where to go?”

“Jan will tell you.”

“Who’s Jan?”

“My sexy GPS dominatrix.”

I was surprised that explanation didn’t prompt a few more questions from him.

When we got to the rental place, both my new phony-name credit card and my new phony-name driver’s license worked like gangbusters and I rented a full-sized coupe. Soon the Banana Republic bags were in the coupe’s trunk and PMA was behind the wheel. I relieved to just be riding shotgun, as I was goofy on pain pills. It would be another all-day drive today as we headed west toward beautiful Springfield, Missouri.

As the kid took the wheel, I made the other call I needed to take care of before I lost the cell phone signal out in the boonies on the interstate.

“Who?”
Jules said on the phone.

“David Muhlfelder. I was referred to by a friend.”

Pause.

“Quit fucking with me, will ya? I need this like I need another twat.”

“I assure you, I’m not…”

“What phone number are you calling from? It’s not…”

“I’m David Muhlfelder and I have an important case to discuss with your firm.”

Jules sighed wearily.

“If things are this weird, I’m seriously going to swallow eight Xanax tonight and take a Whitney Houston bath.”

“I’ll call some other time.”

“No, no, no, NO, I am sorry, SIR…I must have mistaken you for someone else I used to know.”

“Well, before we go any further, I need a firm that excels at cyber security.”

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “That is SO us!  For example, there was a situation yesterday with a flash drive that infects computers?  I smashed that sucker under my heel and shut off the computer in question immediately. Then I threw the pieces into a nearby saltwater tidal strait!”

“I see. That’s the kind of attitude I’m looking for.  I’m going to be out of town for another week or so…then I’ll call back and set up an appointment with you.”

“A FUCKING WEEK? YOU BETTER BE FUCKING BACK FOR MY OPERATION!”

And she had been doing so well up until then. 

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to, but I will be arriving in New York in a week.”

“Wait…what was the name again?”

“David Muhlfelder. M-U-H-L…”

“…Felder, got it. And the number?”

“I’ll be in touch.”

I hung up. I swear, even though we were disconnected, I could still hear her screaming at David Muhlfelder with everything she had - even though there were four states between us.

Luckily, pain pills take the edge off of those kinds of disagreements, so I found the button that made my seat recline and got ready to take a nice little nap. But then my new CIA-gifted phone buzzed due to a text coming in from Howard. General Kraemer had decided our meet-up would be at 3552 West 76 Country Boulevard, Branson, Missouri – at eleven a.m. tomorrow morning.

Branson? Really?

Well, I asked for a public location and, in the Springfield area, you couldn’t get much more public than Branson. I viewed the town as the brain-damaged cousin of Las Vegas, a country-fried strip of corny tourist attractions including a Haunted House, a Dinosaur Museum and a Hollywood Wax Museum. But the real attraction in Branson was the old-timey-by-design theatres owned by entertainers who had long ago diminished into vague memories elsewhere in America. People like Andy “Moon River” Williams, Tony “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” Orlando and Yakov “In Russia, party comes to you” Smirnoff, among many others, had all owned venues here, because Branson was where entertainment went to die – and sometimes even death didn’t get in the way of ticket sales. Williams, for example, had been gone for at least three years, but his theatre still had an ongoing tribute act in heavy rotation. Which I could not believe. I mean, how the hell many Andy Williams fans were left? I barely remembered the guy at this point and, as people kept telling me, I was pretty old. I just remembered he had had a variety show in the sixties that featured a guy in a bear suit. Hollywood was brilliant sometimes.

I had driven through Branson exactly once many years before on a family trip, back when I had a family, just to see what all the hype was all about. I’m still wondering. The tourist area, as I recalled, was start-to-finish ugly and tacky with all of its attractions on either side of the same aging two-lane state road. Traffic in and out of the area was bumper-to-bumper, forcing drivers to crawl past such high-profile attractions as Hannah’s Maze of Mirrors and the Celebrity Car Museum. We didn’t stop in Branson then.

Tomorrow, I would have to.

As PMA quietly drove us onward on the interstate, I drifted in and out of sleep, my mind replaying the exploding house and the SUV slamming my car over and over, as if they were YouTube clips on an endless playlist loop. Haunting those images was a ghostly overlay of the face of the guy who looked like Chuck Connors, grinning his nasty grin, his sadistic eyes dancing with pleasure.

It didn’t make for a restful drive.  Especially since I didn’t know if I if I was heading straight into another nightmare – and dragging an 18-year-old kid with me. 

Why I was even continuing on with this job? It was obvious that Mr. Barry Filer had set me up for trouble, so who knew if the second half of my fee would even be forthcoming? And who exactly was Filer working for? The General farmed this out to somebody who had hired Mr. Barry Filer to employ me. It must have been someone the General trusted, and clearly, that trust was misplaced. Whoever he was, he didn’t want the truth to come out – and was sabotaging my efforts in the most violent and intimidating ways possible.

And, oh yeah, he was also murdering people.

