by Scott Powers
The Bone had had a decent run, though with just the one memorable song, Drive, Drive, Drive. But what a song. Chrysler bought the ad rights and used it in Jeep commercials. Royalties rained down on Max, who wrote and sang it. Drive, Drive, Drive became for Jeep Wranglers what Bob Seger’s Like A Rock was for Chevy pickups: the musical hook to a hugely successful marketing campaign. And more. It became the anthem of Jeep lifestyle.
Those royalties, plus some nice CD sales allowed him to settle in Houston, invest in the store, and pursue his passion: seeking the truth. And seeking his revenge.
He had to quit the band anyway, in part because he was named as a“person of interest”in a murder, making him like plutonium to a band trying to cling to popularity. But, in the end, it was his decision. Truth was, he no longer gave a damn about the band or the music. Not after what happened that March weekend in Detroit.
Finally, this little blonde woman with the gun showed interest.
"What happened in Detroit?"
Max and The Bone had played a gig in a suburban Detroit concert club.
The best part of Detroit always was seeing Di.
Max met Dianne Murphy years earlier in L.A. when he and The Bone were just starting. She was tall and thin with red hair and redder lips against pale, freckled, blushed skin, always looking about fifteen minutes of sunshine away from nasty sunburn. Di was an entertainment lawyer working for The Bone’s firm, smarter than anyone else Max knew. And she was funny, with a dirty humor that came from a supreme confidence. Di could match her persona to her environment, virtually anywhere, from a boardroom to a tattoo parlor, from a gala to a rock band party.
She asked for nothing from Max except his company when they both were available, and that was just fine with him. From the start, she made it clear that she just wanted to use him, to provide a little wild side to her respectable life as a young lawyer. It was a game he bought into eagerly, because he and The Bone only spent a few months a year in Los Angeles anyway. Still, she became his obsession.
“Yeah, I guess I fell in love with her,”Max said.“But I could never tell her that. It would be like breaking a promise.”
“She knew,”Eve said.“Women always know.”
“Every time we’d get together it was always something different, as if L.A. was the place to sample everything life had to offer, you know? We’d go to Long Beach, and she’d draw us into a pickup basketball game. Then we’d go to a party on a yacht. We’d go camping at Lake Arrowhead, where her firm had this gorgeous cabin. Then we’d go shit-kickin’at a rodeo. She was like that. One time we dressed up like tourists to tour Sony Pictures Studios.”
Di insisted they never drive a route they knew, so they could explore while they drove. He’d accompany her to meet a potential client in a bad neighborhood, and then she'd take him to sit in lower-bowl seats at a Laker game. Late night in a club was followed by sex, a shower, a change of clothes, and an early mass in her church.
Eve didn’t want to hear about the sex.
“Why not? That’s the best part of the story.”
“Save it for your grandkids.”
“No, the best part of Di was she could be anyone she wanted to be. Anyone she had to be at the moment. Bitchy or sweet. Coarse or refined. Cold-hearted or sentimental. And you know what? That was who she was. That was Di. You never knew what you’d get. Except, after a while, you knew. She was who she had to be. I learned that from her. Every time I can’t figure out how to act, I ask myself,‘What would Di do?’”
“You got that on a bracelet? WWDD?”
He felt Eve turn toward him in the car. For the first time, he thought, he was reaching her. Damn it, he thought. Not now. Not when it’s about Di.
The Bone’s second CD, Getting Harder, was doing nicely, and just as the band got its first real opportunity to tour nationally as a headliner, Di left L.A. for her hometown of Motown, for a partnership in her father’s firm. Max and Di barely discussed it. L.A., Detroit, it was just something new.“See ya, bye bye, have fun. Call you if I’m in town.”
That was why The Bone always played Detroit.
Like that night.
The hotel had a rooftop pool and hot tub. Di was free. Max was expecting heaven.
He got hell.
