Regeneration Read online

  Regeneration

  Max Allan Collins

  Barbara Collins

  Regeneration

  Kindle Edition

  © Copyright 2021 (As Revised) Max Allan Collins and Barbara Collins

  Wolfpack Publishing

  5130 S. Fort Apache Rd. 215-380

  Las Vegas, NV 89148

  wolfpackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64734-560-0

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64734-561-7

  Also by Max Allan Collins

  John Sand Thrillers

  Come Spy With Me

  Live Fast, Spy Hard

  Other Titles

  An Eliot Ness Mystery Omnibus

  Mommy & Mommy's Day: A Suspense Duo

  Murderlized: Stories

  Too Many Tom Cats: And Other Feline Tales of Suspense

  Murder—His & Hers: Stories

  Reincarnal & Other Dark Tales

  Get your FREE copy of Natural Death Inc.: A Short Story

  Join the Max Allan Collins mailing list for information on new releases, updates, discount offers, and your FREE eBook copy of Natural Death Inc.: A Short Story.

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I

  1. “Big Girls Don’t Cry”

  2. “It’s Over”

  3. “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”

  INTERIM

  PART II

  4. “Be True To Your School”

  5. “To Sir With Love”

  6. “You Make Me Feel Brand New”

  INTERIM

  PART III

  7. “California Dreamin”

  8. “(Listen) Do You Want To Know A Secret?”

  9. “You Can’t Hurry Love”

  10. “Doctor My Eyes”

  11. “Beep Beep”

  12. “Midnight Confessions”

  13. “We Gotta Get Outa This Place”

  14. “Time In A Bottle”

  A Look At: Reincarnal & Other Dark Tales

  Get your FREE copy of Natural Death Inc.: A Short Story

  About The Authors

  Also by Max Allan Collins

  Regeneration

  For the class of ’66

  Hope I die before I get old.

  —Pete Townshend, “My Generation”

  Prologue

  “EVE Of DESTRUCTION”

  (Barry McGuire, #1 Billboard , 1965)

  The homeless man leaned against the granite wall of the Kafer Building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, enjoying the coolness of the stone, waiting for the white-collar workers to leave the building for the day. He was nearly six feet tall, or at least had been, before slouching into anonymity, and the handsome man he’d once been could be discerned by anyone who took the time (which was no one): Indian-sharp cheekbones, skin tanned from the sun, gray-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail with a rubber band he’d found on the sidewalk.

  Wearing faded denim jeans and his best T-shirt, which bore only a few permanent stains, he prided himself on being better dressed than his fellow rabble roaming the streets of the City of Angels. And he was more polite than his piss-stained peers, too, making sure his demeanor was unthreatening whenever he asked the working class for spare change, because he made out like a bandit that way.

  He hadn’t always been homeless, of course, though he knew plenty who had grown up a part of this under-est of underclasses. But even the riffraff who’d raised themselves on the fringes of L.A. had histories. Ben was no exception—he wasn’t just another sad, tortured creature rummaging in dumpsters and sleeping in parks. He was a man, a person. He had a past.

  Benjamin Franklin McRae was born and raised in a small river town in Missouri where he grew to be captain of the football team in high school, a three-point senior with a bright future looming after graduation in ’66. He and his steady, Betsy Jane, had been in the homecoming king and queen’s court, and they’d gone to Kirkwood Community College together. They were engaged in the summer of ’68.

  But that same turbulent summer, he drew an unlucky draft number, and instead of finishing college as planned, he left his life and future wife behind and soon found himself in Da Nang, knee-deep in rice paddies, no longer breathing in clean fresh Midwestern air, but the pungent aromas of napalm and Agent Orange.

  He had killed people and seen people killed. While he had no atrocities on his conscience, personally, he had seen the ditches filled with Vietnamese civilians, families, fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, sleeping wide-eyed in those silly pajama-like outfits, riddled with slugs, soaked with blood. He had walked the tall grass and seen his buds fall dead beside him, a bullet through the throat, through the chest, through the groin, disappearing into the brush as if swallowed by the earth; he had shot upward at trees and, like weird falling fruit, snipers dropped to the ground near his feet, teenage boys with empty faces and full rifles.

  And, too, he’d seen sweet innocent kids—four or five at most—hurling homemade hand grenades.

  After two tours of duty, Uncle Sugar returned him to the States—many in his platoon were not so lucky—and, with his mom and dad dead and Betsy Jane married with two kids, he had left Missouri for the promise of sunshine and prosperity the Beach Boys had sung about. Settling in Los Angeles, he grew his hair out, fell in with the make-love-not-war crowd and never let any of the hippie chicks he was banging or longhairs he was scoring dope off of know he was one of the baby murderers they so disdained.

  One day he woke up, shook the drug hangover off, and walked back into the real world. Within days, he was pouring cement for the construction business, which was just the sort of mindless labor he craved. But terrible nightly dreams began taking him back to the jungle and the rice paddies and he would wake shivering, sweating, not even wanting to try to go back to sleep. So he would drag into work half-dead, and perform his job half-assed.

