“The ultimate.” I heard the kid murmur to himself. “The ultimate.”
The ultimate what? That was what I wondered as I dozed off.
Friday morning.
I woke up with a start after a nightmare in which Chuck Connors was strangling me – he had giant gnarled hands that seemed to have the power of steel gloves. It was as vivid as dream shit gets and I woke up feeling like I couldn’t breathe.
Bad sign.
It was light outside and PMA was already up. He was naked and practicing his Martial Arts Ultimate moves by the window. From what I could see, he hadn’t quite achieved the Ultimate, he was only getting close to the Passable. But I’d keep that to myself.
I really had to take a piss. At my age, you get up once or twice a night because your prostate says you will, but, due to the pain pills, I had slept all the way through to morning. I hurried past PMA, right in the middle of a flying kick, and broke his concentration. I heard him hit the floor with a yelp as I closed the bathroom door behind me.
After I took care of business, I eyed myself in the bathroom mirror. Was I still pale? Hard to tell. Most people looked pale in a hotel bathroom. I moved my arms a little. My body wasn’t as sore, but I noticed some bruises from the SUV had appeared in various places on my torso. I suddenly felt cold and began shivering, still asking myself why I was going on with this job. But something else told me that if I gave up on it, that would mean I was giving up on everything. Now I was awake and I wanted to stay awake. Like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, I needed a mission and for my sins, they gave me one.
If I stopped now, I didn’t know what I would be anymore.
When I stopped shivering, I came out of the bathroom. PMA was still moaning in pain on the floor.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I just fucked up the kick. Fell right on my tailbone.”
He got to his feet to prove he was all right, with his dick swinging between his legs like an upside-down metronome. I told him I was going to order breakfast, so maybe he should put on some pants in the near future.
It would be about an hour to get to Branson, so we got in the car at around nine-fifty.
“What’s our plan?” PMA asked as he started up the car.
“My plan,” I said with a heavy emphasis on the “my,” “is you leave me off a few addresses before the one I’m going to. I walk the rest of the way to the place and go in solo. You drive past, do a U-turn down the road a little, then come back and pull into the parking lot, where you keep the motor running until I come back out again. That means we should fill up the tank on the way in.”
“What? Why are we doing all that? So I don’t look like I’m with you?”
“Exactly. It’s going to be hot today, so keep the air running in the car. When I’m done, I’ll come find you.”
Pause.
“What if you don’t come?”
“Don’t get melodramatic.”
Of course, that’s all he wanted to get. I wasn’t the only guy in the car who needed a mission.
We arrived in Branson an hour later, only stopping for gas, and then we hit the horrendous traffic I had remembered from years gone by. We crawled down the road for a few minutes until I decided we were close enough. I told PMA to pull over and let me out and he did.
It was the first of May and the sun was celebrating by broiling the asphalt under my feet. The kid had left me out in front of what was billed as the World’s Largest Toy Museum. I briefly wondered if the museum itself was the part that was the largest or were the toys themselves ten times normal size? Was there a Barbie the size of a Buick in there? A Frisbee you could bathe in? A big-screen 60-inch Etch-A-Sketch? These were the kinds of moronic thoughts I was distracting myself with as I continued walking towards the address and starting to sweat under the still-low morning sun.
After passing an elevated wooden Go-Kart track and a Hillbilly Diner, it seemed like the next building would be the one I was looking for. It was, in my opinion, a strange choice on General Kraemer’s part. The huge sign that towered above the highway read “Willie Wilson’s Wild West Theatre,” and the building beneath it resembled a super-sized, Disney-ized old Western saloon.
I remembered that Willie Wilson was a country singer whose biggest hit had been “Alamo Jack,” back in 1962 – it had crossed over on the pop charts, which is the only reason I knew it. The song was a ballad with a relentless Johnny Cash guitar lick underneath it about a Texan who was at the Alamo, but took some time to ride out to say goodbye to his sweetheart who was elsewhere. As I recall, the chorus of the song was the sweetheart’s plaintive cry…
“Alamo Jack, don’t you go back…
Alamo Jack, don’t you go back…
Alamo Jack, don’t you go back…
Or you’ll get kilt for sure.”
