Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (13 page)

“The prodigal son has returned home! Hallelujah!”

From what I heard, the prodigal label should have been applied to the father, but who was I to judge? Absolutely no-fucking-body.

A.J. stepped back and did a little soul handshake move that Jeremy matched reluctantly and not very well. Meanwhile, the woman’s eyes widened with delight at PMA.

“A.J., is this your boy? Oh, he’s soooo handsome!”

“Hey, look who he’s got for a daddy, am I right?” he said, then he pointed to the woman. “Jeremy, this is Wanda…” And then he said her last name. It was the same last name of the second richest person in America, which meant she was either a sister or an ex. “She finally recognized my talent, son – and put her money where her mouth was. Maybe not her mouth…”

She gave him a lascivious smile - either that or her Botox was giving out. A.J. gave me a curious look, then turned to PMA.

“This your new stepdad or something? Doesn’t seem like Angela’s type. Isn’t he past his expiration date?” He turned back to me. “No offense.”

“Some taken,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m Max Bowman, your boy’s just helping me out on something.” Then I thought I’d impress him. “He’s training with the CIA.” 

“The CIA,” he said with distaste. “You gonna turn my son into a straight-up spook?”

“Well,” I answered, suddenly not giving a shit. “Strangers things have happened. Like this gallery.”

A.J. tried to stare me down, but then broke down laughing. Wanda started laughing along with him. That left us as the only two in the room who were still relatively stone-faced. After a little more small talk, Wanda invited us all out for a late lunch at one of Chicago’s finest restaurants so we could all get to know each other a little better. But the only other thing I really wanted to know about Wanda was who she voted for in 1932, Roosevelt or Hoover.   

At the expensive eatery, A.J. talked about his art until the main course had come and gone. He told us about how the human body was the greatest canvas of all – except, apparently, the ones with penises, since he never painted on a man’s body, from what I saw – and how he was selling tons of prints of these things on the internet.

Yeah, I could see that. They were probably filling up the wall space in single guys’ apartment where the Nagel prints used to hang.

He told us he had asked Wanda to help him establish the gallery, so he could raise the profile of body-painting in the art community. I replied that Goldie Hawn had already done that in 1967 on
Laugh-In
. Too bad Howard wasn’t there to see them react blankly to my ancient reference.

Anyway, Wanda took it from there, angrily shouting about how the area’s bourgeois Babbits couldn’t deal with a nipple staring them in the face. That prompted A.J. to make out with her for a few minutes, right there at the restaurant table, causing me to consider whether the grilled salmon I had just ate would spring back to life, swim upstream and back out of my mouth. This was the second time in one week I had been embarrassed at an extremely classy restaurant.

Also the second time in eight years I had eaten at one.

Wanda, however, was not embarrassed. No, she was glowing with sexual energy.

“I did not even know what an orgasm was until A.J. went to work on me,” she asserted with authority.

“Man, ain’t that the truth,” said A.J. “Little dusty down there when I first took a look, know what I mean?”

“We do, we do,” I replied, signaling for him to stop because I feared for PMA’s mental health, as well as my own.

It was a good move, because it reminded A.J. that we existed. He ended the make out session and actually asked what we were up to. The kid, being smart, let me take the lead on that.

“I was hired by your former father-in-law…”

The kid looked surprised that I was going there. But it was the only way I would find out anything worthwhile at this lovely family reunion.

“The General?” laughed A.J. “Now, there was a fun dude. So happy to welcome me into the family.”

“Well, I could see where you two might not hit it off. Anyway, there are some questions about the death of his son, Robert…”

A.J. laughed even harder. “The Nazi? I knew that motherfucker was too mean to die…”

“Nazi?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, Robert was Hitler’s number one fan. He had a whole record album full of Hitler speeches and storm trooper songs, you believe that shit?”

“He did?” Even PMA was shocked. A.J. turned to him.

“Yeah, Robbie swore your mom to secrecy about all the Nazi shit he had stashed away, he got it from some private collector when he was in his early teens. But what did the General expect, huh? The kid was sent to military school as soon as he got out of diapers. They went ahead and made that motherfucker into a killing machine.”

A.J. mimed shooting an automatic weapon to make sure we got the idea.

“So who was this Herman he used to hang out with?” I asked.

“Herman?” A bigger roar of laughter. Whatever diners were still enjoying a late lunch threw a few annoyed looks our way, but A.J. didn’t care and neither did Wanda. And I soon found out why. I was sitting too far back from the table and happened to notice that, underneath it, she was vigorously massaging A.J.’s groin. Inside my stomach, my salmon starting making noises again.

