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Suddenly, something punctured his insides. At the same moment, a tide of nausea rose in his throat. The something hard and sharp seemed to spin out of control like a circular saw, cutting through his body, the pain excruciating. For a moment, Max remained upright, then fell to his knees.

Had he been stabbed? Light and dark specks danced before his eyes. He couldn’t really tell what was going on. Everything happened in slow motion.

No one came to help him. The kids either ignored him completely or came to stand over him, mouths open.

The pain began to subside. He felt himself all over—no blood, no wounds.

The kids stared at him as if he were an animal in a zoo.

He managed to get to his feet. Managed to walk out the door into the blinding sunlight. Sweat encased him like a second skin. His new shirt was wringing wet. He was lightheaded and sour-mouthed, but the pain in his gut was gone. His head ached. He looked down and saw a spatter of drool on his Arizona tee.

They’d told him he would never, ever, drink or use again. No alcohol, no more oxy. He’d scoffed at the notion. How could they be so sure? As time had gone on at the Desert Oasis Healing Center, Max had become certain of one thing: the day he got out, he would head straight for the nearest bar he could find.

But when the time came, he didn’t. In fact, it wasn’t until just this moment that he’d even contemplated taking a drink.

Whatever they did at the Desert Oasis Healing Center, it wasn’t aversion therapy. He knew people who had been through aversion therapy—they made you drink alcohol along with a concoction that would make you sick. The Desert Oasis Healing Center was nothing like other rehab centers he’d been to, and if Max had to put into words what they did or how they did it, he would have been at a loss. The program had seemed, well…half-assed. As if it was thought up on the spur of the moment.

They did New Age-type stuff, like leaving him floating in a sensory deprivation tank for hours at a time. Or locking him in a room with no way to see, hear, or feel anything, gloves like oven mitts over his hands. (He was allowed to use the facilities, allowed to eat, even allowed to leave the room, but he never did.) The only thing all those hours and days of “restricted environmental stimulation therapy” did for him was give him a major case of lassitude.

Yet
something
about the rehab center must have worked. Now he’d been treated to a definitive demonstration why going out for a beer wasn’t such a great idea. He felt weak, as if he’d run twenty miles. He sat on the edge of the boardwalk and closed his eyes, waiting for the dizziness to clear.

“Hey,” someone said near his ear. “You OK?”

Max looked back and saw the motel clerk who’d checked him in last night, standing on the boardwalk behind him, holding a bag of candy from The Apothecary Candy Store next door.

“I’m fine,” Max said.

“Don’t look like it to me.” The guy settled on the bench outside the candy store and dug into the sack. “Horehound. Want some? Might settle your stomach.”

“No thanks.”

“Hey, I know you.”

Max closed his eyes.
Wait
for it…

“You’re Max Conroy. That wasn’t the name you registered with, but you can’t fool me.” Guy just kept chatting merrily away, about the horehound candy—get it?
Hore
hound, funny, huh?—and about how this was a one-horse town where even the horse left, and all the time the sun beat down on Max’s head and he knew he was going into a blood sugar nosedive…

“Some guys were asking for you. I told them you checked out. Although technically, you didn’t—check out, I mean. You owe me for the long distance call.”

Just another hole in the old memory. Would he always be like this? “How much?”

“A dollar twenty-eight. You weren’t on long.”

Max reached into his jeans pocket. He heard the motel clerk shift on the bench, and when he looked back, the guy was scrutinizing him. “I was wondering all day why you looked familiar. When those guys came by, that clinched it. Max Conroy, that’s who you are.”

Max’s stomach ached, and he just wanted to get out of here. “If I was Max Conroy, would I be sitting here on this plank in Paradox, Arizona, getting ready to pay a one-dollar phone bill?”

The guy considered. “Maybe. You shooting a film here? Is that what you’re doing? Scouting? Don’t want anybody to know on account of people getting in your face asking for autographs? Hey, are you going to film one of the
V.A.M.Pyre
s here? My niece, she’s thirteen—man oh man, she’s in love with
you
, brother.”

“I’m not Max Conroy!”

“The guys looking for you thought you were.”

“What? What did they say?”

“Don’t bite my head off. I report, you decide, is all. They said they were looking for Max Conroy, the actor. I said you checked out and were long gone.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I wanted to mess with them, I guess. But I thought you’d be nicer.”

Max pushed his palm against his forehead. “Thanks,” he said. “Did you see them go?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. Saw ’em get on the on-ramp headed north.”

“Good.”

The motel clerk, who introduced himself as Luther James (“Jesse James was my great-great-great-great-great-uncle”) said, “If you want to stay here for a while, you know,
incognito
, I can fix you up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, first, you gotta change your look. See, you’re too obvious. You look like Max Conroy after a really bad night.”

Max was floating now, his blood sugar in the basement, everything taking on a surreal tinge. “Could you get me some juice?”

“What kind? Orange juice? Apple?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Luther returned with a bottle of apple juice from the drugstore, and Max drank it down. The blurred edges around his vision began to firm up. He still didn’t feel like moving, though.

Luther sat on the bench again. “See, the best way to change your look is to shave your head. Then people will see you completely different. They’ll be looking at your head, not your face.”

Max stood up. “Thanks for your help, but I’ve got everything under control.”

“Sure you do.” Luther laughed. “Tell you what. You want to get a feel for this town, make your character accurate, what you ought to do is work for a living.”

“I do work for a living.”

“That’s not really working, now, is it? Way I hear it, it’s mostly waiting around. Then you say a couple of lines, and you wait around some more. That’s not real man’s work.”