It was catchy when you were six years old.
As I approached the Wild West Theatre, I saw PMA pull into the parking lot, which was located on the right side of the building. There were only three other vehicles in the lot, but they all appeared to be part of the same convoy – a trio of souped up SUVs. That meant it wouldn’t be hard to find PMA after the meeting. But it also made the whole thing seem not a little ominous. The SUVs were all black and shiny – just like the one Chuck Connors had driven into me in Booneville.
I started shivering again.
Ahead of me, I saw the entrance to the theatre, which, appropriately enough, was made up of two double-sized swinging saloon doors. That also seemed ominous, like I was walking into a gunfight. I was beginning to feel more than a little silly having thoughts like that, I was the one who had told the kid not to be melodramatic. But it was hard to feel otherwise when you were walking into a full-scale parody of a Western saloon.
What the hell. I swung open the double doors like only a gunslinger without a gun would – very tentatively.
There before me was a tourist-friendly version of the ubiquitous saloon set from countless TV and movie Westerns. There were the small round tables where the locals would play poker or just drink themselves into a stupor. There was a large stage that filled up the entire wall to the left, where presumably the saloon girls would perform, and maybe old Willie Wilson himself when he was still above ground. There was a massive, old-timey bar stretching along the entire length of the back wall, showcasing rows and rows of liquor bottles on the shelves behind it and about twenty barstools sitting in front of it. And on the wall to the right, there was a wide assortment of comical wanted posters, as well as antique bar signs featuring amusingly homespun sayings like, “Leave Your Horse Outside,” “20 Beautiful Showgirls and 1 Ugly One,” and “No Shooting Unless You’re Aiming at My Wife.” Charming.
The bartender looked up at me. He was a handsome young guy, well built, who looked like he might’ve aced a Chippendale’s audition.
“Anywhere you like,” he yelled across the room. He had to yell, the place was that big.
I started to look around when I heard somebody say, “Bowman?”
I turned and saw General Kraemer to the right, sitting in a dark corner of the bar by himself. He was dressed a lot like George Burns when he first shows up in Oh, God! -wearing a flannel shirt, khakis, and one of those fishing hats that had the netting over the top portion that covered his skull. He was in his early sixties but he already looked like he was in his seventies. And he looked tense as fuck. Nothing about this whole thing felt good.
I walked over, introduced myself, shook his hand and sat down. He was working on a coffee.
“I appreciate you coming down here, General.”
He nodded curtly.
“Everything all right?” I asked
“I just want to know what this is all about.”
I looked around the room. Just the hunky bartender, prepping the bar. I turned back to the General. Might as well get right to the point, because I didn’t know how much time I had.
“Well, sir, there’s been an inquiry…into the death of General Dav
idson’s son, Robert.”
“An inquiry.”
“Some say there were some…irregularities, I guess you might say. I just dropped by Colonel Allen’s home…”
“Allen? He doesn’t know anything. He likes to pretend he does. He’s got Retired Colonel Syndrome if you ask me.”
“Retired Colonel Syndrome?”
“Yeah, Colonels who never make General. They get bitter and quit. Always ready to gripe.”
“Well, I never got to talk to the Colonel. He’s dead.”
The General turned as pale as I apparently and frequently was.
“Dead?”
“His wife too. I was driving towards their house…and it just blew up. They said it was a gas leak.”
I saw him glance at the bartender, who returned it with a cold, hard look. And then I remembered. The only vehicles I saw in the parking lot were the lookalike SUVs – no vehicle that presumably belonged to the General. So how did he get here? I couldn’t see him grabbing a Greyhound.
