LONE ROCK
DUANE LINDSAY
Copyright 2017
Duane Lindsay
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.
To Traci, the inspiration for everything
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Intro
1 – If This isn’t Where You’re Going
2 – State Street to Civic Center
3 – Shot Through the Heart
4 – You Can’t Go Home Again
5 – The Road to Nowhere
6 – The Man Calling Himself...
7 – It’s Farther Than You Think
8 – Why Didn’t He Just Fly Away
9 – Marvin Hackerman, Albany, New York
10 – Doctor Pay
11 – Barton’s Rent to Own
12 – Pieburn Dafari
13 – He Signed the Register Wilton Hedley
14 – Maggie Powers Called
15 – There’s a Lark in the Toolshed
16 – Leon B. Shearing at Work
17 – Maggie Comes to Call
18 – When Are We Gonna Start
19 – Got to Have a Rigid Tool Calendar
20 – Ramon, Ruiz, and Rudy
21 – Rocket Ship Galileo
22 – What Color We Gonna Paint It?
23 – That... Was Corley Sayres
24 – Right Away Mr. Clooner, Sir
25 – Home For a Dead Pigeon
26 – The Trouble with Toby
27 – How About a Couple’s Special
28 – The Kelly Ridge Toxic Waste Incinerator
29 – Corley Looks Back
30 – Feed Him to the Lions
31 – The Edge of Lone Rock
32 – Take Me to Bed
33 – Calculations... And the Square Root of Nine
34 – Blame for the Fall
35 – Maggie, Pieburn, and the Warthog
36 – Why Don’t You Do Right?
37 – A Stranger in the Night
38 – A Damn Stupid, Ugly Mess
39 – Do It and Die
40 – The Way It Goes
Epilogue
Afterword
Missing Amanda – Preview
TAP DOUBT - Preview
INTRO
Cleveland, Ohio
The telephone rings for the first time since he killed Jesus.
Adrian Beck sits in a stuffed chair with his ankle—the broken one—stretched out stiffly. A crutch, new and already despised, leans against the chair, a glass of milk waits on the end table under the warm glow of a floor lamp, next to the black telephone which rings for the second time...
He resists the urge to scratch under the gauze bandage covering half his face and awkwardly reaches his left arm across his body, past the right arm—the broken one—to pick up the phone. He tucks the receiver against his right ear, the phone cord stretched across his body like a giant twisted rubber band, the ancient landline phone being one of the anachronisms he refused to give up. He has a cell phone but pretty much hates it and only uses it when travelling.
“Is this Adrian Beck?” The voice creaks like old leather.
“Yes.”
“Like on TV?”
“Who is this?”
“I hope you die, you baby killer. There’s a place in Hell for people like you, people who take God’s innocent children. You’re the Devil, that’s who you are! Satan’s spawn from whose loins spring chaos! You can’t run, you bastard, and you can’t hide. God’s coming! He’s coming for you, baby killer. God’s Will won’t be denied...”
The words tumble on like rocks in a sack, scratching and clicking, promising fiery damnation. Adrian’s hand goes numb on the receiver, which slips down his body, catching the edge of the cast. It tugs once, slides down to the polished wood floor, shimmies to a rest half in half out of the lamp glow. The voice is smaller, a tiny rasping squawk like a persistent insect.
He listens in the silent room, the shrill squeak demanding, “God hates you.”
Adrian slaps the telephone button, ending the call. He slumps back into the chair in horror and shock, bumping the table. God doesn’t hate me, he thinks wildly. He doesn’t.
The milk glass wobbles and falls, smashing to a shard filled mess.
Does he?
1 – If This Isn’t Where You’re Going
An office in an older high rise, seventeenth floor, Techtronics Inc. is the only tenant.
Locked glass doors at either side of the bank of elevators; if this isn’t where you’re going, you’re on the wrong floor.
Adrian Beck, 34, tall and slender with just the beginning of a belly, stood at the door holding several thick books, a pile of papers and a laptop all balanced awkwardly on one arm. In the hand opposite a blue coffee cup, tilted, about to slosh on the light gray carpet. Bending his knees to reach the handle, he felt the papers shift and leaned the other way, jutting his chin down to hold back the avalanche. The coffee spilled.
He touched the handle, tugged gently, then more firmly. The door rocked against its electronic bolt but remained stubbornly closed. Adrian pulled again, several sharp jerks.
A woman behind a polished wood desk sighed an exaggerated sigh. She pressed a button on her side of the counter and the air became disturbed by a dull electronic bzzt; the door lock solenoid released.
“Adrian; it’s open,” she called over the clatter.
Bent awkwardly, he juggled the load, shifted backwards as the door pulled toward him, managing—somehow—to keep his hold on the pile. Hunched over his hoard, dressed in tan slacks and pale yellow shirt, he looked like a knock kneed stork.
“Again, Adrian?” asked the girl behind the counter.
She got up and came to meet him, taking the cup before it spilled again.
“Can’t seem to remember, Sheila.”
