Descending Son

by Scott Shepherd

  Rose smiled as he came through the front door. “Hi Jess.”

  She never smiled. Something was up. “Rose. Nothing as usual?”

  She dug a message slip out of a rack. “Actually, you got three calls. All from the same woman.”

  “Really.”

  “Kate Stark.” Rose handed over the slip. “I didn’t know you had family.”

  He stared at the message, tight-lipped. “I don’t.”

  “She said she was your mother.”

  Jess stuffed the piece of paper in his pants pocket.

  “I’m sure she did.”

  Thirty minutes later Jess was still staring at the message. He had already un-crumpled and re-crumpled it a half-dozen times. He had even folded it in half, then into quarters. He was lucky a window wasn’t nearby—otherwise he would have thrown the paper outside, which would have meant hauling his ass outside to go retrieve it.

  Finally, he asked Rose to make a Starbucks run. Jess wasn’t really thirsty, but he didn’t want her listening in on the phone call he finally decided to make.

  A woman picked up on the first ring. “Hello.” She sounded precise and sophisticated. Even saying just the one word.

  “It’s Jess.”

  “I didn’t think you’d call.”

  “Me either,” he admitted.

  Kate Stark waited a moment, choosing each syllable carefully. “He wants to see you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Jessie, don’t…”

  “Seven years I don’t hear a word from the bastard. And suddenly he has you call me out of the blue?”

  Kate took a deep breath. “You’re right. I’m the one who wants you to see him. It’s his birthday and—”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me! You’re actually inviting me to his birthday party?”

  “Your father’s dying, Jessie. I really think it would be a good idea if you got down here and saw him.”

  2

  Most people didn’t realize Los Angeles was two big grids bisected by a mountain range. On one side you had the San Fernando Valley, which was once nothing but orange groves. Now it was a bunch of strips—malls, clubs, and land boasting Spanish names like Reseda and Tujunga. On the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains was the LA Basin, some parts glitzy, other sections you might not get caught dead in. A half-dozen arteries split the mountain range, allowing drivers to get from one grid to the other. Whether it was a couple of large ones that could double as parking lots (the 405 and 101) or narrower roads (Beverly Glen, Coldwater, Laurel), from thirty thousand feet above it looked like ants crawling back and forth over one humongous hill.

  Not exactly a description of paradise. But put a gun to any Angelino’s head and they’d tell you they wouldn’t live anywhere else. Name another place you could find such beaches and weather. And the “Rich and Famous” to boot.

  Jess Stark would list any number of cities along the French and Italian Rivieras. People would respond by saying no one spoke English there. He’d be tempted to say more than half of Los Angeles didn’t speak it either, but he knew that wasn’t very PC.

  For Jess, Los Angeles was just a place to bide time. If he only knew what for, he would have headed there long ago. No sense moving on if there wasn’t a good reason or place to move on to. As a result, he’d been biding for almost seven years now. It wasn’t lost on Jess that he was still only two hours from the desert where he’d been born and raised. He didn’t need Dr. Clifford’s couch to understand why he let himself be tethered by this one-hundred-mile umbilical cord. He just didn’t want to own up to the reasons.

  Jess always knew the day would come when he would get pulled back into the Coachella Valley for some reason. His father being on his deathbed fit the bill. As Jess got into his SUV, he wondered if he was going because he felt an obligation, or to make sure the old fucker really was going to end up six feet under when he got back home.

  Either way, Jess had a feeling that his “biding” time was about over.

  “If I could just get off that LA Freeway without getting killed or caught…”

  Jess had survived seven years in the Big Bad City without either happening, provided he made safe passage across the county line.

  It wasn’t a coincidence that Jerry Jeff Walker was singing about packing up dishes and throwing out LA papers. Jess had popped “LA Freeway” on the iPod as he drove up the on-ramp.

  Interstate 10 started at the Santa Monica Pier and came to an end somewhere on the Florida coast. Jess had only made it as far as Phoenix on a couple of family vacations, back when he agreed to go on them. Jess got on the 10 just west of downtown.

