Free Icon by J. Carson Black

Morocco. In the healing center’s restaurant, Casablanca ’s “As Time Goes By” was piped in from hidden speakers. The waiters wore fezzes, and cabana boys waved palm fans over the swim-up bar. Unfortunately, the bar didn’t serve alcohol.
    Great food, beautiful people, clean and courteous attendants. The Desert Oasis offered the usual rehab fare—the one-on-one counseling, the support group meetings, and seminars. The seminars lasted for hours. That was the worst, because they wouldn’t let anyone leave their seats to pee. They had to wait for certain breaks, and the bathrooms had only four urinals and a lot of desperate people—he’d seen one man who hadn’t made it. Ashamed and angry, the man sat down on the sidewalk and cried.
    But not Max. He held it. He even joked about it. Now, he said, he knew how women felt at concerts.
    The seminars were ongoing. Not rigorous, pretty much standard, except for the denied bathroom privileges.
    Still.
    Max had been unaffected by his previous two stints in rehab, but this one…
    Something had happened to him. It was there beneath his conscious mind, like an underground stream. Moments of terror. His vision obscured by dots of light, especially when he awoke in the mornings. He suffered from vivid hallucinations. Sometimes the man in the rowboat, sometimes snarling wolves intent on ripping him to pieces, sometimes an evil knight on a big horse, swinging a mace. And sometimes just blackness and a feeling of doom. Fortunately, the hallucinations were fading. The more he walked the earth in the real world, the more they receded. But he sensed they were just around some corner of his mind, waiting to jump out at him.
    It occurred to him now, imprisoned in this underground chamber, that whatever it was had been implanted in him. Into his brain. Hypnosis, maybe. The confusion, the holes in his memory, the unreasoning fear, the desire to climb to the highest place he could find and throw himself to his death.
    And Max himself had walked right into this. He could have flown back to LA. He could have confronted Jerry. He could have divorced Talia and called off the adoption. It had all been keeping up with the Joneses, anyway, a photo op for Talia. The baby was probably better off in Africa.
    If he’d done any of these things, the world wouldn’t have come to an end. But instead, he’d hitchhiked down the freeway and buried his wallet somewhere in the desert.
    He’d done stupid things, all to avoid his own pain. An impossible task, since whatever happened to him remained unfathomable.
    At least now, he had something physical to fight. He had an opponent to outwit.
    For the first time in years, Max got mad.
    Really, really mad.

Chapter Twelve
    A COUPLE OF hours later, the door to the bomb shelter opened and Luther climbed down, his movements ponderous and timid.
    Max sat up on his cot and watched him.
    Once on solid ground, Luther bounded toward him. “How’s it goin’, bro?”
    “I’m OK.”
    “Excellent! I see you’ve partaken of the repast we left you.” Luther pulled up one of the folding chairs and sat in front of Max, their knees almost touching. “Thought you’d want to know how all this is going down.”
    “I’m all ears.”
    “We’re going to need your wife’s phone number.”
    Max didn’t react.
    “And we’re going to want you to talk to her. If you could tell her we have you at an undisclosed location, and all we want is two million dollars, and we’ll return you safe and sound—that would be marvelous. You think you can manage that?”
    “No.”
    “No? Wrong answer. What if I put a gun to your head? How’d you feel about that ?”
    Max shrugged.
    “Because we mean business. This is not a game. You are in a bomb shelter. We could seal it up and nobody’d ever be the wiser. You’d die alone. I hear starvation is a terrible way to die. No one would ever know where you went. Depend on that! So if you want to go back to your movie star life, your