Sheila Randall was everything Adrian was not. Small, pretty brunette, outgoing, vivacious and tan, she dressed in an aggressive style she thought of as “assault fashion.” She wore bold colors of clashing hues, mixed with chains, necklaces, silver and gold scarves and shiny plastic. Sheila Randall, as receptionist, was the office face of the company. The psychedelic face.
She studied Adrian beck with a sisterly exasperation, her feelings mixed. Despite his appearance and klutzy manner, he was cute in a geeky sort of way. And as an engineer, working at Techtronics for a very good salary he should be good husband material.
Sheila rated every man into categories; a.) good husband material, b.) good dating material, c.) bad dating material and d.) others. She dated exclusively in the third group and was, therefore, perennially unmarried. Adrian, who should have been a solid a.) or maybe a b.) had, through familiarity, become a d.
Adrian Beck lived only for the job. In the six years Sheila had known him, she’d never heard of his hobbies, never seen a vacation scheduled, never seen him leave early. For that matter, she’d never seen him leave, or arrive. He was here before she got in, he was here when she—and everyone else—left.
He never dated. She’d tested the theory, using every trick she knew and he refused to acknowledge her.
Finally, she’d broken her cardinal rule and asked him out—to a company dinner—and he refused.
Turned her down flat. And he wasn’t gay because she’d heard that Ray in sales had asked him out too. He was just...Adrian.
That was four years ago. By now they’d settled into an easy office relationship; enduring, pleasant and shallow.
“What do you have here?” she asked. She rose on tiptoes to see the cover of the book he carried—Applied Field Chemical Measurements and Standards. “Ooh; a best seller. You want me to return that to the library?”
“No; it’s mine,” he answered. “The library didn’t have it. I brought it from home.”
“You have this at home,” she said with the calm acceptance that this was very probably true. Teasing, because Adrian was safe to tease, “Do you read that between commercials?”
“No, I just read it sometimes. When I’m caught up on trade magazines. I don’t have a television.”
“You don’t.”
“No. It’s a waste of time.”
Sheila tried to imagine her life without a TV. It would be as barren as life in a desert, a life without men. How could he? How could anyone? Where did he point his furniture? Shaking her head—lots of things tinged together—she said, “I heard about your reward.”
“Oh, thanks.” Adrian looked pleased and about eleven.
“Are you going to the banquet?”
“No.” That said decisively.
“Why not?”
He shrugged, sending a calculator tumbling to the lobby carpet. “I’ve got to work. I don’t much like parties. And it’s late.”
“Adrian?” She lamented. “It’s on Friday night! C’mon; get serious. What else are you gonna do on a Friday night?”
He gestured with the book.
She looked shocked. “Don’t even think about it, buster! You’re going to that banquet, got it? Even if I have to drag you there myself.”
“I don’t think—”
“You’re going,” she announced firmly. “And I’m taking you. I’ll pick you up here at six.”
She turned away to the big front desk in a swirl of yellow silk and black satin and some things clattered together with a pleasant noise.
Adrian, in a small cubical office with a window, swallowed a small grin. She’d bought it! Third time this month he’d pulled the door gag, and she went for it every time. He was beginning to think he’d need another joke, but this one was getting better and better. It had legs, he decided.
He set the heavy volume on his desk and looked out the window. It was snowing, great blasts of cold air swirling fat flakes against the glass, and the sky was turning angry with a coming storm. Far off in the distance he could see the edge of Lake Erie, gun metal gray melding with the sky, becoming one with each other.
Be a good night for staying in and catching up on his reading.
He looked down at the book and paused. He ran a finger across the indented gold lettering, reading the name: Applied Field Chemical Measurements and Standards.” He felt, for a rare moment, uneasy. It should be more exciting than this, he thought. Especially today; it should be better.
Earlier that morning he’d been called into the office of the president. Jack Anderson, owner of Techtronics, an engineer who’d single mindedly taken a small company and made it grow into a fifty-million-dollar a year design firm, had told Adrian he’d received an award for excellence in engineering. There would be a dinner at some Hotel downtown—the Sheridan or the Hyatt—and the awards themselves.
“Come on out for once, Adrian,” Jack had said. “It’ll be good for the company.”
“I don’t know; I’ll think about it.”
“Are you afraid of the presentation?” Asked Jack.
“No.” Adrian denied fiercely, since (del-it was true) he was. The idea of going up onto a stage petrified him.
“You are! Don’t worry about it. They’ll call your name, you’ll get up and accept a plaque, people will cheer, flashes will go off, the newspaper reporters will be all over you; typical.”
Adrian had smiled at the image; himself as some Oscar winner, holding aloft his award, making speeches. “No,” he said with certainty.
Jack leaned back in his chair and pressed the tips of his fingers together, making a steeple. Above this he regarded Adrian. He sighed. “Son; let me give you some advice.” Jack was nearing sixty; with his grey hair and thick glasses he could pull off ‘son.’ Besides, he’d been Adrian’s mentor for the eleven years Adrian had worked at Techtronics.
