“I told you. I’m not involved with anything, and I’m not hanging out with some woman. I’m not traveling with any criminals. I used to, but those days are done.”
“You’ve been off the scene for a while, haven’t you?” she asked Jazz.
“You still go on tour?” the other agent asked.
After several more questions Jazz tried to shut them down.
“Guys, look. This ain’t a meet and greet here. You searched me, and you questioned me. Is there anything you need from me?”
Suddenly there was silence that lasted a few minutes. Then the doors shut, and the music started again.
“Have a great day, guys!” Jazz shouted from the front seat.
Still taking calm, slow breaths, Cheyenne realized Jazz had simply been telling the FBI duo a lie. She couldn’t believe they had bought the lie. Yeah, right, this was License, living in a hidden bunker and now carrying someone being investigated by the FBI around in a Hummer.
Why would the FBI want me anyway?
The big question: Why would they believe he’s some mega hip-hop star?
The even bigger question: When is he going to get me out of here? For now that was the only question that mattered.
Five minutes later, when the engine roared to life, the floor panel above her popped open. She jerked upward and tried to suck in as much air as she could, which started her coughing for a few seconds. Finally she was able to sit up.
“You okay?” Jazz asked.
“What was that all about?”
“They’re gone,” he said.
“FBI? Were they really FBI?”
Jazz sighed, offering her a hand and pulling her up out of the space that now looked smaller than she first thought.
“Man, I hate having to do that,” he said, looking out the tinted glass in the back of the Hummer.
“Do what?”
“I hate having to use my ‘get out of jail free’ card.”
Cheyenne wiped the sweat off the back of her neck and stretched her shoulders and arms, digesting his comment.
“What do you mean…Are you seriously saying that you’re License?”
“Do I look that old and out of shape?” he asked as he chuckled.
“I don’t really know what License looks like, but you sound just like him.”
He laughed. “Well, I should. I gave them my credentials. I carry my SYNAPSYS with me. My former life and soul, as I call it.”
She studied his face more and saw the resemblance.
“Come on. Don’t be a cliché like everybody else and get starstruck,” he told her, his disappointment sounding genuine. “All that is an elaborate illusion anyway.”
“It’s just— Now I really and truly don’t get what is happening here.”
“Let’s get back on the road, and I’ll fill in a few more of the blanks,” Jazz said.
“Wait. Hold on. You have to tell me the truth. You really are License? You had all those hit songs a few years back? Married and divorced Juniper Campbell?”
Jazz gave her a mocking, shocked look. “Wait…That marriage was never official. You’ve been listening to the paparazzi.” He broke out into laughter.
She sat there, confused and nervous. Things had gone from surreal to absurd.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “I’ll answer the question you’re dying to ask.”
“What’s that?”
“Jazz. Why I have that nickname. You probably don’t even know my actual name, do you?”
“I’m having a hard time keeping up with your personas,” Cheyenne said.
“Jamil C. Taylor. That’s my name. Jazz comes from my middle name, which my father gave me.”
“What’s the C stand for?” she asked.
“Coltrane.”
3.
As they drove through Texas on their way to Tulsa, the designated city Jazz had been given, he began to share his story with Cheyenne. She took it all in without saying too much or asking too many questions. She allowed him to paint a picture of the person he once was and the man he now happened to be. As she looked out at the vast, barren flatlands outside of Amarillo, the shapes and colors of his life’s self-portrait started to form, and she conflated it with everything else that was happening.
“I’m seventeen years old, and people start using the word wunderkind when talking about me. Ten years ago. Wow. I make an album. Nobody even bothers these days, right? I make physical copies and sell them on street corners. People have to figure out how to even play the CDs. You got it right by calling it a persona. That’s exactly what I created. I added a whole bunch of mystique to it. From my supposed background to the music I made.”
“Did you make up your bio? Living on the streets and all that? Didn’t you say you killed someone when you were thirteen?”
“Yeah. My father worked at Sillc Technologies.”
Cheyenne knew them well. “Before or after Acatour bought them?”
“He was one of the founders.”
“Money was never an issue in your house, right?”
“Exactly.” His earnest eyes stared at the highway in front of them. “Everything was manufactured and manipulated.”
“But that’s your voice, right? You were the one singing.”
“Sure. I made the music. I have that talent. But it became not just a commodity. It became a religion for some. And by the time I was twenty-one and living in Nashville, I was a shell of a man, living without a soul. All the doors to the world opened up to me, and I found myself in some really twisted places. Wicked places, with stuff happening that should’ve revolted me. The more exclusive the scene, the more evil it seemed to be.”
Cheyenne didn’t want to know the details of those scenes. She was more curious how he finally got out of them.
“I remember reading a review of some of my music in which they used words like moody and gloomy and grumpy referring to me. They asked where the carefree License had gone. I was so resentful and lashed out at the critic, proving the point he had made. The reality was, yeah, I was miserable. And that started my journey of trying to learn why I was the way I was.”