They drank wine. They made crazy love in the bubbles. She got out and stretched. The Jacuzzi lights and moonlight, and what looked like stardust, illuminated her long, luscious frame.
She looked magical, until the stardust glitter increased, pouring onto Di.
For that few seconds, Max thought he was tripping, having a flashback from those days. His mind rebelled against the hallucination. Stop it. Stop it!
The stardust flowed anyway. When the shower became a show, the lights went out. So did the moon and stars. All of them. Max was intoxicated in blood and heart, so it took him too long to realize this was not a hallucination. Something was totally wrong.
Di shrieked, then struggled to breathe, and collapsed onto the hotel rooftop as the shower of sparkles engulfed her. As if in a dream, Max couldn’t move. His body felt too heavy for him to pull himself out of the water.
Just fifteen feet away, Di lay unmoving.
Above them he saw nothing but darkness. No, not nothing. There were shades of darkness, and his eyes carved silhouettes out of the blackness. A sulfurous odor overwhelmed him. His ears rang in waves. He felt rage rise, rage against his inability to respond, to move, to get to Di. Quickly that emotion blurred into something resembling sheer terror.
Above the hotel roof, he could make out the outline of a saucer, totally dark against the darker sky, and as broad as the hotel itself. Odd hands, rubbery and pale, pulled him from the water. Max could control his arms and hands, so he grabbed back, scratching deeply, clawing at the forms, filling his fingernails. Max heard another shriek, but this one was not Di. It sounded more like a wounded dog. He grabbed again, clutching, his fingernails pulling more flesh. Then a bolt of what could only have been electricity passed through his body.
That was it. That was all he remembered. He must have passed out.
Max awoke lying on the deck. The lights were back on. Di was gone. So was whatever had visited. He ran from edge to edge of the rooftop shouting her name, looking over as if he hoped to see her lying below. Something Earth-like would have been preferable to what he was fearing.
Max found his pants and dug his watch from his pocket. It was 4:45 a.m. Maybe an hour had passed. He wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t entirely sure what he had experienced. Max sat down to clear his head, which pounded. Throughout his body, his muscles ached too. Max flexed his toes, feet, legs, fingers, and arms. He rolled his neck.
Dull, opal-colored gook filled his fingernails and smeared his fingertips on both hands. He held them up, careful not to spill anything. He remembered. He rushed to the deck of the hot tube and found more gook. He must have really hurt that creature.
He looked around. Di’s clothes lay behind the tub, where she had folded them. On top were her shoes, just as she had left them.
He hated himself for his inaction. He just sat there, on the side of the hot tub, as useless as he had been when they attacked.
The police took an hour to get there. They were polite, but showed professional disdain for his story. The more obvious explanation occurred to them: He got stoned. He passed out. She left him. He had a bad dream.
They were fucking stupid. Stupid. He told them so. They shrugged. They'd been called worse.
“What about this?”
He had put the gunk in a baggie. He’d found enough flesh, oily and skin-like, to fill a roach or two. But the police refused it.
“Why would she leave her clothes behind? Her shoes? Why the hell would she leave her purse in my room?”
“If she’s still gone Tuesday, you can file a missing person’s report."
No one in the band believed him either, not even their drummer, Johnnie Jones, who generally believed any crazy-ass thing. Max was furious with them. And h
e was worried about Di. He stayed behind in Detroit when the band left for its next show in Cleveland. They'd pick up another bassist somewhere.
On Monday, he called Di’s law firm and reached her father. “No, she hadn’t come in. No, he hadn’t heard from her. He was worried too.” When Max tried to explain about the encounter, her father hung up.
Max had no idea what to do next. He called a radio DJ friend, who invited him down as a guest on the afternoon drive show. Max was so frustrated with the world's indifference to this incredible, horrible incident that he was ready to tell the world to go to hell.
“Police think I got drunk, passed out, or I was having drug flashbacks, and she just left. I wish to hell that was true. But it’s not,”Max said on the air.“She left her clothes. She left her car. She hasn’t showed up anywhere since. And I wasn’t tripping. And I know what I saw. And I got proof; I scratched the crap out of one of them. I got alien DNA.”
