Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) Read online

  A beat.

  “Fine.”

  He kept wanting to assume we were done talking. But I was a dog with a bone.

  “All I get is fine? Okay, then I guess I’ll have to ask a series of questions to find out what this is all about. Like they used to do on What’s My Line? Is this case bigger than a breadbox?”

  “Max, update your fucking references. What’s My Line, Jesus, didn’t they give out buggy whips to the winners on that thing?”

  “You’re the same age as me, Howard.”

  “Yeah, but I try to exist in the current millennium. Another thing you might wanna try.”

  Another pause. I decided to try again. What the hell.

  “So – this whole “something has changed” business. Does that have to do with my new client?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And, by the way, you’re still not on a secure line.”

  “Which means you do know what I’m talking about.”

  “Max. I don’t have time for this.”

  “You don’t want to have time for this.”

  “Gotta go, the other line’s blinking.”

  “Color me perplexed.”

  “Color you disconnected.”

  Click.

  I turned to see a squirrel running up a cherry tree followed by an angry beagle trying to climb up after it. It was too soon to tell which one of those I was about to be. At the very least, I received confirmation that shit was weird. Sometimes, it’s enough to know that you’re paranoid for a reason. But that big, fat envelope in my coat pocket was starting to feel like it weighed three tons.

  Time to keep walking. Time to get home. On Roosevelt Island, that never takes too long.

  Roosevelt Island is about two miles long and a tenth of one across. It’s got parks on either end, the one at the top has an ancient lighthouse near a huge ancient hospital, the one at the bottom has a brand new giant cement statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disembodied head. There are exactly three ways to get to Roosevelt Island unless you’re a fucking bird; the tram from the Manhattan side, the Roosevelt Island Bridge from the Queens side, and the subway from both sides. You can’t walk or drive directly to the city itself from the Island – which is why most New Yorkers don’t make the effort.

  Why the fuck would they?

  First of all, there’s no place to eat. Yeah, there’s a Subway, and mediocre-to-poor sushi, Chinese and pizza places, and a sports bar where you can get a decent burger, and a Starbucks, but that’s about it. No great neighborhood places like in the rest of the five boroughs. And don’t think about getting anything better brought to your door. You can only get delivery from Queens and only from the places desperate enough to want to send a delivery guy across the bridge on a bike. You call and ask a place if it delivers to Roosevelt Island, and you can time the pause with a stopwatch. They don’t want to say no, but eventually they will.

  Second of all, the population is half Chinese and the other half is disabled and/or elderly. Why so many Chinese? There must be some kind of flyer circulating around Beijing touting the wonders of Roosevelt Island, otherwise I can’t explain it. As for those who are no longer able to walk, I guess it’s appropriate that an island filled with people in wheelchairs should be named after Roosevelt. To me, they serve as a daily reminder that I don’t need or want that my time is running out.

  Third, there’s the problematic history of this place. When it was called Welfare Island, it hosted a notorious overcrowded asylum, a workhouse populated by irredeemable convicts and a smallpox hospital you could enter any time you liked but never leave. In other words, if you’re looking for Paradise, keep moving – this chunk of land has always been seen as a dumping ground for the exiled, the demented and the doomed.

  I loved the fucking place.

  Clearly, I had the personality of a demented and doomed exile, especially since the events of twelve years ago. Plus it was quiet in a way Manhattan never could be and it was manageable in a way Manhattan never wanted to be. Fifteen minutes away from La Guardia, twenty minutes from JFK and a great bodega at the bottom of my building that sold organic milk, so I wouldn’t grow tits from synthetic cow hormones.

  My building. It resembled the projects you’d see in the opening credits of that seventies TV show, Good Times. Most of the residents in my building had their rent subsidized by the government; old-timers, poor Good Times families and the like. I was one of the few people paying most of the freight on the place, which didn’t bother me, it was still a good deal for this neck of the woods. I lived on the 13th floor, where else? At least the building still had the balls to call it the 13th floor, not like the other high-rises where they went right from the 12th to the 14th. They’d rather look like they flunked arithmetic than deny ancient superstitions, which was typical in a country that tried to ignore climate change while the seas rose, the forests burned and the reservoirs dried up.

  Immediately next door to me lived neighbor Larry, around sixty-five years old, grey hair, grungy cap and stubble. I didn’t know what was wrong with Larry and I didn’t want to find out. He was barely able to walk due to oozing sores on his leg, but he managed to double his speed when he finally got a cane to work with. Because Leg Sore Larry wasn’t all that mobile, he stayed at home covering every inch of the walls of his shitty little apartment with pictures ripped from whatever magazines they still actually churned out of a printing press. His ongoing sideways Sistine Chapel rip-and-tape mural extended to his front entrance, where he was in his Scarlett Period, Scarlett as in Scarlett Johansson, whose magnificent everything was the centerpiece of every photo on the door facing our common hallway. It added just the right touch of continental charm associated with every smelly college dorm hallway.

