The Five

FIVE

This Seat is Saved

TWENTY-ONE.

Ariel had lost her way.

She was wandering in a place unfamiliar. It was a hot thicket of leafy green vines that nearly blotted out the sun. What she could see of the sky was a white glare. She knew only that she had to get from where she was to some other place, that she couldn’t stay where she stood, and so she pushed onward through the wall of vegetation ahead as another closed at her back.

There were thorns in here. They were stabbing her and cutting across her skin whenever and wherever she moved. It was treacherous, this going forward. It was painful and almost unbearable, but she had no choice; she must bear it, to reach the other side.

She smelled earth, and heat, and the raw green growth that surrounded her. She was aware also of another smell, a sweet aroma, a rich scent nearly like wine, perfuming the air. She saw small dark berries hanging from the thorned vines by the hundreds, some wholly black and others touched with red, and she realized she stood in a dense thicket of blackberry brambles that went on in all directions.

The question was: which way led out? Or, another question, and more troubling: was there any way out?

She continued onward, in the direction she had chosen though she couldn’t remember making such a decision. It had been made for her, it seemed. She could always stop, turn and go another way, but it seemed to her that sometimes in this world you just have to trust something.

She had not gone very far when the man came through the brambles, and stood before her as if to block her path.

Ariel knew him. She knew his face, from a driver’s license picture. She knew what he’d done to two friends of hers, and she knew now what he wanted to do to her.

As she backed away, he followed. He wore no expression. Fear tightened around her heart and hobbled her legs. He came on unhurriedly, with a supreme and terrifying confidence, and as he closed the distance between them his face began to change.

Ariel saw the flesh ripple and move, like clay being reshaped by a phantom hand. The bones began to shift beneath it. With a series of cracking noises the features distorted and destroyed themselves as one cheek swelled outward and the other caved in, as the nose collapsed into a widening fissure and the forehead lengthened like a slab of veined stone. One eye retreated into the dark while the other burst out like the eye of a fish popped by a hook.

All this, while his lower jaw slid forward. Then with a sound like sticks being broken it began to unhinge itself from the upper jaw, and as Ariel backed away through the slashing thorns she put her hand up before her own face to push aside the image of a reptilian mouth yawning open, stretching itself to impossible size, dwarfing even the misshapen head upon which it had grown. The grotesque body lurched toward her, staggering through the brambles, its arms at its side and hands gripped into fists, its single eye wet and gleaming on the edge of the voracious mouth.

Something dark flew out of that gaping hole. It was followed by another, and another still, and then three at a time and five at a time, ten and then twenty, a vomiting forth of dark sleek projectiles that in an instant grew wings and black feathers and spun around Ariel like a living whirlwind.

The crows flew in black swarms from Jeremy Pett’s straining mouth. Some of them came at Ariel, jabbing and clawing, their small red eyes ticking this way and that, but most of them fell upon the fruit, and this they tore from the vines and swallowed in dripping beaks as they fought each other for the next swallow. They tumbled through the black-stained air in vicious struggling knots, their shrill cries nearly human in their expressions of greed, triumph and frustrated anguish.

Thousands of crows blighted the air. They battered themselves into Ariel’s face, they battered into each other and, still fighting and tearing at each other over the sweet pulp, flapped on broken wings in their death spirals. Through chinks in the black walls that circled her, Ariel saw Jeremy Pett spinning around and around, his arms outstretched wide like the cylinders of a bizarre machine, the engine of a carnival ride that has popped its rivets and burned out its regulators and now must spin and spin until it spins itself to pieces or shatters itself in a blast and roar. As the crows streamed out of him, he had shriveled. His clothes had fallen away, revealing a body that had become an emaciated horror of gray flesh. The hideous head with its gaping mouth had darkened like an old wart and was flagging back and forth, boneless, on the spindly neck. It began to implode, and as the last few black feathered things struggled out blinking their red eyes and already tearing at each other, the head collapsed like an airless balloon.

In all this shrieking noise, in all this flurry of feathers and chaos of claws, Ariel watched the skeletal body fall, still locked in its spinning circle, and she thought, He is a vessel.

The crows came at her. They tangled in her hair and jammed against her nostrils. They squirmed against her eyes and thrashed across her mouth. But as she staggered back, seeking some place to protect herself in this field of life that had become the province of hell, she realized that they were only coming at her because she was between them and the few vines of fruit that remained unseized, and they would not stop until they had it all, every last bit of it.

Look at me, someone said.

Ariel turned her head. Standing beside her was the girl.

She looked exactly as Ariel remembered her. She wore the same clothes and the same raggedy straw hat, and she stared at Ariel through ebony eyes that were both serene and impassioned. Her cheeks were marred by scatters of teenaged acne, the same as before.

Walk with me, the girl said. Her voice had no accent yet it reminded Ariel of a voice she had once heard and trusted, somewhere in the long-ago.

When the girl held out her hand Ariel took it.

The crows continued to swirl around them, but none penetrated the space between.

Whether the girl moved first or she herself did, Ariel didn’t know. But they were walking together side-by-side through the brambles, hand holding hand, as the black curtains of crows flapped in their faces and hissed at their backs. Still, not one entered the space they occupied, and as Ariel and the girl walked forward the crows retreated before them. Speaking in shrill tongues of indignation, the solid walls of feathers and glinting crimson eyes began to break apart like so many crumbling leaves shaken off a dead tree.

Ariel awakened and lay staring at the ceiling. A fan was lazily turning up there, creaking very softly. The sunlight was bright through the pale yellow window curtains. A dog barked somewhere along Benton Place, and a motorcycle went past. She turned her head on the pillow in search of a clock. The one on the bedside table said it was about ten minutes after ten, the hands in a pleasing symmetry. She stretched and heard her backbone pop, and she started to push aside the sheet but she decided she would lie there until ten-fifteen and try to absorb her dream.

She was in bed in the guest bedroom at Berke’s mother’s house, in an area of small but neatly-kept homes in the northeast section of San Diego, perched on a hill above Interstate 15. They’d gotten here last night, after a two-hundred-and-eighty mile drive from Stone Church. When they’d reached the house, they were so wrung out by their experience that all they could do was mumble some pleasantries to Mrs. Fisk and find a place to stow their bags before they crashed. Truitt Allen, though he’d driven the whole distance, had gone into the den with his laptop, cellphone and a cup of coffee and shut the door. Ariel assumed the white GMC Yukon with dark-tinted windows that had trailed them up through the winding streets and parked in front of the house was still there; she would check, just out of curiosity, when she got out of bed.