  For a good hour, it seemed impossible to outrun Los Angeles—the malls got bigger, the car dealerships larger, and neon signs brighter as they beckoned the weary driver to come in and spend a load of money they didn’t have.

  A few miles outside of Riverside it all changed.

  The air got clearer. In the mornings it would be a good deal cooler and the afternoons were a whole lot hotter. Large rock formations cropped up on the side of the road and suddenly there were literally fields of grain and purple majestic mountains. White sands stretched for mile upon mile.

  As Jess dipped into the Coachella Valley, he noticed a few citified touches had sprung up in his seven-year absence. Where once stood a small building housing the Morongo Indian Casino, there now was a hotel the size of the Washington Monument. It looked bizarre; it was the only structure over two stories for a dozen miles. The outlet malls in Cabazon that were just going up when Jess left were now doing booming business even in the pre-noon hours.

  But some things forever stayed the same. Big billboards tempted tourists with sunny skies, golf courses, and resorts. Hadley’s Orchards, where you never could imagine that so many different kinds of fruit could be dried, pitted, and placed in a plastic baggie. The rest stop with the life-sized brontosaurus slide had children racing up and down it, no different from when Jess was a child and insisted his parents take him there each week.

  And the desert had lost none of its beauty. Sure, housing developments had sprung up all over the white sand floor, but zoning restrictions made sure there was enough room between communities to still boastfully refer to Palm Springs as “the Desert” (as opposed to Vegas, where all one ever heard of was “the Strip”).

  Jess swung onto 111, the main thoroughfare into downtown Palm Springs that split off Interstate 10. High up on the northern hills, windmills reigned over the valley, pumping energy for all they were worth. Jess passed by the Aerial Tramway, where one could take a funicular to the mountaintop and have a snowball fight, then half an hour later enjoy a tennis game in the ninety-degree sunshine down below.

  Jess checked the dashboard clock. Not even noon. Pretty darn good. The empty road promised he’d reach his destination in less than two hours—an excellent time even in the good old days when Indian Wells was reservation land instead of a place where they held professional tennis tournaments.

  Up ahead, a dust storm suddenly appeared. For a moment Jess wondered if he was about to fly into the teeth of a freaky bout of weather or if he should be on the lookout for Dorothy Gale’s house being blown into the sky by a twister. But it quickly turned out to be a pickup truck that had carelessly swung off the road and kicked up a ton of dirt into the morning breeze. The pickup began weaving back and forth. At first it seemed like the driver was on a twenty-hour bender and the bartender had forgotten to take his keys.

  Then, Jess saw the motorcyclist.

  The rider was trying to run up on the heel of the pickup. Each time the truck driver tried to let the cyclist by, the biker would chase the pickup’s tail.

  Jess wrenched the SUV into a hard right and a quick brake as he had no interest in playing a game of chicken with a crazy man. The moment Jess swung onto the right shoulder, the pickup barreled by on the wrong side of the road with the motorcycle in hot pursuit.

  Jess got a quick glimpse of the cyclist as he sped by. He was
well built, dressed in black from head to toe except for a scarlet red helmet and silver gloves that clamped down on the accelerator. The tinted face mask betrayed not a single feature of the rider. He could have been the Pale Horseman on a modern metal steed.

  As Jess tried to maintain control of his own car bumping along the shoulder, he heard a gigantic crunch. He glanced in the rearview mirror to see the pickup fly off the road and roll end over end at least four times.

  The motorcycle and its rider remained unscathed. It buzzed around the bend and out of sight without missing a beat.

  Jess screeched to a complete stop and jumped out of the SUV. He raced across the highway, onto the hot sand and past a snapped-in-half cactus, which had taken the brunt of the pickup that lay twenty yards farther on. The driver was pinned beneath the scrunched door. Jess’s heart skipped a beat when he spotted gasoline leaking from the tank.

  He dropped to his knees to check on the man and fought the instinct to turn away—the pickup driver was in such bad shape. His face had numerous deep gashes and blood seeped through his mangled clothes. He was in his late twenties, but even with all the facial wounds, Jess could see he was handsome and athletic. Jess got his arms under his shoulders.

