My speeder was still parked outside, which was good. I crossed the parking lot and beeped my alarm off. Gripping the door handle, I pulled up. Suddenly, a white flash blinded me as something smashed into the back of my head.
UAKM — CHAPTER FOUR
“My God, Murphy. You look like hell.”
With some effort, I pushed myself up from a puddle of drool and slumped back into my chair, struggling to focus. The Colonel stood across the desk from me, slowly shaking his head. I hadn’t seen Colonel Roy O’Brien since he’d kicked me out of his detective agency. I’d been one of his young, star recruits, and he’d been my mentor. I owed a lot of what I knew to him. We’d parted on bad terms, though, and had avoided each other since.
Fifteen years later, he was standing in my office, unexpected and uninvited, and I was seeing three of him. The three Colonels had lost the remaining color in their hair and looked a little thicker through the waist. Their faces had acquired a few dozen additional wrinkles, but the jaws were still firm and thrust forward. The deepset blue eyes hadn’t lost any of their malicious glint, and the acid smiles were every bit as smug and infuriating as I’d remembered them.
I watched through horribly pulsating eyes and mirage-like waves of nausea as the three old men merged into one. “You caught me on a bad day. I forgot to take my
Flintstones.”
I was slurring, damn it. And probably talking too loud. The Colonel stepped around to where I was slumped precariously and sat down with one leg up on the desk. “Looks like I caught you in the middle of a bender.”
“This isn’t a bender. This is nighttime.” Without warning, my chair lurched to the left, forcing me to grab for my desk and severely disrupting my already impaired equilibrium. With no small amount of effort, I forced the room to stop spinning and stretched myself. The Colonel’s proximity wasn’t helping the unsettled feeling in my stomach. Maybe a drink would calm things down. Two bottles floated around my desk. I guessed right and unscrewed the cap. “Wanna drink? This stuff isn’t bad once you get used to it.”
The Colonel smiled and looked piously toward the floor, his hands folded serenely on his thigh. “No thanks, I haven’t had a drink in eight years.” He glanced back up at me, too quickly. “Yeah, one day I looked in the mirror and decided I needed to make a few lifestyle changes. Quit drinking, quit smoking. Now I’m looking forward to a nice long retirement on a tropical island with a tribe of beautiful young women.”
It wasn’t an attractive mental image, but everyone has a dream. He chortled and rubbed his hands together.
“Enough about me, Tex. Tell me about you. How’s everything going? Bad as it looks?”
I steadied myself as conversationally as possible. “Depends. What is today? Saturday?
Oh, Saturdays aren’t too bad. I don’t get really suicidal till about Thursday afternoon.”
I poured about seven fingers of bourbon in the general direction of my glass, then attempted to fix a pointed stare at the Colonel. “So, was there something you wanted?
Or did you just come by to sprinkle a little salt into the open wounds of my pathetic life?”
The Colonel chuckled insincerely. “Now why would I want to do a thing like that, Tex?
Just because you ratted on me, got me suspended, humiliated me in front of peers — you sold me out, you son-of-a-bitch!”
His eyes burning through me, the Colonel paused to run a hand through his white, still-thick hair. It was a mannerism he’d always used when he was agitated. He stood and walked away, a hand massaging the back of his neck. After a moment he turned back to face me and, slowly, the smug grin reappeared.
“Of course, that’s all in the past. I quit hating you for it weeks ago. Naturally, I got reinstated and everything worked out fine.”
“Glad to hear it.” I took an unnecessary slug from my glass and wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve. The Colonel smirked and returned to his perch on the corner of me desk.
“So what happened? I heard you were doing pretty well there for awhile. Solved a couple of decent cases. What’s your problem? Are you one of those people who can’t live with success?”
I leaned into my left armrest, away from the old man, and rubbed my eyes with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. “Oh, living with it isn’t the problem. I just can’t commit to anything long-term.”
The Colonel didn’t respond immediately. I looked up at him and saw the priggish look on his face. It made me angry, and the paint thinner coursing through my veins didn’t help. I leaned forward and stuck a finger at him. “You know what I was fifteen years ago? I was a stupid, idealistic kid! If you weren’t such a bastard, you could have tried to understand why I did what I did. I mean, now… now I understand that I was out of line, but it was just an innocent, stupid mistake. You didn’t have to cut me off!”
The Colonel leaned down and stuck a gnarled finger back into my face.
“Yes I did! Because apparently you never learned the first rule of a PI: never, ever betray your friends! Friendship goes beyond blood or genetics or politics. You find out who your friends are, then you hold onto ‘em! They’re a precious commodity to people like me and you.”
With one last piercing stare, the Colonel stood up. He crossed the room, then paused at the door. “You’re too good to end up like this, Tex. You’ve got no excuse.”
He opened the door. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
The door slammed shut, and I was no longer in my office. I was in a dark place, lying down, a dull ache lurking somewhere close by. I’d been dreaming about the Colonel — or was I remembering a conversation that had actually happened? I couldn’t be sure. My mind was out of focus, and an unpleasant odor was making it hard to concentrate. What was that smell? Vaguely familiar… nauseating… claustrophobic. In my mind’s eye, I saw my Great-Aunt Gertie, who’d been dead for thirty years, I began to hear soft footsteps and low voices.
Somewhere nearby, I heard a harsh female voice accusing someone of sleeping with her sister. A deep, testosterone-laced voice denied everything. I tried to open my eyes, but it hurt. From the back of my skull, a steady pounding gradually accelerated. My eyeballs felt as though they were swelling up. With a mighty effort, I opened my eyelids.
Everything was white. I tried to move my head, but it didn’t want to. The female voice was now accusing the man of sleeping with her grandmother. The voice was coming from above me and to the left. The stench in the air was almost unbearable. Suddenly, a woman’s face appeared in front of the white backdrop. The face was long and thin, not unattractive, but haggard. The eyes looked down at me compassionately, and the narrow lips gave way to two sets of uneven, gray teeth.
“Hello there.”
I tried to respond, but nothing came out. My mouth, I realized, was parched, and my lips felt dry and brittle.
“I’ll bet you’re thirsty, huh?”
The woman’s face disappeared, then reappeared behind a light blue plastic cup. As the water hit my tongue, my swallowing mechanism failed to respond, and I lurched into a coughing fit, which amplified the pounding in my head. After a few seconds, we tried again, and this time the water went down without incident. The woman vanished, and I began to wonder where I was — a POW camp, a lunatic asylum, or worse. Maybe some good Samaritan had carried me from my office and checked me into a detox center. I tried to get my bearings. The last thing I could remember was LaDonna. Or had it all been a rot gut-induced hallucination?