The Dark Man (15 page)

“Folks are out there watching, Ford.”

“
Again
, who are these people and what are they watching?”

“Anybody and everybody. Former fans. People like to keep up, you know? Nothing is private or personal anymore. And it’s simple things, too, like hypothetically, maybe some detective took a selfie with you in Anchorage six months ago, he posts it online somewhere, some picture of you smiling and giving a thumbs up while he’s got his arm around you; that thing gets a thousand likes and your name lives on. Fans get to see that the almighty Ford Atticus Ford didn’t let a little bad press get him down. Some of the crazies have online maps tracking your trips.”

Now it’s my turn to say, “Really?”

“You still got murdered publicly for about two weeks after the lawsuits were tied up, but then they found that senator from Oklahoma with four hookers in his office and poof, you’re old news. It’s amazing how fast people move on.”

I sip my beer. Time for a little revelation of my own. “Glad I’m no longer the social pariah—thank God—but the good thing is, I’ve been perfectly happy away from all that. At least for the time being. But there’s always been this thing, this idea—never mind.”

“What?”

I can hear myself saying it out loud, and the thought sounds insane. “I’ve been thinking about pitching another show when I’m ready. Maybe a show where a crew follows me around and I help these detectives solve crimes, like I’m out there doing good for society.”

“Redemption.”

“It’s more like I’m looking at the world as a good place that I can help, but yeah, you could say redemption is a factor. I’ve made a couple of phone calls. Mostly it’s been wishes and wants or ifs and buts.” I have to take a sip of this beer. My throat has gotten dry. It’s the first time I’ve admitted this to anyone other than Ulie.

The bottle clunks against the table, half of it gone.

Apparently I needed more than a sip.

“Could work,” Mike says, “but listen to this. Since you’re not public enemy number one anymore, Carla has an even bigger idea.”

I haven’t talked to Carla since our last day in court when the judge ordered The Paranormal Channel and its subsidiaries to pay the Hoppers 6.66 million dollars in damages.

I shit you not: 6-6-6.

Maybe Judge Karen Dunham had a sense of humor. Maybe she was trying to send a message.

Regardless, Carla tried to shake my hand, I flipped her the bird instead, and I haven’t seen nor heard from her since.

“Carla has an idea,” I say, “and I don’t fucking care.”

Mike puts his elbows on the table and leans toward me. “I completely agree.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, fuck Carla. But …”

“Why did I know there was a ‘but’ coming?”

“You’re hoping for redemption, yeah? Here’s Carla’s proposal: we make a documentary, hour and a half long, give or take, and she thinks she can get
national
theatrical distribution. The great Ford Atticus Ford is coming to a silver screen near you.” He makes a wide gesture with his hands, displaying my name up on some invisible marquee. “We’re talking in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred theaters on opening night. They’ve conducted interviews with focus groups and the tests have scored astronomically. Carla thinks she can finagle us some points on the back end, too. Ford, don’t shake your head. Listen to me. We’re talking tens of
millions
of dollars. All we’d have to do is spend a couple of weeks shooting, and if it does as well as they project, we’d be set for life.”

I can’t help but get titillated by the suggestion. My brain is buzzing with a hundred concepts already. There have been so many cases that I’ve worked on in the past two years that could use national attention. Hate crimes, domestic abuse, child abandonment—so many charities and organizations that need better funding and resources.

I’m not worried about the money. Regardless of what happened with the show, I walked away with plenty in my coffers. So did Mike, I thought.

“Let me think about it,” I tell him, keeping my bubbling enthusiasm buried for now. “And I’ll think about it on one condition. You keep Carla as far away from me as you possibly can.”

Mike grins and lifts his finger to Caribou, ordering another round. “Carla suspected that would be the case, and she’s already agreed to take a hands-off production credit to get you on board. You’re the talent, Ford, the draw, and she knows that. I know it, too. You’re the face, I’m the brains.”

