by J. R. Rain
“I was waiting to see what would happen.”
We rounded the final curve of the golf course and were now headed toward the Greek Theater. In silence, we moved past the theater and adjacent housing track filled with opulent homes.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about him,” she said after a while.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I was waiting to see where things were going with us.”
“So where are things going with us?” I asked.
“I love you, you big lug, but you’re so closed, so secretive. It’s hard for me to get around that.”
“I understand.”
“But, dammit, I want to still see you,” she said. “But I also want to see other people, too.”
“You mean you want to continue seeing other people,” I said.
“Yes. To continue.”
We walked in silence some more, then I said, “So we’ll have one of those fancy, high-tech, open relationships everyone talks about?”
She laughed. “Yeah, something like that.”
“And I can date other people, too?”
“That’s how it works,” she said, although I could hear the hesitancy in her voice.
“And you’re not afraid of losing me?” I asked.
“I’m terrified,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-six
Euphoria. Pure, unadulterated euphoria.
An hour earlier I had taken my ninth Vicodin followed by a beer chaser, and now I was feeling high as a kite and pain free and at peace with the world around me.
Everyone should feel this good.
Maybe they do. Maybe I’m the one who’s missing out.
I was in my living room. It was early afternoon and the sun was shining straight through my blinds and into my apartment. Earlier, the bright light had given me a headache.
But not anymore.
Vicodin gets rid of headaches. Vicodin gets rid of all aches. And on top of that, it makes you feel so damn good that even the bright sunlight is no longer a problem. Hell, nothing is a problem.
You’re now well beyond the recommended daily dosage, Mr. King. I think it’s official: you might just have a problem.
Sure I did, but I didn’t care; at least not now.
Taking Vicodin with a beer chaser was a big no-no, as alcohol did something that increased something, but I didn’t care. At least not now.
Don’t try this at home, kids....
I felt so damn good and my head felt so damn clear, but I knew I had a serious fucking problem and I knew this problem was threatening to get out of control.
I’ll deal with it later.
Always later, right King?
For now, my knees were no longer sore and my head was no longer hurting; my lower back felt damn good and even my jaw had quit throbbing, a jaw that had been hurting since my re-constructive plastic surgery thirty years ago.
Feeling good like I should.
I lay back on my sofa, rested my head on a throw pillow, and closed my eyes. My body felt wonderful. My body felt healthy. My body felt strong.
Everyone should feel this good....
Chapter Thirty-seven
It was later, and I was still feeling good as I read through Miranda’s police file for the umpteenth time, focusing my attention this time around on Miranda’s last boyfriends.
Jason Anderson, her most recent ex-boyfriend who now lived in New York, didn’t have a clue what happened to Miranda. His story was fairly simple: Miranda had broken up with him a year or so ago after she had caught him cheating. He’d made several attempts to win her back but she wanted nothing more to do with him.
Good for her.
Police investigators had checked him out completely; he was clean. Besides, he had a rock-solid alibi at the time of her disappearance and the police had dropped him from the suspect list.
My instincts told me there was nothing there. I dropped him, too, the cheating bastard.
Generally, twenty-two-year-old girls didn’t run away. Hell, at that age, it was called moving. But Miranda had lived a very easy and sheltered life with her mother. Miranda’s mental and personal growth had no doubt been stunted by a few years.
Just a beautiful girl with no clue just how beautiful she really is.
The police had checked out all the hotels in Vegas but nothing had turned up under her name. They did the same for Reno and Laughlin and Tahoe. Nothing. They checked with current friends and old friends. Nothing. According to her friends, Miranda had had only one other significant boyfriend, a high school sweetheart named Flip Barowski, now six or seven years removed. The detectives, perhaps considering Flip was too far removed, never bothered contacting him.
I got up from my chair. Oops, too fast. Instantly lightheaded, I guided myself over to my corner desk and sat down. I opened Miranda’s personal case file and flipped back a dozen or so pages until I found the letter I had removed from her bureau drawer. The love letter.
I read it again.
Flip apparently had it bad for Miranda. Very bad. And in his letter he was apologizing for something again and again, but, unfortunately, he didn’t say why he was apologizing. He ended the letter very succinctly: he threatened to end his own life if he could not have her.
Now that’s love. Or infatuation.
Either way, I grabbed my car keys and headed out the door. I was really too buzzed to drive, but that never stopped me before.
Don’t try this at home, kids.
Chapter Thirty-eight
I was on the road, buzzed and high, when Becky the pianist from the Pussycat called.
“Hey, good-looking,” she said.
“Hey, pretty mama.”
Oops. Too Elvis.
“Do you even know who this is?” she asked, giggling.
I pulled out onto Morton Ave and headed down through the hills of Echo Park. The reception here was fuzzy at best.
“No,” I said, “unless it’s Becky from the Pussycat.”
“How did you know?”
“I’m good at voices.”
“Well, I’m very impressed,” she said.