“Look, Bowman, Robert Davidson died on the battlefield. Pretty black-and-white situation. I processed the papers myself out of respect for General Davidson.”
Wow. He jumped right past that house explosion.
He kept talking, or rather, spewing. But at the same time, I felt his hand poking at my thigh under the table. I was pretty sure he wasn’t trying to come on to me, so what was the point of the groping? Meanwhile, the words kept coming.
“…so I don’t know what you mean by irregularities, Robert was under my command and I did everything by the book.”
I put my hand under the table. He was pushing a scrap of paper at me. I took it and shoved it in my pants pocket, both playing like nothing was happening. That meant the bartender was bad news. But I already had guessed that.
“Sir, I’m certainly not questioning your integrity. There was an inquiry and I was simply asked to follow up on it. I did want to ask you about Dark Sky’s involvement…”
The second I let the words “Dark Sky” out of my mouth, the show started without warning.
The lights on the stage across the room came to life. A triumphant Western theme blared over the sound system. I turned to the General, who was trying to tell me something with his eyes - something else I had already guessed. He was in some sort of hostage situation.
The music was the final clue.
It was the theme from The Rifleman. Which meant my nightmare was about to come to life.
Yes, my old friend, Not-Quite Chuck Connors, burst through the curtains to take center stage. He was wearing a cowboy hat, riding gloves, jeans and the same weird shirt the actual Rifleman wore on the old show, that corduroy shirt that looked like it had root beer barrels for buttons. It was scary how much he looked like the real thing.
Especially since he was holding in his hand – The Rifleman rifle.
Who the fuck was this freak who was assuming the role of a TV hero from sixty years ago? And where the fuck did he get the rifle? It wasn’t just something you picked up at a nearby Walmart. The Rifleman rifle was a special one, a Winchester .44-40 with a larger loop than normal for the lever action located underneath the gun. That allowed Lucas McCain, the role Connors played, to flip the rifle all the way around in a circle. He would do this to cock the weapon as well as demonstrate to a potential enemy how bad-ass he was.
There was one other interesting element to the rifle, and that was the screw that jutted inside the loop – positioned so that all McCain had to do was slam the lever down and the screw would automatically push back the trigger and fire the gun. That meant he could shoot repeatedly with the rifle in a fast and deadly way – because it had been jimmy-rigged into becoming one of the world’s first automatic weapons.
Not-Quite Connors did the Lucas McCain rifle flip in our direction, swooping the barrel around in a 360-degree circle, as he stared at us with unrestrained evil glee. I turned to the General, who was staring at Not-Quite Connors with unrestrained loathing. There wasn’t much I could do but watch.
“The Willie Wilson Wild West Theatre is proud to present The Rifleman!” yelled the bartender, who quickly ran to the side of the bar.
With good reason, because Not-Quite Connors crouched down, aimed and began shooting the liquor bottles on the shelves behind the bar. Twelve shots, twelve bottles. The liquid poured down to the ground as Not-Quite Connors flipped his rifle around one more time.
He was using live ammunition. You could smell the gunpowder in the air.
He reached into his shirt pocket and began reloading.
I got up. I couldn’t just sit there. The General grabbed my arm.
“Don’t…” he whispered.
Not-Quite Connors crouched – and shot the General straight in the chest. Right through the heart. Another eleven shots that whizzed right by my waist.
The General slumped over. He was dead.
I froze and looked him over. His chest looked like ground meat from the force of the shots. And behind his shredded bloody shirt, I saw the wire. They were, of course, listening to everything we said. Luckily, the General hadn’t said much and neither had I.
Now there was the little matter of how this was going to end for me.
Not-Quite Connors jumped off the stage and his long legs made quick work of the distance between him and me. I didn’t move a muscle.
“Want a shot?” he asked when he was close enough.
I looked at him in confusion. And that’s when he turned the rifle sideways, holding it horizontally in front of his chest, and threw it right at me with both arms. I couldn’t avoid catching it or it would have slammed into my chin.
