Prodigal Sons Read online

  _________________

  Prodigal Sons

  _________________

  By Mike Miner

  Prodigal Sons

  Copyright © 2014, All Due Respect Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this electronic book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Co-publishers: Mike Monson and Chris Rhatigan

  Editors: CJ Edwards, Mike Monson, and Chris Rhatigan

  Cover design: Eric Beetner

  Table of Contents

  Matthew 1

  Mark 1

  Matthew 2

  Luke 1

  Matthew 3

  Mark 2

  Matthew 4

  Luke 2

  Matthew 5

  Mark 3

  Matthew 6

  Luke 3

  Matthew 7

  Luke 4

  The Rescue of Tomiko Jones

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The prettiest thing is the darkest darkness.

  - William T. Vollman

  MATTHEW 1

  Matthew Flanagan was awake a long time before he opened his eyes.

  Fragments of a dream lingered. Decaying at the end of a street, a crooked house squatted. Matthew didn’t recognize the house, but he knew there was something inside that he needed. Creatures protected it. What sounded like mad dogs, monsters that barked and bit. In the distance, a melody of keys jangling, cop shoes squeaking and the industrial hum of fluorescent lighting; the familiar music of jail.

  The Beverly Hills Police Department did not have bars on its cells. Instead there were thick glass doors which looked less forbidding than they should—Matthew felt a bit cheated. In the movie version of his life, he’d put bars on the cell. The glass was strangely more isolating than bars; even the air he breathed was trapped inside. Through it, he could see the police desk and the officers doing their thing. Instead of a bed, prisoners were given a mat to put on the concrete floor. A cheerful orange, the color of a Good Humor Creamsicle, decorated the walls. The thought of eating a Good Humor Creamsicle made a rumpus in Matthew’s stomach. A clock hung on the wall behind the police desk but he couldn’t see its face. He was pretty sure it was Saturday morning, but if the female cop at the desk walked over and told him it was the following Friday, he wouldn’t put up much of an argument.

  The khaki-uniformed woman filed papers and chatted with someone Matthew couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear what she said. It was like watching television with the sound down and no remote control to change the channel. He wanted desperately for her to look over and acknowledge him, but she didn’t even glance in his direction.

  On the floor on the other side of the cell, his cellmate slept the sleep of the damned. His snoring was an echo of the mad dog snarling from Matthew’s dream. If he’d had it, Matthew would have paid a million dollars to be able to sleep like that. He thought about pounding on the glass to get someone’s attention, but he didn’t know what he’d do with it.

  He started to case the cell. A table against a wall held checkers, a deck of cards, a year-old Cosmopolitan professing to know “The Secret to His Orgasm” and, to Matthew’s surprise, a remote control. He picked it up and tried to turn up the volume of the scene outside his cell but he still couldn’t hear anything. He was amazed to see a television mounted inside a cage in the corner of his cell. It seemed to him that things were looking up, but he was like a man heading toward an oasis who is not convinced it’s real until he actually sips the water. He touched the power button and the TV came to life. It got two stations, CBS and the Weather Channel. Hurricane Felix was crashing into Aruba and Georgetown was playing Seton Hall in basketball. He settled on the hoops and shuffled the deck of cards. A game of solitaire commenced. All in all, he thought, if he could just murder his cellmate, he’d be willing to stay here for quite some time. This was a much nicer cell than the last two he’d spent the night in. He made a mental note to commit his next crime in Beverly Hills. As the snoring continued, he tried to piece together the broken shards of his memory.

  * * *

  The Argyle Hotel was a concrete falcon perched in the center of the Sunset Strip searching the palm-lined streets of Hollywood for rats. Inside the hotel, next to the lobby, was the Fenix Bar. Friday nights were a cacophony of A-list actors prowling for unknown starlets drinking too much, wearing too little and knowing even less. With this came a circus of hangers on, hipsters, producers, prostitutes, directors, drug dealers, has beens, never weres and never would bes. A seventeen-year-old Hungarian stripper named Lara who sent half her weekly earnings to her mother in Budapest was talking to the Professor at a table in the middle of the room.

  A small man with long, wavy blonde hair just turning gray, wearing a tweed blazer with elbow patches over a Grateful Dead t-shirt, the Professor sipped rum and coke, his usual, from a massive brandy snifter. He lifted it toward Matthew as he approached. “It must be Friday night.”

  Nobody was sure how old the Professor was, maybe forty, maybe older. He taught high school English somewhere downtown and had been a law student at Occidental College for so long that someone made the crack that the only people who stayed in law school so long were professors. The nickname stuck.

  “I’ll have the same.” Matthew winked at one of the human-sized Barbie dolls they hired as waitresses.

  Lara stood up to leave as Matthew sat down.

  “Perhaps we’ll meet some day on the bridge of the Danube.” The Professor’s voice was a melodious instrument. He didn’t speak, he sang, he hummed, he purred. Every long vowel was held for an extra note, every consonant slurred. “Perhaps.” A lovely Eastern European accent. She melted into the crowd like sugar into water.