The phones lit up. But there wasn’t one caller whom he trusted to be helpful. Finally, Drive Time Dan and his partner Rue turned on him.
"You sure you weren't having an acid flashback? Rue asked.
"Believe me, I know an acid flashback when I'm having one."
"So do I. In fact, I think I might be having one right now!" Dan said. "You're turning into a little green man, Max. I think that alien DNA might have gotten into your system."
Max flipped him off.
"Look, he's trying to call home," Rue said.
Max stormed out, not humiliated as he should have been, but angry as hell.
That night the phone in his hotel room rang.
Some guy was in the lobby, wanting to see the gunk from his nails.
They met in the lobby bar, which was busy with happy hour. The man was fiftyish, stocky, with rolling shoulders, and a serious, taut face. He had used too much brown dye in his hair, and he wore a Red Wings jacket.
Max hoped to find sympathy and help. This was the wrong guy.
“If you’re smart, you’ll shut the fuck up, and save what’s left of your reputation,”he advised.
“Who the hell are you?”Max said, leaning over the table, trying to look tough and aggressive. Max was too tall and lanky to pull it off. The guy in the Red Wings jacket looked like he could easily break him, and didn’t flinch.
“I don’t know where she is,”he replied.“But I promise you, if you want to see her again, you’ll give me the bag and forget it.”
Max was stunned.
“Are you threatening me? Do you have something to do with this? I swear, I’ll…”
“Save it. You have no idea what happened. You have no idea what might happen next. All I can tell you is, as long asyou have that baggie, you’re a target, and so is anyone you care about.”
Max stared the man down. Whoever he was, he was serious. Max realized the guy knew the story about Di was true, or else why would he throw around such threats?
Max forever regretted his response. He threw the bag at the man and downed his drink.
It took Max a day or two to fully realize that he had given away his leverage, just because he was intimidated by the notion that the only person who believed him told him to. Never again, he vowed.
Max turned his eyes from the road and caught Eve’s eyes.“I had what you have now. And I gave it away,”he told her.“Don’t. Don’t ever.”
“So what happened next?”
The man in the Red Wings jacket vanished. Max stayed in Detroit. The band hired a replacement bass guitarist.
On that Friday, another police detective called Max, wanting to talk to him about the missing person report he'd filed on Di. Max went to see him.
“Is this her?”the cop asked. He gently laid a picture of Di’s face, eyes closed, on the desk. The woman in the picture was Di.
And she was clearly dead.
Max put both hands over his eyes. At that moment, he felt completely culpable, as if something he did at the hot tub, on the radio show, or in the hotel bar somehow had led to this. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t understand. He picked up the picture. How could the most alive person he had ever known come to this? His mind all but stopped.
He wanted to cry, but fuck them.
“She was found last night in a river in Ohio.”
The cop waited for a response, but Max said nothing. He could barely move. He could barely breathe.
Di’s body, naked, broken, and bloated, had been found caught in debris in a river in Columbus, Ohio. She hadn't drowned. There was no water in her lungs. Di was already dead when she went in. Someone dumped her. Kids playing in the rip-rap of the riverbed had spotted her body under a bridge.
Cause of death was undetermined. The autopsy had found traces of Quaaludes in her blood. Di didn't take such things! Otherwise, she appeared to have died of cardiac arrest, cause unknown. Police had assumed foul play. They believed they would determine the cause was homicide.
“We need to know your whereabouts for the last ninety-six hours,”the detective said.“And we have some questions for you."
The police took Max to a substation and questioned him hard but did not keep him.
The Columbus police also asked him to come down and speak with them. It was, after all, their case. He told them the same story he gave in Detroit.
Max spoke several more times with the Columbus detectives but they never charged him with anything. He stuck to his UFO story. That only kept him forefront in their minds, but they could not tie him to Di any later than Saturday night in Detroit, and she appeared to have been killed on Monday.
