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by J. Carson Black

  WHEN THE WOMAN spotted the turnoff for Joshua Tree National Park, she exited the freeway and took the road under the overpass.

  “Why are we stopping here?” asked the boy.

  “I think you should see this.”

  “See what? It’s just a bunch of rocks and cactus.”

  The woman said nothing, just followed the road to the Cottonwood Visitor Center, and parked out front.

  “We haven’t made it very far,” the boy said as they got out of the car.

  “We’re in no hurry.”

  “Jesus, it’s hot out here!”

  “Mouth,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, yeah. OK.” He started up the walkway to the visitor center, turned back. “You coming?”

  She motioned to her mobile phone, which was vibrating. “In a minute.”

  The number on the readout belonged to Gordon White Eagle. When she answered he said, “Dammit! I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday afternoon!”

  “What time in the afternoon?”

  “How should I know?” He paused. “Around five o’clock, six at the latest.”

  “I don’t answer after five. You didn’t leave a message, did you, Gordon?”

  Gordon ignored this. “Where are you now?”

  “Joshua Tree National Park. I think we’re going to camp here.”

  “No you’re not. There’s been a change of plans.” Gordon paused. The woman had never known Gordon to pause.

  There was no ambiguity to Gordon. He was certain of things. In fact, he was a know-it-all. She’d seen him intimidate people—he was big, with a shiny bald head like Mr. Clean. She knew it was all calculated to get the upper hand, but no one got the upper hand with her. Right now, surprisingly, she heard indecision in his voice like play in a steering wheel. “Our, er…resident went out on his own yesterday and hasn’t come back. I’ve had a couple of my men looking for him since early yesterday evening. I need you here.”

  The woman looked at the new black pavement and the desert beyond. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get here ASAP! This isn’t a scenic trip. How long will it take you to get here?”

  Shaun estimated: Yucca Valley to Blythe, Blythe to Quartzite, Quartzite to Phoenix. Phoenix up I-17 to Cottonwood, then to Desert Oasis. “Late.”

  “Late? What does that mean?”

  “Night.”

  “I’ll send a jet. Where’s the nearest airport? Indio, right?”

  After the arrangements were made, Shaun closed the phone and walked to the visitor center. The road trip, the national parks and scenic vistas and campgrounds, would have to wait. It was something kids should have in their childhood. Her best friend from elementary school, Lisa Ann Davenport, had traveled all over the country with her parents every summer, and it had set her up for life. Lisa Ann was married to a handsome, successful businessman. She ran her own business, and they had two children, a boy and a girl. No doubt, she and her husband took them to national parks, where they made s’mores and told ghost stories around the campfire. Shaun wanted those kinds of experiences for Jimmy.

  He was far too obsessed with killing.

  She found him pawing through the Joshua Tree hats. There were plenty of souvenirs at the Cottonwood Visitor Center, and she let him pick out half a dozen. Paid for them in cash without complaint.

  They took a short loop drive, photographed a couple of Joshua trees, then drove back to Indio to wait for Gordon’s jet.

  AFTER THE DEPUTY and the detective left him alone at the table, the waitress kept looking at him. He knew she was wondering where she’d seen him before.

  Time to get out of here. He shifted in his seat to reach for his wallet.

  It wasn’t there.

  From her place by the lunch counter, the waitress watched him like a hawk watches a weasel.

  Where was his wallet?

  She started in his direction.

  He looked at the money Pat had thrown on the table. Not enough to cover the bill. Cheap son of a bitch.

  The waitress was standing over him.

  He tried the other back pocket of his jeans. Her voice assaulted his ears, shutting out all thought. Her lips were moving but he couldn’t hear anything but the band-saw shriek.

  He squinted up at her, tried to read her lips.

  “Don’t worry about that. Deputy has it covered.”

  She was looking at him quizzically, as if wondering why Tess would bring a stinking bum into her place.

  “Thanks.”

  “Thank her.”