  “We need to get you away from this thing,” he said.

  The pickup driver lay limp in his arms. Jess didn’t know if this was because the man was unconscious or agreeing with him. Surprisingly, he was able to yank the guy halfway out of the pickup on the first try.

  The driver’s eyes popped open. He gripped Jess’s throat and shook him wildly.

  “D… don’t… don’t make me go back!”

  Jess was confused. “Huh? What…?”

  “I can’t go back there!”

  Jess forcefully removed the man’s hands from his throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! C’mon, let’s move!” Another yank allowed Jess to pull the man clear of the pickup and drag him forty yards further into the desert.

  Seconds later, the truck exploded in flames.

  Jess threw himself over the injured driver for both of their protection as pickup parts scattered all over the sand.

  Once the sky stopped raining auto parts, Jess straightened up to find that the man had lost consciousness. His breathing was labored. Jess rooted around for his cell phone and suddenly realized it was in the SUV that was parked at least two hundred yards away.

  He started to get to his feet to run for the phone. Then, thinking better of it, he dug into the driver’s pockets. He came up with a cell and a handful of blood from the gaping wound in the man’s abdominal area.

  “Damn.” Jess clamped down on the rising nausea in his own stomach and the feeling of doom beginning to take residence.

  He punched in 911 and quickly walked an operator through the situation. He tried to approximate his location, but was told it wouldn’t be necessary.

  “We can trace your cell, Mr. Cox.”

  “Cox? My name’s Jess Stark.”

  “This isn’t Tom Cox?” asked the operator.

  He suddenly understood. “No, that must be the injured party. I’m using his phone.”

  The operator said they would have the paramedics out there as quickly as possible. He should just hang tight. Jess said he would. He remained kneeling in the middle of the desert—sunbaked and in mild shock himself.

  Waiting. Drenched in a young man’s blood.

  Tom Cox died in Jess’s lap three minutes before the first paramedic arrived.

  3

  Jess immediately noticed three things about Thaddeus Burke. First off, the man was absolutely no-nonsense. If he was born with a sense of humor, it was long gone by the time he reached adolescence. Second, he loved being sheriff. If the man was literate, which Jess would wager the jury was out on, he would consider Jim Thompson a god, and any of that writer’s lawmen a role model. Finally, his middle initial was probably an “S”, standing for Suspicious. Burke seemed like a man who never took anything at face value—which was validated by the sheriff’s shaking head as he handed Jess back his driver’s license.

  “Good Samaritan fresh out of Los Angeles, that’s what I’m supposed to believe here,” Burke said.

  “Label me whatever you want, Sheriff. I saw the guy go flying off the road and ran over to see if there was anything I could do to help.”

  Burke was in his early fifties; his standard crew cut gleamed blond from too much time in the sun. Jess didn’t know what was more remarkable about the man: the apparent absence of body fat (indicated by his form-fitting uniform) or the impeccably seamless tan. Burke glanced over at Jess’s SUV. “Most people wouldn’t have stopped.”

  “I didn’t have much choice. I almost got run off the road. If I hadn’t pulled over, you’d be making room for both me and Cox.”

  Jess indicated the coroner wagon parked behind Burke. The paramedics had left twenty minutes earlier. A few cop cars still remained.

  “You know Tom Cox, then?” asked the sheriff.

  “The 911 operator told me his name when I used his cell phone to call in the accident. I’m an innocent bystander, Sheriff. No reason to turn this into something it isn’t.”

  Jess looked past Burke again. The medical examiner, an attractive woman in her mid-forties, her scarlet hair in a tight bun, was wrapping things up.

  “What about the motorcycle rider? Any luck finding him?”

  Burke offered up a slight grin. “Innocent bystander, huh?”

  “Just making sure you know that the biker definitely drove Cox off the highway.”

  “Appreciate the help. I’m sure we would’ve figured it out from the skid marks.” Burke looked back up Highway 111. “Didn’t get a look at the guy’s face?”