  “The talent in this place is outrageous.” ‘Talent’ was how the Professor referred to beautiful women.

  “She seemed very talented.”

  In Matthew’s pickled brain, the Fenix Bar was a Rembrandt painting. The light collected around people’s faces and ignored the thick swirls of painted background. A friend appeared out of the chiaroscuro, Timothy Azzari, Taz.

  Taz worked for a big movie producer. He hated it and always wanted to hear how great everyone else’s careers were. “How’s the job going, Matthew?”

  “Just another day at the dream factory.”

  “Was today that big shoot?”

  “What shoot?” the Professor asked.

  Matthew shrugged, then used his hands to show what he meant. “Three buxom girls in bikinis eating pancakes. Lots of toppings. Syrup, whipped cream… you know.”

  “You still doing your own writing?” The Professor always liked to ask after his writing, the dream that had brought him here. Lately, his questions were like a dentist’s tool striking a nerve.

  Matthew tried to remember the last time he’d done any writing he could call his own. He took a long, cold sip and considered his never-quite-finished screenplays.

  “When he’s not busy selling his soul.” Taz laughed at his cleverness.

  Matthew chuckled. “That’s the going rate to make it in this town.”

  “Who’s the client?”

  “International House of Pancakes.”

  “What’s the tagline?”

  “I hop. You hop. We all hop to IHOP.”

  Taz’s roommate, Shoe, worked next door at the House of Blues. He
had left passes for them at the door for the night’s show and a message on Matthew’s voice mail, “You can only hear ‘A Ass Pocket of Whiskey’ at one venue tonight,” he’d hollered. Someone had paid a lot of money to make the exterior look like an authentic southern dive, but it ended up looking like a ride at Disneyland. Authentic blues shows were rare—tonight was an exception. Fat Possum Records was hosting an evening of Delta blues.

  They found him at the bar to the left of the stage. A little leprechaun of a person, red haired and red faced. “Check this guy out.” Shoe pointed to the stage where an old black man wearing a tattered suit sat alone on a chair playing electric guitar. The guitar was out of tune, but it matched his voice and somehow seemed to work. After every song the man made a show of tuning his instrument, but it sounded even worse. Shoe roared with laughter at this and rocked back and forth more or less to the beat.

  Matthew took a gulp of his beer and enjoyed the setting. In the darkness, a dim red glow prevailed, giving him the impression of being in one of the more pleasant circles of hell. Maybe this was where bad musicians went when they died. “Pure Mississippi,” Shoe said, then hollered along with the song, which had something to do with bad whiskey. The man on stage seemed amused at the white people dancing to his music and mildly annoyed when they cheered at the wrong time, making him lose his place. A few times he actually stopped and sighed, which made the audience hoot more, thinking they were seeing the genuine article—which, Matthew supposed, they were. Shoe couldn’t stop laughing.

  Shoe lived for the blues and couldn’t abide people who didn’t appreciate it in the proper way. Shoe was of the opinion that white people—particularly white men—should be forced to live in the town from the film Footloose, where it was illegal to dance until Kevin Bacon showed up and ruined a perfectly good idea. “White people,” Shoe said shaking his head.

  Six or seven drinks were about the perfect buzz for driving down Sunset Boulevard. Matthew turned up the radio, opened the sunroof of his BMW and relished the blurry haze of lights. The Professor, riding shotgun, discussed with Taz, who leaned his head between the two front seats, where to go next. They settled on the Sunset Room because the Professor could get them past the line.

  It took three rings for Matthew to realize it was his cell phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Where the hell are you?” His wife, Lucinda’s voice was bitter ice; it made him shiver.

  “Sweetheart, how are you?”

  In the background, the Professor and Taz made a happy racket.

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Nope. Sober as a judge.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it’s a reference to judges in the old West needing to be sober before they could issue a judgment.”

  “You don’t sound too sober. Where are you?”

  “Sunset and,” Matthew squinted at street signs that throbbed in and out of focus, “Vermont.”

  “Are you on your way home?”

  “Home? Honey, I told you I’d be late.”

  “It is late. It’s midnight.”

  “Midnight already?”

  The Professor pointed to his indisputable Rolex, which concurred. Matthew imagined her making a deal with herself—if he doesn’t call by midnight, I’m calling him.

  “Look, I’m just gonna drop these guys off and maybe sit with them for a minute or two.”

  “Are you driving?”

  “Of course I’m driving. I’m the only one who’s sober.” Matthew had to punch the Professor to keep him from laughing. “If you shouldn’t drive home, just stay down there.”

  Never in the history of his life had a better idea been suggested. But he didn’t want to hear what he should or shouldn’t do. He didn’t care. It was going to be one of those nights. He could tell. He was going to drink like Judas Iscariot must have at the Last Supper, before he kissed Jesus. Like he’d be going to hell in the morning. He had trouble explaining his drinking, even to himself. Sometimes it was as though his life and the lives of his wife and unborn children depended on his finishing whatever drink was in front of him. And tomorrow night, if he could pull it off, he’d do it again.