  He kept his eyes down. In his years of going out in public, Max had noticed people didn’t really see you if you looked like a kicked dog. But he had to ask. “What was that about the train crash? What the deputy was talking about?”

  “Oh, that.” She waved a hand. “She’s got some weird kind of memory. Perfect recall or something like that—she remembers every little thing.” She added, “Since you’re all paid up, you can go now.”

  And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

  He went outside and turned into the alley beside the diner. He was only exposed on the main street for a few seconds, but his heart pounded so hard he thought it would explode. He stopped in the shade of the diner. The building opposite him was windowless; a few cars were parked nose-in. Nothing stirred. The town drowsed in the heat and the flies.

  No limo.

  No wallet either. He shoved his hand into in his jeans pocket, thinking he might at least have some change. Instead, his fingers closed around a tight wad of bills. Somewhere along the line—he couldn’t remember exactly when—he’d stuffed cash in both pockets, plenty of it. Max had no idea when that had happened; his space-time continuum was completely disrupted.

  Then he remembered. When the deputy processed him into the jail, she’d taken cash from his pockets. He’d signed for it with the name of one of his lesser-known characters. Here in the alley, he pictured the cash falling onto the desk, loose change and a wad of crinkled bills. The deputy had him count it.

  There were holes in his memory. Max had become accustomed to that in the last week or so.

  But what had happened to his wallet?

  Relax. Don’t think about it and it will come to you.

  MAX REMEMBERED MOST of the day before—his escape from the Desert Oasis Healing Center in the laundry truck, the guy letting him out on I-17, thumbing rides. Just wanting to get away from the paparazzi and be a nobody for a while. He remembered taking shelter from the thunderstorm inside a Texaco mini-mart in some town along the freeway. He’d just come from a thrift store down the street, having tried to hire on there. But the owner recognized him and called in his buddies to look at him like he was an animal in a zoo. The owner said, “Job? You serious? What is this? Is this a reality show? Like Candid Camera?”

  “Huh,” said the owner’s buddy.

  The thrift store owner looked past Max in the direction of the front doors. “Where’s the camera?”

  “There is no camera. I want to work here.”

  “You can’t work here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” The guy stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  The idea he could get work had seemed reasonable at the time. From the moment he’d left the Desert Oasis Healing Center, Max had seen his escape as a second chance. He was sober for the first time in years. He wanted to make a clean break. Leave his old life behind and be a normal guy like his father was. Your average Joe. Even when he drifted in and out of awareness, that goal remained constant—his north star. Max wasn’t asking for much, just a regular job. Something he could do with his hands, maybe. No autograph seekers, no cameras, no paparazzi. No public that saw him through the prism of its own needs, wants, or desires.

  But he couldn’t escape who he was. People recognized him. They gawked. They yelled his name. Took photos of him with their phones.

  The funny thing? He used to pretend he was a regular citizen all the time in LA—and half
the time he got away with it. But now, when Max really wanted to be anonymous, it didn’t work quite so well. Maybe it was because it meant so much to him. Maybe he was trying too hard.

  So it had been raining, really coming down, and he’d gone from the thrift store to the Texaco mini-mart next door, thinking he might try there. Hard rain pelted the roof and steam rose from the pavement. He was sopping wet and shivering. He’d wait out the storm by pretending to look for items aisle by aisle.

  Suddenly his ringtone blasted, howling, “Now you’re messing with a son of a bitch!” from “Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth.

  He fumbled in his pocket, and the phone skated out of his wet hand and hit the floor. The kid behind the counter stared at him, his face pale under the fluorescents. Max picked up the phone and turned away, lowering his voice. “Hello?”

  “Max. Ah, glad I found you.”

  Jerry.

  Max said nothing. He felt like the cottontails he used to shoot at when he was a kid. How they’d hunker down in plain sight and hope you didn’t see them. Their ears lit up like stained glass windows—bright pink.

