Liquid fear f-1 Read online

  The Blame Game was one of Roland’s favorite pastimes. It wasn’t whether you won or lost, succeeded or failed, lived or died, so long as you found someone or something to blame. Wendy had served the most often, but he’d filled her up and moved on.

  And despite his secret hope that he’d beaten alcoholism on his own, through willpower and courage, the simple truth was the craving had been lifted by the very God he was now cursing. That God wasn’t a bearded white geezer in the sky, but something large and mysterious, and Roland actually hadn’t probed too deeply for fear that it would prove to be nothing but vapor.

  And maybe this was the proof that God had been an elaborate fantasy.

  His fingers trailed between the cool sheets to the other side of the bed. The pillow smelled of a woman’s shampoo, but his olfactory sense was as unreliable as the other four. She might have left in the night, or even months ago.

  No, she would be there, she had to be there, and he would use her as a temporary painkiller, the latest contestant in the Blame Game. Whoever she was.

  “Asleep?” he whispered, but the syllables still scratched his raw throat. Roland rolled toward her side of the bed and opened one eye. The blankets were smooth, his hand naked and alone.

  The walls were cheap pine paneling, the curtains the deep mottled beige of unbleached linen. The gypsum whorls in the ceiling were cracked, long strands of dusty cobwebs dangling and swaying.

  He drew a deep breath and the air tasted of Febreze and Lysol, the sprays fighting a losing battle with cigarettes, beer, and urine. Another motel room, although Roland had no idea of its city.

  Indy? Last I remember, I was tooling through the Crossroads of America, the land of Peyton Manning and chili cheese fries.

  He sat up with a groan, and the blood increased its sluggish course around his brain. His skull felt as if it were gripped in the mouth of a hungry T. rex. His tongue was a carpet that had been stomped on and then vacuumed dry. His heartbeat staggered and pounded in a familiar arrhythmia.

  The bedside table would reveal a suicidal potion. Socrates cheerfully chose poison over the admission of defeat. When logic failed the Athenian philosopher, death seemed a reasonable alternative to putting up with more bullshit. Hemlock was his vehicle, but Roland preferred a slower-acting brand.

  He’d always been a goddamned coward.

  The headache suggested a white wine, something cheap from Southern California. Wine could have chased vodka or, if he’d felt sufficiently masochistic, Everclear.

  Unlike many alcoholics, Roland had never suffered from denial. From the first sip on, he always knew exactly what he was doing.

  Except, of course, for anything that happened during the blackouts.

  The nightstand contained no empty bottles. An alarm clock blazed red numerals that said 9:35. Above it loomed a lamp, its battered beige shade held together by a strip of masking tape. An empty ashtray was the only other item on the table.

  “Honey?” he croaked, going for the generic, because no specific name floated up from the mist in his skull.

  Cincinnati.

  The room felt like Ohio. Maybe it was an underlying muddy-river stench to the air, or perhaps it was the taint of coal-fired power plants. As a salesman for a company that made supplies for advertising signs, Roland might be in town to service major clients like AK Steel, the Kroger Company, or Proctor amp; Gamble.

  Whether it was neon, adhesives, banners, or 3-D lettering, Carolina Sign Supply could meet every outdoor advertising need, no matter how garish. The slogans swam together like eels in his gut.

  Roland swung his legs over the side of the bed. He wore a pair of black boxers that featured a clown face on the front, the bulbous red nose marking the fly. Roland slept naked when a woman was with him, so he could be pretty sure he’d been flying solo the night before.

  Of course, he might have ended up at one of the local watering holes or topless joints. In that case, all bets were off. He wasn’t the type who paid for companionship.

  At least not in cash. For the rest, he’d trade his fucking soul and not bat an eye.

  But the other side of the bed was unruffled. He had definitely slept by himself. His battered leather briefcase, which held his sample notebooks, was parked by the nightstand, his pants tossed on the floor.

  A few coins had leaked from his pants pockets and glinted like dirty ice on the gray industrial carpet. He had undressed carelessly, his shirt tossed over the arm of a vinyl chair.