“Herman was Robbie’s ‘close companion,” A.J. said with a raised eyebrow. “Those two were
tight
.”

“Are you implying something?” I asked.

“Duh,” he replied.

“You know Herman’s last name?”

“I never asked, I just wanted to stay far away from that freak of the week.”

“So he was in the military too?”

A.J. slowly shook his head.

“No?”

“Well, he was. He and Robbie signed up together. But I guess Herman was a little too psycho even for the army. He got out and ended up with one of those private army companies, you know, the ones who make the
real
money out of our international blood sport.”

“Like Dark Sky?”

A.J. shrugged and I could tell he didn’t know and didn’t give a fuck. I was lucky he remembered that much. Anyway, he had already moved back onto his favorite subject, himself. He still hadn’t really asked PMA anything about his life. Wanda at least had the manners to do that, so, when A.J. stopped to breathe, she jumped in.

“Jeremy, are you still in high school?”

“Graduating next month.”

“Then off to college?”

“I got into George Washington.”

“From what I read, so did Jefferson,” chuckled A.J.

“Anyway, I don’t really want to go to school. I’d rather just start working.”

That prompted Wanda to go on for about a half-hour about how education was important, like a very special episode of
Full House
or something. The kid’s eyes glazed over.

“How tall was Herman?” I asked out of nowhere in the middle of the lecture.

A.J. didn’t hesitate. “Tall fucker.” He turned to PMA. “You met Herman that one Christmas? What, maybe six five?”

PMA looked at me and knew what I was thinking. “I don’t know, I was seven, everybody seemed tall.”

I was suddenly glad to be having this lunch, despite Wanda’s attempts to give A.J. dessert in his pants.

We went back to the gallery, where I was more than anxious to say my goodbyes. Then Wanda, again trying to promote normal familial relationships, came out with an unexpected invitation. We could stay the night at her condo. I begged off, saying I had to do some research that night, but Jeremy was welcome to go. PMA looked at me uncertainly, but then A.J. seemed to actually put some effort into getting him to accept and that made the kid say yes. I told them I would be holed up in a hotel for the night, but I would let them know where I was staying.

Then I walked back down to Halstead to my car, checking out a couple other small galleries along the way. Nobody else was painting real-life naked women, so A.J. seemed to have the market cornered on that particular niche. Maybe Wanda was just making a sound business investment? I had a hunch the partnership would probably sour after he took an ill-advised trip into the Crab Nebula and Wanda caught him with space-colored paint on his dick. Whatever. She was getting in one last thrill before it all ended - so what if A.J. was the Max Bialystock of the art world? Was anybody really getting hurt?

Well, one person might be about to.   

I hoped the kid would still be in one emotional piece come the morning. Unfortunately, he had to learn. We all did.

I drove off in search of a quiet place to stay.

Sunday morning.

It was one a.m. and someone was banging the hell out of my door.

After I left the kid with A.J. and Wanda, I got depressed about spending the night in another random hotel room box. So I remembered that one thousand dollars Howard had sent me and went in search of a luxury W. Ritz Four Seasons Carlton Whatever suite with an amazing view of Lake Michigan. If I was going to be dead in a few days, I wanted more than my nice new silver watch from Banana Republic to show for it.

After a little wandering around, I found just the thing – an Experience Suite they called it, and I negotiated them down to a mere $899.99 for the night. I was probably the only guy that night who would experience the Experience Suite with only shopping bags for luggage, but the clerk was more concerned about the cash than my resemblance to a homeless person.

When I unlocked the door to the room and switched on the lights, I saw this was indeed an Experience. At nine hundred and fifty square feet, the suite was bigger than my apartment and infinitely more tricked out. The sitting area had a huge curved sectional couch with a fifty-two inch LCD television, a vintage record player with a selection of vinyl, and a wet bar stocked with booze. In the bedroom, the king bed had a mirrored headboard and goose down pillows – plus, of course, another fifty-two inch TV.  They even threw in a Waffle Spa Bathrobe, whatever the hell that was, so I could lounge around in style.

After I called the number Wanda had given me and told her where I was staying (she approved), I took a bath in the whirlpool Jacuzzi tub, covered myself in waffles and poured myself some Jack. I went out to the sitting area to take in the view of the lake, which was magnificent. Lake Michigan was, of course, a Great Lake, but, to me, it looked like an ocean with no end in sight from my view on the eighteenth floor.  

That’s when I slowly realized there was nothing more depressing than experiencing an Experience Suite by yourself. And also, that if I ever told Jules about that I did this without her, she would rip my intestines out of my stomach and strangle me with them.

