by Eyre Price
He looked her up and down, from the mussed knot of red hair on the top of her head to the fuzzy, stuffed mallard duck slippers on her feet. Stuffed duck slippers?
“Come on, babe,” a man’s voice bellowed from somewhere upstairs. “It’s wabbit season!”
Daniel offered her a look, somewhere between judgmental and prurient curiosity.
“I’m making up for all the lost time I spent married to you.” It was the only explanation she was willing to offer.
Her words weren’t the most painful part of his morning and without waiting for the invitation he knew she’d never volunteer, he limped past her into the two-story Mediterranean she’d bought with booty plundered from him in their divorce. She could’ve stopped him easily enough, but she didn’t. Instead, she closed the door and followed him into her living room.
There were two suitcases packed and waiting by the stairs.
“Are you going somewhere?” he wondered aloud.
“I’m going up to Portland to see Grace.”
He nodded, grateful she was going to be somewhere else.
Concealed in a back room somewhere, a dog—big and loud and thoroughly pissed off—was barking furiously at the intruder. “Hades!” she screamed in a voice he’d only ever heard her use toward him. “Shut up, Hades! Shut up!” All the yelling did nothing to silence the canine’s snarled threats.
She turned back to Daniel. “Why do you look like somebody actually did to you what I’ve been dreaming of doing for years?”
She wasn’t the only one who wasn’t offering explanations. “Where’s Zack?”
“Zack?” A tinge of concern seeped into her voice. “What do you mean?”
What did he mean? It was impossible to explain the simplest thing to her, but how could he possibly make her understand why there might be hit men from Vegas hunting him down? Or why those same bad men might now want to find her only child?
There were no words to make her comprehend that Daniel’s escape had put these men on the hook. How could he make her understand that if these very bad men wanted to live out the rest of the week themselves, their only hope was to bring back Daniel and his money. And because of that, they were likely to come straight for what meant the most to Daniel, whatever—or whomever—he could not bear to lose.
“Zack.” He struggled hard to contain his own growing panic. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know.” She was more than concerned now. Maybe even scared. “What’s this all about?” She was certainly angry. “What the hell have you done now?”
“How can you not know where he is?”
“He’s nineteen,” she reminded him. “It’s not like he keeps me up-to-date on his comings and goings.”
“I’m not asking you to manage his social calendar, Connie.” He ran his good hand through his thinning hair. “I’m asking you to know where our son is. I would’ve thought if you could cash the child support checks, even you—”
“What the hell does that mean?”
He was more than willing to meet her challenge. “It means—”
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” There was a young man’s voice at the top of the stairs, but it wasn’t their son’s. “I think you better take a second to rethink how you’re talking to my lady there, chief.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. The last thing he needed this morning was the D-list character actor whose only meaningful role had been as the casually tossed cigarette that started the personal forest fire that burned Daniel’s life to the ground. “This doesn’t concern you, Randy.”
“Oh, I think it does.” The beefy young man who descended the carpeted stairs wore nothing but a pair of boxer briefs and a red and black buffalo-plaid Elmer Fudd hat. Still, his chest was puffed out in some misguided mammalian attempt at establishing dominance. “If it’s happening in my house—”
“This isn’t your house,” Daniel was quick to point out. “It’s Connie’s name on the deed and my money that makes the mortgage. So why don’t you just turn right around and go finish whatever you’ve got started up there all by yourself.”
Randy descended the stairs two at a time. “How ’bout I come down there and finish what it looks like somebody else started?”
Daniel didn’t have time for another pissing match. He turned back to Connie. “How do I get in touch with Zack? I called his number but it goes straight to voice mail.”
“You’re scaring me, Daniel.” She pulled her robe tight around her and tied the belt. “What’s wrong with Zack?”
“He’s fine.” It was true for the moment, but he recognized the way he’d voiced the words didn’t inspire confidence in her.
“Is this about the last time that you two—”
“The last time what?” What had Zack told her?
It hadn’t been much. “He said the two of you had a fight. You told him you were cutting off his money.”
That wasn’t quite right. “I told him I was cutting off his money if he doesn’t go back to school.”
She rolled her emerald eyes. “He doesn’t want to go to school.”
“Nobody wants to go to school, but most people recognize it’s a necessity.”
“You never went to school.” The way she said it suggested she might have retained some small vestige of admiration for him, but she was quick to catch herself on it. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re still an asshole. But you’ve done all right for yourself.”
“I am an asshole,” he freely agreed. “But the days of making money simply by being an asshole are coming to an end.” The words sounded unexpectedly dire once they’d slipped out of his mouth. Dire, but true just the same.
“Well, he wants music.”
“Then he can go back to school for music.”
“He wants his music.” She arched her well-shaped eyebrow and he knew it was the end of any meaningful discussion on the subject.
He knew he didn’t have time for this conversation and steered the conversation back to finding Zack. “Is he off with Alistair?”
She shook her head. “No, Georgie went back to UC San Jose for spring semester.”