As I reflexively grabbed onto the still-hot weapon, Not-Quite Connors rushed me and punched me in the head, knocking me to the floor and taking the rifle back from me as I went down. I hit the floor hard.
That’s when PMA rushed into the saloon and jumped on Not-Quite Connors’ back.
The idiot.
As I tried to get back on my feet, the bartender came running across the room and efficiently peeled the kid off Not-Quite Connors - and threw him a few feet across the room into a nearby table, where PMA and the furniture both fell all over the floor.
“Leave the kid alone,” I said as I leaned on a table for support.
Then I noticed three other guys emerging from a backroom. All three were wearing blood-red jumpsuits and were packing nine millimeter pistols, all of which were aimed in our general direction.
Not-Quite Connors glared at me and flipped the rifle around again. “Get out of here,” he snarled. “And remember whose prints are on this gun.”
I glanced at what was left of the General. Turned out old soldiers really did die and there wasn’t a lot I could do about it now - my responsibility was to get the kid out of there alive. I grabbed PMA’s arm, pulled him up off the floor and yanked him in the direction of the double saloon doors so we could get the hell out of Dodge.
“You keep chasing this thing,” bellowed Not-Quite Connors, “And you answer to me. I don’t care where or when or how, you answer to me.”
I didn’t stop to respond. I didn’t think a snappy comeback would serve my interests.
A couple minutes later, I was driving and the kid was breathing heavy.
“What the fuck. What the fuck. What the FUCK.”
I checked the rear view mirror to make sure the SUV squad wasn’t following us. It wasn’t.
“WHAT THE FUCK!!!!” he screamed, much to the amusement of the kids in the back seat of the car next to us, waiting for the red light to turn green. The parents in the front seat had other feelings about it.
“That was the guy who rammed me at the Colonel’s house,” I told him in between gasping for air. He wasn’t the only one breathing heavy.
“He looked exactly like the guy on that old show! The one they show Saturday mornings!”
“I’m aware.”
“WHAT THE FUCK!”
I drove on. To where, I wasn’t sure.
&nbs
p; “We gotta go to the police!”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“After he shot the General, he threw me the rifle. He was wearing gloves. I wasn’t.”
As I said that, something else clicked. I suddenly understood why Not-Quite Connors had rammed me after the Colonel’s house had gone up in smoke. It had thrown my car around in the opposite direction – so it looked like I was driving away from the house, not towards it. That’s what the Booneville cop would remember.
They were setting me up. They made it look like I killed the Colonel and the General. Of course, the physical evidence might prove me innocent. Might.
I turned off the main drag of Branson as soon as I was able so I could get the car above twenty mph and put some miles between us and Willie Wilson’s Wild West Theatre.
“I should’ve used a MAU move on that guy,” the kid said as I clamped down on the gas pedal. “I just lost my focus.”
“You shouldn’t have come in there,” I said angrily. “I told you to stay in the car.”
“I was worried. I noticed in the parking lot…all three SUVs that looked the same. They all had Montana license plates. And one of them had a bashed-in front fender – and I remembered you said an SUV had hit you back in Kentucky, right? I mean, shit, I thought I better see what was going on, then I heard the shots. FUCK.”
“Montana?” I said.
“Did they just buy that place to do that to you? I don’t understand. Where the fuck do we go now? FUCK.” He rubbed his temples and closed his eyes.
The paper.
I almost forgot the scrap of paper the General had slipped me under the table.
I quickly dug into my pocket until I found it.
“What’s that?” he asked as I pulled it out.
“The General snuck this to me in the saloon.” I handed it to him. “What’s it say?”
“Michael Winters.”
A name I had never heard before.
I hooked up with the I-44 west and took it to the Springfield airport. I returned the rental to the company I had gotten it from, then walked over to the next kiosk over and rented a new one, my fifth rental.
Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) Page 10