Eye of the Burning Man: A Mick Callahan Novel (The Mick Callahan Series)

by Harry Shannon

  "Ronnie. What a surprise. I should have heard your clothes coming."

  "Callahan, my man," Ronnie said. A slap of the palm. "Are you ready to enter the house of pain?"

  "I'm not sure I'm ready for Sesame Street."

  Ronnie wandered off to get a plastic mat. I ran for two minutes, slowed to a walk for three, and then left the treadmill and dropped onto my back on the mat. Ronnie stretched my hamstrings.

  "Jesus, I am old."

  "Probably the drinking," Ronnie said.

  I heard my right knee snap into place. "Yeah, probably. That also indirectly accounts for the broken nose, the cracked ribs, the bad jaw, and the flattened knuckles. I don't know exactly where the stupidity came from."

  "That part is genetics." Ronnie flipped me over onto the stomach and stretched both legs again. He stopped and eyed a livid, reddish mark on my calf. "I've been meaning to ask you. What the hell is this?"

  "What?"

  "This nasty-ass scar, that's what."

  "It's a long story. Some dumb redneck chased me around with a crossbow a few months ago. He got lucky."

  "Looks like it hurt like hell."

  "It did."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He stopped breathing."

  Ronnie paused for a second, but did not press for details. He slapped me on the back. "Let's get to it."

  We hit the machines briskly, both of us used to the cross-training routine. Moments passed in that odd silence only male friends enjoy, although from time to time we spoke.

  On the leg press, I said: "Funny thing."

  "What?"

  "All the psychology classes I've endured, the books I've read, the papers I've written, the shows I have done on relationships, when it comes to women . . ."

  "I got a Master's, you got a Ph.D. and between us we don't know dick. Move your feet out a little wider, Mick. That's cool. Now what's been going on?"

  I grunted with exertion. "I'm just venting, man. They want you to be strong and tough and protective, right?"

  "Right. Until they don't want you to be strong and protective."

  "And if you are, they get scared."

  Ronnie helped me up and led the way over to the bench press. Over his shoulder: "Is this the part where you explain who the fuck banged up your face last night, and why?"

  I flopped onto the bench and tested the weight of the bar. "I can't answer the 'who' part. I guess the 'why' was for money. I'm not even sure about that."

  "Somebody try to hold you up? Hope it wasn't a brother."

  "Beats the hell out of me . . . and by the way, he did." I took a breath and started fifteen repetitions. Ronnie waited for me to finish, gasping.

  "You're a little weaker today," Ronnie said. "That's probably from the adrenaline. Your muscles are sore. So what happened, Mick?"

  I shrugged but stayed flat on my back. "I don't know. Some idiot in a mask jumped out of the bushes. He had a gun."

  "No shit?"

  I did another fifteen, grunting and expelling air. "It was over in a couple of minutes. That girl I've been seeing? She watched me break dance with the guy. She says it scared her. Now, she doesn't want to see me any more."

  "Man that sucks."

  The last set. "No kidding. I thought she was going to bat her lashes and call me her hero. Instead, I get dumped on my ass."

  "Women," Ronnie said.

  "Women."

  The workout was brisk and efficient. I was in the shower, dressed, and back outside the front door a little over sixty minutes. I paused at the counter to buy something to drink that wasn't laced with suspect herbs or diuretics.

  I noticed an attractive brunette standing outside the entrance. She wore sunglasses. She was dressed in gym shorts pulled up over a pair of dancer's tights, beat-up white tennis shoes with the laces untied. She carried a bottle of water, some tiny headphones, and a sweat towel. She looked good. Suddenly it struck me that she was staring up at the billboard at the back of the parking lot.

  I walked through the doors, intending to be cool, but got a case of nerves. The girl turned to look at me, sunglasses obscuring her eyes. To my utter horror, I blushed.

  "I've looked better," I said. Oh Jesus, that sounded SO arrogant. She snorted and walked past me, entered the gym through the turnstile and never looked back. Smooth, Callahan. Really smooth.

