Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1)

by Joel Canfield

  “They’re getting ready to make the world safe for white people like you. So don’t worry your pretty little smelly head.”

  He looked at me with some confusion, not sure if I was joking or actually tuning in on his wavelength.

  “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

  “I mean, you and the rest of your paranoid bigoted subhuman clan of pussies who piss their pants at the thought of progress in any form are going to be fine. You can continue to claim to own Jesus, the Bible, the Constitution, the fucking Declaration of Independence and, of course, the American flag and you can continue to pretend all of those things are full-on in favor of you keeping your foot on the throat of every person of color, condemning to eternal damnation every sexual act outside of heterosexual marriage, despising and invalidating every other religion outside of yours and teaching your children that America has never done anything remotely wrong in its entire two-hundred-and-thirty-nine year history.”

  A couple of beats. PMA was staring at me as though I was experiencing a complete psychotic break.

  “What?”

  “RAISE THE FUCKING GATE.”

  He waddled back as fast as he could to the booth.

  “AND SHOVE THAT SWORD UP YOUR ASS!”

  The gate went up and I hit the gas pedal. In my rear view mirror, I saw him standing there like a poor faithful dog who had no idea why his master had just kicked him across the room. I briefly felt guilty, but only briefly. I didn’t have room for any more emotions.

  The Dark Sky assholes had gotten all the files out of my computer, every last one of them, through that fucking goddam flash drive. That included all the documents I had stored on Lorie’s arrest. That’s how they knew right where to hit me and they took their best swing. Wham, home run.

  I still remembered the call.

  It was a slow morning at the Agency when my phone rang. A voice identified itself as being from the sheriff’s office in Salisbury, Delaware.

  “Are you Lorie Bowman’s father?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have her in custody.”

  “For what?”

  “Murder.”

  You don’t forget anything about that kind of moment.

  After I left Allison - for nobody, that’s how bad it was – the kids didn’t take it well. No kids do. I did my best, taking them on weekends, but a part-time dad wasn’t a real one. The split affected them both in very different ways. Grace became more and more of a steel-eyed machine, suppressing any feelings, while my youngest, Lorie, went the other way – she melted down and became an emotional basket case.

  I knew Allison was badmouthing me to all her friends in front of them. Grace was receptive to the poison, but Lorie was more than a little conflicted. One day, she asked me why I hated babies, and that’s when I knew she had found out about the abortion, which Allison and I had supposedly agreed to hide from the kids. In the end, I couldn’t fight the constant stream of anti-dad propaganda they were fed Monday through Friday – and, as the kids grew older, they began cancelling the weekends. And then they barely saw me at all.

  Allison, meanwhile, had gone back to working at the Agency, where she quickly found her next victim, a repressed shlub named Edgar who had little experience with women and even less with children. Unfortunately, it turned out he hated kids – but Allison turned the other way when he started raining verbal abuse on ours for such severe sins as having the TV volume up too high. Grace, the tough one, merely let it bounce off her steel skin. That left Lorie, who took most of his heat and took it to heart.

  When she hit her teens, Lorie went into full rebellion, piercing her nose, dying her hair and embracing the emo culture of the time. She also cut herself. When she got out of high school, she moved out as fast as she could and not to college, because she didn’t keep up her grades and hated school. Instead, she moved in with a local rock guitarist.

  That relationship didn’t last and she was devastated.

  Unable to cope, she moved in with Grace, who had already graduated from college and had a staff job at an internet company in Delaware. But she was still obsessed with the rocker. She talked him into spending one more night with her - but when the morning came, so did her wake-up call: The relationship itself was over as far as he was concerned.

  I saw her a few months later and noticed her stomach was a little big. Was she…? “No!” she yelped. She had always had weight issues and I should keep my mouth shut. I did, thinking no more about it. A couple of months later, I got that call from the sheriff’s office and found out they were holding her for suspected murder. And I had the sensation of falling off a cliff I didn’t even know I was standing on.

