Eye of the Burning Man: A Mick Callahan Novel (The Mick Callahan Series) Read online

  I checked on Leyna, who seemed as entranced as I'd hoped. I modulated to a higher key.

  "I'm no prude, ladies and gentlemen. Most of you know I blew myself out of the Navy and nearly killed myself and my career, all behind drugs and alcohol. This was back when a few of you had actually heard of me. But that kind of selfish, hippie idiocy has left us a complete social catastrophe to clean up. Okay, now I'm going to go on a rant."

  I switched the microphone off and clicked on my telephone headset. Leyna was now watching with rapt attention. Like a dork, I got up and strolled around the booth, still talking. I could feel her eyes roaming my frame and it felt a bit silly, like a high school jock passing by the cheerleaders. All I need is a few more hormones and some fresh pimples.

  "Don't worry, guys, I'm going to take a final caller or two, but let me get the rest of this off my chest. We have had more than thirty years of unbridled narcissism in this culture. For the uninitiated, Narcissus was the Greek boy in the myth who fell in love with his own image in a pool of water. That irritated the Gods, so they froze him there to see nothing but his own reflection forever. Healthy narcissism is thinking you're a pretty good person, or that you look nice in that outfit. Unhealthy narcissism is to be so trapped within our own wants and needs that we are unable to connect and properly empathize with the feelings and needs of others. Otto Kernberg once called human evil just a kind of malignant narcissism.

  "Living creatures are not objects, people. They are not things. And as much as we would like them to serve us unconditionally, they cannot. In fact, it is precisely the tension between us, the struggle to meet one another's needs without surrendering our own integrity, that produces adult love, real love that promotes growth and solves emotional problems, love that matures people and breaks down their infantile concepts and selfish impulses. I can recommend a great essay, although it reads about as easily as the Chinese phone book. It's by a Jewish philosopher named Martin Buber, and it is called 'I and Thou.' Go find it."

  I sat down behind the console. "Okay. End of lecture. That diatribe probably pissed somebody off, so I'll take another caller now." I selected a button and pressed it.

  "Good evening, you're on the air live with Mick Callahan."

  "Hi Mick, I love your show," the woman said. "My name is Trudy."

  "Thank you, Trudy. What's on your mind?"

  "I was just thinking about how my marriage failed. And I was thinking about what you said just now."

  "Yes?"

  She chuckled ruefully. "The marriage ended with a lot of accusations, you know? You never gave me this or you never listened to me about that. Well, that and oral sex."

  I cringed. "Excuse me?"

  "Passing each other in the hall and saying 'screw you.' That's a joke."

  I laughed. "Back to the divorce. The marriage degenerated into accusations, and a kind of stuck feeling? Just the same issues over and over?"

  "On both sides."

  "Right."

  "Funny thing is," she said, "my ex and I get along okay, now. It's like we are better friends than we were husband and wife."

  "And what do you make of that?"

  "Being married brought some things up in both of us that weren't there before," she said, thoughtfully. "Something happened. And we both got really locked into what we weren't getting, instead of paying attention to what we could give."

  "Brilliant," I gave her applause. "Thank you for saying that. Because that is one of the points I have been trying to make all week, and it feels great that somebody understands."

  "Cool," she said, suddenly sounding very young.

  "When old patterns surface," I said, "we revert to being frustrated children. We fall into habits created when we were the most egocentric we were ever intended to be." I looked down at her name on the note pad. "Thank you for calling, Trudy."

  "Thank you, Mick," she said.

  I killed the line and glanced at the clock. "It looks like we have time for one more caller. But now my phone is dead. Come on, somebody. I'll take the third caller right after this word from one of our sponsors."

  I slipped in another CD, a musical spot advertising a chain of furniture stores. Leyna was watching with frank appreciation. The lonely cowboy shoots . . . he scores! Yo, there is a God. I kept one eye on the phone bank and began to pack up my things. For an expert on the subject of love, I'm sure objectifying this enchanting young woman. Can we spell hypocrite?