  I walked to the car feeling self-conscious. I got in the Chevy, turned over the engine, popped in a George Jones cassette and crossed through two open parking spaces before heading towards Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I passed an old woman in a VW, a black Volvo station wagon, and a man reading the newspaper in a red, wide-body Ford truck.

  The light at Laurel Canyon was tricky; it took a long time to change. I was humming along with the music, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. The red truck pulled up behind me. I finished my drink and waited.

  The light changed. I drove straight on ahead, past the rear parking lot of the department store. The truck waited a moment and followed. I stiffened. Don't be paranoid. The guy is waiting for his wife to get out of the damned mall.

  I went right, then right again into the next lot. The truck drove past without turning. In the rearview mirror, I saw a large, tanned forearm with a tattoo on it. I caught reflecting sunglasses and close-cut blond hair. It was no one I recognized.

  The truck went to the next driveway, turned in, and meandered towards the side entrance. Then I backed out of the parking space. Feeling foolish, I turned around and drove back towards Laurel Canyon. The truck did not follow, but the driver definitely watched me drive away, his face impassive behind mirrored lenses.

  I crossed Laurel again, re-entered the parking lot behind the gym, and headed back to Victory. I checked the rearview mirror every few seconds. The red truck did not follow. As I passed the gym it suddenly occurred to me yet again that my face was on a billboard, thirty feet high. I was a minor television celebrity for Christ's sake. So what if someone recognized me? I laughed out loud at my own foolishness. Still, I'll admit I glanced in the rearview mirror on and off for a few more minutes.

  I saw private clients in a quaint, middle-class area originally developed by denizens of the entertainment industry who worked in and around Universal Studios. It is still called Studio City. I rented a small two-room office in a nondescript, gray office building on Chandler. I pulled into the parking garage below the building, trotted up the stairs and went in through the back door.

  The small one-person office with waiting room was furnished in beige and forest green colors. It was designed to feel as comfortable as an apartment. A crowded wooden bookshelf dominated in the waiting room. I found an Isaac Perelman CD, put on the stereo. I gathered myself, and then opened the outer door. A brunette woman, wearing purple clothing, sat quietly, reading Premier Magazine. She looked up and smiled.

  "Hello, Janice."

  "I heard the music."

  "Good. Come on in." I sat in my rocking chair, and Janice assumed her customary position on the smaller couch. "How was your week, Janice?"

  She did not make eye contact. "It was okay. You know."

  "Actually, I don't know. Why don't you fill me in?"

  One tear.

  "You're crying, Janice. Are you feeling sad?"

  "Yes."

  Wait. Give her a moment. I kept my face impassive and eyes kind. After two very long minutes, she spoke again.

  "The dream is back."

  "Does that surprise you?"

  "I don't know. I guess I thought that since we had talked about it, since we kind of understood it, maybe . . ."

  "Maybe it would stop happening."

  "Yes."

  "Did you write it down, as we had discussed?"

  "Yes."

  "Read it to me," I said. "If something has changed, even the smallest detail, we want to know about it."

  But it hadn't changed. A dark man with movie-star looks would creep in the window and force himself upon her. She would resist, but ultimately en
joy the experience. The dream was an unconscious attempt to deal with sexual neurosis, and was a fairly common female fantasy. It was entirely harmless, in and of itself, merely an expression of a deep wish to be liberated from inhibitions.

  Janice seemed incapable of accepting that part of her. She experienced the dream as ego-dystonic, found it extremely disturbing. For a moment I wondered why the dream was now coming nightly, and what might have changed in her life, then smiled as gently as possible, and leaned forward to close the distance between us.

  "Janice?"

  "Yes, Mr. Callahan?"

  No eye contact. "We have been working together for several weeks now. Have you come to trust me?"

  "I think so."

  "May I ask you something personal?"

  Her eyelashes fluttered. She examined her lap as if looking for lint.

  "Have you found yourself attracted to anyone in particular, lately?"

  Her face turned bright red. Janice nodded briskly. She began to cry.

  "May I ask the name of that man?"

  But we both already knew the answer.