  She had indeed been pregnant – and, after she had given birth in a bathroom at a party at a friend’s house, she dumped it into the trash can outside on the curb.

  The next morning, the cops picked up Lorie at Grace’s place, where she was alone – her sister was at work. Lorie, when she was booked, for some reason gave the cops my number. Maybe she didn’t want Edgar to find out. Maybe she wanted to see what I would do. Who knows, I didn’t.

  Allison got her out on bail, because I was still dead broke from the divorce. But then there was the defense attorney, who wanted a huge retainer to take on Lorie’s case. I was expected to contribute half. I didn’t have it. That’s when I made the mistake of going to my father.

  I had already borrowed some money some years earlier because I just couldn’t make it when I was paying both alimony and child support. So far, I had been unable to pay him back – I was up to my neck in credit card debt. But I thought he might understand this situation. It wasn’t about me, it was about my daughter, his granddaughter, and doing what we could to keep her out of jail for the rest of her life. But he was still pissed off about my divorce, even more pissed off about the money I already owed him and he made it clear nothing else would be forthcoming. I fought a little because this was the kind of situation when a family came together instead of pointing figures and resurrecting old grudges.

  That’s when he blamed me for the dead baby.

  A screaming match ensued, and my part in it wasn’t anything to be proud of. When my father passed away from cancer three years later, I discovered that I had been disowned. By that time, I was also persona non grata with Allison and my kids. She had gotten the money together through other means but never stopped telling everyone around her how I had failed when my daughter needed me most.

  The ironic part was that the case against Lorie had come to nothing – it seemed like the D.A. had overreached by charging her with murder in the first when he would have a hard time proving it. The case went away and Lorie moved back in with Allison and Edgar.

  I had lost my parents, my kids and a grandson, all in one fell swoop. I started drinking and didn’t stop. I showed up late for work on those days when I showed up at all. My work got sloppy. And finally the CIA and I agreed on the fact that I shouldn’t work there anymore. I got a decent severance package and Howard said he would do what he could in terms of throwing me an occasional freelance job. He couldn’t be too open with his support, because his lovely wife Janet was close friends with Allison, but he still ended up coming through for me on the sly. Which was why I couldn’t hate Howard for the betrayal. He was put in a position where he didn’t have much choice. Just like I was now in a position where I didn’t have much choice.

  Andrew Wright had made it clear during the rest of our talk in The Tank that he had a lot of clout with the law enforcement community. He told me what I already knew, that there was no statute of limitations on murder. And he let me know in no uncertain terms that he would see to it that the Salisbury D.A. would go ahead and press formal charges against my daughter unless I did what he was requesting. Of course, the charges might not stick. Of course, Wright might be bluffing about the whole thing. It didn’t matter. What mattered was any chance of the dead-and-buried case being brought back to horrifying life. My daughter would be traumatized all
over again. Expensive lawyers would have to be hired again. Headlines might pop up in the newspaper again.

  And it would all be my fault.

  “Are you okay?” PMA asked me, shaking me out of my self-pity. “What’d they do to you in there?”

  I didn’t answer, because I finally saw, up the road, a ratty old bar that had a “CASINO” sign in front of it. Turned out, in Montana, you could call yourself a casino even if you only had one old slot machine that only took quarters sitting in the corner. I ordered a double Jack on the rocks. And it was gone quicker than you could lose twenty-five cents in that one-armed bandit.

  “So what’s going on?” PMA sat at the bar, staring at me knocking back my drink, and getting increasingly agitated by my state.

  I slammed my empty glass on the bar and motioned for another. “I don’t want to get into it. But we’re going back to your house and I’m going to lie to your grandfather.”

  The kid didn’t object. “That’s probably the best thing. My uncle…his fucking face… He’s so messed up.”

  “Yeah. Join the club,” I said as my next Jack arrived. “By the way, you’re driving from here on, I don’t care if you don’t have an ID, because I’m getting fucked up as fast as I can.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to Missoula. We’ll fly back tomorrow.”