I don’t even know how to express myself, so I hold up a saltshaker like it’s a glass of champagne. “I’m not saying yes, mind you, but man, this is unreal. It’s exactly what I’ve been wanting for almost two years now. There are so many things we can do. Wait, yeah, there’s that lighthouse down in Florida. I got in good with the chief of police there—I’m sure he would love to have us work on this impossible cold case they’ve been looking at since 1987, and I know he—”

“Ford—”

“—would be totally cool with loaning us one of his detectives—”

“—Ford—”

“—for a couple of weeks—”

“Hey. Dude. Listen to me. We aren’t going to have creative control.”

My heart slams to a stop like a crash test dummy’s head against a steering wheel, then sinks down to somewhere around my colon. “We don’t?”

“No, they already have the concept worked up. It’s the
concept
that tested so goddamn amazing.”

“Which is what?”

“We go after the right-hander that hurt Chelsea. We fight back.”

I’m flabbergasted that he would even suggest such a thing, let alone be on board with it. After all we went through with that family. After everything we put that little girl through. “Mike.
Mike
? You’re kidding, right?” I ask this around a flabbergasted chuckle.

“It’s what the people want.”

“No. No, no, no. Not a fucking chance. I am not putting Chelsea Hopper through anything else. Not publicly. Never again. I can’t even think of all the ways I would say no to this. And even if, by some miracle of the heavens above that I would give five seconds of thought to the possibility, the Hoppers wouldn’t come within a thousand miles of me. They would rather drive a wooden stake through my heart than see my face again. Are you nuts? Is Carla nuts? What the hell?”

He scratches his forehead with the mouth of the beer bottle. “You finished?”

“I’m just getting started.”

“Before you do, hear me out.”

I remain silent, fuming.

Mike continues, “I don’t know how she did it. Probably because she’s some magical sorceress and sold the souls of a million newborns to the devil himself, but Carla got the Hoppers to agree.”

“What!”

“In concept alone, nothing more. They don’t want anything to do with the story, or the filming, or the production. The marketing, the celebrities, nothing. They’re only granting the rights to their family’s story—
because
—they have a memoir coming out this fall. They—”

“So now
they’re
exploiting Chelsea? What happened to all the money they got in the settlement?”

“After all the lawyer fees and suits and countersuits and appeals, they didn’t come away with all that much. Haven’t you kept up with this?”

“Obviously not.”

“It’s how it works, Ford, you know that. That being the case, if somebody from Fifth Avenue, or wherever those big publishers live, somebody shows up on your front doorstep with a check that has two commas and six zeroes in it, and you don’t have to fight anybody in
court
for it—it’s easy to see how some small, tortured family like the Hoppers might hand over the rights for a bigger house, maybe a deeper college fund for Chelsea. Cosmetic surgery to conceal the scars that a fucking
demon
gave their daughter? You’d do the same, right?”

From my position, having had money, and having kept money, enough to last me for a long, long while, my answer is no. It’s not worth it. However, given what I know about the Hoppers and their situation, okay, yeah. Maybe it’s not necessarily exploitation if they feel like their story could serve as a warning to other families looking to cash in.

Hell if I know. People do strange things to fatten their bank accounts.

I ask Mike, “So they’re on board with this whole fucked-all-to-hell idea as long as a paycheck is involved, and they don’t have to look us in the eye?”

He salutes me with his beer bottle.

“And you’re okay with this? You’re okay coming back? Honest to God, Mike, I never thought I’d hear from you again. I called you today because I needed help, like actual, legitimate help with this badass right-hander because there’s no other person on this planet that I would trust to go to war with me against something so strong, and then you show up, lying about how you just want to help Craghorn—”

“I’m not lying about that. He needs help, for sure.”

“Then you drop this on me? What in the immortal fuck, dude? Do you need the money? What’s the deal? Why the flip-flop? One minute you’re punching me in the face and the next, you’re practically begging me to come work with you again. I—I can’t even fathom what’s going on here.”

Mike snorts and looks away; he can barely make eye contact with me. “The truth is, it took a few trips to a shrink, but I finally got around to forgiving you. And, for months now, I’ve been waffling about whether I was actually going to say something. I was there, man. I totally was. And then—then I showed up today, saw your face, and a whole rush of anger came on like goddamn Niagara Falls and I couldn’t let it go again. Not until, well, not until we got back into the groove. By then it was just—this is hard, dude. Man to man, this opening-up thing. The doc says I gotta do it, though. Good for my head.” He tips back in his chair, nibbles on his bottom lip awhile before he continues. “So there’s that. And then, Toni and I, we got caught up in some bad investments,” he adds, like he’s already regretting the words coming out of his mouth.

