“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.
Sitting there in the squalid room of the Rat Motel, Max knew he needed help. He needed to talk to his closest friend.
When he dialed the number to the motorcycle shop, Dave’s wife, Karen, answered.
He almost hung up. Instead, he asked, “Is Dave there?”
“Max?”
“Yeah. Is Dave around?”
Her voice sounded tinny—distant. She avoided him when she could. “Dave’s gone all day. What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“We heard you left rehab.”
“Where’d you hear that? Is it all over the media?”
“No, there’s been nothing on TV. Jerry called Dave this morning, hoping he’d know where you were.”
Earlier this morning Max had turned on the television. He hadn’t seen anything either. They’d somehow managed to keep his escape from the rehab center quiet—Jerry was good at that kind of thing. Max knew Jerry would find a way to keep it quiet until he could woo him back.
But Jerry didn’t know Max was unwooable.
Karen was talking again. “Where are you?”
“Here and there.” He laughed, but it came out forced. The guy in the rowboat was back. He was right outside Max’s window.
“Max? Did you hear me? Once Dave gets off, he could come for you. All you have to do is tell us where you are.”
The guy in the rowboat looked the same as he had the last time Max had seen him—the same shower cap and granny glasses, tinted pink like the specs in that famous picture of Janis Joplin. He rowed past and waved.
What did they do to him?
“Max? Just tell us where. Dave will come and get you. We’re worried.”
Max didn’t buy the “we’re worried” part. Dave would be worried—no doubt about that—but Karen would just as soon never see Max again after what had happened in Nautilus Canyon.
The canyon, which the three of them had hiked in southern Utah last summer, wasn’t named for the nautilus shell without reason. The trail ran through an intricate labyrinth of red-rock chambers. Dave had gone off ahead—he was always an adventurous sort. Max and Karen followed at a slower pace, taking in the stunning play of light and shadow. Then Karen found an offshoot chamber that glowed like St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Christmas. She eased through a narrow passage in the rock to take a photograph—and her leg got stuck up to the thigh. Max worked assiduously to get her out; he used sunscreen on her leg to help it slide.
And Max being Max, it didn’t stop there.
Afterward, Max and Karen agreed. As long as Dave didn’t know what happened, things would be fine. What was done was done. Why go out of their way to hurt him?
And so Max and Karen stayed away from each other as much as possible, their dislike for each other growing along with the residual self-loathing.
Max felt bad about the whole thing, but the damage was done. It would only hurt Dave to know the truth. He and Dave had been best friends since high school. One mistake wasn’t going to sabotage that.
And Max knew without a doubt that Dave would help him now. He would come and get him and together they’d work something out. Dave was the ultimate wingman. He would keep his secret.
And Karen—she was good at keeping secrets too.