Max worked plenty—two hours in the gym six days a week, the time spent memorizing lines and researching his character, the long days and nights on the set. Not to mention his
other
job—promoting his films, making personal appearances and cameos. You had to work full time just to keep your name and face out there, or people would forget. “What I do is work.”

Luther waved at him. “Oh, sure, I didn’t mean to insult you or nothing.”

“Seriously. It’s hard work.”

“Yeah, I get you. All’s I’m saying is you seem to be looking for more. Am I right?”

He
was
right, but Max still felt insulted.

“You ever work with your hands? I need someone to finish putting up the rain gutters on my house. It’s monsoon season and it’s my number-one priority. But I have this bad back.” He leaned even farther forward and lowered his voice. “Tell you what. I’ll let you stay there if you’ll help me out. How about that?”

Max realized this was what he had been aiming for. All he’d wanted was to escape the pressure, escape the fishbowl, and go back to his life before he became a movie star.

For a moment there, he’d lost his way. For a moment, he’d gone back to being what he’d been before—an addict. He’d faltered. Max knew if he went back to LA, he would go right back to the drugs, the alcohol, just to survive. This was the last, best chance he’d ever have to transform himself.

“OK.”

“Ha
ha
,” Luther said, patting Max on the back. “I knew it! Tell you what. Let’s go to my place, OK? Let’s get you all taken care of, get you started on those gutters. Then we’ll see what’s what.”

As they walked, Max became aware of a car tracking them. He thought about walking into the nearest store when Luther said under his breath, “Should’ve known.”

A seventies-era Cadillac in mint condition pulled up beside them. A large man bounced out and opened his arms wide. “Luther, my boy! How are you faring?”

Luther stayed where he was and said, “I’m good, Unc.”

“Motel receipts?”

“Up.”

“Excellent! Give me a hug, boy, and introduce me to your friend.”

Luther introduced his uncle as Sam P. Noon.

“Call me Sam P. That’s what everyone calls me, son,” he said.

Max looked from one to the other. Luther had long stringy hair. His uncle had long stringy hair. Luther was shaped like a pear. His uncle was shaped like a pear. Sam P. looked like one of those inflatable clowns you’d hit and they’d spring back at you.

Sam P. was looking at Max. His eyes narrowed. Then he smiled. “Luther, my boy, we’ve got to talk. Why don’t you tell your handsome friend here you’ll meet up later?”

Luther glanced at Max. “Go ahead over to the motel. I’ll meet you there soon as I can.”

M
AX APPROACHED THE
Rat Motel cautiously, from the alley, and melted into the shade of the same tree he’d hidden under last time.

Good thing he did. The limo was back—parked outside the motel office, engine running, probably to keep the air conditioner on. A few moments later, his two former captors marched outside, clearly in a foul mood.

Seeing them walk out angry made Max feel better. He remained in shadow and watched as the limo turned the corner and accelerated away.

He was about to walk over when the sound of an engine starting up caught his attention.

A white truck was parked half a block up—a shiny new Chevy. The truck executed a U-turn and turned onto the street the limo had taken a few moments before.

Max hung back in the shade, his heart pounding.

He had the definite impression the white truck had been waiting for the limo. Were the people in the truck following the limo because they were looking for
him
?

Max wondered if he was getting just a little bit paranoid.

Better safe than sorry.
And so he waited.

And waited some more.

Finally, Luther drove up to the motel and Max walked across the street to meet him.

They drove out of town past a clutter of houses and businesses and up a dirt road between scruffy five-acre spreads to a place partially hidden by a fence of live bamboo. The white brick ranch could have belonged to the Rat Pack—if they’d been on a budget.

Luther opened the door to the house. “What do you think?”

He took in the sixties-era furniture arranged on a beaten-down white carpet.

“Nice,” Max murmured, to be polite. Frigid air-conditioning blasted the sunken living room. Luther showed him the house. It didn’t take long. Lots of white, lots of threadbare, lots of old.

“We can go out by the pool,” Luther said, motioning to the yard beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. “I have extra swim trunks, if you want to take a dip.”

Max declined.

He was glad, though, to be outside that frigid house, even in July. They sat in the shade of the terrace. Luther asked him the usual questions. What was it like to be a rich, famous movie star?

Did he really have a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle? (Yes.) And was it true it once belonged to James Dean? (No.) What was it like to sleep with a babe like Talia L’Apel? Were they really going to adopt a baby from Africa like it said in the tabloids? Wasn’t he just in rehab? As the questions got more personal and prurient, Luther pulled a bottle of Coca-Cola from the antique vending machine and held it up. “Coke?” Max nodded. It looked like the original bottle, the heavy greenish glass shaped like a woman.

“Sure.”

Luther turned away to open the bottle on the door and asked if Max ever had three-ways with Paris Hilton. With Lindsay Lohan? Were there ever guys? The questions were insulting, but he was used to that. Everybody thought his life belonged to them, and they could tell him how badly he was fucking up and give him all kinds of advice and ask rude questions. He hated that shit, but it was nothing unusual.

At least the Coke tasted good.

Luther disappeared inside the house and returned with a baking sheet of heated-over taquitos, the frozen kind, like Max’s mother used to make. He realized he was ravenously hungry. He ate four or five in a row and tried to keep up with the conversation. Luther handed him another Coke. Max watched the ice lumps clinging to the bottle, watched them slide down and drip between his fingers. He thought about telling Luther he could mind his own fucking business, but forgot about it when he heard a loud voice say, “Freeze!”

It was as if someone had spoken forcefully in his ear. A man’s voice, authoritative. But Max turned his head and no one was there. It was just the two of them here. He really was losing it.