  A rash of illnesses followed, including fatigue and depression, causing him to lose one job after another. The doctors at the veterans hospital had some kind of term for it—delayed post-combat stress fatigue syndrome or some such shit—and put him on a variety of antidepressants.

  Drugs again.

  But these, whether uppers or downers, only made his constant fatigue worse. Drinking helped numb the hurt, but didn’t do much for his job prospects.

  Ben wanted to work, he really did, and, yeah, he drank some, but he was no rummy, he had never been one to drink on the job; but even if he felt better and his fatigue went away, who would hire him now?

  Now that so many years had slipped through his fingers, and he was pushing fifty?

  It was a little after six o’clock in the evening and dusk was beginning to sneak in like Cong from the east, the buildings casting long shadows over the city. Ben had been there since four that afternoon, to catch the older executives slipping away early for the day, heading out to the links for a round of golf before dinner. He generally did well with them, especially if he mentioned he was a Viet Nam vet; these were his classmates, from the late ’60s and early ’70s—they looked at him and saw the shell of their brother who got killed over there, or the best friend they’d lost contact with a million years ago. So they would hand him a buck or two, perhaps feeling guilty that they, too, hadn’t gone off to that sen
seless war, as if Ben wouldn’t have stayed home if he could.

  But Ben had learned that the professionals who left later, between five and six o’clock—younger ones in their twenties and early thirties, Generation X, wasn’t that what they were called?— were a cold, callous lot. The only thing he ever got from them was a blankly contemptuous stare, if they bothered to look at him at all.

  He was ready to call it quits for the day, when a young woman he’d seen before, wearing a fetching, form-fitting red suit with an oversize collar and straight skirt, stepped out of the building onto the sidewalk.

  A smile tickled his stubbly face. There was always time to take a look at this one. Not that good-looking women were exactly rare in this part of the world—but there was something about her, something that reminded him of the girls he’d dated, of Betsy Jane and the backseat of his Chevy Nova.

  She had shoulder-length auburn hair and pink satiny skin that seemed to glow. Her face was youthful, her features exquisite, as beautiful as any of the Hollywood wannabes he’d seen on these streets.

  She paused in front of the building, looking up Wilshire Boulevard, then down. He remained where he was, leaning against the building, too intimidated to ask her for money.

  No, not intimidated—embarrassed. It was goddamn hard to embarrass a homeless beggar like him, but this vision, this reminder of a life lost or anyway misspent, made him ashamed. Made it all his own fault, somehow.

  Then something extraordinary happened: She walked over to him.

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember where I parked my car,” she said with a little laugh, as if he were a casual friend or coworker. The laugh had a falling, tinkling cadence, like a wind chime.

  Ben looked into eyes as green and glimmering as an emerald. Cleared his throat. “White GM, right?”

  She had an odd look on her face, like she couldn’t even remember the make of her car. Was she on something?

  “White GM,” he repeated.

  Then she nodded. “Thanks for remembering. Funny—I’ve seen you standing over here. You look at me, sometimes.”

  Ben did something he hadn’t done since high school: He blushed. “Yes, I … I didn’t mean anything by it….”

  “No, it’s okay. But isn’t that funny? I remember that you stand here every day, but I don’t remember where I put my own car?”

  Another tinkling laugh.

  “Yeah, uh, funny,” he said.

  “Hysterical…. Can you help?”

  “Sure,” he said, and pointed across the boulevard. “I’ve seen you park up that side street sometimes. I wasn’t here this morning, but it’s worth a try.”

  “Thank you,” she responded with a little smile. “You’re very kind. You have nice eyes.”

  Was she flirting with him? That was insane. He remembered his place.

  And he took his best shot. “Uh … you wouldn’t happen to have any spare change, would ya? I could use a hot meal.”

  Her confused emerald eyes turned compassionate. “I’ll look,” she said, and dug into her black purse. She withdrew a twenty and handed it to him. “Will this do?”

  “Ah … yeah,” he said, stunned by her generosity. And touched. But before he could thank her, she turned away.

  He watched her walk down to the corner and wait for the light to turn green. When it did, she began to cross the busy intersection, the hem of her silk-linen red dress rising up her luscious Betsy Jane legs with every step…. And he wished he was eighteen again and captain of the football team and the prom, the goddamn fucking prom, was tonight.

  Suddenly a tan sedan with tinted windows squealed around the corner, the driver apparently not seeing her crossing the street.

  Ben shouted a warning, but it came too late, the impact of the car sending her up over the hood, with a terrible splash of blood, hurling her like a rag doll up and over the car, then down again, bone-crunchingly hard on the cruel pavement, behind the vehicle with another ghastly splash of blood, tossing her crumpled form, limbs askew, head at an unnatural angle, to the cement.