  Line one flickered, then died. The second lit and continued to blink. "Hold on, please, I'll be right with you." I punched the line back to 'hold,' shoved the rest of my papers into a briefcase, located the computer mouse and lined up the pre-recorded nighttime programming so it would start with one click. The commercial faded away. I dropped back into my chair just as my fingers killed the CD and flipped the mike back to 'live.'

  "We're almost out of time tonight. I want to wish everyone a romantic evening." I grinned at Leyna and continued speaking. "From now until dawn, we're playing cool jazz and classic blues. I will be back with you again tomorrow evening from nine to midnight. But before I go, I promised I'd take one last caller."

  I opened up the line. "Hello, you're on the air."

  Traffic sounds, far away. Perhaps someone on a cell phone?

  "Hello? Anyone there?"

  A muffled chuckle followed the question. A man's voice. A chill jogged up my back. After a few seconds, the caller broke the connection with a gentle click. I shook my head and covered. "Just my luck, the last caller on a night devoted to the subject of love ends up doing horny breathing into the telephone."

  I flipped off the lights and clicked the mouse. The computer started a choral station ID, which then led to hours of automatic jazz programming.

  "Good night, everybody," I said. Hey, girl . . . here's my best FM voice. "This is Mick Callahan, signing off and thanking you for being with me this evening. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow night."

  Just as the clock hit the hour, my cell phone rang. I put my briefcase on the console and flipped open the telephone.

  "It's me."

  I pictured a thin young man with a burn scar covering half his face. "What's up, Jerry? Are you in town?"

  "No, I'm still in Nevada, just messing around online."

  "I'm in a little bit of a rush tonight." A pause. "Are you okay?"

  "Me? I guess so." Jerry was slurring his words slightly, like he'd been drinking again. "I just wanted to talk."

  "No luck, huh?"

  "No luck, Mick." Jerry's voice caught on a strip of barbed wire. "It's like she never existed."

  I looked up. Leyna was growing impatient. "Look, Jerry, I have an important business meeting I have to get to." That lie hurt. Don't be such a dick. "Can I call you back tomorrow or something?"

  "No, it's okay," Jerry sighed booze into the receiver. "I've just been staring at the monitor for hours. I can't find a trace of Mary, Mick, and I'm damned good at this. There's no driver's license, credit card, phone bill, store card, nothing. Maybe something bad has happened. I want to know if she's okay."

  "She'll turn up."

  "Maybe. I guess I just needed to whine to somebody. No big deal."

  "I'll try to call you back in an hour or two." The second lie hurt worse than the first. "Take it easy."

  "You too."

  I closed the phone again and stepped out of the booth, briefcase swinging at my side. "A girlfriend?" Leyna purred, somewhat coolly. She had been filing her nails, and the file was poking up out of one fist like a miniature erection.

  I shook my head. "A friend from Nevada, kid name of Jerry. He's a hacker. He's been searching the Internet, looking for a girl who helped us out of a mess. She up and disappeared a few months ago. He really had a thing for her."

  "That's romantic."

  "I'm not sure he'd look at it that way. Good show?"

  "Good show."

  "Suitably impressed, Madam?"

  She nodded. "The lady is impressed. Do you want to stop f
or a coffee somewhere to unwind, or just take me home?"

  I put his arms around her. "That depends."

  Leyna giggled. "On what?"

  I kissed her. She kissed back, pressing her lean body against mine. Finally, we broke away. "It depends on whether or not I'm staying with you in the 310 area code tonight."

  Leyna raised her hands to cup my face. She stroked my ear and whispered, "818, you're invited."

  I locked up rapidly; we walked down the plushy carpeted hallway, through the metal security door and past the empty reception desk. I flipped the exterior lights over to motion detector mode, made sure the coffee maker was off, and opened the front door. We stepped outside, into a reasonably pleasant evening. The odd quirk about L.A. heat waves is that the parking lots and backyards end up cooler during the night than the buildings they surround.

  I passed my hand in front of the motion detector and the parking area lit up. My dusty old blue Chevy was halfway down the row, standing alone. Her shiny black BMW convertible was beside it. I put my right arm around her waist and shifted the briefcase to my left hand. Leyna snuggled in close. Our hips bumped as we walked along, lost in lust.

