Familiar Lies

by Brian J. Jarrett

  Max’s mind wandered and he could almost see himself opening the door to find Josh sitting there on the end of his perfectly made bed, headphones on, listening to some kind of hard rock. Max would smile and wave and Josh would return it while the muted music escaped from the headphones.

  Max twisted the knob and pushed the door open.

  He stood at the threshold and glanced inside the room to find the bed empty, just as he knew it would be. The foot of the bed was a little creased from where Max had been sitting earlier when he read the letter. He couldn’t help but feel that he’d violated something sacred by sitting there.

  Or maybe he felt he’d violated Josh’s privacy by reading the letter in the first place. It hadn’t been meant for Max, it had been meant for whoever Julie was. Max considered what Vanessa had said about people choosing what side of themselves they showed to others. He wondered what side she showed to her husband and son. Surely not the cougar milf who took advantage of a seventeen year old boy.

  But Max couldn’t help but shake the notion that maybe Vanessa was the one who’d been taken advantage of.

  He glanced at the closet door and the breath caught in his throat. He blinked hard, trying to rid his eyes of the fatigue and force them to work properly.

  The closet door stood slightly ajar.

  Surely it had been closed when he left the room earlier. Max hadn’t touched it, had he? He racked his brain, trying to remember opening the closet and couldn’t remember doing so a single time since Josh had passed.

  Maybe the door came open on its own, he thought. That had to be it. Houses come alive at night; they inhale, they exhale. They yawn and stretch.

  Surely that had to be the explanation.

  Max stepped into his son’s room and walked to the closet. He touched the handle and had the wild idea to open it. His mind seemed to come a little unhinged and he could imagine his son’s body in there, his neck snapped from the fall, his arms and legs broken, bones protruding from compound fractures, his face smashed and deformed. The type of injuries that require a closed casket.

  Max saw his son’s face in his mind—terrible and clear—just as it had been on the day he’d been forced to identify his body. He hadn’t thought of that day in a long time, effectively blocking it out until this moment. Now it came back like a ghost from his past, there for a reckoning long overdue.

  Max pushed the closet door closed. It clicked loudly in the quiet room as it shut. He turned back toward the bed, expecting to see his son there.

  Of course the bed sat there painfully empty.

  You’re tired, Max told himself. You just need some sleep. This will seem like a silly dream in the morning.

  He told himself that, but nonetheless he slept with the light on that night.

  Chapter Eight

  The following day Max took the rest of the week off last minute, calling in from home to let his boss know. Ken Tomlin wasn’t a bad guy to work for and sounded more disappointed than mad at the news. “We’ll make do,” he told Max before hanging up. Ken didn’t deserve the kind of half-ass job Max had been doing for the past year, but things were what they were, for lack of a better, more justified reason.

  Max slept in that morning until almost eleven o’clock, rising and getting dressed by noon. He had a light lunch and prepared for the day, figuring out where to go next. Last night he’d had no luck finding club owners with any of the names listed in Josh’s letter, but he didn’t plan on letting that stop him. He had two working feet, after all, and he planned to get them stepping.

  By four o’clock Max hoped it would be close enough to opening time to get started. He didn’t have much of a game plan outside of showing up at every club he could find and simply asking questions. Not the best-laid plan, more like throwing everything against the wall to see what stuck, but at least he was doing something. And something was better than nothing at all.

  He doubted there’d be much business on a Wednesday night and maybe he could find somebody ready to talk. Worth a shot.

  Max left the house with a printed list of night clubs in a ten-mile radius. He hadn’t realized how many there would be and how much he’d have to rely on his phone’s GPS to find them. He stopped first at a dive bar called Mallon’s and encountered a short and squat man built like a fire hydrant who greeted him with squinty eyes and a pleasant demeanor. Ultimately he proved unhelpful, but it gave Max some hope that he wouldn’t run into a brick wall everywhere.

  Max visited four more bars; one with live music, another Mexican themed. A couple more had little more than bare floors and pool tables, all serving watered down mainstream brand beers and some heart-stopping junk food.

  It occurred to him as he drove away from the last bar visited that maybe he was headed in the wrong direction, chasing down the wrong kind of places.

  Maybe he needed to check the strip clubs.

  Josh wouldn’t do that, the voice in his mind countered. He was underage.

  But his underage son had had a relationship with Vanessa Simmons, a very average and very married housewife. All things considered, the strip club surely wasn’t an impossibility.

  He stopped the car and ran a search on his phone, bringing back all the strip clubs in the area. They were clustered together in the same part of town, likely zoned for that kind of activity. The politicians’ way of keeping the revenue coming while keeping the riffraff out of the high tax areas.

  Choosing the first place at random, Max pulled out and headed toward a place affectionately called The Hustle.

  * * *

  Max pulled into the gravel-lined parking lot of The Hustle, his tires crunching as he avoided potholes and searched for a spot. He found one close to the door, his suspicion that a Wednesday night would be slow proving true. He got out of the car and took a deep breath, smelling car exhaust and beer hops.