It was interesting, she thought, how they handled the gas situation. Last night when they needed to fill up, True had given some kind of code over his cellphone. When the Scumbucket had pulled up to the pumps at a Texaco station, the white Yukon and another Yukon, this one a metallic gray, had stopped on either side of The Five’s van and trailer. From each SUV two men dressed like True, in casual slacks and shirts, had gotten out to stand facing the darkness on the far side of I-8. They would have looked like ordinary business travellers stretching their legs except for the weirdly-shaped pairs of binoculars they were using as they scanned back and forth. “Night vision,” Nomad had told her. “Either that, or thermal.”

True had pumped their gas. A third man from both the SUVs had filled those tanks as well. There’d been a brief discussion among the agents and a pair of them went into the gas station and came out each carrying two bags of popcorn and four cups of coffee in a styrofoam tray. True had asked if anybody needed to use the restrooms, and when all the band members said they did, they got an FBI escort who waited outside the doors. Never was there a time when two of the agents did not keep watch with their night vision or thermal or whatever it was. Ariel had the impression that there was a fourth man in each Yukon, riding in the back, just from some movement she thought she detected and from the fourth coffee. Nine men on duty, including True. Ariel figured that had to be a lot of taxpayer money being spent, to safeguard the lives of four musicians whose deodorant had worn off a long time ago. Plus True had put their gasoline on his own—or his agency’s—credit card. No wonder this country was so deep in debt.

Ariel lifted her head and looked at the other single bed in the room. John Charles was still asleep, tangled up in his sheet as if he too had dreamed of blackberry brambles and the striding specter of Jeremy Pett. His face was turned away from her, toward the window. She hated to see what his right eye looked like today, because last night it had been swollen shut as tight as an oyster and colored a curious mingled palette of black with purple edges and olive-green highlights. The icepack they’d given him at the medical trailer had helped some, she guessed, and so had the supply of Excedrin Extra Strength.

He had saved her life.

She still couldn’t get her mind around yesterday afternoon. It had been just like the cliché: everything happened so fast. When John had stopped singing and the music had faltered, and then John had stage-dived like a lunatic…it was too much to handle. And later learning that the young man—nineteen years old on his California driver’s license, True had told them—had been aiming that gun at her…too much to handle.

The shooter had been taken away very quickly and efficiently. After The Five had gotten offstage and the techs had cleared their gear, Monster Ripper had started setting up about an hour later, but soon after that—past a visit to the medical trailer and brief interviews with reporters from the Tucson TV stations and Brad Lowell from The Daily Star—the Scumbucket had pulled out of that particular circus with True behind the wheel. On I-8 West, the two Yukons had gotten into position, the metallic gray in front and the white behind them, and that was how they rolled.

He had saved her life.

It was going to take her a long time to put this gift on a shelf, if ever.

He snorted a little bit, as if reading her thoughts. His hand came up to touch his eye, but even in sleep his brain figured he probably shouldn’t do that and his hand sank back down again across his chest.

True hadn’t told them the young man’s name yet, though he’d certainly seen it on the license. He’d said he would let them know what developed, and that was last night before he’d secluded himself in the den.

Ariel allowed herself to return to the dream, and play it back again. It was so bright and sunny and cheerful in the bedroom. There was the spicy odor of air fragrance, which maybe Mrs. Fisk had sprayed around this morning to counter their need for showers. It was difficult to think of dark things, in here, but now she must.

He is a vessel.

She remembered thinking that. What did it mean, exactly? She retained the vivid image of the crows, swarming at the fruit and tearing it from the vines. And she retained the vivid image of the girl.

The girl.

Walk with me.

Ariel was struck with a desire—a need—to see the song. The Kumbaya song, Berke had called it. She leaned over to the floor, where her fringed-leather bag was parked next to her blue suitcase. She opened the bag, removed from it her notebook with its glued-on gemstones of a dozen colors, and then turned to the page upon which she’d written what they had of the communal song. The last song, it was supposed to be. Performed at the last show in Austin, on Saturday the 16th of August. The song that was a testament to The Five, that was written by all of them together, that held a little of their souls in its words and music.

Welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it.

Write a song about it, just keep it under four minutes.

Got to figure what to keep, and what to leave behind, and like life it’s never easy.

I wish you safe travel and courage when you need it.

And that was it, so far.

Unremarkable.

A song in progress.

Something in progress.

Ariel scanned the lines again. What she’d written down, she realized, began and ended—to this point, at least—with words spoken by the girl at the well.

Sitting up on the bed with a pillow at her back, with a dog barking down the street and the sunlight streaming through the yellow curtains, Ariel felt a transcendent truth come upon her, a sense of wonder that had some fear mixed in with it too, yes, but it was like being locked in a tight and exhilarating groove of rhythm and tempo, the knowledge that everything was right, was flowing as it should, and that to break this rhythm, this strange and somewhat frightening connection, this forward motion that led to an unknown counterpoint, would not only be unprofessional, it would be tragic.

Ariel thought that the girl—whoever and whatever she might be—was helping them write this song.

“John?” she said. And again: “John?”

“No,” he mumbled, “I don’t want any.”

She was relieved, in a way. What was she going to tell him? How was she going to explain what she felt? And it was just a feeling, that’s all it was.

Walk with me, the girl had said.

Ariel decided she needed to get up. Like right now. She needed to take a shower and wash the red dust of Stone Church out of her hair, and then she needed to get dressed and find a quiet place to work on this song.

It was time to get serious.

Terry was still asleep on the floor, in his sleeping bag. Berke had taken the sofa in the basement’s little junkroom. It’s good enough for me, Ariel had heard Berke tell her mother before she’d carried her suitcase down the steps. Ariel figured Berke had wanted to sleep as far as possible from the room where her mother and stepfather had lain together for nearly ten years. As Ariel understood the story, Berke had been fourteen when her mother and father had divorced, and later her mother had sold the house where Berke had been born and she and her daughter had moved in with Floyd Fisk, the divorced father of a twenty-year-old nursing student, after the wedding.