“You? Captain Penny-Pincher?”

“I was stupid. Impulsive. Greedy, with a wife that wants nice things. I don’t know how much cash you have left—”

“Plenty.”

“You would’ve thought I had rocks up here,” he says, rapping his knuckles against his skull. “I had all these people coming to me with ‘investment opportunities,’ and shit. There was this one with a salsa factory down in Guadalajara. Profit margins were supposed to be—you know what, it doesn’t matter. The money went first, then the houses, the cars. The kids are so ashamed of me, they’ve barely spoken to me in months. We managed to keep the beach house in Kitty Hawk, but that was because we took every single penny we found to save it. I’m talking, like, Toni and I were smashing the kids’ piggy banks with a ball-peen hammer. It’s been tough, bro, I won’t lie. I’ve tried to get my own ideas made into shows, checking around with all the old contacts, ringing them up. They wouldn’t touch any of my pitches, not without you. Not without the almighty Ford Atticus Ford running point. I was so pissed that I didn’t even want to look you in the eye, much less be on another show with you ever again. It took a while, but I got over it.”

“But why now? Why this thing with Carla and the Hoppers?”

His shoulders go up to his ears and then drop, resigned. “Same goes for me. Like I said, somebody comes at you with promises of a check that has six zeroes and two commas, it’s hard to say no. I’m not proud of it.”

I take a second to let this marinate. Mike’s broke; he obviously and desperately needs the money, so much so that he’s willing to overlook my past transgressions. He’s also willing to overlook the fact that we would once again be allowing Carla Hancock to exploit the story of little Chelsea Hopper.

I want to tell him to go to hell, that I will
not
take advantage of her again, even if her parents are blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes.

But I could also get national attention for something I’ve been doing privately already with my own investigations. Millions of theatergoers could watch as I send that bastard right-hander back to where he belongs.

Talk about emotional wavering. I’m like a swing set in a hurricane.

Mike says, “I get it, Ford. It’s a big whammy. You probably need some time. Just promise me you’ll think it over, okay?”

Until I have a chance to process this, I refuse to tell him that I’ve already been working on Chelsea’s case on the side. “Let me sleep on it. But first you have to help me beat that thing over at Craghorn’s. I have a job to do, and you owe me for the surprise punch in the nutsack.”

Mike and I remain silent on the ride back over to Craghorn’s house. He tossed his idea grenade in my direction, and he probably feels like he’s allowing it to do the smart thing and simmer awhile before he brings it up again. The only thing he does say is this: “Kind of a dick move to spring it on you like that.”

I agree with a simple, “Yeah.”

Then we pull into Craghorn’s driveway. With his car gone, and Detective Thomas’s unmarked sedan out of the way, I’m thankful we don’t have to spend fifteen minutes driving around the block, praying someone will leave a spot open.

We slam the doors of the rented Honda closed and stroll through the gentle sprinkle, turning and climbing the steps, side-by-side. In my mind, I’m picturing us as two gunslingers in the Old West, starring in an action movie directed by Michael Bay, where we’re marching in slow motion with some badass guitar riff overlaid in the background.

We did that for an episode at some ghost town in Nevada back during season five, and I’m fairly certain it was my favorite thirty seconds of staged footage on the show.

I use Craghorn’s spare key to unlock the deadbolt and then reach for the door handle. It’s a chunk of ice. I picture my hand getting stuck to it, ripping off a layer of skin. Instinctively I recoil, and it’s nice to see that I don’t leave anything behind on the metal when my hand comes free. “Jesus, feel that.”

Mike touches it with the back of his hand and whistles. “That’s insane. How warm is it out here?”

“Eighty-five, at least. Can you imagine the strength of that thing inside?”

“I don’t want to.”

“And Louisa is trapped in there with it.”