  * * * * *

  . . . The boy woke up lying on a square of carpeting; the carpet lay on thick strips of metal. He was blind and deaf, his head covered with thick cloth, perhaps a sack of some kind. There was a gag in his mouth that still reeked of the chemical used to subdue him. He knew he was back inside the van.

  He fought back tears and tried to avoid throwing up into the gag. If he did, he knew he would drown in his own vomit.

  Loco had very vague images of what had happened during the last couple of weeks. Whatever the man and woman had used to drug Loco had also stolen large chunks of his memory. He knew that he had been photographed because he remembered the flash of the camera. He knew he had been kidnapped because he remembered the large man with the shaved head and body piercing.

  He heard a rumbling sound, something like the coughing roar of a large beast. He cringed, and then realized it was only an engine starting nearby. The floor below him began to tremble and shake. It slowly came to him that he was lying in a vehicle that had begun to move. Loco wondered how far away he was from his aunt Blanca, his home, and his friends. He told himself to be strong. He told himself someone would come for him. He told himself to be patient.

  And then he cried.

  THREE

  "You can get pissed off at somebody you really love?"

  "Hell, yes." I was pacing the booth with the headset on, feeling claustrophobic and bored, wishing Leyna hadn't dumped me. "I think it might even be easier to get furious with someone you love. That person is more likely than anyone else to ring your chimes, right?"

  "Okay. Thanks. I just wanted to know, because my girlfriend and I fight all the time."

  I stopped walking. "Well, hold on, if you argue once in a while, that's fine, but all the time?"

  A woman's voice, shrill and angry in the background: "Carl, that's just bullshit and you know it!" I grabbed the tape-delay button and cut the offending word. Got to practice that more often. The station, which ran on a three-second time delay, had the beeper and also "caller ID," to avoid scatological pranksters. Half of them had their phone numbers blocked anyway. Sometimes technology sucks.

  "Carl, old buddy? Sounds like you got your hands full there."

  "Yeah," the caller said, dryly. "Now she wants to fight about how often we fight. One more question?"

  "Sure, go ahead."

  "How come every time she reads a self-help book, I'm the one who has to change?"

  That was a good one, and got its due. I laughed heartily. "Put her on for a moment, Carl."

  "Hello?"

  "Hi. This is Mick Callahan, and you are on the air. It sounds like it was frustrating you to listen to Carl talk and not be able to interject."

  "Yes," she said, suddenly shy. "Gee, this is weird."

  "Being on the air?"

  "Yeah."

  "What is your name?"

  "Gina."

  "Well, Gina, what do you two usually fight about?"

  "All kinds of things," she said, now seemingly tongue-tied. Her boyfriend was silent in the background.

  "What were you fighting about tonight?"

  "I don't remember now," she said with a giggle.

  I did my best to cover the dead air, and my poor choice. "Most couples are not fighting about what they think they're fighting about. There are always underlying issues, generally relating to our childhood experiences."

  "Okay."

  "You can think of those issues like plates in the earth that shift seismically from time to time and cause earthquakes in the relationship. The trick is to understand one another well enough to see those quakes coming. We have to either head them off, or at least process them in a more adult manner."

  "I see," she said.

  "Good. Thanks for calling."

  "Thank you for the advice."

  That was three pounds of uncut, semi-profound bullshit, I thought. And no matter how you slice it, my country ass is in deep trouble tonight. I took another caller.

  "My name is Gene," the man said. "I was thinking about the sixties. Free love, whatever happened to that idea? That we could all just, like, hang out together, get high, and kick back. I really thought that was cool. I mean, the closest thing we have now is that Burning Man Festival out in Nevada. You're from Nevada, right?"

  "Right," I said, somewhat cautiously, "from up north, around Dry Wells."

  "I just thought you might have gone to that Burning Man thing out there. It's coming up again."

  "I know a little about it. As the old joke goes, I spent a year there one weekend. I was pretty blasted at the time, and I had just gotten thrown out of the Seals for fighting."

  "For what?"