Ariel took her shower, washed her hair and got dressed in jeans and a purple long-sleeved peasant blouse with a floral print and ruffles of white lace at the cuffs and neck. One of her many finds from vintage clothes shops, though now these were nearly as expensive as the newer items. When she emerged from the bathroom she ran into a bleary-eyed Terry, who just grunted a greeting and shambled past in his tatty gray bathrobe.

Ariel saw that John was still conked out. Maybe that was for the best. She took her notebook and her purple-inked pen and walked through the hallway into the kitchen, where she found Berke’s mother monitoring a crockpot while she was watching a soap opera on a small TV.

“Good morning!” Berke’s mother had been born Kim Chapman, but somewhere in her days as a thespian and cheerleader at Patrick Henry High School she’d been called ‘Chappie’, and it had stuck. Her face lit up with the presence of someone else in the room. She was an attractive woman, tall and lean with her daughter’s strong bone structure. But her brown eyes, many shades lighter than Berke’s, were sad. Ariel had met Chappie on several occasions when they’d played San Diego but had never been to this house. She knew that Chappie was forty-nine, that she was the middle child between two brothers, that her own father was a retired technical worker for Northrup Grumman who had once shaken the hand of Howard Hughes, and that she used Clairol Medium Brown to cover up the creeping gray in her long, still-silky hair. She was wearing a pair of beige slacks and a black sleeveless blouse.

“Morning,” Ariel replied. “Smells good.”

“Veggie stew for lunch. Do you want breakfast? I can make just about anything.”

“Really, all I’d like is a glass of orange juice.” She reconsidered. “Maybe some toast would be nice. And some jam?”

“Juice, two slices of whole-wheat toast and some strawberry jam. Does that sound all right?”

“Great. I’ll get the juice.” Ariel made a move toward the refrigerator, which was covered with bright little flowery magnets in different hues holding a variety of color photos, some faded with age. She saw glimpses of a different world: a smiling, balding heavy-set man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and sitting amid piles of books; a slim girl about sixteen years old with thick, curly black hair pounding away at a drum set with her eyes closed; a terrier of some kind, head cocked and looking quizzically at the camera; a scene in a bar with maybe a dozen people, most of them long-haired and gray-haired, lifting their beer bottles; the balding heavy-set man, now in sunglasses, standing with his arm around a happier Chappie Fisk and behind them the natural wonder of the Grand Canyon.

“Oh, I’ll get it,” Chappie said, and she swooped in as mothers will and got the container of orange juice out before Ariel could even register exactly where it was.

“I guess Berke’s still asleep?” Ariel asked as Chappie poured juice into a glass.

“Haven’t heard from her. Here you go. Now, for your toast.”

“Thank you.” Ariel drank some of the juice and gazed around the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was a sunny place. A homey place, with homey knickknacks collected from different tourist destinations. Everything neat and clean, everything orderly. It was difficult to grasp, in this sunny kitchen with the soap on TV and Chappie busy loading up the toaster, that Chappie’s husband—her second husband—and Berke’s stepdad had died last month, yet there was a feeling in this house, however bright and neat it was, that someone was missing and would not be coming home.

Ariel, and none of the other band members as far as she knew, had ever met Floyd Fisk. Berke had told her mother well in advance of their gigs in San Diego that she didn’t want him anywhere near her, and so he’d never shown his face.

Floyd fucking Fisk, Berke had said to Ariel one day at rehearsal when they were talking about—or talking around, really—their parents. Don’t you think that sounds like the fucking dumb-ass barber in Mayberry? You know, the Opie show?

What’s so bad about him? Ariel had asked. I mean…is he like…cruel to your mother?

Cruel to my mother, Berke had repeated, as if trying that on as a reason. No, he’s not cruel to her. She loves him. But he’s not my dad. You know?

Ariel wasn’t sure she did know, but Berke’s mood had gotten black-cloud stormy and that was a good sign not to travel any further without a lightning rod.

“Can I ask you a question?” Chappie asked as she spread strawberry jam on the two pieces of toast. “This…is kind of weird to ask, but…are you…Berke’s friend?”

“I’m her friend, yes.”

“Well… I mean…” Chappie gave her a quick sidelong glance. “Are you her good friend?”

“Oh!” Ariel realized what the subject of this was. “Oh, no. Not that kind of friend.”

A blush of color rose into the woman’s cheeks. She shrugged. “I didn’t know. I don’t ask Berke very much.” She offered Ariel the toast on a yellow plate with brown ceramic flowers around the rim. “She can snap your head off when she’s in a bad mood. But I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

“We all get edgy sometimes.”

“Oh… I’m supposed to let you know… Mr. Allen went downtown this morning. He said he’d be back by early afternoon.”

“Did he take the van?”

“No, he got into one of those huge SUVs. Do you know he ate four eggs and just about finished off all my bacon? He said he’d reimburse me, but still…that man can eat.” Chappie pretended to watch her soap opera for a moment, but Ariel could tell she was formulating either another statement or question because the corners of her mouth moved. “Let me ask you something else,” she finally said. “Do you trust that man to protect you? I mean to protect all of you. The whole band. I watched that video over and over. I saw how close you came to getting shot. Aren’t your parents worried about you? Haven’t you heard from them?”

“I’ve called them,” Ariel answered. “When it first happened, in Sweetwater. I called them again from Tucson.”

“And…what? They don’t want you to come home?”

“They didn’t mention that. I didn’t expect them to.” Ariel took a bite of toast and chewed it. “Anyway, I wouldn’t go, because that’s not my home anymore. I live in Austin. But…next year…it may be somewhere else.”

“Berke did tell me that the band is breaking up,” Chappie said matter-of-factly. “I’m sorry to hear that, because she always…” Here she paused, as if deciding whether she was betraying a confidence or not. She went on. “Always believed in you guys,” she said. “More I think than she’s believed in any of her other bands. She particularly believed in John and in you. That you would find success. Make a hit record. Get the recording deal. Whatever. Jesus, I am old, but I swear I didn’t date Elvis Presley.”

Ariel smiled.

“But I did date Todd Rundgren,” Chappie said. “I had a little thing going on with Joe Strummer. I used to give backrubs to Iggy Pop. And Robert Plant kissed my hand one night in Hollywood, standing right on the Sunset Strip, and something like that you never forget.”

