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by J. Carson Black

  Gordon said, “Our erstwhile friend has flown the coop. Taken a powder. Made tracks, so to speak.”

  Shaun stared impassively at him from behind her Dolce & Gabbana aviators. Gordon shivered despite the heat. She always made him nervous. “Apparently, he bribed one of the laundry crew to drive him out in his truck.”

  Shaun said nothing. There was no curiosity at all. He realized for the hundredth time that she was a beautiful woman but she left him cold.

  She had perfect features. A model’s cheekbones and a model’s posture. But Gordon, who was naturally attracted to pretty much every woman on earth, no matter how dumpy or plain, shuddered at the thought of fucking this one.

  It wasn’t that she came off a bit mannish. It wasn’t even that god-awful haircut, a man’s haircut, what you’d call a “fade,” clipped close to her skull.

  No. Sex, no matter if it was with one of the maids from housekeeping or an alcoholic socialite or the hottest movie star in LA, was special to him. Performance art in the sweetest possible way. But he knew, with this woman, it would just be…mating.

  Shaun finally spoke. “What did Max see?”

  Gordon didn’t know for sure if Max Conroy saw anything. And frankly, it was a side issue. The fact that he saw anything at all was only relevant to the fact that it might have spurred him to leave.

  “So what did he see?” Shaun repeated.

  “Nothing that important.” It was just another problem in a string of problems Gordon had to deal with. And problems invited scrutiny.

  “He might have seen a body,” Gordon said at last.

  Deedee Wertman, an inbred socialite from Montauk, had come out to Arizona to recover from a bad love affair. It was easy to see why she got dumped. She was fat, loud, and abrasive.

  She was also headstrong. She insisted on going into the sweat lodge.

  Thing was, Gordon had put a temporary moratorium on sweat lodges after the tragedy at another self-help place just up the road. The insurance costs were way too high. But Deedee Wertman kept at him, hectoring like a magpie. She wanted the sweat lodge experience. She’d paid for the sweat lodge experience. It said “sweat lodge experience” right in the brochure—was this a case of false advertising?

  He should have refunded her money. He should have told her to go to hell and never darken his doorway again. But Gordon had too much on his mind, and so he relented. He’d instructed Mike, his sweat lodge man (during the interim, Mike had been relegated to gardening and landscaping duties) to keep the temperature down and provide plenty of air vents. He insisted Deedee drink ten glasses of water before going inside, and if she was in there for more than fifteen minutes he would pull her out personally.

  Deedee Wertman was so excited at the prospect of the sweat lodge experience, she didn’t watch where she was going. She tripped over a tree root at the entrance to the lodge and speared herself on the finial of one of the two waist-high ceremonial lamps outside.

  Deedee Wertman bled to death before they could summon the paramedics.

  So they didn’t. Summon the paramedics.

  In a panic, Gordon directed her to be taken to the storage room and put on ice.

  This was a liability problem he just couldn’t face right now. It was his sixtieth birthday, there was a big party planned, and there was the Other Thing.

  The timing was impossible.

  Fortunately, Deedee Wertman had virtually no friends and, better yet, was estranged from her family. She was childless and hadn’t spoken to her only sister in twenty years. Deedee loved “adventures”—she globe-trotted around the world by herself, spending her inheritance down.

  It was amazing what Gordon could learn through hypnosis. From what she’d told him, he figured that Deedee had only a hundred thousand or so dollars left, and he’d planned for her to spend most of it here.

  The best-laid plans…

  “So you think Conroy saw her?” Shaun said.

  “Why else would he take off like that?”

  “Because he hated it here?”

  Gordon had to admit that was a possibility. Not everyone took to the Desert Oasis Way.

  “You said he wasn’t right in the head.”

  “He was royally fucked up, all right. I did a pretty good job of screwing with his psyche, not to toot my own horn. Kids, don’t try this at home.”

  Shaun ignored this. “Where is the dead woman now?”

  “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “So what do you want me to do? Kill him?”