They got him anyway. They made sure his name got out to the local paper. Word spread that he, a rock star celebrity who'd quit his band that very week, was a person of interest. His bizarre radio interview was like frosting on this delicious story. The scandal was picked up by all the celebrity news and gossip shows, and stained him forever.
Di was buried in Detroit. Her parents and friends gave Max cold stares when he showed at the funeral. He kept his distance. Outside the church, her brother moved toward him as if to confront him, but two other men stopped the guy and pushed him away.
Afterward, Max went back to Los Angeles, closed out his life there, and returned to Houston.
He was so mad at the guys in the band for not believing him that he hired another attorney to draw up formal arrangements for a permanent split. The Bone’s manager, Howie, said it was just as well because the scandal followed the band everywhere it went, and they wanted to put it behind them. So the guys rolled on all his termination demands, and he retained lucrative partnership rights.
Max had old friends in Houston but he couldn’t bear their company. They were somewhere between pitying and suspecting him. He drifted into a life of self-imposed exile and spent months in virtual seclusion, forever changed and not understanding. He changed the color of his hair and shaved his beard. He abandoned his stage name, Max Baker. Eventually, he even changed the tattoos that covered both his arms from collar to wrist.
Yet he wasn’t completely lost. There was time to fill and plenty to do. Gradually, he began researching UFOs. He learned he was not alone. He became more obsessive about it, making pilgrimages, and dropping in on UFOlogy conferences.
At the same time, he became interested in the comics business. He’d met Tommy at a UFO conference. Tommy had a little shop and Max loved it. Max poured money into it, becoming partners with Tommy, and it became the talk of the Houston scene, then something of a Southwest institution.
Somewhere he found the network, or it found him.
“Since then I’ve run the shop for fun. I live for only one reason,”Max told Eve, as he drove the Camaro eastbound along U.S. Highway 98, somewhere in south Alabama.“I’ve got to solve what happened to her. And if I can’t do that, I’ve got to hurt those bastards any way I can.”
They crossed into Florida, which seemed like a milestone, but they were still hours away from their destination, where they would meet his network contact, a man w
ith expertise in chemical and material engineering. He would test the foil swatch that Eve held as tightly as to her life.
She hadn’t said much as he told his story and shared almost none of hers.
It's not that Eve was ashamed of any of her story or afraid of how he might react. She just didn't find talking to others about anything to be useful. Not to her, anyway. To them, maybe. Self was a coin she'd never figured out how to spend and get anything back of value. No, she didn't want to chat with someone about her love life, her hopes and dreams, or what she had for dinner last night. And she had little interest in anyone else's.
All Max knew at this point was that she had found this swatch in her dead grandfather’s effects and that a neighbor had said he talked about it being from the Roswell spaceship debris.
"So that was my Detroit breakdown, my motor city shakedown. Do you believe it?”
“It’s strange that they found her in Columbus, Ohio,”Eve said.
“Why’sthat?”
“Because that’s where my story is taking me, too.”
CHAPTER 6
BURNIN' FOR YOU
Eve came with him because Max seemed to have a plan and resources, and she didn’t. But she didn’t fully trust him. She feared he lived in a fantasy world, was paranoid, and, worst of all, was probably inept. She wasn’t sure she believed his story, though she didn’t say so.
To his credit, he didn’t push her. With a story like his, he probably was happy with anyone who didn’t tell him he was full of crap.
At the same time, Eve managed to keep her own story mostly to herself.
“I know what you’re going through, darlin'," he said once.“It’s okay. Tell me when you’re ready.”
They drove straight through from San Antonio. Eventually he gave her a turn to drive and he dozed. They arrived in Orlando shortly before midnight.
The directions led them to the parking lot of a nondescript, small office-industrial center. A sign at the far end, above a single door, revealed the university’s“Materials Characterization Center.”