“I guess not,” Ariel said.

“Wow, the music scene back then…it was in—” There was just the briefest of pauses and Ariel thought she was about to hear the f-bomb dropped, but Chappie caught herself. “—credible,” she finished. “So much going on, so many bands. It was just electric. And we were right in there. People wouldn’t believe how many songs were written about the sisters.”

Ariel nodded. Chappie wasn’t hesitant to admit her membership in the sisterhood of groupies. To hear her tell it, as she’d told it before, Chappie and the ‘sisters of comfort’ were all about maintaining the sanity of their rocker men and keeping them well-supplied so the great works could keep on coming. Flowing. Being created. Ariel finished her orange juice and again said thank you.

“I’ve got coffee. Do you want some?” Chappie motioned toward the pot. Her own cup, a piece of merchandise—maybe an original—that bore a picture of The Eagles, sat on the counter. “Oh…you’re a tea drinker, aren’t you?”

“Right.”

Chappie refilled her cup. “So you think Mr. Allen and those men out there can protect you?” She reached up to a cupboard, opened it and with a smooth, unhurried and completely unselfconscious motion she brought out a half-bottle of Jack Daniels. It was the most natural thing in the world to pour a small bite of Jack into your coffee before noon, which she did. “You trust the FBI?”

“I guess I do, so far.”

“So far, you’re not dead.” Chappie capped the Jack bottle and put it away. She sipped at her high-octane fuel. “Neither is my daughter. But you know that was a close call yesterday, don’t you? Nancy Grace said last night on TV that this guy at Stone Church was probably copycatting Jeremy Pett, and she thinks there’ll be others. Listen, if you were my blood, I’d get on a plane and come collect you. I’d say no tour or music or ticket sales are worth getting killed for. I’d say put it all away until that nut is in jail.”

“Have you said any of this to Berke?” Ariel asked, knowing what the answer would be.

Chappie took another drink before she replied. “This is the biggest cliché in the world, what I’m about to say. But Berke has always walked to her own beat. She’s her own different drummer. She might be scared, but she’s not going to show it and she won’t back down from anybody…not even that…” Again, the f-bomb was poised to drop. But no. “Nut,” Chappie finished.

“Berke is a strong person,” Ariel agreed. “I envy her strength. Her knowing how to get what she wants.”

“Yeah, it’d be a great world if everybody was like her.” Chappie attempted a smile that didn’t quite work due to the bitterness at its core. Then she walked a few steps away to check on the crockpot.

Ariel decided it was time to move on. “I think I’ll go outside for a while.” Last night she’d seen, in the front yard, the wooden park bench under the eucalyptus tree. “Thanks for the—”

“I’m surprised she even agreed to come here,” Chappie interrupted, and Ariel braced for an onslaught. “Even with Floyd gone. I’m surprised, that’s all.”

“Well…” Ariel felt as if she were walking on treacherous ground. “I guess she wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I had to almost beg her to come. To get what he left her. He said to me very plainly, early last year, that if anything happened to him he wanted her to have what he’d saved for her. It was very important to him.” She nodded. “Very important. And the letter too. I told him, nothing was going to happen, he was fine and he was going to have another checkup to make sure. Mandy came over twice a week to watch him take his medicine and check his blood pressure. But…he said he was tired sometimes. Just tired. Everybody gets tired.” She started to take another drink, but lowered the cup before it reached her mouth. “They did what they could for him. The emergency team. I watched them work, so I know they did what they could. But oh my God, how I miss him.” Her hand came up and the fingers pressed against her lips. Her eyes glistened. “And the thing was…he tried so hard…so hard…to be a father to Berke, but she wouldn’t let him in. She turned her back on everything he tried to do for her. Okay, so he wasn’t…like…the world’s greatest drummer, like Warren thought he was. Floyd didn’t know music, and he didn’t keep up with bands, and he liked most of all just reading, or sitting on the couch watching football or old movies, and he wasn’t flash…but he was substance. Do you understand what I mean?” She looked hopefully at Ariel, and Ariel said she absolutely understood.

When Chappie spoke again it was in a tone of reverence. “Floyd was no Todd Rundgren. He was no Joe Strummer or Iggy Pop. He was no Warren Bonnevey, either. He didn’t say he was going out for cigarettes and three days later he was calling you from Los Angeles asking you to send money because he was on the edge—right on the edge, he said—of getting a gig with the latest hitmaker, whoever was high on the chart that week. He didn’t knock holes in the walls because he didn’t get a callback. Jesus, if that house Berke grew up in could talk, it would fucking scream. Excuse my mouth, but it would. Floyd didn’t holler and yell and go on a rampage at three o’clock in the morning because he thought I was stealing his sticks and burying them in the back yard. And then he didn’t go sit in the bathtub and start shouting that if he had a gun he’d kill everybody in the house and then himself. Oh, those were some choice days and nights, Ariel. And the terrible thing was… Warren really was good. He had a great talent. He had the fire inside, you know? But it was a horrible thing, to watch someone you loved burn alive from the inside out.”

Ariel had no idea what to say, so she said what she felt: “I’m so sorry.”

Chappie blew air between her lips and waved Ariel’s comment away and took another drink of Jack and java. “Life,” she said. “It’s not bubblegum. See, the deal is… Berke asked me one time—oh, she asked many times, in that very nice way she has of asking—why I would give up on her father and marry—her description—a total loser. The Mayberry barber, she called him. The bookworm, that was another one. She said, Mom, he’s just so nothing. And I looked her right in the face, I stared her down, and I said I love Floyd Fisk because he loves me, and because he loved her, whether she wanted to accept that or not, and because they call it ‘flash’ for the reason that it goes up in smoke so fast, but you can hold onto ‘substance’, and it holds onto you. ‘Substance’ honors responsibility, and you can say…oh, man, that’s so old…but the truth is, I wanted to be happy and I wanted to be loved. I wanted things to be settled. If that’s old, you can wrap it up for me because I’ll take as much of that as I can carry.”

Chappie’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Oh,” she said softly, and brokenly.

Ariel saw a box of Kleenex on the counter. She pulled a couple of tissues out and gave them to Berke’s mother.

“Thanks,” Chappie said as she dabbed her eyes. “You’re sweet.”

