Free Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) by Joel Canfield

destination which was anywhere I was not.
    “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I went on, kind of wanting her to like me again. I knew that what she was doing now had nothing to do with me. I just wanted the same thing to be true for the first part of the meal. I wanted her to not just have been greasing the wheels for the pay-off when she acted like I had a shot with her.
    “You didn’t disappoint me. Life did.”
    Oh, boy. That’s where we were.
    We sat quietly for a minute or two, until the waiter returned with her AmEx card and the receipt for the meal. She scribbled on a generous tip and signed it. Then she got up and walked out, leaving me the poorest and most alone guy in the room.
    That wouldn’t have been the case if Pancho was still making tacos.
    The poorest part, anyway.
     
     

Gas Leak
     
     
    It was Tuesday morning.
    I avoided the Jack – and the Jules – when I got back to the hotel the night before, and slept moderately well probably because I ducked both J’s.
    Although I did keep thinking about Angela during the night. I was a man, so of course I pictured her naked a few times, but mostly I thought about what she was hiding. She seemed to erupt like an overheated volcano every time I mentioned her brother - she wouldn’t divulge even the most basic piece of information about him. She just wanted me gone and the whole thing forgotten. Not only that, she wanted it too badly, which meant there was a huge fucking skeleton in some closet somewhere whose bones kept rattling in her ear to the point where it hurt.
    Anyway, I was done with the dead ends around here. It was time to hit the road.
    And suddenly, I felt all balanced and Zen again, like I could just focus on the case and ignore all the Sturm und Drang and other bullshit surrounding it. Because I was finally getting the hell out of D.C. and leaving all the pain from my past in a crappy midrange hotel room.
    Plus, I was beginning to believe all the danger of the Davidson case lay in the pain of their past.  Whatever they were all scared of, whatever they were worried I might stir up, it seemed to be all about things that had been, not things that were. If there was some scandal attached to Robert Davidson, it was old and moldy and there was no reason to drag it out into the light if I ever found out what it was. Frankly, I didn’t care what it was and wasn’t anxious to find out. I had a simple job, to prove the guy was dead, and that was my only obligation. If there was some nastiness lurking from days gone by, I’d leave it where it was.
    But the idea of Robert Davidson still being alive? That was dumber than a dog barking at itself in the mirror.
    So it was just a matter of what the ugly truth had been about the guy. Maybe Angela was just afraid if I uncovered it, I’d blackmail her or go right to the National Enquirer . In any event, the only real threat to me so far had been a teenager attacking my tires. I needed to relax about the whole fucking thing, again, it was just another job despite the involvement of living legend General Donald Davidson.
    All of that self-manufactured reassurance put me in such an almost good mood that I was heading towards giddy as I prepared to pack up, check out and hit the road. As I gathered my luggage - the Banana Republic shopping bags, that is - I called Jules. I had waited until the last possible second to make sure she’d be at work, where she couldn’t scream obscenities at me. 
    But, then again, if Angela consistently underestimated me, I consistently underestimated Jules, who, when she answered, immediately said in a pleasant and professional voice that she would call me back in a minute. Then, as I saw it in my head, she quietly got up from her desk, took quick, purposeful strides towards the elevator, rode it forty floors down to the ground level, walked out of the high-rise where she worked and ducked into a back alley where she knew she could scream as many obscenities at me as she damn