  “I’m fine, and I’ll see you in a few hours. Save a place for me.”

  She hung up. For a moment he was worried by her tone, but then he saw the Sunset Bar. There was a time when Lu would have been riding shotgun on a mission like this. He missed those days. He had seemed to get in a lot less trouble back then.

  They moved past the velvet ropes to the VIP room to a curtained booth with its own bar. Vodka, champagne, orange juice, cranberry juice, and ice buckets at the ready.

  In the next booth, Matthew saw the Professor's Hungarian stripper who got an occasional television commercial which she sent to her mother, her three brothers and two sisters to watch. She was shaped like a martini glass and almost as thin. Sometimes Matthew couldn’t help himself.

  “Can you breathe in that dress?”

  “I no breathe.”

  “How convenient.”

  Two or three drinks later, the Professor stood and drew the curtains around the table. Matthew was suddenly claustrophobic. The Professor conjured a mirror, but their friend from the Eastern Bloc had another idea. She giggled as she lowered the straps of her dress. The Professor gave Matthew a look as she poured champagne onto her tiny nipples, which looked sharp enough to cut glass, and then dusted them with cocaine. Matthew and the Professor each took a side. The sound of her giggles tickled Matthew’s nose like bubbles in champagne. He sat back, opened his mouth and gasped for air. He was good and fucked up. His vision doubled, then tripled. Moments began to jumble and lose their place in time.

  Dancing.

  Laughing.

  Dancing.

  Drinking. A merry go round and round.

  Driving. The pavement leaned to the right then turned into lawn, then a stone

  Staircase—CRASH.

  A flashlight screamed in his face. His car in a fountain.

  “Do you know what town you’re in?” Policemen were always so polite.

  No. Looks like Beverly Hills. But that can’t be right.

  Handcuffs. The back of the cruiser.

  Matthew wondered if when you died, you got to see the events of your life and those you knew and loved like a movie. He wished he could put some sort of commentary in for his wife on nights like this; some sort of apology. But what would he say? Honey, I really needed something to keep me awake for the ride home. I didn’t want to be rude. Just fast-forward through this scene. Please close your eyes.

  * * *

  At the police desk, a kind face, someone’s favorite aunt. “Let me give you some motherly advice—once more and it’s a felony.”

  Pictures. Fingerprints. His one phone call. She didn’t answer.

  His last words on the answering machine, “I really wish you were there.”

  .

  The deck of cards had no eights and only one ace, the ace of spades. To compensate, Matthew used the two Jokers as wild cards, but the deck was still stacked against him. He moved his fingers and frowned. They had confiscated his wedding ring.

  His cellmate was awake. He was reading Cosmopolitan. Matthew knew from his fashionable clothes, a Paper T-shirt and Diesel jeans, that he had taste and style. But he could see from his watch, a Timex, that the bail money and lawyer’s fees were going to hurt.

  After a while, he turned his large, bloodshot eyes to Matthew and said, “So, what do you do?” “I write and produce television commercials.”

  “Cool.”

  Matthew shrugged. He wrote what his bosses wanted to read and changed it when they wanted it changed. At the end of the day it was all tits and whipped cream.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m an actor.”

  “So what do you do?”

  The man smiled. “I’m a bartender.”

  “Guys like you get me in more trouble.”

  “Sorry.”
<
br />   “Not your fault.”

  Time was a fat man climbing a steep staircase. Seconds passed like his wheezing footsteps.

  The policewoman eventually appeared and opened the cell door. She wrinkled her face. “It smells like a brewery in here.”

  Matthew was in no mood.

  “Mr. Flanagan?”

  Matthew raised an eyebrow.

  “Someone is here to pick you up. She does not look happy.” The woman stepped aside so that he could exit the cell.

  As he stood, Matthew’s stomach lost its bottom. His head reminded him of his sins. The policewoman led him to her desk. He could finally see the time. Nine forty-five. A useless piece of knowledge now, like knowing ancient Greek. He thought about taking the policewoman’s gun and shooting himself in the head. A woman behind the desk placed his belongings on the counter. He put his wedding ring on as she put credit cards, receipts, a wallet and finally thirty-five cents in nickels on the Formica. The last thing he had to do was make a thumbprint next to the one he’d made the night before, to make sure he hadn’t turned into someone else overnight. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the prints didn’t match. They did, and the look on the woman’s face made him feel as if this were the final evidence against him; he had done everything he remembered and more that he couldn’t.

  “Take those stairs up to the lobby. She’ll be waiting. Good luck and behave yourself.” Matthew looked at the stairs, took a deep breath and started walking.

  Lu looked sadder than he thought possible. He wondered briefly what she would look like at his funeral—not this bad, probably. The lobby was small, with wooden benches against the walls. A policeman stood behind a glass partition. How many of these unhappy reunions had the man witnessed? Lu didn’t look at him right away, though she must have heard his guilty footsteps. Finally, her eyes met his and he was almost knocked over by her grief, by what he imagined she saw when she looked at him. “How are you?” The fact that she cared, even when he deserved to suffer, even when she’d told him so, was a constant surprise.