I tried to sleep some more while Jeremy fiddled with the satellite radio. He favored music that was a little more recent than
Hooray for Hazel
- from groups with names like Vampire Weekend, Cage the Elephant and some group that decided to spell “Churches” with a “V” instead of a “U.”  Yeah, band names were stupid when I was a kid – anybody remember the Human Beinz? - but at least they were pronounceable.

As we approached Springfield, we hit another big box store plaza, where we bought some more clothes and shit like toothpaste and a razor for PMA. As a bonus, we now had more shopping bags to use for luggage. At the same exit was a reasonable Ramada Radisson Wyndham Omni Whatever Hotel where we had no trouble getting a room - two queen beds and a little fridge. Perfect.

I stuck to room service for our dinner as I didn’t want us to be too visible. But, as I had also procured another bottle of Jack at the plaza, we could still enjoy a few drinks. Missouri was an interesting state. It not only had the most bible colleges of any state in the country, it also had the most permissive liquor laws.

PMA never had Jack before and I thought the first slug might kill him. After he was through coughing, I threw in a little water and some more ice into his glass, and it went down a whole easier.

We talked a little after we ate. And drank a little more. The kid obviously needed to unwind and this was helping. I took a chance and asked about his father.

Turned out PMA’s father was an artist of sorts. Angela rebelled against the military purity of her family and ran off to marry him in Vegas a couple years after she graduated college with a bullshit degree. It was the kind of relationship where romance soon gave way to reality and she suddenly realized she hadn’t married an artist, she had married someone who
said
he was an artist – which is, unfortunately, very different. He could paint some okay shit, but nobody was going to line up and pay money for it. So he taught some art classes for spare change, but that hardly held up his end of the checkbook.

Angela stuck with the marriage for about ten years, mostly because PMA was in the picture, and only kicked the guy’s ass out after she caught him using a young female student’s naked body for a canvas. As PMA described it, Pops was painting a bowl of fruit right under the student’s breasts. He then had the genius to incorporate said breasts into the artwork by transforming them into succulent, 3D apples that that perched perkily on top of the painted bananas in the painted bowl.

In other words, the guy was a fruitcake.

A.J. Longetti – the kid still shared the last name - tried to claim it was an artistic experiment. Maybe it was, but then Angela spied paint smeared on his dick - paint that was the exact same color as the base of the fruit bowl. General Davidson happily financed the divorce and her lawyer made sure the degenerate Dali didn’t get a dime.

Angela moved on and married some snarky Wall Street guy who made millions in his thirties and retired young. She thought a self-made millionaire wouldn’t need to use her, but she forgot about the biggest asset she brought to the party – her father. Turned out he wanted to run for political office with Angela’s last name in his back pocket. Angela just wanted to run, and did so a little over a year ago.

The guy never gave PMA the time of day. He just wanted the kid to shut up and stay in his room, which he gladly did.

That’s when Angela officially gave up on men, took the boy and moved back in with the General. She didn’t know where else to go and besides, her father needed her. Her mother had passed away from pancreatic cancer a couple years back and the General was more than a little lost without his wife of fifty-two years to run the house for him. Angela was more lost than he was, so it turned out they both needed each other. Then the strokes began hitting the General and suddenly, the house became an even darker place than it was before Angela moved in.

As PMA told me all this unfortunate history, I thought about the father figures he’d been dealt over his eighteen years of existence. A broke “artist” for a father. A conniving rich prick for a stepfather. And an intimidating legend for a grandfather.

No wonder he was so into Andre Gibraltar and whatever guides to life the muscle-bound guru churned out.

We were both getting blotto on the booze by this point, which is why I guess the kid got up the guts to ask me some questions, as the Mets quietly lost on the hotel room TV.

“Y’got kids?”

I nodded. “Two girls. They don’t talk to me.”

“How come?”

“Uh…I broke up the marriage and they blamed me. That kind of shit.”

That was only half-true, but I didn’t want to get into it. It was still too soon and I didn’t know where PMA and I would end up.

“Marriages break up. I’d still talk to my dad. If he wasn’t a fucking ASSHOLE.”

He drained his glass, then he stared off into space. I stared at the TV. The Mets were done, so I grabbed the remote and started going up and down the channels.

“WHOA STOP!”

PMA found a channel he liked and I quickly saw why. It was some kind of infomercial featuring Andre Gibraltar himself, in all his overblown vein-popping muscled glory, touting his MAU instructional videos.

“You know,” I said, “This guy’s probably an asshole too.”

“Sometimes, ya gotta be an asshole,” the kid mumbled.

“Who taught you that?”

“Nobody had to. You just watch things. That’s all.”

“Something tells me you’re not good at being an asshole.”

“Gotta learn how. Gotta learn how to DOMINATE.”

I put my empty glass down and my head back on the pillow of my bed. Pain pills were happily swimming through my bloodstream and I was ready to join them for a pool party.

“Kid, it ain’t like that,” I mumbled.