I was driving by the shabbier homes of lower Echo Park. The day was sweltering. I turned right onto Glendale and picked up speed. My window was mostly up to hear better, my cell’s earpiece shoved deep into my ear canal.
“So do you really think I’m good-looking?” I asked.
“I think you’re beautiful,” she said. “Especially your voice.”
Becky sounded as if she were on something. Join the club. I think we were both feeling flirty and lonely and high.
“Even for an old geezer?” I asked.
She giggled. “You’re only fifty-something, right?”
Close, but not quite.
“Old enough to be your father,” I said.
“You can be my daddy anytime, sugar,” she said, giggling again, and then she got to the point, which was probably for the best. “We need to rehearse sometime this week.”
“Am I that bad?”
“No, you’re that good. I think one rehearsal ought to do it. Can you come by the Cat this afternoon? Say three-thirty?”
I told her I would and we clicked off. I was now on Sunset Blvd. and heading west into the setting sun. I flipped down my shades.
Cool as cool gets.
* * *
The euphoria from the prescription drugs was wearing off.
And with its passing came the all-pervasive pain in my knees and back, and it came back with a vengeance.
I hate when that happens.
I need more Vicodin. Bad.
Ignoring the pain as best as I could, I parked in front of Dana’s oversized house, ignored the faux dog, and knocked on her heavy front door.
A moment later, she appeared, and she didn’t look good. Eyes bloodshot and vacant. Hair awry and forgotten. Dried tears crusting in the corner of her eyes and down her cheeks. She looked at me blankly for a moment or two, then turned and retreated back into her
home. She left the door open and I followed her in, shutting it behind me. The house was dark and dead, shades drawn, lights off. Despite my lingering high, I felt miserable just being here.
As I followed her, I saw that my hands were shaking badly. I hadn’t had the shakes in decades, not even with the drinking.
It’s happening again.
King, you need help.
Ya think?
In the main living room, Dana fell into a wide, overstuffed chair, and reached immediately for a cut crystal tumbler that was filled with amber liquid. I was willing to bet the amber liquid wasn’t lemonade.
She hadn’t spoken, and I didn’t bother asking her how she was doing. I knew how she was doing: not good at all.
“Your daughter didn’t date much,” I said simply.
She rolled her head my direction. “No.”
“Why?”
“None of the guys were good enough, I guess.”
“For you or her?” I asked.
“Both. I watched over her carefully, vigilantly. We weren’t going to settle for just anyone.”
“Her last boyfriend was a guy named Jason.”
“Yes.”
“No one since?” I asked.
“No one that I know of.”
“Did she date anyone before Jason?”
“No.”
“Not even casually?”
“I wouldn’t allow it.”
Hell, maybe Miranda had run away. I chewed my lip, a bad habit, and looked at the woman sitting across from me. She was obviously on some type of sedative to help deal with her daughter’s disappearance.
“Did she date in high school?”
“Yes, one boy.”
“What happened to him?”
“They broke up.”
“Why?”
“Because they were just kids; it wasn’t meant to last.”
“Did you facilitate the break-up?”
“No. Actually, the boy played a trick on her.”
I sat up a little straighter.
“A trick?” I said.
She turned her head slowly toward me again and blinked long and dramatically, and for the first time today she seemed to really look at me.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but why the hell are you asking questions about my daughter’s boyfriend from fucking high school?”
I opened my mouth to answer but she didn’t let me answer, and suddenly, now given an outlet, all of her anger and frustration and fear was directed onto me.
“I demand to know what the fuck you’ve been up to, Mr. Aaron fucking King!”
Ah, yes. When a client asks for a full accounting—or, in this case, demands—by law I have to give them one. In this situation, I would have preferred to wait, but she was calling me out, so to speak, and so I caught her up to date on the investigation.
Dana did not know about the Trader Joe’s employee, or the bum, or the van driven by the man with pockmarks, and when I was done she lost it. Just lost it.
Tears sprung fully formed from her eyes, spilling down over sharp cheekbones. She dropped the tumbler in her lap, spilling the booze everywhere. I was by her side instantly, plucking the glass up, and wrapping an arm around her shaking shoulders while she sobbed into my chest.
Aaron fucking King to the rescue.
When she was done, when she had gained some semblance of control over herself, I slipped off the chair’s arm and sat on the ornate glass coffee table directly across from her. I took both her hands in mine. They were shaking nearly as bad as my own.
“I didn’t think I had tears enough to cry,” she said.
Tears enough to cry. Sounded like a sad, sad song.
Not everything is a song, King.
Oh, yeah?
“So she was kidnapped by some son-of-a-bitch in a van,” she said.
I sucked in some air. “I think so, yes. The police are looking for the van now.”
“But it could be anywhere, she could be anywhere, dead in the desert, tortured and raped and burned alive for all I know.”
“We don’t know that.”
“But it’s a very real possibility.”
I didn’t want to lie to her, and so I squeezed her hands and said nothing.