  "I know. Kind of like getting tossed out of a casino for gambling, isn't it? Anyway, it's a blur, but the Burning Man Festival kind of represents everything I have tried to change about my life, so I'm not enthusiastic about attending again."

  "If you can remember it, you weren't there?"

  "I do recall that it's pretty pagan, and originated near San Francisco."

  "Look, I loved it. People come together and paint themselves blue, man. They run around naked and create art with just their bodies, or whatever is lying around. You can make a statement. Take 'shrooms or acid, smoke a lot of great weed, all kinds of good shit. Oops."

  This time I didn't move quickly enough. The offending word went out over the air. "Careful, I don't want the FCC down on my neck. I don't have Stern's deep pockets."

  "Mick, check it out again, might be more fun sober."

  "I doubt it. I think I wandered around in shock the first time, and I was pretty wild back in the day. It just seemed too hippie."

  "Huh?"

  "Sorry. My stepfather was a real redneck who served in Viet Nam. He didn't care much for that lifestyle. I think that rubbed off on me."

  "Those were the good old days," Gene said wistfully. "We had our priorities straight."

  "Oh, really?" I said, dryly. "Is that so?"

  "Yeah, we were out to change the world back then. We stood for something. Now look at what's happened."

  "I hate to echo a conservative like George Will, who is just to the right of Attila the Hun, but think it over, Gene. Let's take a closer look at what free love and recreational drug use in the nineteen sixties have given us here in the 21st Century. Ready?"

  "Okay. Sure."

  I went off on a rant. "We got AIDS and some new forms of sexually transmitted diseases that are highly resistant to antibiotics. We got pot that is up to twenty times stronger than what John Lennon smoked. We got miles of inner cities devastated by a cocaine and crack epidemic and now also reeling from the abuse of crystal methamphetamine, Vicodin, and Oxycontin. We have truly staggering levels of drug addiction nationwide, a total disintegration of the nuclear family without a logical, disciplined replacement on the horizon, and the genders at war in a way previous generations never dreamed
could happen."

  "Yeah, but . . ."

  "I'm not finished yet, Gene." I got up and began to pace. "We have lost respect for men, for integrity, and to an extent even for the women feminism was intended defend. Someone explain to me how pornography has liberated the ladies, okay? We have reactionary fundamentalists manipulating some news outlets and trying to turn the clock back. Wars, deficits, apathy. And listen, I recognize that I contributed to this chaos. We all do. Our politicians are sleazy, corrupt, and we no longer revere Congress, the Senate, or the Presidency. And you want us to run off to some festival in the desert to re-live the glory years? Come on. That's what we got from the last time around. We got screwed. We're a mess, Gene."

  Gene paused. "Okay," he said finally. "But we did get some freaking great rock and roll music."

  I roared. "Okay, I'll have to give you that one. We certainly did. And it's also a good thing that we learned to question our government more than we ever had before. Thanks for calling in."

  I cut the line, sat in the chair, flipped through some CDs, spoke over the musical introduction. "And here, just for the Hades of it, is a song from Gene's favorite flashback. It is a little piece by Cream, with Eric Clapton on guitar. It's called 'Sunshine of Your Love.' I'm Mick Callahan, and I'll be back with you in just a moment."

  The music rocked on and I reached into the small refrigerator near my feet, grabbed a Diet soda. The air-conditioning kicked in and a soft rush of cool wind blew past my shoulders. If that doesn't stir something up, I don't know what will. If it stays dead tonight, maybe it's time for another career change.

  Line one. I took the call during the song. I couldn't hear the voice at first, just noise; the cacophony of competing rock music and some static, voices murmuring in the background. Someone was trying to call from a bar or a night club.

  "Hello?"

  Slurring words, trying to whisper: "I need you."

  I glanced at the caller ID, jotted down the number. It was long distance, a 909 prefix; so somewhere out towards San Bernardino, Pomona, or maybe even Claremont. Was this a prank? "Please, speak up. Don't waste my time."

  "I need your help," a woman said. She sounded drunk or drugged. "Don't you remember?"