  Lest you think I’m a cruel man who doesn’t care about the disabled, you’re entitled. From my side, Leg Sore Larry tried too hard to befriend me when I moved in and then turned surly when I didn’t greet him with open arms. After that, he started stealing my New York Times on a regular basis. I suppose we had a lot in common - like me, his marriage was long over and his kids didn’t talk to him. The difference was I didn’t mind being alone and he did. But something about him made me think his problems began long before his legs started leaking.

  On the other side of my door was Nancy with the Breathing Apparatus Face. That was my version of the Frank Sinatra classic love song, Nancy with the Laughing Face. True, my rewrite had a few too many syllables in the title, but my sick mind made them fit to the tune. Nancy was one of those confined to a wheelchair who also had, as my song title suggested, some sort of breathing tube attached to some sort of contraption in the back of the wheelchair that was required to be on twenty-four-seven. She wasn’t a sight most people would enjoy, but I liked her. In contrast to Leg Sore Larry, Nancy always had a big smile and a nice greeting for you. She was clearly not going to have a lot of enjoyment during what was left of her life, but she was going to make the most of it anyway. I might have married Nancy if sex wasn’t out of the question. Maybe I was just captivated by the knowledge that she was physically incapable of stealing my Times.

  I unlocked the door and went inside my two bedroom apartment. I didn’t really need that second bedroom anymore, it was where my daughters slept when they used to visit. Used to. I threw out the rest of their stuff last year.

  “You’re back already? What the fuck? You barely had enough time to ride the train and back.”

  Jules didn’t wait to be in the same room with me before she started in. She would always begin abusing me as soon as I opened the door. She kept at it as I walked down the flight of stairs inside the front door that led down to the actual apartment. Despite what Mr. Barry Filer thought of me, I did have a semblance of a bedside manner. Jules’, on the other hand, was removed at birth. Against my better judgment, I had given her a key three months ago. Now she thought she lived here.

  “It was a short meeting,” I told her.

  “What, you just blew
each other and left?”

  That made me laugh until I actually pictured what she was describing.

  If it wasn’t for anti-depressants, Xanax and HGTV, Jules would’ve been very much at home in the island’s old asylum. Right now, she was OD-ing on one of those half hours where a couple pretended to look for a house and invariably narrowed it down to three choices. The half-hour inevitably ended with one of them saying to the other, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and then the show cut to whatever shitbox they decided to buy. This is what passes for a TV show now. Bring back the Lone fucking Ranger.

  I turned the corner into the living room, where Jules was sprawled out on my poor excuse for a couch in her panties and an Anchorman T-shirt she had nabbed at a Marshall’s close-out for $2.99. It was purple and featured Will Ferrell sitting at a desk with no pants. She was overcharged.

  The house show went to commercial so she was free to talk to me.

  “So – what crap job do you get to do now?”

  “I’m not sure. And when I am sure, I still can’t tell you.”

  That got her attention. I always told her everything. I had nobody else to listen to my shit.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Howard’s suddenly talking about secure lines and everybody’s acting like I’m the guy that’s going to bring down the government.”

  She sat up and considered me.

  “So you’re doing something important. That should make you feel good, right?”

  “I don’t like important. Important means somebody’s watching over your shoulder and sticking their fingers in your business.”

  “So why’d you take the job?”

  That’s when I removed the big, fat envelope from my pocket. Her eyes almost came out of her head.

  “HOLY FUCK.” Then, because she’s Jules, “Those aren’t all ones, are they?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I gotta look at some files on the computer and see what this is all about.”

  “You’re buying me a nice dinner tonight, right? OFF this godforsaken island, right?”

  “Do I get sex?”

  “Oh, when don’t you, asshole?”

  I shrugged with a smile. The commercial was over and she was back eyeing real estate, the kind neither of us would ever buy. We could never be suburban. Or stable, for that matter.

  Jules was nice, but I didn’t know if it would go much past where it was. She kept her hair blonde even though it was brown and her weight went up and down more than the stock market, but she was cute, if a little snarly. Then again, I liked unreasonable women, maybe because I needed somebody to shout in my fucking ear to make me feel something. She had been a cabaret singer with some limited success, then her acute acid reflux did some damage to her vocal cords – which made her a singer who couldn’t sing. However, yelling wasn’t a problem.

  Even though she had lost her singing voice, luckily she wasn’t stupid and got a job as an assistant at a law firm. She hated it, but the medical plan covered her meds and the salary allowed her to save up for the operation that would restore her instrument. She was close to having enough money, but I wasn’t sure why she was bothering. She was in her forties now and wasn’t about to become a star, especially since her repertoire stopped at 1963 with Eydie Gorme and Blame It on the Bossa Nova. She claimed not to listen to any music that came afterwards, except for some Broadway shit. That’s why we got along; I loved Sinatra and knew all the standards. But I also loved the Beatles, the Stones, Nirvana and even Kanye West, which drove her insane.

  “After what that asshole did to Taylor Swift?” she’d shriek at me.

  I’d reply, “Listen to their music side-by-side. You’ll know who deserves to have an award taken away.”

  That was another problem - she lived in the past and wanted both of us to get a condo there together. Despite Howard’s opinion of me, I still wanted to pretend maybe something new might work, but she wasn’t budging. In her words, “The passage of time can kiss my ass.”