I took a brief nap while watching the Mets lose to the Nationals, one to zip. Right now, those boys couldn’t hit their way out of a wet paper bag. What the hell. I woke up to a new Saturday Night Live and the musical guest was Wiz Khalifa, so I finally got to see what exactly what a Wiz Khalifa was. Turned out it was a guy with more tattoos than skin. I somehow made it to the end of the show and got up still covered in waffles. I planned to throw two more pain pills into my mouth and sleep the big sleep, as a great man once wrote…

…when someone started banging the hell out of my door.

In the words of Dorothy Parker, what fresh hell was this?

I assumed it wasn’t Not-Quite Connors or he would have already shot his way through the door. Maybe it was just a drunk who came back to the wrong room. Whoever it was, I didn’t really care. It had been a long day – a long week, for that matter – and I was ready to call the downstairs and sic security on whoever the fuck it was, but I decided I’d better take a peek through the peephole.

Huh.

I made sure my robe was tied all the way shut and opened the door.

And that’s when Angela Davidson started slapping the fuck out of my face.

“What the hell were you thinking? WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?”

She could hit. Damn, was she watching those Andre Gibraltar videos?

I backed up from the door and held up my hands on either side of my face to block her spinning hands of death. My robe was flying every which way, so I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t getting an exclusive show, but I was too busy protecting my jaw from more damage to inspect whether my modesty was intact.

I heard the room door slam shut behind us as I kept retreating from her assault until I fell back over the sectional couch and onto the handsome charcoal-grey area rug. Luckily, my head missed the glass coffee table by a few inches. I had gotten knocked to the floor more times this week than I had in the past fifty years – in other words, ever, since I outgrew the playground.

I looked up at her towering imperious figure. Goddamn if she didn’t look hot.

“It’s a little late for a visit, isn’t it?” I offered.

“What have you been doing with my son?” she demanded.

“Mostly trying to get rid of him,” I said as I self-consciously held my robe shut and awkwardly got to my feet. “What happened? Did A.J. drop a dime on my ass?”

“He called me and I appreciated it. He was very upset that you were indoctrinating him into the CIA.”

“He’s got a strong moral compass, that one.”

“Why would you take him along on your little adventures? Who does this with an eighteen-year-old kid?”

I smoothed back my hair, walked over to the wet bar and offered her a drink. She opted for Jack, same as me, so she couldn’t have been
that
mad. I told her to sit down and we’d talk this out. She sat on one end of the sectional couch and, after I handed her the drink, I sat down somewhere near the middle, which represented our positions pretty perfectly.

Then she just plain started crying. Oh Jesus, take me now. I mean, seriously.

“I’ve been so worried…I had no idea where he was. Thank God that creep called me. I jumped on the first plane out of D.C.,” she said between sobs.

“Your boy doesn’t take no for an answer. You should know that.”

“Could you maybe get me a damn Kleenex?” she asked as the tears streamed down her face. I had once again forgotten my gentlemanly manners. I got the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed it to her, then stood there looking like the useless idiot I was.

“I made him text you, but that’s all I could do. Believe me, things have been a little stressful out here in the field.”

“Well, he’s coming home with me.”

I indicated my complete agreement with that idea, then I sat back down on the sofa. A little closer this time. She calmed down as her tsunami of tears passed.

“Why’d you come to Chicago? Did Jeremy actually want to see his sad excuses for a father?” she asked.

“No, the dad was just on the way.”

“On the way to what?”

“Probably nothing good, considering all the people who have been killed so far. Which brings me to a few follow-up questions about your brother. I understand he had an interesting record collection, which apparently included some Nazi storm trooper tunes. Guess he skipped over that whole grunge music craze and went right to the Horst Wessel song.”

No answer. Her mouth was still hanging open from my disclosure about the dead folks.

“Your charming ex-husband, who I hope was at least good in bed because he doesn’t appear good for much else, filled me in on Robbie’s hobbies and his sparkling personality. I’m also interesting in knowing more about Herman.”

“None of this has anything to do with…”

“All of it has something to do with this,” I interrupted. Fuck gentlemanly manners, I was tired of her bullshit, she was evading more than a Republican talking about race relations. “Ask your son what we’ve been through. The more I know, the more I have a chance of actually surviving this. So you need to lower the walls and let me in.”

Did that sound too sexual? She swallowed most of the Jack in her glass.

“I’m so exhausted, I haven’t had one good night’s sleep since Jeremy left.”

“And you’re not going to have another one until you tell me what I need to know.”

She looked away. “I don’t know who to trust.”