  "My car or yours?"

  Leyna wrinkled her nose. "Mine, of course."

  The bushes near her BMW stood tall, grew thick. One rustled a bit, just a flicker of movement. I caught from the corner of my eye and hesitated, almost causing Leyna to stumble. The hairs on the back of my neck fluttered. I responded to something deep in my mind, the voice of my abusive stepfather: Stay awake, damn you, boy! You got to keep your eyes peeled . . .

  I shifted my weight and rolled Leyna around to the left. Another rustling sound. My mouth went dry. The quicksilver ice of adrenaline pumped through me as I used peripheral vision to track the brush. I kept my face turned forward, towards the BMW.

  I spoke in a normal tone. "Where is your apartment again, above or below Wilshire?"

  Leyna looked puzzled. After all, I'd driven her home several times. "Below, are you tired, or something?" We were almost to her car.

  "Get down!"

  The brush exploded. I shoved her onto a small patch of dirt near the asphalt. Leyna howled as she scraped her knee and elbow.

  I was facing a strange apparition: One huge ape of a man dressed entirely in dark clothing. He wore a navy watch cap pulled down over his head, and his features were covered with a plastic Halloween mask that had been spray painted black. One arm was stretched out towards me, as if pointing to something back at the radio station. A prominent tattoo on the forearm showed a black stick figure in a circle of reddish fire.

  "What the . . ."

  But then, in that giant fist, Leyna saw the small gun. She screamed.

  "Shut her up," the man whispered. "One more sound and I splatter your brains all over the car."

  I stood quietly, taking the measure of my opponent. Watch his eyes, boy, the eyes always tell you what's coming. I figured the man for six four. He probably weighed two-fifty, maybe thirty or more pounds more than me. Maybe there's a way out of this. See what he's after.

  "I don't have much money. You can have what I've got."

  "How much?" the big man hissed. The whisper was theatrically exaggerated, the sibilance of a large snake.

  "I'd have to look," I said. "Maybe sixty bucks."

  "And the Beemer?"

  "Sure. And the car."

  A black glove pointed to Leyna. "Maybe I'll take her, too."

  "Not a chance." I shook my head but did not move my body. "Don't even think about it."

  "Why not, motherfucker?"

  "Do you want the sixty bucks, or not?" I asked, pleasantly. "No hassles that way."

  "I'll take whatever I want. Including her."

  He is going to kill you both, he's only playing around. "Relax. Don't worry. I can't identify you."

  "Huh?"

  "I'll just tell the cops we got jumped by some steroid junkie with shrunken balls who thought he was Zorro."

  The eyes behind the mask widened slightly. The gun moved a fraction higher. The man tensed, debated pulling the trigger. I went in very low, swept my right arm up and away. The gun fired once, but I barely heard it.

  I slammed into the man, drove him back into the Chevrolet and head-butted the Halloween mask. He grunted. Take this bastard down hard, my stepfather whispered, or you're dead.

  I bounced off a solid wall of gym-rat muscle. He clawed desperately for purchase as the gun came back down. Leyna now had her purse open, her cell phone in hand. She was screaming for the police. Her voice seemed to come from another dimension.

  To my horror the .22 started to shift towards Leyna, so I grabbed the thick wrist and let my body go slack. My weight forced his arm down towards the dirt. Another POP followed as I freed my left hand and grabbed at the crotch of the black jeans, clenched my fist fiercely and twisted the testicles. The man bellowed and brought the gun down on my forehead. The world whistled the National Anthem.

  My eyes filled with blood but I knew better than to release the gun hand so I used my body weight again and dragged the man into an awkward position; he ended up bent in half with his knees buckling. I forced the gun hand inward and began to pressure his fingers, trying to force the guy to shoot himself in the stomach. Teach him not to fuck with you, kid.

  The man released the weapon and swung. He caught along the right side of my jaw. I fell backwards and forced the gun to spin away across the pavement towards Leyna. I kicked up at the attacker, but the bigger man dodged. I got up, spun around on one knee and got back to my feet. Now do it, just do it! I was probably quite a sight by now; face contorted with anger and smeared with my own blood.

