With my new rental car, my third so far on this trip, I drove around the city until I found what very well could have been the last remaining pay phone in Lexington – outside a dilapidated 7-11. I used it to make a collect call to Howard’s office on his direct line.
“Yeah?”
Thank Christ he was there.
“Howard. Me.”
“A collect call? You can still make those? Where the fuck are you?”
“Are we on a secure line?”
“You’re asking me? Remember where I work? I’m always on a secure line. What’s going on?”
“A lot.”
I didn’t want to tell him about the explosion. With any luck, nobody knew about it yet, since Booneville wasn’t exactly at the center of the media universe.
“Such as?”
“I don’t want to say too much, but I need a big favor. Remember what we did for Jerry Mendelsohn back in 2002 or so?”
“Yeah.”
“I need that done for me. Like yesterday.”
A pause.
“Jesus, that’s a big ask. I don’t know. You’re not…”
“Howard, this is serious in ways you can’t imagine.”
He sighed.
“Let me see what I can do.”
“I need it in the morning.”
“Jawohl, mein fuhrer. I’ll send a courier.”
“Perfect. Tell him to meet me…”
I looked down the street. I saw a familiar yellow and red sign.
“…at the Denny’s on East High Street – Lexington, Kentucky. I don’t know the address, but there’s probably just one. Nine a.m. tomorrow. Can your courier make that?”
“Yeah. He’ll make it.”
“Nothing to anybody about talking to me or where I am. The courier shouldn’t even know my name.”
“What the hell is this about?”
“As usual, I wish I knew. But you have to do one more thing for me.”
“Okayyyyy…” The “y” trailed down to the lowest possible note on Howard’s scale. That meant he was worried about how deep he was getting into my shit.
“I’m not fucking around, Howard. You know me. I don’t hit the panic button often.”
“All right, all right, just fucking tell me.”
I fucking told him.
When I was done, I went to a nearby CVS and bought a small pad of paper and a pen, along with a bottle of Coke Zero. I wrote down all the numbers that I might need that were stored in my iPhone, then I did to it what I had done to Mr. Barry Filer’s burner, just in case they were somehow tracking my personal phone too. Losing that iPhone hurt worse than losing the credit card. I had three Words with Friends games going with Jules that would never get finished.
Oh well. That bitch always won anyway.
I returned the rental and took a cab to an Embassy Quality Express Whatever Suites near the Denny’s I would be visiting tomorrow morning. I checked in with cash and a phony name. I unlocked the door to the room, entered with my Banana Republic shopping bags, sat down on the bed and exhaled. It had been a long day filled with unwelcome surprises, including the deaths of two people I never even got to meet. But it was just about over. The sun was going down and I had done everything I could do before the courier arrived tomorrow morning. Since my body was still aching from the crash, I took a few of the pain pills the doctor in Booneville had prescribed to me, washed them down with some Jack, laid down on the queen bed and watched half of a bad movie on HBO before I finally fell asleep.
Thursday morning.
I woke up at seven-thirty, shocked that it was that late and I had slept that long. I hadn’t even had dinner. Clearly, my body was screaming for sleep and the pain pills had helped me get it. Now I had to get it together so I could get down to the Denny’s well before the courier did at nine a.m. I pissed, showered, shaved, got dressed and went out the door.
The Denny’s wasn’t all that crowded when I arrived, so it was easy to get a booth with a good view of the door. I had to be ready for whoever walked through it, since there was always the chance Howard was a part of the problem, in which case it would be somebody a lot more hostile than a courier. I hated to think like that, but I had to. Of course, if they were sending some kind of assassin after me, I wouldn’t be able to do much about it, since I was neither armed nor dangerous. But if I could see him coming, I would at least buy me a few moments to make a run for it. And I’d know where to run. I had checked out where the back door was.
I checked my nice new silver watch. It was only eight-twenty and I was starving, so I quickly got my order in and the waitress hustled back with my Coke Zero to kick things off.
I’m not a coffee person, maybe because my mother was a full-on addict. When I was a kid, I would find her half-finished cups of java all over the house. She would forget she was working on one cup and immediately pour another, just like a nicotine freak who lights one cigarette before the one he’s smoking burns all the way down. Because of this, everything in our house smelled like stale coffee. When you made a call on our old-fashioned rotary phone, you got a contact high from the fumes left behind on the mouthpiece.
Anyway, that had been the least of her problems and, for that matter, mine.
My body still hurt like a son of a bitch from the shock of the crash. I was wishing I had taken another one or two of the magic pills when I woke up, but I couldn’t chance being groggy with all that was happening. I plowed through my eggs and pancakes in about five minutes flat and waited. I remembered this was what people had to do before smartphones, just sit. And sit. And sit. All I could do was scope out the locals at the other tables and wonder what the hell was next for me.
