Free The Loch by Steve Alten

Will Rogers said, there are two theories to arguing with a woman, and neither of 'em works. Your mom's just worried about you. Let me work on her a while."
     
    * * *
     
    But heart-stopping screams in the middle of the night were not exactly what my mother or Charlie had in mind when they invited me to stay with them. After the third straight night of listening to my mother threaten to send me to a sanitarium, I decided it would be best if I checked into a motel.
    The next several months were a blur. I applied to every school with a marine sciences department, but the on-going war in Iraq, combined with the federal government's massive tax cuts had led to deficits that were strapping the states and forcing universities to cut positions and programs. While I waited to hear something, I bounced around from job to job, painting houses, trimming landscapes, basically allowing my mind to turn to mush. The antidepressants made me nauseous, but had little effect on my night terrors. I soon found something that did: alcohol.
    Being inebriated kept me from entering the deepest stages of sleep, the stages where the night terrors lay in wait. Given the choice between preserving my sanity and my liver, I chose my sanity.
    I'd never been much of a drinker in college, but my tolerance rose quickly with my "cure," and it wasn't long before occasional use became abuse. Days were devoted to sleeping off hangovers, my nights reserved for bingeing on expensive drinks and cheap women, both of which I found in abundance in South Beach, my new favorite haunt.
    Hey, everyone from my ex-fiancée to my shrink had told me to loosen up. As far as I was concerned, I was just following their advice. And it didn't get any looser than South Beach after dark.
    I'd hit the clubs by ten and party past dawn. Sometimes I'd make it back to my motel room, other times waking up in strange places I had no recollection of entering. I hung out with people whose names I couldn't remember, and had sex with women who couldn't care less.
    And neither could I.
    Having been goal-oriented and disciplined for as long as I could remember, I quickly became a rudderless, sinking ship. I stopped working out. I quit my job and lived off my savings, which vanished as quickly as the women in my life. No longer interested in the future, I was merely biding my time in the present.
    I became a social vampire, a drunk haunted by my failures. I became my father.
     
    * * *
     
    It was a Thursday afternoon in May, five months after the Sargasso incident, when destiny came calling again. I was lying in a pile of wet towels on the bathroom floor of a motel efficiency when my brain registered a pounding on the door.
    Sobriety greeted me with migrainelike symptoms. Pulling myself up by the porcelain, I spewed the prior night's toxins into the toilet bowl (is there a worse stench than Jack Daniel's over tacos?), then crawled toward the door.
    The pounding awakened my escort from the previous night, a buxom rinsed-out blonde whose name never registered. Stumbling out of bed, totally naked, she unchained the door as the two of us confronted the stranger.
    "Zachary Wallace? My name is Max Rael. How'd you do?"
    He was a tall man in his late twenties, English, with strawberry blond hair, short and spiked, and his green eyes were highlighted by black eyeliner. Though temperatures were in the mid-eighties, he wore a heavy black trench coat and slacks, giving him a Gothic look.
    In any other city he'd have been gawked at, but this was South Beach.
    "What do you want? I'm paid up for the week."
    "No worries, brar, I'm not with the hotel. Actually, I work for your father." He pushed past the blonde, then turned up his nose. "This room stinks of gunge. Pay off the bird and get dressed, we need to talk."
     
    * * *
     
    An hour later, I found myself facing the Englishman on a park bench, hiding behind dark sunglasses.
    "If you don't mind me saying so, you look like you've come out on the wrong side of a