  “No, I don’t want you to kill him!” He leaned toward her, trying to keep the pleading tone out of his voice. “You have to get him back here.”

  Chapter Seven

  FROM THE ALLEY behind the diner, Max made his way to the motel. The place seemed quiet, no cars in front of the units. Certainly no stretch limos. After ten minutes or so watching the Rat Motel from a shaded yard across the street, he realized that he couldn’t go back to his room. That was the first place they’d look.

  Instead, he walked a block over to the Subway/Short Hop Trucking Center. There, he bought stick deodorant, a $2.99 pair of pull-on shorts, sunglasses, a ball cap, and an extra large T-shirt with the words “Arizona: Rattlesnake Capital of the World” printed on the front. He took his purchases into the restroom and came out a new man.

  After dining on a sub sandwich while sitting in the back booth with a good view of the doors, he went looking for a place to think. He needed a dark place, a busy place, an anonymous place. It just so happened Paradox had a game arcade for the disaffected youths who were forced to grow up here. He found himself a dark corner to play a video game while he tried to think about what to do next.

  Jerry wasn’t giving up. All Jerry wanted was to get Max back to the gulag so he could stumble through another vampire epic. To Jerry, Max was an ATM machine.

  The thugs were over the top, but Jerry always did have a flair for the dramatic. Max felt a little embarrassed by the way he’d overreacted. It was pretty clear to him that Jerry’d sent guys to scare him into going back to LA, but it wasn’t going to work. What were they going to do to him, really? Break his kneecaps? He was a valuable commodity. No way they’d hurt him. The limo, the guys in suits—that was all for show, to intimidate him into doing what they wanted.

  For the first time in days, Max asked himself if starring in another vampire epic was such a bad thing.

  He was the luckiest man on earth. He was married to one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. In two weeks’ time, Talia would come winging her way back from Africa with their adopted baby girl, just in time for the premiere of the next installment of the V.A.M.Pyre Chronicles. Their reunion on Piers Morgan’s show would be Hulued and YouTubed and TMZed.

  Lots of red meat here. The rekindled romance with his former/current wife, the new theatrical release, the sweet orphan baby girl from Africa. And Max’s stint in rehab was the icing on the cake. It was all about redemption—the bad boy movie star brought to heel by true love.

  Fans—especially female fans—loved to see the bad boy tamed.

  Max suddenly asked himself, why was he being so stubborn? What was so bad about his life? He wasn’t an impoverished tenant farmer in Appalachia. He wasn’t a starving child in Bangladesh. He was a star, for Christ’s sake. He was lucky.

  Would it hurt to be just a little bit thankful for all his good fortune?

  He could go back to his old life, no problem. In fact, he could start now, by walking across the street and plunking down some of his hard-earned cash at the Branding Iron. Go from one cave to another, but that cave would be soothing and have that cool, slightly dank smell of beer. Budweiser signs, quiet darkness, middle of the day.

  He pictured an icy bottle of Rolling Rock. OK, they wouldn’t have Rolling Rock in a backwater like this. Heinie, maybe. They’d have Heineken, wouldn’t they? He could see the green bottle, the amber waves of grain, the droplets of sweat cold and crisp in his hand. He pictured pouring it into a bar glass, li
fting it to his lips—

  Suddenly, something punctured his insides. At the same moment, a tide of nausea rose in his throat. The something hard and sharp seemed to spin out of control like a circular saw, cutting through his body, the pain excruciating. For a moment, Max remained upright, then fell to his knees.

  Had he been stabbed? Light and dark specks danced before his eyes. He couldn’t really tell what was going on. Everything happened in slow motion.

  No one came to help him. The kids either ignored him completely or came to stand over him, mouths open.

  The pain began to subside. He felt himself all over—no blood, no wounds.

  The kids stared at him as if he were an animal in a zoo.