“Help me find her, King. Please. I’ll give you anything you want. Please help me find my baby. Please, oh God, please....”
I patted her hand and made sympathetic noises, and after awhile I said, “Tell me about the boy in high school.”
“But I don’t understand—”
“Neither do I, but I have nothing else to go on, Dana. And since I don’t have enough time or manpower to cruise the city streets looking for the white van, I’m going to do what I have been trained to do, which is to turn over every rock and stone until your daughter shows up.”
“And one of those stones is her high school boyfriend?”
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. Now please tell me the trick he played on her, the reason she broke up with him.”
“Her boyfriend was a twin.”
I inhaled sharply. There it was again. Twins.
“Go on,” I said.
“They were dating for nearly their entire senior year when the boy decided to do something stupid. Very, very stupid.”
“What?”
She looked away. “He let his twin brother rape Miranda.”
“I’m not sure I’m following—”
“The sons-of-bitches played a trick on her, King. One twin stepped out of the room—her boyfriend—and the other stepped in—his brother, dressed identically from head to foot, to fool her. Granted, it was late at night and everyone had been drinking, but Miranda knew something was wrong the moment he forced himself on her. She tried to stop him, but couldn’t. I told him that if I ever saw him or his fucking perverted brother again, I would kill them both.”
I didn’t doubt it.
“Do you have a picture of Flip?” I asked.
“He’s in her high school yearbook somewhere.”
“Would you mind?”
She didn’t, or at least not very much. She left the room and came back a few minutes later lugging a bright green high school yearbook. She sat next to me on the glass coffee table, flipped open the book. A moment later, she found the right page. Her partially painted fingernail, which was worried down to a mere nub, pointed to a handsome young man with a thick neck and spiky blond hair. His identical twin brother was next to him. Flip and Bryan Barowski. Both had fairly clear complexions.
Which meant neither matched the description of our pock-marked driver.
Strike one and two.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Clarke and I were at the Hollywood YMCA. He was doing bench presses on a shining new machine, and I was doing shoulder raises on an older machine that wasn’t so shiny.
“They say that you get more definition if you use free weights,” I said when we both finished our respective sets. “So why are we not using free weights?”
Clarke’s face was still slightly purple with the strain of his recent pressing. A pulsating, lightning bolt-like vein slashed down across his forehead, Harry Potter-like. Clarke was tired of all my Harry Potter jokes. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t, since I was a closet Harry Potter fan.
“Because we’re not thirty anymore,” he said, “and we don’t care about definition.”
“We don’t?”
Clarke leaned back and cranked out ten more reps. When finished, he sat forward again. Good thing, because the lightning bolt-like vein looked like it was about to burst.
“No,” he said. “And if you say anything about the throbbing, lightning bolt-like vein on my forehead I’m going to go fucking ape-shit on you, King. Fucking ape-shit. I see you looking at it now.”
I ignored him, or pretended to. “If we’re not here for definition, Harry, then what the hell are we doing in the gym?”
“My name isn’t fucking Harry, and we’re here to prolong our lives.”
“And why would we wa
nt to do that?”
“Because it’s better than the alternative,” he said. He looked over at me, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose. He shook his head and grinned. “You’re a real asshole sometimes, you know.”
“I know.”
And he kept on looking at me. “Sitting here, in this light, you look exactly like him.”
“That’s because I am him, Clarke.”
We were alone in the small weight room. Just around the corner next to us was the entrance to the women’s locker room. Woohoo! Sometimes, when the door opened wide enough, you could catch a glimpse inside. And each time it did, Clarke and I automatically leaned a little to the side to get a better view. Just two harmless, although slightly perverted, old men. But, alas, it was the middle of the day and the Y was quiet, with only a handful of women coming and going.
“I know that,” he said, “but with all the plastic surgery it’s easy to forget....” his voice trailed off as he studied me some more. I hate being studied. “Upon first glance, you look nothing like him. You added a dimple to your chin and did something with your eyes and lips. Your disguise is perfect. You sound perfect. But sometimes, when you smile—”
“Let’s drop it,” I said, cutting in.
“—you look exactly fucking like him,” he said, finishing anyway.
A young gal stepped out of the women’s locker room and crossed between us, hair wet and dressed in a business suit. She left behind a vapor trail of fine shampoo, soap and womanliness. We both casually watched her go.
“We’re pigs, you know,” said Clarke.
“No, we’re old men. We’re allowed to look at the ladies. It’s a privileged we’ve earned. They know we’re harmless. Hell, I think they even like it.”
“Like it or not, I saw her glance your way as she passed.”
“Maybe she likes old men with chin dimples,” I said.
“Except you don’t really look like an old man. I mean you’re older, but, but you still look like a movie star.”
“I am a movie star.”
“You were a movie star.”
“Same thing.”
“Either way, you still kind of look like one. People think they know you from somewhere and it drives them fucking crazy.”