“Then who is he off with?”
A shrug. “He started playing with a new band, but I don’t know any of the boys. We asked him—” She stopped short, caught on something she didn’t want to say aloud.
He’d seen that look in her eyes too often to mistake it: guilt. “What did you do?”
She struggled for a response. And then gave up with a sigh.
“We told him we needed some time and space.” It was Randy who offered the answer she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He stood behind Connie and wrapped his artificially bronzed and chemically bloated arms around her. “We’re a couple here.” He kissed the back of her neck and she did not resist him. He looked at Daniel and smiled like he knew a secret. “We need the space to do all the things that couples are supposed to do.”
Daniel wasn’t deterred by the insinuation. “You threw Zack out?”
“We didn’t throw anybody out,” Randy countered quickly.
“I’m not talking to you about this.” Daniel looked directly at Connie. “You put our son on the street and didn’t tell me? What kind of mother are—”
“What kind of father are you?” she snapped defensively. “He didn’t turn to you, did he?”
He wanted to slap her with a response every bit as sharp and painful, but he knew she was right. In a morning filled with a whole world of hurts, the most painful thing he had to endure was the simple realization that when his son had been put out into the world he hadn’t come to him for money or a place to stay. He hadn’t come to him at all.
“He’s over eighteen,” Randy interrupted in a tone suggesting there was no need for anyone to be concerned. “When I was eighteen I was—”
“Just the same plastic-ass boy toy you are today, Randy.” Daniel was uninterested in whatever “school of hard knocks” anecdote the guy wanted to share.
Daniel closed his eyes tightly, trying to conta
in his building anger and focus on what he needed to do. In his head he drew up a bullet-point mission plan: How to Find Zack. Step One. “I need to borrow a car.”
“Call Enterprise,” Randy suggested.
“What happened?” Connie was intrigued. Even under the circumstances, she seemed delighted by the humiliating possibilities. “Did they repossess the Bimmer?”
“I just need a car.” How much farther could he get in a stolen car?
“I need the Jag,” she insisted.
“And I get to keep the Escalade, right?” Randy whined.
She pulled his arms tighter around her. “And Randy needs the Escalade.”
Daniel didn’t care anymore. Not about any of it. “I just need four wheels. I’ll take the Kia.”
“Maria needs it to run errands,” she protested.
“I’ll have it back by Thursday.” He knew he wouldn’t, but the lie was clearly a condition for getting the car. “I promise.”
“All right. If you promise to—”
“Can you just give me the keys?”
She trotted off to fetch them.
“This is it, ace,” Randy whispered when they were alone.
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want you coming back here again, dillhole.” Even for his size—six foot two, 240 pounds—it was hard for a man wearing undies and a cartoon hunter’s cap to look intimidating.
Given what he’d been through so far that day, Daniel tried not to laugh. “What?”
“I got your boy outta here.” He made a quick gesture with his thumb. “And if you come back here again,” he looked to see if his support system was coming back yet. He then turned back and drew his index finger across his throat. “You’re a dead man.”
“Here they are,” Connie called out as she rejoined them, unaware the tension between them had risen to historic heights. She dropped the keys in Daniel’s hand. “Don’t forget. Thursday.”
“Thanks.” It was all Daniel had left to say.
“Thursday,” she reminded him. “So have it back here Wednesday night.”
“Make sure you top it off,” Randy added.
Daniel just nodded. “If Zack calls, tell him to call me. It’s important.”
“This thing,” she couldn’t keep herself from asking. “With Zack. Is it something I should be worried about?”
Life is just one troubling moral dilemma after another. “I’d take my time at Grace’s.” Daniel cast a quick glance at the man he hated more than any other in the world—and that included the killers hunting him. “I’d bring Fudd with you too.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Randy announced defiantly. “I can handle whatever you couldn’t.”
Daniel shrugged and turned back to the woman he hated himself for loving. “Then I’d leave soon.”
“The only one leaving is you,” Randy interrupted. “Now.”
Daniel looked to his ex-wife, not asking for compassion or support, just the decency not to let another man—the other man—throw him out of a house in which he couldn’t help feeling he still held some interest. He looked, but there was nothing there for him. “You need to go, Daniel.”
There was so much he wanted to tell her—a lifetime he wanted one last chance to try to explain—but even he knew better than to try to say anything more than, “I’m sure you’ll both be fine.”
“She’s got me.” Randy tightened his arms around her, flexing biceps ringed with barbwire tattoos—the mullets of personal ink.
“I’ve got Randy.” She backed into him and pulled his pharmaceutically inflated arms around her, not to twist some emotional blade in Daniel’s cuckolded back, but simply because she had found her home there.
And that was all there was to that.
After the grand drama that had played out between them, it seemed oddly anticlimactic to Daniel that such a small gesture could convince him completely of what he’d fought for so many years to deny. For the first time he saw her clearly. Not as his wife. Or his ex-wife. Or even Zack’s mother. He saw her simply as the woman she was.