  The bathroom door was ajar, a bar of light leaking from the opening. He wondered if he had vomited, bent in homage to the porcelain idol. His stomach fluttered up a wave of acid, though no nausea lingered.

  Headache isn’t too bad, either. Must be getting back in the groove.

  And blackouts are a good thing, when you get right down to it, because who wants to remember shit like that? Maybe God has a little mercy in Him after all.

  The air was cold on his bare chest, shrinking his nipples to red points. The air-conditioning must have been set on “igloo,” because spring had been pushing hard to get winter the hell out of the way.

  His face itched and he put a hand to his chin. Stubble, three days’ worth, at least.

  Roland wondered how many appointments he’d missed, how many clients had called the home office asking about the sales rep who had scheduled a visit. Sometimes the benders went on for a week or more, but since taking the job with Carolina Sign, he’d been dependable.

  The company had known of his past. The background check had turned up the DWI, two drunk and disorderly charges, the vandalism, and the court judgment against him in the civil suit brought by his estranged wife.

  In a bit of undeserved serendipity, the company’s general manager was a recovering alcoholic who had shepherded Roland into a twelve-step program. “White chips and second chances,” Harry Grimes, the GM, had said.

  What do you think about third chances, Harry? Or is this the fourth?

  He bent to pick up his pants, blood rushing to his temples. He wondered if he’d spent all his money. Once, while living with Wendy, he had maxed out his credit card in a two-day stretch, $10,000 flushed.

  The worst part had been the waiting, knowing Wendy would open the envelope, pull out the bill, and see the itemized stupidity. Wendy was past waiting, though, exhausted from serial second chances, and the separation agreement showed up in the mailbox before the credit card bill.

  His pants looked relatively clean, so he probably had avoided crawling on his hands and knees, at least on the sidewalk. Keys jingled in his pocket. He fished the wallet out and flipped it open, thumbing through the leather folds. A couple of hundreds and some twenties.

  Maybe he’d made a late-hour cash withdrawal from an ATM. He couldn’t imagine giving up a drinking bout while he still had some green.

  The phone rang, its brittle bleat like a spear to his skull. The home office? A client? Escort service? Newfound-and-already-forgott en drinking buddy? The choices were endless and all were terrible.

  Maybe it was Harry. As Roland reached for the phone, he realized there wasn’t a single person left in the world whose voice would cheer him, who would dispense kind and supportive words, who wouldn’t bring suspicion and disapproval to bear.

  The phone was cold against his ear. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Underwood, you requested a wake-up call at eight,” said a tired, smoke-strained female voice. “We tried three times but received no answer, so we assumed you had checked out.”

  “Sorry, you must have the wrong room.”

  “My apologies,” she said, though her tone suggested the exact opposite. “Is this room one-oh-one?”

  Roland retrieved the rubber-flagged keychain that lay beside the alarm clock. “Right number, wrong person.”

  “Sir, all check-ins require photo ID. The night clerk has ‘David Underwood’ in room one-oh-one.”

  “Sorry, there’s no David here that I know of.” Unless he’d brought home a drinking buddy by that nam
e. In which case, pitiful, hungover David was sleeping either under the bed or in the bathtub.

  The clerk’s voice grew sour. “Either way, Mr. Underwood, checkout is ten o’clock.”

  “Hold on a second,” Roland said, before the clerk could hang up. “What time did I…what time did David check in?”

  He actually wanted to ask what day, but he didn’t want to arouse additional suspicion.

  “We have it at seven ten. There’s a surcharge for having additional people in the room, Mr. Underwood. If you’d care to stop by the desk on your way out-”

  “Never mind.” He had checked in last night, apparently, although the idiots had gotten his name wrong.

  His barebones expense account covered a rental car, meals, and lodging. Extra charges would draw the attention of Carolina Sign’s purse-handlers, who, as in every other American business, were tasked with extracting nickels from the worker bees while shoving stacks of Hamiltons toward management.