Ariel stood with her a while longer until it was clear Chappie had unburdened herself as much as she was able, and now Chappie was focusing back on the soap opera again, and she had finished her Jacked-up coffee and put the cup aside. Ariel said she was going to go sit outside and think about some things. Chappie told her to enjoy the bench out there, it had been where Floyd liked to sit and read when he got home from the bookstore in the afternoons.

The house was a light tan with darker brown trim around the windows. A picket fence guarded the property. There was a rock garden in front, and the eucalyptus tree threw shade over the park bench. The Scumbucket and the trailer stood in the short driveway, behind Chappie’s vanilla-colored VW Beetle. When Ariel emerged from the house and started down the front steps, two agents got out of the white Yukon parked on the street and began talking to each other as if discussing baseball scores or some other interest between men. Ariel saw that they were wearing sunglasses and they didn’t really look at each other as they spoke; they were scanning the street and the houses and hills. She approached them, and when one of the men recognized her presence she asked if she could bring them something to drink but the man said, “No, miss, we’re good, but thank you.”

Ariel wondered if there was a toilet in the rear of that giant SUV. It was likely there was some sanitary setup for their convenience. She sat down on the bench, under the tree, and opened her notebook to the lines of the song again as the men, no longer talking, stood with their backs to her.

It was a puzzle to her. What this could possibly mean. She had no idea where it was supposed to go or what it was supposed to say. She considered the idea that if she closed her eyes very, very tightly and thought very, very hard, maybe the girl would come to her again from the green mist of the blackberry brambles and tell her exactly what it was supposed to mean, or if the girl was feeling particularly salvatious today she would offer up the next line or two.

But deep down Ariel knew it was not going to work that way. The Unknown Hand was not going to write this for them. The song, like any other act of creativity, was no good if it wasn’t strained through the joys and woes of human experience. It was no good if it was not in some way personal. It would not come fully-formed from a girl in a dream. It would have to be worked on, trial and error, writing and scratching out, searching for rhyme and struggling for reason.

Just as it always was, no different.

“Inspiration?”

Ariel looked up at Terry, who had taken his own shower and was dressed in gray shorts and a seagreen shirt covered with small blue and gray paisleys, circa 1969. “Going over our song,” she told.

“You mean the song, right?” He nodded toward the empty half of the bench. “Can I sit?”

“This seat is saved,” she said, “just for you.”

Terry sat down. He angled his head to read the lines and Ariel cocked the notebook toward him so he had a better view.

“Say anything to you?” she asked.

“No, not really. To you?”

“I guess it’s about change. A summing up of things. Where you stand,” she decided. “Like…where are you in your life. What do you need to keep and what do you need to let go of, in order to move on. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Terry said. “I can see that. So you’re wanting another couple of verses and a chorus?”

She thought about it. “I don’t know what I want,” she said. What she meant was: I don’t know the why of this song, much less the what. It sounded so crazy, so spooky-oooky, to say that the girl at the well was directing them. That maybe John had come up with the idea of the communal song on his own, it was something he felt was necessary to keep the band on the same page, but the girl had…what?…read his mind, or planted a seed in Mike’s head, and made a passing statement of care that had struck George strongly enough to remember it in his ICU bed, and maybe…planted the desire to finish this song in Ariel’s own psyche?

But if that were true, in a Twilight Zoney way, then what was the why of it?

“I have to ask you something,” she told him. “This is going to sound strange, but have you had any weird dreams lately?”

His eyes blinked behind the specs. “The night before Stone Church. I was pretty tense about that gig. I had a weird dream that I was playing the Hammond and it bit my hands off at the wrists.”

“That’s not what I mean. I know you believe in God and a Heaven of some kind—whatever that is—and you believe in the other side of that, too. Right?” She waited for him to nod. “I want to tell you about a dream I had last night…or this morning, or whenever it was. I just want you to sit and listen, and then I want to talk to you about some things that are on my mind, and if you think I’m losing it…okay, fair enough. Maybe I am losing it. Maybe I’m the one who ought to be hanging it up for a while and taking a break.” She stared directly into his eyes. “But I don’t think so.” She hesitated, to underscore her resolve at this statement. Then: “Can I tell you?”

“Yeah, sure. Go ahead,” Terry said.

How trustingly he said that, Ariel thought. How bravely he said it. In the next few minutes, she would find out how trusting Terry was of his system of belief, and how bravely he could handle her interpretation of the Unknown Hand at work.

Because she was already thinking that the other side also had its unknown hand.

And it too might be at work.

TWENTY-TWO.

When Ariel had finished and they’d talked it back and forth for about ten minutes, Terry felt either that the incident at Stone Church had snapped her strings or something was happening to The Five that he could not explain or understand. He didn’t know which he believed. It was one thing to hear your voice spoken in a church by a man you could not possibly know, and that was strange and frightening enough, but this…

This was like looking at your reflection in a mirror and putting your hand up against it, and suddenly your hand pushes through the mirror like it’s a thin pane of ice and beyond it is a world that was right there all the time, and maybe you suspected it was right there all the time, and you talked about it and made theories about it, but to actually look into it, to actually see the fearsome wonder that lies hidden beyond the mirror…

Or it was like swimming in the sea at night, under a million stars, and swimming further and further out from the lights of shore until a current takes you and you can’t get back, and you swim and swim against the current until you’re tired, but you have to rest for a while, have to tread water and get your strength back, and then in that night-black water something massive and covered with the scars of time slides along under your feet, and it just keeps sliding on and on, an entity too awesome to look at, and you know the leviathan has either come to eat you or give you a place to stand with your head just above the waves.

What Ariel had told him, and her thoughts about that girl and the song, about George seeing her in his hospital room and calling her an angel of life, about crows flying from the mouth of Jeremy Pett in the blackberry bramble battleground…it was too much for even a believer. It was too much for even someone who had heard his name spoken by a stranger in a church far from home.

“I don’t know,” he told her, sitting on the park bench in the fragrant shade of the eucalyptus tree. She had just asked him if he thought they should talk this over with John and Berke. He could tell that she wanted to, but she needed him to agree. “I’m not sure they’re ready for this.”

“You mean, you’re not ready.”