Nine a.m. finally rolled around and the cavalry was nowhere in sight. General Davidson and John Wayne would not have approved. I tensed up. More and more I was sweating over who was coming to greet me, because I was growing increasingly worried about Howard’s role in all this. He was acting very un-Howard-like, and if he wasn’t on my side anymore, the ground would give beneath me very quickly. I just had to keep reminding myself that I had been deliberately kept alive so far for some reason. Hopefully, that would continue to be the official policy of Whatever-the-Fuck-This-Was-About Incorporated.
It took two more Coke Zeros and another half-hour before I saw the courier come in through the door. And holy shit - this was one scenario I definitely had not considered. He was an assassin, all right. But he didn’t kill humans.
No, this motherfucker killed tires.
I saw him before he saw me, and it was a good thing, otherwise I think he would have spun around and run all the way back home. I stood up, walked over, took Jeremy Davidson by the arm and marched him out of the Denny’s. He looked at me, realized who I was and turned white. Good sign. That meant he had no idea he was meeting me either and he was just fulfilling a random assignment.
I led him around the corner of the Denny’s to a side street with nothing much on it, except some vacant lots and a fire hydrant. We got about a block down that street, when I stopped and turned to him. We stared at each other a moment. He was too scared to say a word, so I frowned and grabbed the sealed, stuffed package that he was carrying under his arm. I began to tear it apart as he looked on.
“So – you’re CIA now?” I said by way of making conversation.
“Summer job,” he said breathlessly.
“Family connections, I take it?”
He looked away sheepishly. Meanwhile, I got the package open and inside was what I wanted to find. My new name was David Muhlfelder and I had the driver’s license, passport, and credit card to prove it. There was also a new phone with encryption software included and another thousand dollars in cash. Thanks, Howard. I stuffed it all in my jacket pocket and threw the packaging in the trash. The kid was still standing there in his overpriced jeans and t-shirt, looking unsure of what to do.
“You can go,” I said peremptorily.
He stood his ground, as they say in Florida after th
ey shoot somebody they shouldn’t have.
“Can I ask you something?”
I nodded.
“Are you out here to do the thing for my grandfather?” he asked tentatively.
I was a little surprised. He wanted to talk. Rare in the Davidson clan. And what he had to say could be important. This was an opportunity. Or as the Help Wanted ad in the Burger King window once said, a whopper-tunity.
“You eat breakfast yet?” I asked.
He ordered a Grand Slam and I ordered another. I felt entitled, since I still had a meal to make up for from last night. After the same waitress I had had before gave me some shit about my cholesterol, she left and Jeremy was again completely at a loss. He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself, let alone me. But I knew. I wanted him to take the first turn of whatever conversational game we were going to play, so I waited. I was getting good at waiting. It’s an art. You have to be like a Buddha, all-knowing and unmoving, my favorite position to assume, even though I was completely unqualified for it.
Finally, he turned to me.
“I’m sorry about the tires. It’s just…my mom was upset. She didn’t want you to do what you were doing.”
“So she told you to come after me.”
“No. I just went on my own.”
That was a surprise. I guessed Angela was just protecting him by taking responsibility. Turned out she was a real mother and not just the kind of mother I had previously thought she was - the kind of mother that’s half a word, as Sammy Davis Jr. used to say.
The waitress brought him a coffee and me my zillionth Coke Zero of the morning. I was starting to get that weird feeling I get after drinking too much of it, like bugs were dancing in my brain.
The kid kept on talking.
“I was studying some CIA tracking techniques and thought I’d try them. Maybe I could stop you without anybody knowing. Maybe my mom could relax about you making some kind of problem at least.”
“She’s been nervous lately?”
“Real nervous about Grandpa. He’s had a bunch of small strokes.”
I sized the kid up. “That was pretty ballsy, coming after me like that and not knowing anything about me.”
“It’s PMA,” he blurted out.
?
“PMA,” I repeated.
He continued to blurt, because he was nervous. “It’s a discipline taught by this guy, this guy who was the Ultimate Fighting Champion, Andre Gibraltar, you probably heard of him. PMA is what he says he uses in fights and in life, to make things happen the way he wants them to happen. The ‘P’ stands for ‘Power.’ You have a powerful idea you want to accomplish, right? That’s where it starts. Then you move into the ‘M,’ that stands for ‘Mind.’ You have to mentally have the will to put that power into action, everybody has ideas, not everybody has the will to go to the next step, and the next step is the ‘A,’ which stands for ‘Action.’ When you have the will in place, you translate that will into action and make things happen.”
Oh sweet, sweet Jesus.
“You spend a lot of time by yourself, don’t you?”
“I really want to join the CIA,” he said too quickly. “If I put PMA to work in my life, I’m pretty sure I can become a great agent.”
“Aren’t you still in school?”
“Just got out of high school. Well, I graduate in June, but I got all my credits done last semester. I’m supposed to start college in the fall, but…”
He stopped. Then he began to study me with a little too much intensity.
“Is there egg on my face?” I asked.
“No, I just…you look kinda pale. I was wondering if you were okay.”
“I’ve never had so many people concerned about my health.”
“Sorry.” He looked down, a little embarrassed, and not just about asking about my skin tone. I think he surmised that I was skeptical of the whole PMA thing.