  Actually, the confusion might benefit him in the long run. Let “David Underwood” foot the charge and let the bitchy desk clerk deal with the inaccurate billing. One problem, though: his twelve-step program was built on rigorous honesty, both with himself and others.

  But the twelve steps had apparently failed him. He had a roiling stomach and jangling head to prove it. The only steps he had taken were those that led down the basement to hell.

  Funny, though, his mouth didn’t taste of liquor. Maybe he’d burned away his taste buds.

  As he got up to shower, the wallet tumbled to the floor. Some of the plastic cards slid free of an inner sleeve. His driver’s license portrait glared at him, eyes startled wide by the examiner’s flash.

  Roland had been dismayed when the examiner listed his hair as “gray.” The gray was there, sure, but he still thought of it as dark brown. He was only thirty-four, after all, even if half of them had been hard years.

  He was sliding the license back into place when he paused. The license was the wrong color, issued in North Carolina. He’d registered in Tennessee to avoid excessive auto insurance.

  Yet there was his face. His height was listed at five feet ten, just as he’d fudged it by an inch, and his weight, 205, was lower than his actual weight at the time. That was before the twelve-step surrender, back when dishonesty was a second skin. Now, healthier and without the boozy bloat, he weighed 185, but it had taken two years to bounce back into shape from the decade of hard drinking.

  It was possible he’d updated his driver’s license after he’d settled near Raleigh. But he would have remembered something like that. He had been abusive, but he couldn’t have killed all of his brain cells.

  And if he’d wandered into a driver’s license office during a blackout, chances were good he would have been denied a license and escorted to the nearest drunk tank.

  One other problem with the license bearing his face: the name listed on it was David Wayne Underwood.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “My psychiatrist is dead.”

  As she considered her friend’s words, Wendy Leng sipped her coffee and ducked beneath the thin layer of cigarette smoke that hung about five feet above the waffle-house floor. The coffee tasted as if it had been dipped from the rolling mop bucket that stood in the corner.

  Eggs, scrambled, had somehow managed to take on the dirty gray of the gravy. At nearby tables, newspapers flapped, people fidgeted with their cell phones as they ate, and lonely old men gazed out the window in the land of bottomless refills. They’d taken a back booth because of Anita’s sensitivity to light and her aversion to being recognized by adoring fans.

  Wendy looked from the congealing grease rimming the plate to her twin reflections in Anita’s sunglasses. “Mind taking those off? I can’t tell when you’re kidding.”

  Anita slid the glasses down her nose and peered over the lenses with her stunning blue eyes. “Like you could anyway?”

  “The sun’s out, the fluorescents in here are bright enough to fry bacon, and you have absolutely nothing left to hide from me.”

  “My eyes are bloodshot.”

  “That goes without saying. Thursday is a day that ends in y, isn’t it?”

  Anita readjusted her shades and sat back in the vinyl-upholstered booth seat. “You just have this thing about faces. ‘Eyes are the window to the soul,’ and all that jazz.”

  “I teach art. If you get the eyes right, the rest is easy.”

  “Well, life isn’t art, and doesn’t even imitate it. Especially when your psychiatrist is dead.”

  Wendy started to ask the logical and expected follow-up question when the jukebox cut in, drowning out the banging of pots and the clatter of silverware. “Hey, I haven’t heard ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ in nearly a decade,” Anita said, smiling and swaying her head in time to the four-beat twang.

  “You always did go for atmosphere.” The room’s cigarette smoke burned Wendy’s nostrils. She’d kicked that habit last year and had become overly sensitive to it ever since. She gave Anita a hurried “bring-it-to-me” motion with her hand.

  “About my psychiatrist.”

  “Let me guess,” Wendy said. “She couldn’t handle your depressed-bitch act any longer, so she slit her wrists.”

  “Wow, that would be poignant.” Anita, who’d had the good sense to order a waffle instead of the Long-Haul Breakfast, pushed syrup around with her fork. “I’m sure if she got you on the couch, Freud would roll over in his grave.”

  “Only if I seduced her. Otherwise, Freud would be bored with simple old me.”

  “Oh, you’re finally coming around to the Sapphic way, huh? Every intelligent woman visits the island sooner or later.”