  He saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and his heart lodged in his throat. Out of his peripheral, he caught a glimpse of a figure walking behind a car, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt like Josh used to wear, with light-blue jeans and white tennis shoes. Feeling a chill run over his body, Max headed after the figure, but when he got there he found nothing but a parked car. No sign of anyone.

  For a moment his mind had been convinced that he’d seen his dead son. Impossible, his better sense reminded him, but his eyes had been fooled. Max wondered if the mind could literally project images onto the retina, should it want to see something badly enough. How else could he have seen such a thing?

  Still shaken, he headed toward the door of the club, unsure of his next move. So far, he’d been winging it, but he wasn’t sure if planning things out would have made a difference. He was learning that things like this tended to take their own direction, regardless of anyone’s plan.

  Things like this, he thought. As if there was a precedent set that he could follow anyway.

  He made it to the door and encountered a bouncer sitting on a stool. A tall house of a man with a grim, pockmarked face rose to meet him. A toothpick jutted from his mouth like a tired movie cliché.

  “Twenty-five,” the man said, blocking the way. “Two drink minimum.”

  “I just wanted to ask a couple of questions,” Max said. He regretted it after he said it, coming right out with things, but there was nothing to do about that now.

  “Nobody comes here asking questions,” the bouncer said. “This is the kind of place where that don’t go over well, if you catch me.”

  Max worked to play off his obvious interest, feigning ignorance. “I’m not a cop,” he said, racking his brain for a cover story. “Truth be told, I’m looking for my daughter. Her name is Julie.”

  The bouncer’s eyes squinted. “You ain’t the first dad to come traipsing into this place, you know.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Pissed off fathers don’t do too much good for business. I think you can understand as much.”

  “We’ve had our differences, Julie and me,” Max conti
nued, making it up as he went. “I just want to know that she’s okay, even if she’s dancing here.”

  “Ain’t no dancer named Julie here,” the bouncer said. He took a step toward Max. “I think it’s time you took a hike.”

  “What about Gabe? Caldwell? Is she with them?”

  “All right, buddy. Time to go.” The bouncer took another step forward, arms raised.

  Max took a step back in response. “Okay, I’m leaving.”

  The bouncer chewed on the toothpick but didn’t move.

  Max turned and walked back to the parking lot. As he headed toward his car he glanced back at the club to find the bouncer standing in the doorway, staring at him. He finished the walk to his car and got in, locking the doors behind him. Another glance toward the door revealed that the bouncer had gone back inside again. Max figured it was probably a good sign that the man didn’t care enough to see him drive off.

  Hopefully he bought the daughter-as-a-stripper cover story Max had cooked up on the fly because something told Max that there was more to this place than its scuzzy strip club exterior. Something deeper, something rotten at its core. He had no proof, nothing outside of a gut feeling and…

  Don’t say it, the voice in his head piped in. You didn’t see Josh’s ghost in the parking lot.

  But what had he seen? And what had he heard last night in Josh’s room?

  It’s all in your head, the voice said. Same as this voice speaking right now. All made up.

  But it didn’t feel made up. It felt real. And what if it was? What if his son was communicating from the grave, helping Max find out what really happened? The kooks on television said that ghosts were the souls of people who died tragically or with unfinished business. Max had never seriously entertained such notions before, but what if? Was it impossible?

  You’re seriously cracking up, his inner narrator said. Don’t lose your grip on reality here, not now. Now is the most important time to stay sane because this isn’t a game.

  No, it certainly was not.

  Three quick knocks came from the passenger window and Max jumped in the seat. He glanced over to find a woman standing there and peering inside. She glanced furtively left and right before moving her hand in a rolling motion, indicating he should roll the window down or hurry up…or both.

  Max rolled the window down and the woman reached inside, unlocking the door and letting herself inside. She wore a tight pair of jeans and a shirt two sizes too small that showed off a more an adequate chest. She had high cheekbones with eyes a little too far apart, but not unappealing. She was pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way and less in the way of a Playboy centerfold.

  “Who are you?” Max said.

  “The Hustle is a one-thirty bar,” the woman said. “Be here fifteen minutes after close and park at the far end of the parking lot.” She pointed to show him where. “Don’t get out of the car.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You were asking questions. I don’t have all the answers, but I have some. And I have questions of my own. Be here when I told you. You only get one chance.”

  The woman exited the car and closed the door softly behind before walking across the graveled parking lot and entering the building through the front door.

  Chapter Nine

  Max had no idea who the girl was that knocked on his car window, but it seemed she had information she felt was important. That meant that his gut feeling had been right; The Hustle was a good place to start. Max didn’t know how his son had been tied up with this place, but if Max had to guess he found himself leaning toward a girl as the explanation. After the revelation of Josh’s relationship with Vanessa and now his ties to a strip club, Max could only wonder with what kind of girls Josh had been keeping company.