She wasn’t his. She never would be. And maybe she never had been.
Daniel felt like a condemned man who’d spent years fearing the gallows door, dreading the moment it would fall beneath his feet with a fatal BANG!, only to find there was no deadly drop after all. Only release.
“All right.” If he chose to, he could simply walk away. “Good luck with that, then.” The first step was surprisingly easy to take. And so were the others that followed. He didn’t feel the need for one last look and he had no parting word for this stranger he now realized he had never really known. Daniel had troubles of his own and he was running out of time to set them right.
Legend holds that the engineers who built the Great Pyramids were entombed at the center of their ingenious creations as a practical precaution to prevent their secrets being revealed.
And tales are told that after Peter the Great saw St. Petersburg’s storybook skyline, he had all of the architects who contributed to its design executed so they could never duplicate it for another monarch.
Death is, after all, the only completely trustworthy confidant.
Daniel, however, was neither pharaoh nor czar, and death had not been an option on his service contract with Brentwood Safe & Vault Installation. So Terry and—Daniel couldn’t remember the name of the guy with the paint-speckled Padres cap who reeked of cheap weed—knew all about the safe they’d installed behind the Elvis painting.
That meant anyone Terry or the whacked-out Padres fan might have shared that information with knew about it too. And whoever those people talked to…and on and on, exponentially, until it seemed reasonable to assume half of metropolitan Los Angeles might be aware of Daniel’s not-so-secret safe.
It wasn’t just Terry and the stoner either.
In that pathetically desperate period when he was trying to get back on his feet after the divorce—and the subsequent temporary commitment—he’d thrown any number of parties at the house to show just how “right” he was. So there were who-knew-how-many guests (most of whom he’d never met) who might have discovered it on their own. Or, more likely, had suffered through his drunken braggadocio and learned about the money he’d cached away in his hidden safe from his own slurring mouth.
He’d held production meetings for the Rock and Roll Redemption pilot at the house with God-knew-who in attendance. Film crews. Editing teams. The members of Mission. Their entourages.
And there was the cable guy.
And the painters.
Maria.
Even the EMTs and police who’d responded to the call when he’d made his suicide attempt had been through the house. Maybe alone in his office. Who could say?
The list of suspects who might have known about the safe and the million reasons to crack it was endless. Still, of all the people who might have wanted his money, Daniel couldn’t figure a single one with motivation to leave a personalized blues song at the scene of their crime, particularly one with lyrics suggesting he could get his money back.
All he had were questions, but he was confident their answers must be in the song. And so he went back to it again.
“The Blues Highway Blues.”
Daniel was familiar with the titular roadway. Long before Bob Dylan revisited it, Route 61 was the major thoroughfare for itinerant bluesmen as they shadowed the Mississippi River down through St. Louis and then over to Memphis, snaking through the fertile crescent of the Mississippi Delta and then finally delivering its disciples in the Big Easy. It was the historical spinal chord of rhythm and blues, the umbilical chord of rock and roll.
And although a twelve-hundred-mile stretch of highway was an inexact destination, the day’s events had left him with three certainties: Moog and Rabidoso were looking for him. They would never stop until they found him. The only chance he had to save his life—and his son’s—was to find the money and make a deal.
So, if there was even the slightest chance
he might be able to recover his money at the end of whatever wild goose chase he was being sent on, he had to take that trip to where the blues had been born.
He was on his way to the Blues Highway.
Every tick of the odometer was another reason to turn back. Every exit he passed was a missed opportunity to come to his senses. Mile after mile passed with the noise on the radio drowned out by the whispering voice at the back of his mind, constantly chiding that he was on a fool’s errand with zero chance to accomplish anything except making his situation even worse.
If another man might have heeded this inner call, something else kept Daniel’s foot pinned to the accelerator. He drove as the sun climbed high in the sky and never slowed or stopped as it gradually slipped from its perch, falling and fading, finally melting into a fruit-sherbet sunset that spilled across a desert horizon he could only see in his rearview mirror.
The miles ticked away like minutes on the clock until evening had turned to darkness and all of the sensible souls had called it a night and pulled off for a hot meal and badly needed sleep. Daniel left them all to their motel beds and kept going until the highway was eventually abandoned to the legion of long-haul truckers and other assorted hard cases who for reasons all their own couldn’t bring themselves to stop either. He was in their number now, counting down exit signs while the rest of the world counted sheep. Just another lost soul, driving hard, with an uncertain destination.
Yet no matter how high the speedometer climbed, he could not outpace the doubt that dogged his steps or the dark thoughts that accompanied him like a shadowy presence seated beside him in the shotgun seat. Was he making a mistake? Should he just turn back? Would he be able to save his son? Or himself?
There are four million miles of highway crisscrossing the United States, an intricate web of blacktop that provides a marathon driver—whether it’s wanted or not—with a reasonable alternative to long-term psychotherapy. The lonely night and endless asphalt will not suffer self-delusion. The miles will coax out the truth.