  He managed to get to his feet. Managed to walk out the door into the blinding sunlight. Sweat encased him like a second skin. His new shirt was wringing wet. He was lightheaded and sour-mouthed, but the pain in his gut was gone. His head ached. He looked down and saw a spatter of drool on his Arizona tee.

  They’d told him he would never, ever, drink or use again. No alcohol, no more oxy. He’d scoffed at the notion. How could they be so sure? As time had gone on at the Desert Oasis Healing Center, Max had become certain of one thing: the day he got out, he would head straight for the nearest bar he could find.

  But when the time came, he didn’t. In fact, it wasn’t until just this moment that he’d even contemplated taking a drink.

  Whatever they did at the Desert Oasis Healing Center, it wasn’t aversion therapy. He knew people who had been through aversion therapy—they made you drink alcohol along with a concoction that would make you sick. The Desert Oasis Healing Center was nothing like other rehab centers he’d been to, and if Max had to put into words what they did or how they did it, he would have been at a loss. The program had seemed, well…half-assed. As if it was thought up on the spur of the moment.

  They did New Age-type stuff, like leaving him floating in a sensory deprivation tank for hours at a time. Or locking him in a room with no way to see, hear, or feel anything, gloves like oven mitts over his hands. (He was allowed to use the facilities, allowed to eat, even allowed to leave the room, but he never did.) The only thing all those hours and days of “restricted environmental stimulation therapy” did for him was give him a major case of lassitude.

  Yet something about the rehab center must have worked. Now he’d been treated to a definitive demonstration why going out for a beer wasn’t such a great idea. He felt weak, as if he’d run twenty miles. He sat on the edge of the boardwalk and closed his eyes, waiting for the dizziness to clear.

  “Hey,” someone said near his ear. “You OK?”

  Max looked back and saw the motel clerk who’d checked him in last night, standing on the boardwalk behind him, holding a bag of candy from The Apothecary Candy Store next door.

  “I’m fine,” Max said.

  “Don’t look like it to me.” The guy settled on the bench outside the candy store and dug into the sack. “Horehound. Want some? Might settle your stomach.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Hey, I know you.”

  Max closed his eyes. Wait for it…

  “You’re Max Conroy. That wasn’t the name you registered with, but you can’t fool me.” Guy just kept chatting merrily away, about the horehound candy—get it? Horehound, funny, huh?—and about how this was a one-horse town where even the horse left, and all the time the sun beat down on Max’s head and he knew he was going into a blood sugar nosedive…

  “Some guys were asking for you. I told them you checked out. Although technically, you didn’t—check out, I mean. You owe me for the long distance call.”

  Just another hole in the old memory. Would he always be like this? “How much?”

  “A dollar twenty-eight. You weren’t on long.”

  Max reached into his jeans pocket. He heard the motel clerk shift on the bench, and when he looked back, the guy was scrutinizing him. “I was wondering all day why you looked familiar. When those guys came by, that clinched it. Max Conroy, that’s who you are.”

  Max’s stomach ached, and he just wanted to get out of here. “If I was Max Conroy, would I be sitting here on this plank in Paradox, Arizona, getting ready to pay a one-dollar phone bill?”

  The guy considered. “Maybe. You shooting a film here? Is that what you’re doing? Scouting? Don’t want anybody to know on account of people getting in your face asking for autographs? Hey, are you going to film one of the V.A.M.Pyres here? My niece, she’s thirteen—man oh man, she’s in love with you, brother.”

  “I’m not Max Conroy!”

  “The guys looking for you thought you were.”

  “What? What did they say?”

  “Don’t bite my head off. I report, you decide, is all. They said they were looking for Max Conroy, the actor. I said you checked out and were long gone.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I wanted to mess with them, I guess. But I thought you’d be nicer.”

  Max pushed his palm against his forehead. “Thanks,” he said. “Did you see them go?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Saw ’em get on the on-ramp headed north.”

  “Good.”

  The motel clerk, who introduced himself as Luther James (“Jesse James was my great-great-great-great-great-uncle”) said, “If you want to stay here for a while, you know, incognito, I can fix you up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, first, you gotta change your look. See, you’re too obvious. You look like Max Conroy after a really bad night.”