“Sometimes you have to stand up and take what’s yours. If it’s important to you, that is. Is it?”
Adrian shrugged. It was, sort of; the award. “Yes. I guess.”
“So you’ve got to go for it. You can’t let what people think stop you. And another thing; it isn’t enough that you’re good at what you do. That’s never enough. You’ve got to tell all the world about yourself. Stand up, Adrian. Stand up and be counted.”
Adrian stood up. “I’ll think it over, Jack.”
And now here he was, thinking it over. Why not go? Sure he didn’t like crowds, and stage fright gave him the willies, but it was his award; he’d earned it.
“I’ll do it,” he said to the empty cubicle, and his stomach churned madly at the very idea.
That was his first mistake.
Sheila’s offer for a ride fell through at four.
She called him. “Adrian, I’m sorry. Ben called; did I tell you about Ben? From jail, can you believe it?”
Adrian could, but didn’t say so. She’d talked about this Ben, as she had talked about every other man she’d dated. He knew Ben had a history of standing her up for dates, had been drunk and hit her on more than one occasion and sent her expensive flowers to “make up.”
In Adrian’s view, you didn’t have to apologize –with or without flowers—if you didn’t screw up in the first place. Sometimes he thought Sheila was attracted to Ben—and others with flowers of regret—because they were screw ups.
Adrian agreed out loud and disagreed a lot silently and she finally got to the point which was, “l can’t come to the award show tonight. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course, “Adrian said, thinking; let him stay in jail, it`ll do him good. And find someone better, huh? But it never crossed his mind to be the better one she should find.
“You’ll go anyway Adrian, won’t you?”
“I don’t know...”
“You have to. I couldn’t bear it if you stayed away because of me. Just promise you’ll go.”
Why not? Be bold, he thought, a whole new Adrian. “All right, I’ll go.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“Oh,” she said, as if she’d just thought of it. “How will you get there?”
“Don`t worry,” he said “I`ll stay here at the office till eight or so. I’ll just take the bus.”
That was his second mistake.
2 – State Street to Civic Center
The bus, number 29—State Street to Civic Center—wheezed to an arthritic stop at Wilson Blvd. The night air carried a chill bite, overhung with a breezy mist from the lake. Mist hovered like dust motes under the street lamps.
The bus door squealed open on ancient hydraulics and Adrian boarded, happy to be out of the cold. He dropped six tokens into the box and turned down the narrow aisle, lurching against the metal handrails as the driver swung from the curb.
He settled into a seat halfway back, giving only slight acknowledgment but no eye contact to the few other passengers. There was a man with a mustache and a baker’s apron, a pretty blonde near the back he decided was a receptionist, an old man with an oxygen bottle on a little cart, drowsing, falling sideways on a bench seat. Everyone kept a distance between themselves and others, and, magnified by the dark and cold, they seemed like planets in a mechanized automotive solar system.
A light flush of excitement pulsed through him He was getting an award. Jack had
green-lighted the Morelli project. He was on a roll; everything was coming up roses, and other unlikely clichés occurred to him and he agreed with them all. It had been so easy. Just ask; that’s all there was to it. Ask and ye shall receive, that’s what they taught him in church. Well; that and the meek shall inherit the earth. Adrian had his doubts about that one. The meek might inherit, but only if their parents were mean, pushy bastards who took stuff first.
Adrian, of course, was neither. Nor did he think of himself as meek, though he knew most people did. He considered himself... safe. Secure. Realistic. Practical, pragmatic and reasonable. All excellent qualities which had served him so well for so long. But now he was having second thoughts. Maybe, just possibly, there was more to life than...whatever the rest of that quote was.
He huddled beneath his big book and fretted. Eleven years. From college to here had been a smooth uninterrupted flow, safe, secure, planned and organized, buffed to a fine sheen by habit and conformity.
When had he become so insulated? When had the world compressed to the office, the bus, the apartment?
Time for a change, he decided. Tomorrow, after sleeping in, he’d start a whole new pattern. Tomorrow was three weeks until spring, and the idea excited him. Spring; time of rebirth and growth. He nodded, the decision made: tomorrow he would become to be the new Adrian Beck.
A faint whine of sirens in the near distance lifted his eyes. He saw his reflection in the dirty window, the mirrored interior of the brightly lit bus behind him. Cream walls, white domed ceiling, old green painted metal panels beneath the seats and brown woven plastic seats with shiny silver rails, gleaming from the touch of thousands of hands.
His eyes shifted and he saw the dark street outside. Brick faced shops passed by like old soldiers in endless review, worn and weary, doors closed, windows barred. Bright street corners passed, making cones of safe warmth appear and vanish.
Adrian looked around. The blond in the back slumped in an attractive heap, wrapped in her own thoughts. She wore a brown coat pulled tight around her, with a cheap fur collar. Her hair, tangled and unkempt, had several streaks of brown, making her seem slattern. A check out girl getting off late shift, Adrian thought; from a supermarket or a department store. Or, he considered with a faint smile, the second chair flutist from the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra, bussing home from a late practice.
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