  He left the parking lot after the girl went back inside and hit a drive through, mindlessly chomping down on a burger while he sat and contemplated a seemingly endless string of possibilities. He found the exercise exhausting and impossible, so he went back home to catch a few hours of rest before heading back over to the club.

  He found, however, that once he’d gotten home he didn’t want to go inside. It felt too much like a mausoleum in there. He decided instead to sleep in the car and after several moments with his eyes closed, he dozed off into a light and dreamless sleep.

  He awoke after a few hours feeling a little more refreshed. Night had fallen while he slept, blanketing the surrounding landscape in darkness. The half moon had come out, staring down at the earth as it had for millennia. Max thought about the moon and its permanently hidden dark side. Even the moon, it seemed, had a side it chose to show to the Earth.

  Max glanced at the digital display on the dashboard: 11:30 p.m. He’d slept for longer than he planned. He found himself turning over the events of the past couple of days in his mind again, but he stopped himself. Conjecture hadn’t gotten him anywhere so far; it would be better to allow the information to flow in without prejudice. He could put the pieces together later.

  He sat in the car for the next hour in a near-meditative state, just staring at the garage door and allowing his mind to ramble on with trivialities. After tiring with that exercise he started the car and headed back to The Hustle, wondering just what kind of revelations awaited him.

  He almost didn’t want to find out.

  * * *

  Max pulled into the parking lot of The Hustle and drove to the far end as instructed. He parked the car and killed the engine, noticing immediately why the girl he’d met earlier had requested that he park there. With no lights overhead, shadows surrounded the car, blanketing it in near darkness.

  He waited there in the parking lot, leaning back in the seat and watching the front door. He saw the bouncer step outside a few times for a cigarette. Throughout the night, mostly men rolled into the lot, though he did notice one or two couples enter the building. He remembered going to a strip club once with Katie before they were married, but the experience had been awkward at best. Max never really understood what people got out of strip joints, but clearly there was some draw or else there wouldn’t be so damn many of them.

  As the clock closed in on 1:30 a.m. Max saw a slow exodus emerge from the front door. The patrons streamed out, more than a few walking on unsteady legs as they headed toward their waiting cars. Max hadn’t really spent much time in clubs, even before Katie and he married, and he wondered if the number of those drunk behind the wheel might be just a little higher than he’d considered.

  Fifteen minutes later, the last of the staff left. Four tall and thin girls emerged from the club, followed by a few stocky guys and the bouncer Max had met earlier. The girls either got into their own cars or were picked up by boyfriends (or girlfriends or husbands, Max didn’t care to assume) until only two people were left behind: the young woman who’d tapped on his window earlier and another guy Max didn’t recognize.

  They spoke for a few minutes and then the man got into his car and left. The woman waited until the car drove out of sight before making her way quickly toward Max’s parked car. He realized as he watched her walk that he had no means of protecting himself; no gun, no knife, not even a baseball bat. He supposed that he had a tire iron in the trunk if nothing else, but that only went so far. Max didn’t know this woman from anyone and her intentions could go any which way. As she approached he realized there was little he could do aside from allowing her into the car and taking his chances.

  She went straight to the passenger side of Max’s car and got in. “Drive,” she said, closing the door and staring ahead.

  “Where to?”

  “Anywhere.”

  Max paused.

  “Do it or I get out.”

  Max started the car and put it in drive, pulling out of the parking lot slowly as he wondered if he’d just made the worst mistake of his life.

  Chapter Ten

  “What’s your name?” Max asked as he drove the car down a two lane road with no destination in mind.

  “Rub
y.”

  “Nice name,” Max said, struggling for something to say.

  “It was my grandmother’s name.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She was a bitch.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Sorry for all the cloak and dagger shit, but I can’t take the chance of being seen with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know who I can trust. I’m taking a big risk just be getting in this car with you, you know.”

  “You mean the same risk I’m taking by letting you in my car?”

  Ruby thought about that for a moment. “Fair enough.”

  “What information do you have?” Max asked.

  “You came in spouting off a whole list of names. I recognized two of them: Julie and Gabe.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Julie used to bartend at The Hustle, along with me.”

  “You don’t dance then?”

  “Hell no. I just serve up the drinks.”

  “I thought the money was in dancing.”

  “It is, but I’m not selling my soul to get it. Bartending’s good; the drinks are way overpriced, the guys tip well and the drink minimums are really just where these guys get started. I’m going to college, or at least I will be. I won’t get stuck in that hellhole forever.”

  “So Julie was a bartender at The Hustle. Who’s Gabe?”

  “He manages the place. He’s also her boyfriend. Or he was.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “I wouldn’t call them couple of the year or anything, but yeah.”

  Max took a hand off the wheel and reached into his back pocket to retrieve Josh’s letter. He handed it to Ruby.

  She read the contents by the light of her cell phone before folding up the letter and handing it back to him. “Who wrote this?”

  “My son.”

  “I thought you said you had a daughter. I assume that was all made up?”

  Max nodded.

  “Why don’t you ask your son then?”