The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [54]
With that done, Mel tended to other related matters while Max took a trip to The Crow Job’s backside. He returned with nothing he didn’t already know, with the exception of a general knowledge of the area and a visual familiarity with the scene. He’d requested to view Nigel’s body with McGregor; there were no funeral plans, needless to say, due to a confounding absence of family or friends in any way linked to him, and due to understandable reasons of secrecy....
...the matter instantly proved to be perplexing enough to inspire the local P.D. into buttoning their lips permanently.
The only problem they had in doing that was in the way the discovery gained media attention throughout the stunted pursuit for the child’s identity. Matt McGregor’s experienced insight was largely responsible for the cover-up and the Fed’s intervention.
In other words, Max’s request to view the corpse was going to take a little while to be granted.
Max made good of his promise to Mel that they would have dinner together that night, although when they spoke to each other and Melony managed to share a few thoughts, Max simply interrogated her.
***
Later still that evening, Melony caught her husband red-handed (and much to her non-expectations) smoking a cigarette on the front porch, standing candidly beside decorative marble pottery which was empty but for a dozen or so expired butts.
***
The mid-to-late morning of Sunday was uneventful with the exception of an enlivening telephone call from Matt McGregor, proclaiming news of another grisly discovery, made from within the room of a motel down the street from The Crow Job, and of the related disappearance of a certain reverend’s daughter.
15.
Ralston and Jessica
Ralston sat under the dim light in the corner chair, nude, beads of sweat like blisters spread upon a muscular body neglected by laziness and time, his hairless chest rising and then slowly falling from the drags of the redolent fumes of a half-spent Thai joint. The pot was good. It was very good. And very abundant. Its vaporous streams accumulated at the ceiling and drifted languidly out the open window.
He sat there, his shadow casting a distorted framework of blackness across the carpet, trailing toward the queen-sized waterbed and over the side of a black-and-white-checkered comforter until it arrived at Jessica’s own sleek nudeness resting, almost posing, spread-eagle atop several bed pillows. In a way, she was tantalizing him, but in a way, she didn’t care. She was just as comfortably numb as her celebrity boyfriend was, feeling pretty goddamn good about herself, about the past day, about the night, about the early morning hours as those hours crept upon the two of them since the concert of the night before.
Right then, time was slowly creeping upon the early morning hour of two a.m., Sunday morning. They had been partying since they returned from The Crow Job concert to their two-story home in the upper-class section of Brea the morning before. The afternoon after the concert, band members and swarms of friends and friends of friends had flooded their home in celebration of the gig’s success, highlighted by a half-hearted but promising little review of the gig in the Show section of the Orange County Register’s early edition, presented to Ralston’s guests by the band’s bass player and courtesy of the paper boy.
The party had dwindled considerably soon afterwards, though it had officially ended later that evening. Such was Ralston’s parties...all-nighters and all-dayers...and if it wasn’t for Jessica’s fatigue and Ralston’s own growing yearnings for a peace-and-quiet kick-back time of solitude, the celebration would have lasted the weekend.
Another reason for Ralston to call it quits this time, the most important reason, was that he