Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (22 page)

“Wow. And you’re going to sound that good again?”

She teared up and nodded. If I had been a younger man, I would have fucked her again right then and there. I had to be happy just knowing I didn’t need boner pills yet.

We ordered some dinner for ourselves and the kid. Over the Chinese, Jules texted me a question for the kid that I couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t asked him in all the time we spent together.

“Jules wants to know if you have a girl.”

He looked a little embarrassed.

“There was somebody, but then I got the CIA summer job thing.”

“She disagreed with that move?”

“We had a huge fight about it.”

“So I guess your dad’s not the only one who disapproves.”

“People need to stay out of my fucking business.”

We moved on to less volatile subjects and it ended up being a very nice night. God knows I needed one.

But it didn’t last long. I woke up around three a.m. worrying about the kid and Jules. I didn’t know why Skip Skipperson was next door – maybe just as insurance that I would do what I was supposed to do if the General recovered. But it bothered me. Jules was sleeping like a rock, so I got up, put on my bathrobe and went into the closet off the hallway. And I dug in the back of it until I found what I was looking for.

The small box with the handgun and the bullets that went in it.

Howard, who believed that no household was complete without firearms, had sent me his old gun as a joke when he traded up to a newer and more powerful model. I had taken some shooting classes while I was with the CIA, so I knew the basics, but that was all I knew. I started to take the box into the living room, then remembered something and doubled back to the bedroom, where I quietly unplugged the clock radio and took it with me. I had only listened to a couple of Jules’ songs and I was anxious to hear the rest.

As I checked out the gun, I listened to the CD at a low volume. Son of a bitch, on the next track, she sang
Nice and Easy
and did a good job of it. The gun itself was in its original packaging, so it was clean and ready for action. I carefully loaded it, leaving the first chamber empty so I didn’t accidentally shoot myself. Guns made me nervous and I wasn’t afraid to admit it, but I had to get past that so I could at least try to protect Jules and PMA from whatever might happen next.

When I was done, I put the handgun in a pantry in the kitchen, on a high shelf behind a bunch of shit I never used. Hopefully, I would forget I ever put it up there.

Then I sat back down on the couch, turned on the TV but kept it muted, because I was still listening to Jules belt out the standards. Hurricane Mel was looking big and monstrous on the CNN radar – they were still holding to their Sandy-sized prediction. It would be making landfall in fifteen hours or so. Tomorrow afternoon, we’d start seeing rain here on the island.

Meanwhile, on the CD, Jules started singing
Good Morning Heartache
, the Billie Holiday standard. Gutsy move taking on a legend, but Jules held her own. As the song went on, the melancholy got to me. She found the profound unhappiness in the lyric and injected it straight into my heart. 

Then I heard a noise and wondered why I had hidden the gun in the kitchen. That wasn’t very practical if something happened fast.

I turned. It was just Jules standing there in the hallway, wearing that godawful
Anchorman
T-shirt and nothing else. I saw it in her eyes – she wanted to know what had happened to me. She knew me too well and she knew something had changed. So she came over and sat next to me, and I told her about my daughter and what she had left in the trash, and somehow I made it all the way through without breaking down. She hugged me and held on. She was going to stay with me.

That was all I needed to know.     

Wednesday evening.

Outside the wind was howling and the rain was pounding. Mel was launching his assault on the shore, which meant many television reporters standing by beaches on the coast of New Jersey were hoping things would get bad enough to get them on YouTube - but not bad enough to kill them. I was somewhere in the middle - maybe just a few bloody noses or near-drownings. It was a win-win; I’d get some entertainment value and they’d get a few million online hits.   

Along with the gusts and the downpour, it was also dark as night outside, even though sunset wasn’t due for another hour; the thick clouds were blocking out whatever light was left in the day. It was around seven p.m. and Jules was searching the kitchen in a panic. I watched her, not sure why she was spooked, as she picked her phone up off the counter and started typing furiously. I pulled mine out of my jeans and waited for my latest communication from headquarters. It was a good thing I had an unlimited text plan or I would have gone completely broke in the past twenty-four hours.

THERE’S NOTHING TO FUCKING EAT IN THIS FUCKING CAVE

“I’m not going out in this shit!” I yelled as I headed into the living room, where the kid was waiting for the Weather Channel reporter to get picked up by the wind and thrown into the side of a building.

YOU HAVE TO. STORES MIGHT FUCKING CLOSE MORON

I sighed at my phone screen. More incoming.

I’M NOT GOING TO LIVE ON MOLDY SALTINES AND WATER SHITBIRD

“Make a list,” I wearily said. I really didn’t have to make the suggestion, because text after text started coming through of all the things I needed to buy. Milk. Eggs. Chocolate-covered pretzels. Bananas. Ben & Jerry’s. Basil. Chocolate-covered potato chips. Cheese.