  “If I was after women, you couldn’t handle the competition, sweetie,” Wendy said, dabbing the endearment with sarcasm as gooey as the waffle-house syrup. “As it is, I don’t need anybody in my life, male or female.”

  “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Anita said, misquoting Shakespeare. As a catalog model, Anita had quickly learned she was more at home in front of a camera than on a live stage.

  Despite the drama of her past, or perhaps because of it, she still clung to a delusion of eventual A-list movie stardom.

  One delusion of many, Wendy thought. Hence the psychiatrist.

  Wendy jumped in before Anita could harmonize with Billy Ray Cyrus’s addictive yet mind-numbing chorus. “So who killed her?”

  Anita forked waffle in her mouth and flashed a wad of soggy dough. She had the appetite of a wrestler, but genetics and an obsessive fitness regimen held her at a firm 118 pounds despite her generous bosom. “Nobody killed her. Cardiac arrest. People die all the time.”

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  “Because I figured you’d assume the worst. You’re always assuming the worst.”

  “No, I’m not.” She sipped her coffee, confirming it was terrible. “Besides, sometimes the worst blindsides you and you don’t get a chance to assume anything. Take my marriage, for instance.”

  “Well, enough about you.” Anita flashed a smile that always earned instant absolution, no matter the degree of rudeness. “Anyway, it took me six months to start trusting her, and then she has the nerve to go and die on me.”

  “She died on her other patients, too.”

  “And that’s my problem how?”

  “Never mind.” Wendy glanced at the clock. Ten was fast approaching, and she had to prep for her nooner. “I’ve got to get to class.”

  “Some people never leave college. And at your age-”

  “I know, but college was God’s way of bringing us together. The School of Hard Knocks.”

  “Or Fuck U. That’s U like in university.”

  The sarcasm, like most, contained a good bit of truth. Anita had served as a model in one of Wendy’s graduate studio art classes, stripping off her clothes for a dozen people without batting a luscious eyelash.

  After the session, Anita had remarked that Wendy’s rendering, though obviously
exaggerated and not all that flattering, had captured her personality better than any of the more technically exact illustrations. Perhaps because Wendy instinctively appreciated the sensual radiance Anita projected.

  An uneasy friendship was formed, and it had lasted through a shared apartment, a traumatic clinical trial, different sexual attitudes, and now one hell of a heart-clogging breakfast.

  “Don’t you want to hear what my psychiatrist’s psychiatrist told me?” Anita said.

  “Shrink a shrink and pretty soon you get down to nothing.” Wendy put her pinky to her lips and thumb to her ear in the international sign language for “Call me.” She reached for the bill, which was stuck to the table by a dot of syrup.

  “No, really. I need to say this.”

  “Okay. But make it fast. The next generation of Pablo Picassos and Frida Kahlos are waiting.”

  “The pills I was on, the samples my psychiatrist gave me for free so the diagnosis would stay off my insurance?”

  The topic bugged Wendy, but she couldn’t pinpoint the cause. “Yeah. New class of antidepressants. I thought we’d learned our lesson about untested drugs.”

  Anita lowered her voice and became guarded. “We need to talk about that, because I’m starting to remember.”

  Wendy squeezed her fork until the metal cut into her palm. “That was a different lifetime, Nita. That wasn’t us. That couldn’t have been us.”

  “I know we’re supposed to remember it that one way, but what if it happened the other way?”

  “It could have happened a million ways,” Wendy said. “The lesson is not to play around with drugs.”

  “Oh, so now we get all moral?”

  Wendy was about to explode, to tell Anita to shut the hell up, and the rage was a warning sign. You could bury the past, but the stench had a way of rising through the cracks. But the best way to forget was to change the subject. “So tell me about this new drug they gave you.”

  Anita nodded. “Supposed to treat my stress, anxiety, depression, and all the rest of it. I’ve been on it for two weeks.”

  “And it seems to be working.” Wendy eyed the half-full cup of coffee and weighed the need for an extra boost of caffeine against the additional destruction of taste buds.