“So you know your grandfather hired me.”
He looked back up. “Um…yeah.”
“You know why he hired me?”
“Um…yeah. My uncle, right?”
I sipped my Coke Zero. I was about to try and cross the Rubicon if this kid would hand me a paddle to help me do it.
“What do you think about it?”
“My uncle? Well…I don’t know. He was always a little out there. I mean, I only saw him a couple of times when I was a kid. I was pretty young when he died, nine or ten maybe.”
“What was he like?”
“He was really…I don’t know…intense? Kinda…angry?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. He and Grandpa used to yell at each other about war stuff. Something about what my uncle was doing over in Afghanistan. I don’t remember much. I do remember this one time, because it was really weird, when he came over with this guy…and Grandpa called the guy his ‘girlfriend.”
“What was this guy’s name?”
“His first name was Herman. I remember that because I never met anybody named Herman before.”
“I still haven’t. What about Herman’s last name?”
He shook his head and shrugged. “My grandpa acted like he knew him, but I don’t know how.”
“So you think your uncle was gay?”
Jeremy shrugged again, but no head shake this time. “I don’t know. I didn’t really understand what gay was back then.”
Interesting. The first personal information I had about Robert Davidson was the fact that he had a girlfriend named Herman.
Meanwhile, Jeremy was starting to seem like a smart and earnest boy. I didn’t really appreciate earnest as much as some others, but in this case, it seemed to fit. The PMA stuff was a phase, a way for him to try to become a man, which made me think the father wasn’t much in the picture. I had to wonder - why was he telling me all this, when the rest of his family wouldn’t?
“Are you with the CIA?” he asked.
“I used to be. Now they just hire me for jobs like this.”
His eyes lit up. “You carry a gun?”
“It’s been a couple of decades since I even fired one. Kid, the truth is I was a desk jockey the whole time at the Agency. They liked me for my brain, which was all I had to offer. I don’t do Kung Fu and if I jumped through a window firing guns in both hands like they do in the movies, I’d probably end up falling on my face and accidentally shooting myself in the balls. So don’t get it in your head that I’m any kind of superspy.”
“I practice Kung Fu. Not Kung Fu strictly speaking, but MAU. Martial Arts Ultimate.”
“Three letters again. Must be Andre’s idea.”
“Yeah, it puts together the best parts of Taekwon-Do, Danzan Ryū and Shootfighting.”
That sounded painful. Our food came, which was a good thing, because it was time to get back to business.
“So why does your grandfather think your uncle is still alive?” I said casually as I poured syrup over my new set of pancakes.
“No idea.”
“Where’s your dad, if you don’t mind?”
“He lives in Chicago.”
That’s all he said and I didn’t go further. It was probably another long story I didn’t want to deal with right now. I sent my fork in after the cakes, mentally assembling my next line of questioning. But then he changed the subject before I did.
“I…I really want to go with you.”
My fork stopped in mid-air. I looked back at the kid. He was serious.
“I mean, before, I know….well, I know I tried to stop you, but…but things happen for a reason. Now I think I got sent to meet you on purpose. Maybe we should work together to find out the truth. It’ll be good for Grandpa and maybe Mom too. And I think I can learn stuff from you.”
“Your name’s Jeremy, right?” He nodded. “Well, Jeremy, here’s the thing. The reason I’m pale and sore today is because yesterday a black SUV rammed me from the side while a few hundred feet away from me a house was in the process of blowing to smithereens. One sm
ithereen even landed on my car hood.”
His eyes widened.
“So I don’t know what I’m in for here. I do know if I get you killed, many people would be angry at me – including me.”
He ate a little, trying to come up with a response and finally found one. “But it wouldn’t be like it was your fault or anything, it would be my choice, not yours – so my fault if anything did happen.”
“That’s not how everyone else would see it. Believe me, I’ve taken enough blame in my life.”
“I just want my grandpa to be proud of me. He needs somebody to be proud of.”
“So – join the Army. Wouldn’t he want that more than anything?”
“I don’t want to kill anybody, that’s why I thought the CIA was good for me.”
I laughed. “You don’t think the CIA kills people?”
He shrugged. He was embarrassed again and I could see he felt stupid. I was a dick.
But at least now I knew why I liked the kid.
He was like me – he lacked the killer instinct. It was why my father didn’t go far at the Agency and why I ultimately opted out. You either were okay with killing people – as a matter of fact, you saw it as the path to progress – or you couldn’t get past the part where someone had to die for your ambitions, whether they be personal or political. Once someone at the Agency saw that sentimental streak in you, you wouldn’t ever have a shot at rising to the upper echelon. Because they really didn’t believe you belonged there at all.
“Okay, okay, kid, I know what you’re saying, but…no. The other thing is, I’m going to be gone a while. You should get back to your job and your mom.”
“That wouldn’t be a big deal, I could just tell my supervisor I was helping you. And I could tell my mom they gave me a job that would keep me out of town for a while, she wouldn’t know I was with you or anything.”
Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) Page 8