  “Max? You there?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I have some stuff for you to sign,” Max’s business manager said. “That last little escapade of yours is costing us. Audemars Piguet is making noises about backing out of the endorsement deal, but I promised him there wouldn’t be a repeat. There’s a new clause I’m faxing over, no biggie.”

  Max said nothing.

  Jerry said, “Max, I can see why you’re angry.” Max didn’t reply. “I know you hate the place, and I’m sorry about that.” Max said nothing. “But you’re going to thank me later. Once this is all over, we’ll have a big laugh about it…are you listening? You didn’t lose your voice, did you? If so, we need to get hold of the vocal coach. Shooting starts in three weeks—”

  “I won’t be there in three weeks.”

  “What? Are you crazy? What are you saying? You have a contract!”

  It went on like that for a while. First shock, then anger, then denial—skipping right over grief. Max listened, wondering why he didn’t just cut Jerry off. Shut the phone and that would be the end of it. But he couldn’t. He clamped the cell hard against his ear, every muscle tense. Maybe listening to Jerry Gold was the beginning of catharsis. Maybe he needed to remind himself what was in the rearview mirror, and why he was leaving it all behind.

  Jerry was talking faster now. “You’re due on the set August first! You can’t just turn your back on this and act like it’s some kind of stupid game. This is real life, Jacko, and you’d better get that through your head right now. People are depending on you. You know how much this is costing already? So stop with the prima donna bullshit and get back with the program!”

  A calmness came over him. His fingers loosened. “I quit,” he said.

  Silence. Then, “You quit? You quit?” A tirade followed. Max let the phone drop through his hands to the floor, heard the case crack.

  Serenity bloomed inside him. He turned to look at the attendant, who was staring at him, eyes wide.

  “Dude, you broke your phone!”

  The ringtone once again filled the small mini-mart: “Now you’re messin’ with a—” beat, beat, “Son of a bitch, you’re messin’ with a—”

  Max picked the phone up off the floor. Noticed the dried swirls from a mop—place was dirty as hell.

  When Max answered, he heard “You are in big fucking trouble! You—”

  He ended the call. It was difficult because the edges didn’t true up. The smile inside him was warm and welcoming, like a sunrise.

  The phone sounded again. Max wondered if his darling wife was with Jerry right now. Wondered if she was hearing all this. If so, he hoped she was worried.

  Lightning strobed the interior of the mini-mart. Thunder crashed.

  The phone stayed quiet in his hand.

  “Dude, I mean, seriously…” The kid trailed off. “Hey, man, I seen you before?”

  Outside, headlights flared up behind the needles of rain. Water funneled off the windshield of a dark car with a menacing grille. Windshield wipers slashed.

  The kid behind the counter said, “You’re…Hey, man, I know you…”

  Max stepped toward the door and peered outside. He suddenly became aware how completely soaked he was. When he moved, his jeans rasped together like sandpaper.

  No one got out of the car in front. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth, sluicing off the buckets of water coming out of the sky. Max couldn’t see past the wipers, past the water brimming on the windshield, but he could almost feel whoever it was peering out at him, peering into the brightly lit store.

  The glare of the overhead lights was getting to him. He felt exposed in here.

  There were times Max was hyperalert. Times when he could tell something was wrong—a sixth sense. He’d always had it. It felt, right now, like someone had taken a comb and run it over the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He felt the tingle in his belly, a low humming. A warning.

  Did Jerry know where he was? Had they sent someone after him? Pinpointed his position by GPS through his phone?

  “Dude,” he said to the kid behind the counter. “You got a back way out of here?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He nodded at a door near the beer case. “Why?”

  There wasn’t much time. Max opened the door to the rear of the store, looked up the hall to the exit, and saw the open doorway to the back room.

  He returned to the front of the store just as a car door slammed outside. “Hey, man,” he said. “You got a good lock on the door to the back room?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  Outside, feet pelted on wet pavement. “Take my advice and go lock yourself in there now.”

  “What’re you—?”