I turned to PMA. “Get your shoes on, I’m going to need help.”

As we rode down in the elevator, I asked the kid if he had heard from his mother. He said he had had his phone off since yesterday morning because she was calling constantly and he didn’t want to talk to her. I asked him to turn it back on in case we needed to know anything. He wasn’t happy about it, but he did it.

Maybe I made more of the trip downstairs than I needed to, because we were literally out in the harsh weather for about ten seconds, the time it took to run from the exit from my building to the entrance to the bodega. On a covered walkway. I didn’t even put on a coat and neither did the kid, which turned out to be a mistake, because Mel’s winds turned the rain horizontal, so we were soaked by the time we got in the store.

Inside the bodega, chaos was in full swing. Everybody and their brother and their mother and their brother from another mother was in there thinking what Jules was thinking, that if this storm was as bad as the media said it was going to be, anybody without supplies would be SOL come tomorrow morning. We each grabbed a shopping basket to gather up what was left on the shelves and when we were done scavenging, we made our way back to the end of the long, long line that wound its way from the front counter all the way to the back of the aisle with the cookies and the cereal. It would be a while.

After what seemed like most of the rest of my lifetime, we had made it almost halfway through the line, inching our way up a couple of footsteps every so often, when my phone vibrated with a new text. What, did we need Nutella too? I pulled it out and checked the screen.

             
IS THAT YOU GUYS

I stared at it a moment, then wrote back.

             
Is that us what? Still in store

I turned to the kid, who was staring at his phone, which had finally fully rebooted and was buzzing like there was no tomorrow. Somebody had been trying hard to contact him.

He looked at me.

“My grandpa died this morning.”

My heart stopped. I turned back to my phone – another message from Jules.

             
THEN WHO THE FUCK DO I HEAR

I dropped the basket and ran, and the kid followed suit, even though he didn’t know what was going on. We pushed our way out of the bodega and back into my building. Luckily, the elevator was already sitting on the ground floor, so I jumped right in with the kid, hit the 13 button, then repeatedly hit the button to close the doors.

“What’s going on?” asked the kid.

I didn’t have an answer.

We got to my floor, I punched the button to open the elevator doors repeatedly and we ran out and down the long hallway. As I passed the door of Skip Skipperson, I noticed it quietly closing, but not closing all the way, as if he was avoiding making the sound of that final “click.” And then I noticed my door, which I had left unlocked like a dope, also in the same not-quite-closed position.

I opened it and flew down the stairs, almost killing myself in the process. I yelled Jules’ name, even though she couldn’t yell back.

Then I saw her.

She was down on her stomach on the carpet in the living room, as if she had just taken a few steps away from the sofa when she was hit and fell forward. There was blood coming from the right side of her head, where there was a vicious wound, too big to be caused by a knife. She was unconscious.

I ran to her motionless body, yelling to the kid to call 911 and get an ambulance over here. First aid was a prominent part of my collection of things I did not know anything about, so I had no idea how to proceed. She was breathing, but it seemed a little weak to me, who, again, didn’t know anything. As I heard the kid finish up the call, I ran and got an old towel out of the closet, then I ran back to her and put the towel up against the wound to try and slow the bleeding.

“They said it would take a few extra minutes because of the storm, but they’ll be here soon.”

I nodded and motioned for him to come kneel by her and take my place. When he had, I got up and headed to the kitchen.

“Who the fuck did this?” he yelled over to me.

“Guess,” I said grimly, as I reached into the back of the high shelf where I had stashed the gun. I grabbed a bullet out of the ammo box and put it in the first chamber.

The General was dead. If we had been watching anything else other than The Weather Channel, we might have known that and had some warning. As it was, the moment I had been dreading was here – the moment when I was no longer useful and just a loose end to be tied up.

Which is why I had a new neighbor.

When Skip finally got his marching orders, he most likely took a peek outside his door and saw mine was open, then came in to quietly take care of me with one of Dark Sky’s specialty items, a handsome, handmade tomahawk. Jules heard him coming in – but the only person coming in should have been me and I would have said something, because I always did. That’s when she texted. When she got confirmation that it wasn’t me, she got up to see who was there. And when Skip turned the corner and saw a figure, he let the tomahawk fly. Maybe he saw it was a woman in the moment before he made the throw, maybe that’s why he just missed making a clean kill, who knows? But he quickly knew how badly he had fucked up and he just as quickly got the fuck out of there.

“I’ll be back,” I said as I headed for the stairs.

PMA saw what I was holding. “Max, a gun? Where’d you get that?” he said with extreme surprise.

“Stay with her,” I said quietly as I went up the stairs.

I pushed my front door open – it had never closed all the way. Skip’s door, however, was now shut tight. I gently tried his doorknob. Locked.