“Ariel…listen… I’m trying to make sense of this, okay?” Terry felt himself floundering, like that swimmer in the night far from shore. “You saying this song is…like…divinely inspired, right? By that girl, and she was something other than an ordinary girl? But John had the idea for all of us to write the song before we got to that place.”

“No, he had the idea for all of us to write a song before we got there. He came up with the idea, but she…” Ariel hesitated, as lost as she’d been in her dream. What exactly was she trying to get at? “…is refining it,” she said, for want of a better term.

“Is refining it? Is? Ariel, here are the lines of the song, right here on this page. In this notebook. Your notebook. And you came up with this line about figuring what to keep and what to leave behind, didn’t you? You did, not…her. So how can she be refining the song? How can she have anything to do with it? Okay, maybe George had a dream about her in the hospital, just like you did last night, but I don’t see—”

“Why would George have had a dream about her? He hardly spoke to her that day.”

“That’s the way dreams work. Things pop in and out. Look, I haven’t had any dreams about her. As far as I know, neither have John or Berke. If she was like…some kind of supernatural force or something, then why wouldn’t she speak to all of us at the same time?”

Ariel almost said it, but she didn’t: Maybe she spoke to the one who would listen, and maybe she trusted that listener to carry the message forward.

“What would be the reason for it?” Terry had his hand on her shoulder, like someone might do to calm a deranged person. “Honestly, now. Are we supposed to write a song that brings about whirled peas? Come on! Are we supposed to write a song that makes us…like…a huge success and suddenly we’re the great big music stars? If you’ve noticed, we’re all over the news right now, and you know who made that possible? It wasn’t that girl.” He leaned in closer, as if confiding a secret, but Ariel already knew what he was going to say. “It was Jeremy Pett. It was Mike’s murder, and George getting shot. It was some nut with a .25 at Stone Church. Yeah, I believe there’s a God, and I believe there’s a Satan too. I believe in a Heaven and a Hell, and all the stuff that a lot of people laugh at. But this is just a few lines of a song.”

“A .25?” Ariel asked. That was the first she’d heard of it. “True didn’t say what kind of gun it was.”

“It sounded like a .25 to me. A small gun. My dad’s a collector. Handguns, not rifles. He took me out to a pistol range a few times.” Terry shrugged. “It’s one of the man things he was pushing on me.” He reached out for the notebook and the pen. “Can I show you something?”

She gave the two items up.

Terry sat for a while looking at the lines, and then beneath the last line he wrote in the purple ink Won’t you move my hand, please tell me what to write.

Then he waited, pen poised.

“Okay already,” Ariel said. “I get it.”

Terry’s hand moved, and he began to write.

I’m sitting here like a candle on the darkest night.

I’ve got my hot flame, got my flicker on, but where am I when my light is gone?

I wish you safe travel, courage, you’re gonna need it.

Terry looked up and handed her back the pen. “Second verse. Did that girl write it, or did I?”

Ariel took the pen and also the notebook. She closed it.

He was right. Of course he was right. But she couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been sitting out here on this bench, saving a seat just for Terry, and if she hadn’t told him what was on her mind, this second verse would not have been born today.

“What a way to earn a living.” Terry was looking at the two FBI agents who were still scanning the street, the houses and the hills. When he spoke again, his tone was a little wistful. “I’m so sorry about Mike and George. But the awful thing—the thing that makes you really sick—is that the media attention has already made us a success, if you want to use that word for it. It’s already sold thousands of CDs that we wouldn’t have sold just going on like we were. No telling what doors are about to open. And we’re just doing exactly what we were doing before.” He gave a small bitter smile. “Because before all this press and shit, where were we going? Around in a circle.” He didn’t have to remind her of what they’d shared for the last three years: the grinding road trips, the gigs where you hoped to sell enough T-shirts to pay for a motel room, the indignity of opening for bands—some younger and much less experienced—who got the lucky break of a record deal early on, and you never saw your own break coming, no matter how hard you worked or what you did. “That just wears you down,” Terry said. “You know? It wore me down. Way down. And before that I was there with the Venomaires, watching that death battle between John and Kevin Keeler over who was going to run the band, and then Kevin having his nervous breakdown on stage in Atlanta. With all that, and then Julia and the pain pills.”

When he sighed, it was the sound of a man whose joy has become a burden. “I don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces. I’m leaving because I want to do the vintage keyboards thing, sure, but the other part is…where am I when my light is gone? What have I done? What am I going to do? Have I mattered to anybody?” He paused for a moment, and he straightened his glasses on his face as if to be able to see a little more clearly. “I need some time and space, all my own. I need to get off the bus and find out where I am.”

Ariel said, “The man in the church. The voice. About music being your life.”

“I’ll always play, if just for myself. I’ll always write songs. Maybe I’ll kick in with another band someday. Maybe I’ll record at home. I’m not doubting what he told me. I just want to know why he took the time to speak to me, if that’s all there is.” Terry sat staring at the ground, where the edge of the eucalyptus shade met the promise of the California sun. “Well,” he said at last, and he stood up a bit creakily, like an old codger artfully disguised in a young skin. “That stew smelled pretty good in there. I’m starving.”

Ariel also got to her feet, holding the notebook close to her side. “Let’s get at it,” she suggested. She took his hand and they walked into the house together, and behind them the FBI agents returned to their Yukon.

In the kitchen, the two lovely birds of morning had emerged from their slumber nests and had already been served with bowls of veggie stew. One bird had touselled, curly black hair and dark hollows under her equally dark eyes, she wore a loose-fitting T-shirt and a pair of camo-print men’s boxer shorts and she was sullenly nursing a cup of coffee that may or may not have been spiked like momma’s own. The other, wearing the Five tee and the gray PJ bottoms in which he’d slept, had an even more wildly cockscrewed bedhead of long black hair and—

“Christ, what an eye!” Terry said, not without admiration.

“Thanks, and go eff yourself,” Nomad replied, being a gentleman in front of the older lady.

The first thing that had jumped into Terry’s mind upon seeing that eye was the title of King Crimson’s 1974 album Starless and Bible Black. Except the swollen-shut lump of head-butted flesh wasn’t completely black, it contained splotches and streaks of green in maybe four different sick shades. It had been bad last night but today…whoa! It was time for the phantom to put his mask back on.

“Are you going to be able to do the gig?” Ariel asked.