“You don’t seem miserable now,” Cheyenne said. Deluded, yes, and maybe a bit delirious, but certainly not miserable.
“I’m not. Life has a point and a purpose now, even though it doesn’t quite align with the purposes of the rest of my family. Or my former fans.” He chuckled. “There’s a lot more joy.”
“What changed?”
He shrugged, looking down the highway as if to choose his words. “If I say I found Jesus, I’m sure that’d sound pious or predictable, right?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Yeah, well, who cares how it sounds? It’s the truth. I was broadsided. Especially since— Well, that’s another long story. One involving a girl and love and tragedy and grief.”
“Did someone die?” Cheyenne asked.
Jazz laughed and slapped the steering wheel in amusement. “No. Come on. She dumped me at a McDonald’s. For real. The only thing that died was my heart. No, scratch that. It was my pride that died. But it was part of God’s grand plan. It opened a door. All that to say, I was living a manufactured dream that paid me and others an insane amount of money. I eventually discovered it wasn’t others’ plans that I should choose to follow, but God’s. So I got out of that scene. That world.”
She couldn’t remember ever hearing anything about this, though she hadn’t exactly paid attention to lifestyles of musicians or other famous people. Unless, of course, they were in the tech world.
“So you became a hermit?” she asked.
“Hardly. The powers that be wanted me back. I was part of the club, and if I wanted out, they were going to make sure I would pay. First they threatened me. Then they began to cut me off. Relationships, career, everyt
hing. Family members came to me, wanting to have me committed and doing everything possible to stop this so-called insanity. That lasted, well, until I finally dropped off the face of the planet. I’ve basically been in hiding now for a couple of years.”
This time she couldn’t resist. “But how, then, did you—”
“Find myself living in an underground bunker?” he asked with a laugh. “Working on global conspiracies?”
“Well, the first question about the bunker came to mind. Not sure about conspiracies.”
“My faith—it was real. And I knew I needed to tell others about the evil things that I’d seen, that I’d been a part of. I’d heard about people being ‘called,’ but this was different. My life suddenly had purpose and direction and meaning. To refer to it as a calling seems to dial it down too much. I was all in from the very beginning. And then I met someone I consider a modern-day prophet. I kid you not.”
“Who?”
For a moment she wondered if he was going to say her father’s name.
“A man calling himself different names like Reckoner and Acrobat. He came to me, knowing my change of heart, the change in my life. He told me about his big plan, which was already in place. A plan to expose the cabal controlling everyone and everything in our world. That’s when all the preparations really began.”
“The preparations for what?”
Jazz looked at her. “The beginning of the end.”
SEVEN
Darkness Sleeps
1.
She’s drowning inches away from him, but he can’t grab her and pull her back up to the surface. Her mouth moves, but she can’t speak, can’t utter his name, can’t make a sound. The seas close in all around them, but somehow he continues floating as he watches the waters swallow his wife.
Even knowing he’s dreaming, Will can’t breathe because of his terror. The nightmare feels so real. His clothes and skin feel soaked. He can even taste the salty ocean. The topsy-turvy of the endless tides have made him seasick even as he feels his body resting on his side, his head against two flat pillows, the soft blanket mostly covering him.
He takes her hand and tugs at her, but then she tugs back, waking him up even more. It’s not her hand that he’s holding but rather the cover, and Amy is yanking it back, even though she already has most of it wrapped around her.
In the darkness of their bedroom, Will opened his eyes, feeling as though his heart were exploding—like a strand of lit firecrackers. He breathed in and out slowly, trying to calm himself. It was early morning, around three. That was all his eyes would tell him without his glasses. He felt a brief moment of relief, but then he let the dark reality seep back into any spots where sunlight had leaked in.
He was starting over in his career from scratch. But he wasn’t twenty-two; he was forty-six. And he wasn’t shiny and pristine anymore. Like an item in a thrift store, he was scratched up and tarnished. Whatever price he had written on his tag, Will knew it would be very, very cheap.
2.
He hadn’t been able to fall back asleep until after Amy woke up, so by the time he got out of bed to help the girls get ready for school, he felt as beat-up as he had felt in his nightmare. Coffee hadn’t done anything for him, and he hadn’t done much good in getting the girls dressed and out the door with their mother on time. He had failed to get their teeth brushed and had lost his patience.
Life’s hard enough without having to worry about being a bad daddy.
The morning hadn’t been any more successful with the variety of things he had worked on. Or tried to work on. Like the call to connect with Grant Borley, a friend from his Northwestern University days who had become a head guy at a waste-disposal company. He wasn’t exactly sure what Grant’s title was, but it didn’t really matter since this wasn’t an interview. Grant had graciously agreed to talk to him. Will appreciated the gesture, especially since his last dozen contacts hadn’t resulted in anything.