  “But, Jesus, Max, we have to do something about this. We have to do something about Dark Sky, nobody knows what they’re up to. I mean, shit, how much money is the Pentagon feeding them?”

  Money.

  Andrew Wright wanted me to believe all this madness was just about one old man not wanting to hurt another old man. He wanted me to believe there was indeed a shred of human decency in him and to trust in fairy tales that never had a happy ending. Well, of course, the truth was good ol’ Andy wasn’t worried at all about General Davidson’s well-being. He was worried about his fucking funding. If this shit got out, and it might if the General made a big media stink about all this, Congress might turn off the spigot – and Dark Sky might really go dark.

  Money and power. It was always really about money and power.

  “Kid, you and I can’t do anything about it.”

  “We could tell our story…”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I just shook my head.

  “We just can’t.”

  We spent our last night on the road in the same hotel in Kalispell where we crashed the night before. I took the last two pain pills I had from the Booneville pharmacy and washed them down with the rest of the bottle of Jack, then spent the night delirious in bed as the ghosts came out of the walls to scream at me. My ex-parents. My ex-wife. My ex-children. My ex-life.

  Jesus.

  Thursday morning.

  I got up in the middle of the night, drunk, tired and wired. The kid was asleep, so I went over to the desk in the room, fired up the Chromebook and, just for fun, started researching the so-called COIN warfare in Afghanistan a few years back just to see if I could find if there had been any sightings of a crazed killer with a trick rifle. There were none that I could find.

  Instead, I found out about the tomahawks.

  Night raids in Afghanistan were conducted with, according to a New York Times article, “primeval tomahawks.” Holy shit, really? And the tomahawks were custom-made by a guy in North Carolina, Daniel Winkler, who also provided the Native American weaponry for the 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans. According to the article, the tomahawks were financed by “private donors.” A Seal Team 6 member confirmed that he himself witnessed some “hatchet kills.”

  I recalled the tomahawk display case in The Barn, the handmade instruments of primitive death carefully preserved and under glass – the way fetish items for perverted killers should be. And I wondered if any women and children were involved in those “hatchet kills.” After all, Mr. Barry Filer had proudly proclaimed that Herman and Robert had cleaned out a few villages.

  I turned off the laptop and turned on the TV with the sound down, so I didn’t wake up the kid. And then I watched infomercials about juicers and genie bras until dawn, the dawn of the day when I would be ending this fiasco once and for all.

  When the kid finally woke up, we drove down to the Missoula airport and returned the rental, then we grabbed the next flight to Washington D.C., where, upon arrival, I rented my seventh and final car of this hell trip and drove it down to Virginia Beach. The voice at the gate intercom was a new one, a male voice. PMA told me it was the butler. I gave my name and he buzzed me in.

  As I pulled in and parked in front of the General’s mansion, I noticed a few more vehicles parked on the roundabout driveway than there were previously. One of them had a little red cross on its bumper. Uh oh.

  Before I went in to face the latest fresh hell, I took care of some unfinished business. I turned to the kid and pulled out a few thousand dollar bills from the latest envelope from Mr. Barry Filer.

  “Take this. You earned it.”

  “They make thousand dollar bills?” PMA looked at the bills, and then looked at me in confusion. “You sure? That’s a lot of money.”

  “The only reason I took it is so I could give you some.”

  That was kind of a lie. I didn’t have any qualms about taking their blood money. It was a little less that would be left in their pot and more that would be in mine. That wasn’t going to make me lose any sleep.

  The kid shrugged and took the money.

  We got out of the car and walked over to the mansion. PMA opened the front door like he lived there, which he did, and I was once again in the Four Seasons lobby.

  I yelled, “Hello?”

  A minute later, Angela came downstairs in her bathrobe, the same bathrobe she was wearing the first time I met her. I resisted the urge to return some of the slaps she had applied to my face a few days ago and instead put all the violence in my glare. She ran over and hugged her boy, then turned to me.