  Max didn’t hear what else the kid said. He was out the back door and gone.

  Chapter Four

  TURNED OUT NO one had been coming for him—at least not at the mini-mart. But Max’s instincts had been right. There had been trouble brewing, he’d just mistaken the nature of that trouble.

  The mini-mart was the target of a simple robbery. The robber left with the contents of the cash register and a case of beer. The kid was shaken, but unhurt. The security camera tape that they played on the news showed a guy wearing a dark hoodie. You couldn’t see his face.

  Max watched the nightly news while sitting on the swaybacked bed of the Riata Motel farther south in Paradox.

  The bed smelled of feet.

  Fortunately, the kid at the mini-mart didn’t mention that he had, moments before, pointed the back way out to the famous actor, Max Conroy.

  Too shaken from the experience, probably.

  Max felt he’d dodged a bullet. He’d been the kid on the trestle who managed to jump off before the train hit him. The old sixth sense had worked out…

  Except the guy in the hoodie hadn’t been coming for him. He was just some asshole holding up a mini-mart.

  But someone was coming. He could feel it.

  Max had put eighty miles between himself and the Texaco mini-mart. By then, the rain had stopped, and he’d been bone tired when the trucker had dropped him off in Paradox. He’d staggered as far as the Riata and peeled off some cash for one night’s stay.

  Couldn’t use a credit card even if he wanted to. He’d buried his wallet last night, in a fit of paranoia after the incident at the Texaco—wrapped it in a plastic produce bag and dropped it into the hole he’d dug by a fence somewhere in the desert. His credit cards, his Triple A card, his SAG card. Everything. A clean sweep.

  He’d ditched the cell phone too.

  Sitting on the lumpy bed in the Riata Motel, Max thought, why the hell did I do that?

  But he knew. In the throes of some paranoid delusion, he really had tried to burn his bridges.

  After a long shower, Max opened the door and leaned in the doorway of Room 3 of the Riata Motel. The place was old enough to
have a neon sign, buzzing and sizzling a weak yellow: the R, the A, the T. Rat. Like someone did it on purpose as a joke.

  Standing out there in the freshness after the rain, the sweet but slightly acrid smell of wet creosote in his nostrils, he tried to remember where exactly he’d buried his wallet. Just in case he needed to go back and find it again.

  Unfortunately, he drew a blank.

  The burying tactic was nothing new for him. He’d have his doctors write prescriptions for oxy and other drugs, and stockpile them. Sometimes, when he hated what he was doing, he’d bury them in his yard and try to forget where they were. He did that with liquor too. Max had always hoped that if he was shit-faced, or drugged out of his mind, he wouldn’t remember where he’d hidden them.

  Many times, it worked. There were caches of drugs and liquor all over his backyard he didn’t know about—stuff he’d forgotten. Salted throughout his yard like land mines.

  THE NEXT MORNING Max awoke from a terrible dream. In the dream, he was standing on the ledge of the Jumeirah Essex House in New York, looking down twenty-five stories at the street. And he was naked.

  Somebody down below—looked like an ant next to a Tonka truck—yelled into a bullhorn, but he couldn’t hear what the guy said.

  He sat up in bed in the Rat Motel. The sun filtered in through the cheesy orange curtains. The nightmare reminded him of something he’d seen on a TV show—he thought it was Dateline NBC. An in-depth look at the ill effects of some intensive self-help seminars. A rash of people had developed a sort of “mental break,” many of them ending up shivering naked on a ledge somewhere, more than a few leaping to their deaths.

  The story, which he could barely remember, must have influenced his dreams. But he wondered. If he’d stayed at the Healing Center, would he have ended up like that?

  The worst, though, were the hallucinations: gigantic birds of prey coming at him from out of the sky, or rats running up his legs. There were harmless visions, as well—a man rowing a boat a couple of feet off the ground.

  Funny: for all the drugs and alcohol he’d consumed over the years, he’d never had a hallucination before his time at the Desert Oasis Healing Center.