  The driver did not stop. And Ben saw something more grotesque than he’d ever seen in a life filled with grotesqueries: As the sedan sped away, the driver—through the tinted windshield Ben barely made him out, sunglasses, dark hair, male, twenties— turned on his windshield wipers and wiper solvent shot up and helped the blades wash away the blood.

  Ben was already breaking into a run, dodging in and out of traffic that was shrieking to a halt, and within seconds he reached her and, dropping down on his knees, gathered her broken body in his arms, her blood as red as the dress.

  And then he was back in the rice paddies, screaming, “Medic! Medic!” telling her to hold on, to hold on, a chopper was coming….

  But she just stared back at him with lifeless green eyes, and the EMT boys—when they finally came—were confused that Ben kept calling the dead woman Betsy Jane when her ID said something else.

  PART I

  Before

  “Big Girls Don’t Cry”

  (Four Seasons, #1 Billboard, 1962)

  Joyce Lackey stood at the wide window in her well-appointed office of polished granite and brushed steel on the sixty-third floor of the John Hancock Building in downtown Chicago. Looking out over the tops of the other buildings toward the soothing shoreline of Lake Michigan, she took in the carefree joggers and bikers and in-line skaters moving in miniature along a cement path under a continuous canopy of trees vivid with fall colors. The late afternoon sun spilled its rays downward like an endlessly unspooling bolt of gold lamé, while here and there, sailboats drifted lazily in the breeze across the turquoise lake.

  The view from this window was one Joyce—fifty-five, senior account executive at Ballard, Henke and Hurst Advertising—had worked long and hard to attain. It was a view she relished. It was a view Joyce knew she would never likely see again.

  With a sigh, the shapely brown-eyed blonde turned back to her massive mahogany desk where a tan leather Vuitton suitcase (no cardboard box for her) lay open, filled with the few office belongings she was allowed to take with her, a sadly austere culmination of thirty years of faithful service.

  The executive desk set—blotter, appointment book, pen and pencil holder with Seiko clock, along with the expensive MontBlanc pens—was her own, purchased some years ago in the basement of Neiman Marcus with her first bonus check, long before the company became prosperous enough to hand out MontBlanc pens to the executives like they were Bics. The crystal heart-shaped Swarovski paperweight was a gift from Henry Ballard, one of the founders of the company, a Robert Young-esque father figure she had adored (in both boardroom and bedroom).

  Henry had been the kindest, most handsome man she had ever met. Unfortunately, he was also a married man, with an atrophying trophy wife, four children and (at least during the years Joyce knew him) five grandchildren. It had been clear to Joyce from the beginning of their long affair that Henry would never leave his wife, whose Evanston family remained prominent social fixtures in Chicago, and investors in the firm. Oddly, Joyce never particularly wanted Henry to leave Doris, rather was content to see him at work—and after, when they would sometimes go to her condominium up the Gold Coast—instinctively realizing that her job was really her first love.

  And even if she did, from time to time, in the afterglow of fantastic sex, fantasize that one day Henry might show up at her door, suitcase in hand … that fantasy ended two years ago with his coronary over a plate of rare prime rib at the Cliff Dweller’s Club.

  She gazed across the room at some of the numerous awards arranged on small marble pillars that she had won for the advertising firm during her tenure; they would have to stay behind, along with others on the agency’s walls and in the reception-area display case. Which was all right with her. The way she felt now—that is, betrayed—the awards would only have wound up in a dumpster.

  Being forced into early retirement was an eventuality that had never crossed her mind. In fact, retiring at all h
ad never crossed her mind. For Christ’s sake, she had years of quality work left in her. She was at the top of her goddamn game!

  So why was the company doing this to her?

  Idly she toyed with the Patek Philippe watch on her wrist, a gift the board had given her last week in place of her job. Now she wondered if she had priced herself out of the market by asking for all those raises over the years … though God knows she certainly deserved them.

  When she was hired straight out of Northwestern as a copy writer in the 1970s, Ballard and Henke had been a struggling advertising outfit at the bottom of the local heap, until she catapulted them to the top of the business in the early 1980s with her “I’m worth it” campaign.

  With billboards and radio and TV spots trumpeting her slogan in every state of the union, Joyce had found herself profiled in Chicago magazine, the Tribune and Sun-Times, and even the giveaway Reader, which had singled her out for a tongue-in-cheek piece that put her on a pedestal of irony, picturing Joyce as the poster child for the Me Decade. This leftist, left-handed compliment had only boosted her standing in the industry.

  Then in the ’90s, sensing people were feeling guilty with their excessive spending—even though she herself never felt that way, particularly—Joyce had coined the phrase “provisional hedonism,” understanding the need for people to rationalize away their expensive purchases. This phrase remained within the industry itself, but her slogan for the public—“Buy it as an investment!”— became a new creed for the Baby Boomer generation, and one she personally had followed.