  “Hello,” she said quietly.

  “Good afternoon and you knew the whole fucking time,” I replied.

  She said nothing. I noticed she looked like hell, but I’m sure I wasn’t exactly radiating good health and vitality myself.

  PMA looked at Angela in horror. “You knew what? That Uncle Robbie was alive? You knew the whole time?”

  “We’ll talk about this later,” she said in an almost-whisper.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said, giving the kid a look that indicated he should leave it all alone.

  She led us upstairs, which was a surprise. I hadn’t been up there before. We got to the top and then walked down the hallway. She opened the door at the end of the hall.

  And that’s when I saw this was not going to be over today.

  General Davidson was in a hospital bed, attended by a few nurses. They had installed a whole hospital room set-up, the machines, the monitors, the IV, everything. The General was out like a light and didn’t look like he was about to wake up anytime soon. He made my paleness look like a Miami suntan.

  “Oh my God,” said PMA with real sadness.

  “We really shouldn’t be in here,” she whispered to me, “but I knew you wouldn’t believe me if you didn’t see it for yourself. He had a massive stroke the other night and he’s been in a coma ever since.”

  “Prognosis?” I asked in a little shocked voice.

  “They’re not sure…” She didn’t say more. She didn’t have to.

  She and I went back downstairs, leaving the kid alone with his Grandpa on his probable death bed. She stopped when we got to the front door and turned to me again.

  “I’m sorry…Robbie began calling me a few years ago. I hope you understand.”

  I didn’t want to.

  “I’m assuming you – or someone else - will contact me when the General is able to communicate. Then I’ll finish the job.”

  She nodded and opened the front door. As I took a few steps towards the outside, she said softly, �
��You know, I really did like you.”

  I turned back.

  “Did? I’m not dead yet.”

  She slowly shut the door.

  Homecoming

  I arrived back at Roosevelt Island Friday afternoon and not in a good state. Hungover and defeated, I realized just what it had cost me to leave my apartment and go to meet Mr. Barry Filer in that hotel lobby almost two weeks ago. The cost was discovering what was underneath the tips of a few very ugly icebergs.

  For example, the all-American persona of General Davidson that the country worshipped. The immense darkness lurking underneath that persona was a narrow belief system and an ingrained intolerance that caused Robert Davidson to deny who he was and embrace a violence that wasn’t natural to him. Would Jeremy Davidson end up doing likewise?

  Then there was Dark Sky, the unseen arm of the Pentagon, attempting to win wars without anyone in the country knowing how they were really being fought. Andrew Wright built his own, personal rogue branch of the military and then created the ultimate soldier to fight for it – his own son. Herman and Robert were crown princes, royalty expected to live up to their lineage. The former didn’t have a conscience to get in the way of that, the latter, unfortunately for him, did - no matter how hard he tried to destroy it.

  Finally, there was me, dragging my own condemned past behind me like Marley’s chains, sitting in my apartment year after year avoiding any significant engagement with the human race or my own destiny, medicating the pain by sheer denial of its existence. Wright had shoved my worst failures in my face, forcing me to look at them for the first time in years - the son that was lost in Allison’s abortion and the grandson that was tossed away by my daughter. Because I had broken up a marriage that was bad to begin with and because I couldn’t find a way to heal my daughter’s heart in the aftermath, I was considered a double murderer. That was what they all believed - and that was what I was afraid was true.

  I hated myself and I hated the world too much at that moment to face anyone – which was why I couldn’t call Jules when I returned to my apartment on Friday. Instead, after I took the tram over to the city and deposited my blood money into my bank account, I walked over to T-Mobile and finally got a replacement for my original iPhone. Then I texted Jules on the way home and pretended I was still out of town. I wrote that everything was okay and resolved, and to send me the information about her surgery, and that I would definitely be there to pick her up afterwards.