  Max was floating now, his blood sugar in the basement, everything taking on a surreal tinge. “Could you get me some juice?”

  “What kind? Orange juice? Apple?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Luther returned with a bottle of apple juice from the drugstore, and Max drank it down. The blurred edges around his vision began to firm up. He still didn’t feel like moving, though.

  Luther sat on the bench again. “See, the best way to change your look is to shave your head. Then people will see you completely different. They’ll be looking at your head, not your face.”

  Max stood up. “Thanks for your help, but I’ve got everything under control.”

  “Sure you do.” Luther laughed. “Tell you what. You want to get a feel for this town, make your character accurate, what you ought to do is work for a living.”

  “I do work for a living.”

  “That’s not really working, now, is it? Way I hear it, it’s mostly waiting around. Then you say a couple of lines, and you wait around some more. That’s not real man’s work.”

  Max worked plenty—two hours in the gym six days a week, the time spent memorizing lines and researching his character, the long days and nights on the set. Not to mention his other job—promoting his films, making personal appearances and cameos. You had to work full time just to keep your name and face out there, or people would forget. “What I do is work.”

  Luther waved at him. “Oh, sure, I didn’t mean to insult you or nothing.”

  “Seriously. It’s hard work.”

  “Yeah, I get you. All’s I’m saying is you seem to be looking for more. Am I right?”

  He was right, but Max still felt insulted.

  “You ever work with your hands? I need someone to finish putting up the rain gutters on my house. It’s monsoon season and it’s my number-one priority. But I have this bad back.” He leaned even farther forward and lowered his voice. “Tell you what. I’ll let you stay there if you’ll help me out. How about that?”

  Max realized this was what he had been aiming for. All he’d wanted was to escape the pressure, escape the fishbowl, and go back to his life before he became a movie star.

  For a moment there, he’d lost his way. For a moment, he’d gone back to being what he’d been before—an addict. He’d faltered. Max knew if he went back to LA, he would go right back to the drugs, the alcohol, just to survive. This was the last, best
chance he’d ever have to transform himself.

  “OK.”

  “Ha ha,” Luther said, patting Max on the back. “I knew it! Tell you what. Let’s go to my place, OK? Let’s get you all taken care of, get you started on those gutters. Then we’ll see what’s what.”

  As they walked, Max became aware of a car tracking them. He thought about walking into the nearest store when Luther said under his breath, “Should’ve known.”

  A seventies-era Cadillac in mint condition pulled up beside them. A large man bounced out and opened his arms wide. “Luther, my boy! How are you faring?”

  Luther stayed where he was and said, “I’m good, Unc.”

  “Motel receipts?”

  “Up.”

  “Excellent! Give me a hug, boy, and introduce me to your friend.”

  Luther introduced his uncle as Sam P. Noon.

  “Call me Sam P. That’s what everyone calls me, son,” he said.

  Max looked from one to the other. Luther had long stringy hair. His uncle had long stringy hair. Luther was shaped like a pear. His uncle was shaped like a pear. Sam P. looked like one of those inflatable clowns you’d hit and they’d spring back at you.

  Sam P. was looking at Max. His eyes narrowed. Then he smiled. “Luther, my boy, we’ve got to talk. Why don’t you tell your handsome friend here you’ll meet up later?”

  Luther glanced at Max. “Go ahead over to the motel. I’ll meet you there soon as I can.”

  MAX APPROACHED THE Rat Motel cautiously, from the alley, and melted into the shade of the same tree he’d hidden under last time.

  Good thing he did. The limo was back—parked outside the motel office, engine running, probably to keep the air conditioner on. A few moments later, his two former captors marched outside, clearly in a foul mood.

  Seeing them walk out angry made Max feel better. He remained in shadow and watched as the limo turned the corner and accelerated away.

  He was about to walk over when the sound of an engine starting up caught his attention.