  A cold, weirdly comfortable flower of rage blossomed. Without the gun, the man was just another mean-spirited bully, like all the ones I'd downed in a dozen pointless fights as a kid, or during the dark days of my drinking career. He was my stepfather, Danny Bell.

  "Okay, asshole." I wiped the blood away. "Let's dance."

  POP.

  The two of us turned towards her, startled, and discovered that Leyna now had the little .22. She squeezed the trigger again and it went POP another time. That bullet shattered one of the white lights high up on the lamppost, plunging the area into darkness. She lowered the gun further. It hit me that the first bullet had gone up into the sky. She was getting a feel for the weapon, trying to zero in. I looked back at the bad guy.

  The man in black leaped impossibly high, rolled across the roof of the BMW, and raced back into the thick brush. He was gone so quickly it was as if he had never existed.

  "Leyna?"

  She did not answer, just clung to the now wavering pistol.

  "It's over. He's gone."

  Leyna dropped the gun and sank to her knees. I was still feeling half berserk from the confrontation. I walked in circles for a few moments, kicking at my car and swearing; tense, dizzy, and shaking from unused adrenaline. Finally I sat down next to her. I ripped a piece of my shirt away and held it against the scalp wound. "You okay?"

  Leyna didn't answer.

  I shrugged. "That's a dumb question, right? Me neither."

  Moments passed. Heavy tires roared down the deserted alley and into the dusty parking lot, fierce headlights pinned us. LAPD in a good old black and white, bright colors whirling on top.

  "Keep your hands where we can see them."

  I pointed with a weary arm to the fallen pistol. "Only one gun here, guys. It's a little twenty-two. He jumped us and then ran off into the trees."

  "Did you call us, ma'am?" the other cop asked. He was approaching fast, one hand on a holstered Glock. Meanwhile his partner examined the darkened area and ran his flashlight beam through the flattened brush.

  "Footprints here, Larry," the partner said.

  "I got shell casings," the one called Larry said. He picked them up with a pencil and dropped them into a baggie. He resembled me a bit, similar in build with the same dark hair and eyes, but more Italian than Irish in appearance. He
also had a long, straight nose that wasn't broken, unlike mine. He squatted down next to Leyna. "Someone tried to rob you? Then fired at you?"

  "I shot at him with his own gun."

  "What did he look like?"

  I suddenly felt sick, but hurling in front of Leyna was not an option. I put my head between my knees. "He was a big son of a bitch, bigger than you and me. I'd make him six three or four, and going about two fifty and change."

  "What was he wearing?"

  "Dressed in black, spray painted some kind of a generic Halloween mask to cover his face. Tattoo on the forearm, a little stick man in a ring of flames or something like that."

  "Was he after money?"

  "Maybe."

  "The BMW?"

  I raised my head, answered without thinking. "Maybe her."

  Leyna gasped and shuddered. She pulled away from me. The cop looked at her, puzzled. He eyed my lacerated forehead. "You need me to call an ambulance for that?"

  "No. Just a scalp wound. I don't have a concussion or anything. Don't sweat it." Another police car rolled up. The young cop waved them away and they drove off again. The San Fernando Valley gets pretty busy on a Saturday night.

  The cop asked for some ID and we gave up our driver's licenses. He began writing in a notebook, then paused and chuckled. "I thought I recognized you. You're Mick Callahan, that radio guy. You were a Navy Seal, right?"

  "Half-assed. I made it through BUDS and jump school." Damn, I get sick of that question. "I washed out while I was still on probation."

  "I wore the trident," the cop said, proudly. "Only did one hitch, though. I didn't much like getting shot at."

  "Yeah, me neither."

  "You used to be on television too, didn't you? You got fired for getting in a fist fight one time."

  Jesus, you're not doing me any favors, here. "Yeah, but that was all a few years ago."

  The cop shook my hand. "Officer Larry Donato," he said. He spoke in short, choppy authoritarian sentences that belied the wide-eyed, pleasant expression on his face. "I used to watch your show when I was a kid."

  When you were a kid, huh? "Gee. Thanks."