  Whenever she said something like that, my heart sort of melted. Nothing like misanthropes in love.

  Even though it was only Saturday, I knew she’d be there all weekend. She was already making noises about giving up her place in Harlem and officially moving in with me. We’d both save money, right? I returned the noise with quiet. It was a good trick – Howard wasn’t the only one who knew it.

  I went to the second bedroom, which was what I used for an office even though there was still a queen bed taking up most of the room. I sat down at the IKEA desk, pulled out the flash drive Mr. Barry Filer had given me and shoved it into the USB slot. Of course, it shoved right back because I was holding the fucking thing upside down as usual. Unlike many things in life, with a USB you can only be wrong once, and after I flipped the thing, the screen came up on my computer with the contents.

  More weirdness.

  There was exactly one document on the flash drive. One. It was a massive 11.3 kilobytes. And when I opened up the document, it contained exactly one small piece of information – an address.

  In other words, I still didn’t know who or what I was after. To find that out, I had to go to Virginia.

  I hated Virginia.

  The Davidsons

  The address was located in Virginia Beach, where a lot of D.C. elites settle down once they rape the taxpayers enough to afford the admission price. There were no instructions telling me to go there, but I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do. I just wondered if I had to pay for this trip myself out of the cash I had been supplied with. But when I got around to emptying the hotel envelope to see just how much green was in there, I discovered that Mr. Barry Filer had thoughtfully included a credit card with my name already on it. Attached to the card was a Post-It Note with neatly handwritten instructions (I suspected Mr. Barry Filer’s fine penmanship at work) to use the card for traveling expenses. I called the credit card company to check on the credit limit and was told there was none. I could charge however much I wanted. So I guess somebody trusted me.

  Somebody with excellent credit.

  I lived up to that trust - I didn’t go put a Lamborghini on the card. Instead, I charged a flight down to Richmond, a lousy sandwich from an airport kiosk and a car rental. It was another hour-and-a-half drive to get to Virginia Beach, but that was okay with me. The longer it took the better.

  Because I wasn’t in good shape.

  Even though the address came to me without a name attached, it wasn’t very hard to find out who owned the property. And when I did find out, I started sweating and still hadn’t stopped, even though it was only about fifty-five degrees out. A cold front had hit the Eastern seaboard and had cooled things off considerably for everybody but me - I was in the middle of my own personal heat wave. Why the fuck was I so nervous?

  After a curt female voice at the intercom buzzed the gate open, I wheeled my rented Taurus through it and around the perfectly maintained circular driveway leading me to the foot of what was to all intents and purposes a big fucking mansion. Looking at this monstrosity with windows, I suddenly wasn’t just sweaty, I was shaky too. And deep down, I knew why I was so fucking nervous.

  The truth was I had gotten lazy.

  I had not only lost my edge, I couldn’t remember what it was like to ever have had one. I didn’t want to see it, but, over the years, the agency had been feeding me an increasing number of crap assignments, stuff a Boy Scout who knew how to use Google could have handled. The decline was obvious, but I ascribed it to Howard’s trajectory, not mine. Yeah, he was in a senior position at Langley, but, at every opportunity, I knew they were shoving him further to the side of the real action, preparing him for his final severance package, which would be a nice bundle after all those years. That meant in turn that whatever jobs he threw my way weren’t going to be anything earth-shaking. We were getting old and things were winding down, that was my excuse for allowing things to slide without a fight. The reality was I wanted shit to be easy. I didn�
�t want drama. I had had enough of that in years gone by.

  Unfortunately, when there’s no drama, there’s nothing to prevent you from going completely to hell.

  I didn’t stay in shape. I had too much Jack Daniels at night. I had too many burgers at the sports bar. And I watched too much HGTV with Jules, instead of checking out whatever quality television the internet was demanding I take in. Nor was I reading great literature or compelling nonfiction. No, I was only reading new compilations of old comics I bought when I was a kid. I told myself I was only doing it to laugh at how much sense they didn’t make. How the hell did two-inch-long wings on the Sub-Mariner’s ankles make it so that he could fly? How did the Thing, who was made of rocks, have a girlfriend? Wasn’t intimacy an issue? All the lube in the world wasn’t going to help the entrance of a cock made of rocks feel less than traumatic, right?

  These kinds of inquires weren’t the kind of thing a grown man should occupy his time with, but, as long as I made enough to get by, I felt okay about throwing my ambition into storage and filling my days with whatever didn’t threaten me. But a dozen years of coasting was catching up to me – because I now had to deal with the fucking guy who owned this monster mansion. Why the hell would someone hand me an assignment that involved him? And why were people already treating me like I fucked up before I had done a goddam thing?

  Nothing made any sense, which made me sweat even harder.

  As I got out of the car, I eyed the estate and the beautifully manicured lawn that went on until it met the beach and the ocean put it all to a stop. I mopped my brow with the back of my hand and climbed the steps up to the massive double front doors that had matching American Eagles on them. Then I hit what I guessed was the doorbell. It was a button in the middle of a beautifully sculpted American flag and I thought to myself that there must be a special doorbell store somewhere in a special rich people mall that only they knew about.