“Yes, I am.” Nomad’s voice was huskier than usual. His good eye looked bloodshot. “Don’t worry about me.” He kept eating his stew, though his spoon seemed to have trouble finding his mouth.

Ariel nodded, but the fact remained that she did worry about him. She remembered apologizing for John’s behavior to the girl at the well, and telling her I just try to clean up the mess. It was her path, it seemed. She had tried to clean up the mess for many people, most of them guys she’d been involved with. Most all of them musicians, the messiest of the bunch. Like Neal Tapley, and before him Jess Vandergriff, who was one of the best acoustic guitarists on the East Coast but one of the worst in believing everything was either perfection or crap, nothing in between. And before him, others. After Neal had driven himself off a county road to his death, in the aftermath of one of the messiest drug scenes/breakups/breakdowns Ariel had ever tearfully and agonizingly witnessed, she had sworn off men of the music. There was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was in ever again, no romance, not any little funky and innocent—mostly—fun fuelled by a few vodka shooters when she knew she ought to be drinking silver needle tea and getting the broom ready. Nothing.

And yet.

She had looked at the shape lying in the other bed last night, his shoulder and the wounded side of his face touched by the faintest iridescence of moonlight, and it had crossed her mind that if Terry was not lying on the floor in the sleeping bag she might have drawn aside her sheet, gotten up and gone to John, as silent as a spirit.

She might have slipped in beside him, and gently touched his forehead as if to draw from it the fever of his pain. She would bear that for him, if he would let her. She would ease the trouble in his bones and smooth the worry from his mind. She would take the fire of his anger in her hands, and make of it a candle.

He had so much potential. He was so very good, in so many ways, without knowing he was. She thought maybe that was a great part of why she admired him so much; he didn’t strut or brag, he just did. She wished she had a few embers of his flame, to heat up the sometimes too-cool hallways of her own house. She knew he could be abrasive, he could be childish, he could throw his tantrums and say things his mouth wished seconds later had never tumbled out. He could be terribly human, is what he could be. Human, cranked up to eleven. But she wished she had his ability to go full-throttle, to open up his engines and let the roar of life thunder out. If he made a mistake, the same kind of mistake that would have paralyzed her with the fear she might commit it again, he kicked it aside like an old sack full of ashes. He just kept going forward, even if he didn’t know exactly where he was going. To be honest, sometimes he played his guitar like that, too. But his passion and energy always made up for his lack of direction. At least, in her opinion.

She had asked herself if she was falling in love with him. Love. That was not a word used by members of a gigging band for each other, unless it was in the concept of I love my brother or I love my sister or I love my whole dysfunctional road-crazed family. She wasn’t sure, but she did feel for him—what would be the word used in those old Victorian novels by the Brontë sisters that she liked to read in school?—oh, yes…‘stirrings’.

But only stirrings, because she had tried—and failed, mostly—to clean up so many messes, and her own heartbreak was not a mess she was eager to tackle, her own weeping side of three o’clock had come and gone so many mornings when John had left a club with one or two girls laughing and rubbing themselves all over him, but that was the Nomad part of John, the persona, and she had tried very hard and so far successfully to sing and play ‘This Song Is A Snake’ with no hint of a hiss.

Anyway, there was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was ever in again. No romance. No little funky fun.

But something Terry had said out under the eucalyptus tree had made her heart sink: I don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces.

Three could not be Five. Changes were coming. If two new players came in, the chemistry would be altered. If it didn’t work, John might even decide to join another band. After all, this was a business. Wasn’t it? Berke might split and go her own way. A business, that’s what it was. Not really a family, after all.

She thought she should be considering what to keep and what to leave behind, because this life was never easy.

After his statement to Ariel, Nomad put down his spoon and very gingerly touched the piece of puff pastry that seemed stuck to his face with searing hot Super-Glue. “Maybe you should stretch your acoustic set out tonight. Do two or three extra songs. Since this is such an acoustic crowd.”

The Casbah, on the corner of Laurel Street and Kettner Boulevard in Little Italy, was one of their favorite venues. The music room was small and the club sat under the noisy flight path of aircraft in and out of San Diego International, but it was a fun and friendly place and in the three times they’d played there the reception had always been stellar. One thing Ariel particularly liked is that her acoustic set, usually a couple of quiet songs delivered soon after Berke’s drum solo, went over well at the Casbah. The audience really paid attention unlike at a lot of other clubs where the cry was for louder and louder. “Sure,” Ariel said, pleased at this suggestion. “I’d be glad to.”

A cellphone’s ring tone burbled a couple of bars of The Clash’s ‘London Calling’. Chappie checked the incoming number, which she didn’t recognize, and then she answered, “Hello?” She listened for a few seconds, as Terry walked over to stick his nose into the crockpot’s aroma. “Any of you guys know a DJ Talk It Up?” Chappie asked with the phone at her ear. “From Rock The Net? Pardon?” She was speaking to the caller. Then, to her houseguests again: “Rock Da Net.”

“Fuck, no,” said Nomad, his gentlemanly demeanor over and done.

“He wants to talk to you.” Chappie held the phone toward Ariel.

“Me? No, I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” Chappie told DJ Talk It Up. “That’s right. Okay, I’ll let them know. Uh huh. Listen, how did you get this number?” Evidently that question was not to be answered, because Chappie put the cell down and said, “I guess they’ve found you. Mr. Allen told me they might. Anyway, DJ says to tell you he does a podcast from Los Angeles. He says to check out his website. Rock Da Net.” She couldn’t hold back a grin. “Have you ever heard anything so fucking lame?”

“Got that right,” Nomad said, aiming his spoon in what he hoped was the vicinity of his mouth.

“Says he’ll be at sound check today and would like to do an interview. Get ready for it. That place is going to be crawling with media. But that’s what you want, right?”

No one replied. Because Nomad was the emperor, sometimes his thoughts exactly mirrored those of his subjects, and that was now the case. He was thinking, as they all were, that success—if it meant acceptance, or fame, or money, or revenge on those who looked down on you as if you’d just crawled out of a gutter—was not worth the death and injury of two bandmates. All those things would be great, the dream of every working band, but this price tag was way too steep.

“What I want,” said Berke, and she let that hang for a few seconds before she finished it, “is to get this over with.” She turned her haggard face toward her mother. “The boxes.”