I hit the doorbell over and over like the world’s most persistent Jehovah’s Witness and waited.

After a few moments, he pulled the door open, but stayed mostly behind it, firing a couple of shots into the hallway. He was taking a chance I’d be standing there like a human target and that I’d go down fast. But all he got out of that move was mystified, because the shots only knocked a couple of chunks out of the white bricked wall opposite him.

As he stepped into the open doorway and looked up and down the hallway, he didn’t know I was lying on the hallway floor to his left, opposite the door hinge. I was shaking so hard, I was lucky to hit any part of him. What I got with my shot was the right leg, which went out from under him and sent him falling back down the stairs into his apartment. Then I got up as fast as I could with my ancient aching joints to make sure I got to him before he got his equilibrium back.

It was almost a tie. He was on the almost side.

Skip Skipperson lay sprawled on the landing below. But damn if that Dark Sky training didn’t work – he had reflexively moved into a position where he could return fire. So he quickly shot back at me, but a little too quickly, like a shortstop who stretched to make an amazing catch but blew the throw to first because he was off-balance. The shot went into the inside wall beside the stairway as I fired back and got him in the shoulder. He was down again and I put three more bullets into him.  Then, not particularly caring where they landed, I quickly backed up and slammed his door shut, locking what was left of him inside.

I fell against the hallway wall, feeling the heat of my discharged pistol on my hand. I had never killed a man, or even come anywhere close to it. I thought I would I have been more upset, but instead I was just fucking relieved. He was a fucking killer so fuck him. Besides, I didn’t have time to dwell on how I was feeling because I suddenly saw, at the other end of the long hallway, the EMTs getting off the elevator. I hid the gun behind my back and yelled to them, so they wouldn’t waste time looking for the right apartment.

While they bandaged Jules and got her ready to move downstairs to the ambulance, I went and got my old raincoat, which was bulky enough to disguise a pistol sitting in its pocket. Then I went into the kitchen and grabbed the ammo box and put it in the opposite raincoat pocket. Mel might stop anybody else from coming after me tonight, but no way was I taking chances.

There was only room for me to ride along in the ambulance with Jules, so I threw the kid an old windbreaker I also had in the closet and told him to meet me down at the hospital at the north end of the island. If the red island bus was still running, he could catch a ride on that and stay relatively dry. Whatever he did, I told him not to stay in the apartment, because some other unwelcome guests might show up.

The good thing about living on a tiny island was that it was only a mile drive to the Coler Hospital, the last building before Lighthouse Park at the very north end. And good thing it was close, because the street was already flooding and the wind and the rain were getting insane. We made it down to the emergency entrance, but it looked like we might be the last vehicle to do it without a struggle. Almost instantly, Jules disappeared down the hall into a treatment room.

I’m not a praying man, although I do on occasion try to talk to whoever’s in charge. And I was doing a lot of yakking in my head at the moment. It was some kind of sick joke to do this to Jules right before she regained her singing voice. As usual, I blamed myself. I never should have let her stay with me with the possibility of this going down, but she was depending on me to take care of her. Not that depending on me was ever really a great idea.

Everybody inside the hospital was scrambling. The basement was already filling up with water and the staffers working that night were worried about the parking lot flooding and their cars getting an inside rinse job, which is exactly what happened during Sandy. Surges of water were crashing over the sea walls along the walkways on both the east and west sides of the island. Mel was going to be a great, big son of a bitch, maybe even a bigger bastard than Sandy. I remembered back then flooding got so bad, it was impossible to get to the northern end of the island, where the hospital was.

Maybe that’s why the kid hadn’t made it here. Maybe the hospital was already cut off from the rest of the island. It had been a couple hours and I was starting to worry as much about him as I was about Jules – I texted him more than once and got nothing. 

Finally, a doctor came out and said Julie had suffered blunt trauma, a concussion and a skull fracture. It was touch-and-go at the moment. They’d keep me posted.

A few minutes later, I finally got a text. But it wasn’t from PMA, it was from a number I didn’t recognize.

             
We found your neighbor.

Skip Skipperson’s friends had arrived. Here we go.

I sat there a moment, taking in those four words, then I finally got up and went to the nurses’ station. I left my cellphone number with the head nurse in case anything happened and told her I was going to take a walk. She naturally looked at me as though I was insane.

But I didn’t care. Every part of my body was tingling. I knew I wasn’t safe and I knew it was better to go find the danger than have it come find me. I had to tap into my own PMA and get us all out of this unholy mess.

As I headed for the hospital exit, I tried calling the Roosevelt Island Public Safety department, which was what they called the island’s police force. I got a busy signal. Either their lines were down or Mel was keeping them tied up. Of course, I wasn’t sure how I would explain what was going on if they did answer. Were they really going to believe that trained killers who might be armed with tomahawks were coming after me?