“You can be more specific. You don’t know if you can trust
me
. Ask your boy. I think he’ll tell you that you can.”

“I don’t want to bother him. He’s finally getting some time with his father.”

“And Wanda,” I added as I got up to refill her glass and mine.

“Who’s Wanda?”

“Well, I’d say she’s old enough to be your ex-husband’s mother, but I’m not sure she’s young enough to even make that cut.”

“He’s with an old woman?”

“She’s pleased with her orgasms, he’s pleased with her money. Sound familiar?”

“You’re a little cruel.”

“Sorry. I’m a little on edge.”

“I did think I loved him, you know. You were married young, weren’t you? Didn’t you think you loved her?”

“I wasn’t totally convinced.”

I handed her back her glass and sat down even closer to her as she finally noticed her lavish surroundings.

“Speaking of money, what did this place cost?”

“Forty-five bucks through Trivago.com. Now. Your brother.”

“Sounds like you already know everything.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking you.”

She took a too-big sip from her glass. She was already worn out and I doubted if she had had anything to eat, so I knew, sooner rather than later, the booze would hit her hard. But I also knew I needed her to get past her inhibitions and tell me the fucking truth about her brother.

A delicate balance. I
was
a little cruel.

She sat quietly a moment, then finally nodded. “Okay. Okay. What the hell, let’s get this over with.”

She told me everything. At least it sounded like everything.

Robert Davidson, her younger brother, was a shy and sensitive kid with an artistic bent. General Davidson, on those few days he was home, didn’t like that. Military purity. He had his wife, who always followed orders even when she knew they would lead to disaster, ship the kid out to military school after he finished sixth grade.

That’s when the trouble began. Robert came home for the holidays and summers a different kid. Something had broken, and what was constructed in its place wasn’t pretty. That’s when he started collecting Nazi memorabilia from rogue online sellers and begging sister Angela not to tell General Dad. That’s when his eyes grew cold, that’s when he stopped smiling, that’s when he became obsessed with weaponry of all kinds.

At first, the General was pleased with the turn in Robert’s personality, but then he began to sense just how far a turn it was. The General wanted his son to follow in his oversized footsteps at West Point, but Robert had other plans. He didn’t like all the pomp and circumstance involved with the officers’ training, nor was he particularly interested in rules and regulations. He was interested in becoming Special Ops, training for the Army Rangers and participating in whatever cool and brutal clandestine missions he could.

Like the kid, he wanted to dominate. I didn’t like to think about the duplication of that pattern.

All Angela knew about Herman was that he was a higher level Ranger whose spell Robert fell under. Hence all the jokes about Robert being his “girlfriend.” No one had any idea about Robert’s sexuality, if it mattered. He was gone most of the time and he never mentioned a woman – or a man in that context, for that matter. There was no question, however, that Herman was his BFF – and also that nobody in the Davidson family liked Herman, especially the General, who sensed that Herman was feeding Robert’s darkest impulses and causing him to drift farther and farther away from the family. Angela wasn’t sure what her father thought Robert was up to – he kept all of that to himself. But at some point, about two years before Robert’s death, the father-son relationship was severed forever. She hadn’t heard from her brother since then.

So what was she worried about?

Quite simply, she was worried about everything she didn’t know, an affliction I also suffered from. She had seen the growing madness in Robert’s eyes and she knew whatever he was doing overseas wasn’t going to make for a pretty bedtime story. She was relieved when the reporting on his death finally vanished from the airwaves without any unseemly dirt attached. But her heart was broken and so was her father’s, because they both remembered the four-year-old boy who loved Cookies N’ Cream ice cream, Inspector Gadget cartoons, and Hot Wheels.

As she told me all this, she let slip a few pertinent facts about herself. Even though she was the first child by a couple of years, the General had pretty much ignored her because she wasn’t a boy and her mother had followed suit. She did everything right as a child to try and win their attention, if not their love, and it never really worked out. That’s why she did the absolute wrong thing and married A.J., more of a disaster for her obviously than her parents. But she was happy she got Jeremy out of the deal, even though she worried about him too. She could see her brother in him...

And with that, she started to droop. I had to act fast and ask the biggest question I needed answered before I lost her for good.

“What do you know about Andrew Wright and your father?”

She looked at me with such squinty eyes that I felt that I had physically become out of focus.   

“Andy?”

Andy.
The nickname made him seem so…cuddly.

She somehow bolted up off the couch and onto her feet.

“I have to go…”

“Where exactly?” I asked as I got up. “Tell me about Andy.”

“Can’t…”

She turned and fell into my arms.