  “Seemed like he was deliberately trying to keep it covered. The face shield was completely black. I’m surprised he could see anything.”

  “Probably custom-made—one way tint.” Burke checked the pad he’d been taking notes on. “Red helmet, silver gloves. Don’t think that’ll narrow it down much. We’ve got a lot of bike shops in the Valley—and it doesn’t necessarily mean he bought the stuff local. All the same, we’ve put an APB out on the guy, for all the good it’ll do. Probably halfway to Hemet by now.”

  He shoved the pad in a back pocket, his first move indicating he was done with Jess. “Thanks, Mr. Stark. If you think of anything else contact me at the station.” The sheriff dug a card out of his vest and handed it to him.

  Jess stuck it in his wallet. “There was one other thing about Cox. He was scared to death when I pulled him from the pickup.”

  “Kind of natural, wouldn’t you say? Nasty crash like that?”

  Jess shook his head. “I don’t think it was about the accident. He begged me not to make him ‘go back.’ What do you think that meant?”

  Burke chewed on it, and then shrugged his shoulders. “Beats me. Maybe the place he worked. The Oasis.”

  “The bar off Ironwood?”

  “Tom was the short order cook there the last few months.” The sheriff took another hard look at Jess. “Oasis is a local place. Thought you were from Los Angeles.”

  “I grew up here.”

  The sheriff’s eyes lit up like the proverbial light bulb. “Jess Stark. You’re Walter Stark’s kid.”

  Jess stomped down the reflex to frown and eked out a nod. “That’s right.”

  “You’ve been gone a while, haven’t you, son?”

  “Seven years or so since I moved to Los Angeles.”

  “What brings you back down here?”

  “My father’s birthday. My mother’s got a party planned.”

  “Wish the old man a good one for me.”

  “I’ll make sure and do that.”

  Burke placed a hand on Jess’s shoulder. Discovering Jess’s parentage had suddenly brought a degree of familiarity to the proceedings.

  “Hell of a homecoming, kid.”

  Burke traipsed through the sand to check in with the medical examiner. The redheaded wom
an was just getting to her feet. She motioned to a couple of her men that they could transfer Cox to the coroner’s wagon. She started to confer with Burke—then, her eyes strayed past the sheriff to look over at Jess. But the eye-line was cut off a few seconds later when Burke shifted a bit to his right.

  Jess couldn’t tell if the sheriff had done it on purpose, but he wouldn’t put it past him.

  One of the coroner’s men draped a sheet over Cox’s body and then pulled it up over the dead man’s head.

  It occurred to Jess that the desert sun would never shine down on Cox’s face again.

  Hell of a homecoming indeed.

  4

  The iron gates were large enough to protect Troy. Jess wasn’t planning a surprise attack, but he hadn’t committed to coming when he talked to his mother. Like the ancient Greeks, he figured he would gain entrance to the compound because he was Kate’s birthday gift to his father. Of course, all hell broke loose once the Trojan horse was safely ensconced in the city, and Jess expected nothing less from the father-and-child reunion.

  The family surname was etched in wrought iron over the entrance gates to the mountainous estate. The patriarch had spent years climbing to the top of this hill and wanted to make sure everyone knew he wasn’t planning on leaving it anytime soon.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Walter Stark came to the Coachella Valley as an ambitious young man in the early sixties. This was right about the time Sinatra had taken residence in the heart of Palm Springs. The Rat Pack played golf and drank at Tamarisk Country Club during the day, then went back to Frank’s to eat and drink a whole lot more. Walter, who was failing at one entrepreneurial scheme after another, got his big break parking cars at one of Sinatra’s all-night shindigs.

  A platinum blonde overdosed in one of the cabanas. Unfortunately, she had been with a man she wasn’t married to. At a time when the only focus of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter in the desert was who came and went at the Sinatra house, ambulances and cop cars pulling up the main driveway was the sort of publicity nobody wanted. The Sinatra majordomo begged Walter to escort the fallen woman to a clinic that happened to be owned by her cuckolded physician husband. The ashamed doctor was so appreciative of Walter’s discretion that he immediately hired him to work at the clinic.