“You still look like you’re thirty years old,” Grant said when he popped up in front of Will on the 3-D–image connect call.
Will sat at his desk staring at Grant behind his desk, not in the usual flat visual you got with regular calls but with the new technology that allowed the conversation to feel as if the two of you were really in front of each other. Not like the old hologram visuals that never appeared lifelike, but rather a very realistic and very expensive interface.
“Give me another couple of years,” Will said. “With these girls of mine, I’ll look like Lincoln after the war.”
Grant did look his age, with thinning hair the color of a dull nickel and a face a lot thicker than it used to be.
“How’s Amy doing?” he asked.
“Great,” Will said, then talked up her talents and her food technologist position at Nestle-Mars Co. in a way he never did with her personally. Grant had always had a crush on Amy. He would have found it interesting or ironic to know Will had once brought up his name during a heated and heavy argument, telling his wife she should have married someone like Grant instead. Grant was divorced with several kids himself, so he wasn’t exactly the model for a great husband.
“So you have to wear a suit every day?” Will asked him.
“Yeah. That whole business-casual thing that used to be so popular got yanked out from under us. You’re lucky you get to wear jeans.”
“Hey, I dressed up for you,” Will joked about his button-down shirt. “Listen, man, thanks for taking the time this morning.”
That was the lead-in to talking about his current job situation and any input his friend might have. Like perhaps telling him, “Hey, I have this sweet job that just opened, and I know you’re perfect for it even though you don’t have the first clue what the garbage business is like.” Before Will could even get started, a dreadful sound came from the hallway outside his upstairs office.
“Excuse me for a quick second,” Will said, then opened the door and saw the mangy mutt throwing up all over their cream carpet.
Will cursed and then stood there for a second, trying to figure out what to do. Let the dog keep messing up the carpet and go on with his call or…
“Grant…you’re not gonna believe this. Our dog is sick and is throwing up in the house. And it looks like— Well, it doesn’t look pretty.”
Grant only laughed. “You got a dog?”
“Yeah. Big mistake. Amy wasn’t happy.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
“Nope.”
The high-pitched retching continued.
“I gotta go,” Will said. “I’m so sorry.”
“No sweat. Just contact Raini, and she’ll get another call on the schedule. I’m heading to New York tomorrow for a few days, but once I’m back, we can talk.”
“Sure. That’d be great. Thanks.”
Grant disappeared as Will went back out to the hallway. The poor dog looked up at him as if to say sorry.
“You okay, buddy?” Will asked.
It looked as though the dog had found some of the girls’ crayons since his mess had a rainbow of colored chunks in it.
“That is disgusting,” Will said, picking up the mutt. “But you waited until Mommy was gone, so that’s cool.”
He took Flip downstairs to see if he needed to go outside. And to get a bucket and some cleaning materials.
Not the best way to start job hunting.
Several hours later he hadn’t made much progress. He had filled out half a dozen job applications on the network and then had followed up with a few more friends about talking with them. Meanwhile, he had avoided looking at the fifty unopened messages with bills waiting for him. Two debt collectors called and left messages. He had made the mistake of picking up a third call, thinking it might be Grant again.
“Is this William Stewart at 745 Parkway Drive?” a woman asked.
Nobody called hi
m William except people who wanted him to pay his bills.
“Yes,” Will said.
“This is an attempt to collect a debt, and all communication will be recorded for—,” she began to say.
It was a real human being. He knew that because they got a better response with actual humans calling. This woman was from Movement Apparel, asking him about the $21,413.58 he owed them for clothing he had bought twelve years ago when he worked at a corporation.
“Look, I plan to pay, but I have negative seven hundred bucks in my account,” Will told her. “So it’s gonna be a little while.”
He let the woman go through the regular routine, asking why and talking about getting him on a payment plan and gently threatening to turn him over to collection.
My credit is already shot, so that doesn’t exactly scare me.
After getting off the call with the woman, Will checked his bank account and realized they were almost two thousand dollars overdrawn.
Alone in his house, at his desk without any distractions or noise around him, Will knew it was a good time to pray. Not only was this a great opportunity, but it was a necessity. Yet he didn’t. He couldn’t.
Like talking to Amy, prayer felt impossible for him right now. Not because he didn’t think he’d be heard, but because he had no clue what he would say.
3.
More riots broke out in the streets of Chicago, with dozens of arrests after three confirmed deaths. The news couldn’t determine whether the shootings came from the protesters or from the police trying to break them up. As he picked at a sandwich for lunch, Will watched the melee of men and women yelling and fighting and throwing things and clashing with one another. It grew depressing because it was such a common occurrence. The country had never been more divided, and the division had never been more indecipherable. Will didn’t know what they were fighting about anymore. Some kind of rights, yet there were too many disagreements and debates in this piping-hot stew that boiled over in the center of the city.
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