Chappie left the kitchen and came back with an envelope. She put it down on the table next to Berke’s coffee cup. Written in block letters on the front was Berke—Open The Boxes First. The word First was underlined.

“They’re waiting for you,” Chappie said, her voice betraying no emotion.

Berke took the envelope. She stood up and headed for the back door. She was wearing her running shoes without socks. When she realized nobody was following, she said with forced and farcical cheer, “Come on! Let’s make it a party!”

It was a small free-standing garage whose contents, Berke knew, had gradually choked off enough room for a car. When Chappie unlatched the door and pulled it open, the odor that rolled out was not of old oil and grease but instead of old library stacks. Sunlight had already revealed the dozens of boxes, the precariously-leaning metal shelves jammed full of books and the layers of newspapers and magazines that stood everywhere, but Chappie switched on an overhead light to complete the illumination.

Berke looked around, with her mother at her side and her bandmates behind her. Floyd fucking Fisk had really laid his crap heavy in this hole, she thought. It was a paradise for cockroaches and silverfish, probably for mice too. That smell…she remembered that sickeningly-sweet smell of decaying bindings and newsprint from Floyd fucking Fisk’s downtown store, Second Chance Books. It had been there since before she was born; he’d bought it from the retiring owner who’d had it like since Abraham Lincoln stopped shaving.

This shit was so fucked-up. She looked high and low, at all the murder of trees. An open box to her left invited a glance. It was full of moldering magazines in plastic bags. The covers of the ones she could see were adorned with spaceships and weird alien-looking faces and had the titles Galaxy, Worlds Of If, Analog and Astounding Science Fiction. That figured, she thought. Floyd fucking Fisk probably didn’t even know what really good sci-fi was, like Star Trek and Star Wars. In other boxes and on other shelves she saw titles like Argosy, Esquire, Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock. And who the fuck ever needed so many sets of encyclopedias? They were bound up with cords and looked like weapons of mass destruction. And then there was the ancient stuff in here, the books that appeared to be bound from slabs of wood or crinkly cowhide. There had to be a book of dirty jokes written by Nero around somewhere: The One-Handed Fiddler and 101 More, Or: Pluck It Baby!

But this was no fucking joke in here, this was a serious place. It was where the family car had alternated with Berke’s early—“junior”, the ad had called it—drumkit. It was where she busted some sticks and hammered some heads. It was where she’d been, many times, when the police car pulled up and the cop who got to know the Fisk family said if the girl just didn’t play so late at night, they could work this out with the neighbors. It was the bass beat that was coming through the closed garage door, so maybe they could muffle it with a few pillows?

Sweet sound of rolling thunder, crashing above the mediocre sea of the whitebread world. Dad would have understood. Dad would have said, Pump up the volume, kid, and don’t ever let it get so quiet that you have to hear yourself think.

“There they are.” Chappie motioned toward three large cardboard boxes lying side-by-side-by-side on the floor toward the back of the garage. Berke saw that the one on the left bore the black marker numeral 1, the middle 2 and the one on the right 3. They were sealed with regular white masking tape, but it wouldn’t be any kind of job ripping them open.

“Man, this is a lot of books,” Terry said, as he turned in a circle between Ariel and Nomad. “Wonder if there are any old keyboard manuals in here. Would you know?” he asked Chappie.

“I wouldn’t. This is special stuff that Floyd wanted to keep. You should see the backroom at the bookstore.”

“Did he make a good living?” Nomad asked. “Just selling old books?”

“He got orders from everywhere once he started selling on eBay. We weren’t getting rich, but he was able to pay off the house.”

There was an abrupt tearing noise as Berke stripped the tape off the top seam of Box Number 1.

“You got it?” Nomad asked.

She didn’t answer. She stripped the tape off the edges and pulled the box open.

Chappie stepped forward to see, because she had no idea what Floyd had left their girl.

Berke didn’t know what she was looking at. That pungence of old newsprint drifted up into her face, and she thought if she blew her nose the snot would be yellow. Whatever they were—papers of some kind—they were protected in the plastic bags and backed with cardboard. She brought the first of them out into the light.

It had a strange fold. She removed it from its plastic, and a few tiny pieces of paper spun out around her. Almost dust, but not quite.

There was a gray field of newsprint and a headline The High Cost Of Music and Love: Where’s The Money From Monterey?

There was a black-and-white photograph of John Lennon, unmistakably John Lennon in specs just like Terry’s, dressed as a British soldier with a webbing on his helmet, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun, his lips pursed in either surprise or the beginning of a whistle.

Above the photograph there was a logo that read Rolling Stone. And beside it was the date: November 9, 1967.

She handed it to Terry, who had also come forward to see. She took the next paper from its plastic. This Rolling Stone bore a cover photograph of Tina Turner—it said this young woman was Tina Turner, right there in the caption—caught in a blurred moment of dramatic intensity on stage, and there was a story with the headline Bob Dylan Alive In Nashville: Work Starts On New LP. The date was November 23, 1967.

“My God,” said Terry in a stunned voice, as he peered into the box of treasures. “It’s a mint set. The golden age of Rolling Stone.”

The third issue that Berke brought up had a photograph of a group of about thirty or so people in all manner of clothes sitting on a series of steps in front of a building. She spotted the Fab Four—Paul McCartney was so young—among them. The headline was New Thing For Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour. The date was December 14, 1967.

“Mint,” Terry said again. He shook his head in awe. But for the aging of the paper itself, each Rolling Stone looked to be right off the press.

Berke continued to bring them up from the darkness of the box, into the light. She looked at the papers, at the covers and at some of the pages within, and then she passed them back for her friends to see. A lost age revealed itself to her. It was captured in gritty and startling black-and-white pictures with colored borders. It was held in headlines like The Los Angeles Scene and American Revolution 1969 and Forty Pages Full Of Dope, Sex and Cheap Thrills. It was offered up from the past by the announcements that Cream had broken up, that the Rolling Stones were on the verge of the great comeback of their career, that Johnny Cash was playing a concert at San Quentin, that Janis Joplin might be the Judy Garland of Rock, that Fillmore West was closing, that Paul Is Not Dead, that the Underground Press of America was alive and well, that Chicago’s Conspiracy Eight was the Trial Of The New Culture, that contained in these pages was All The News That Fits, and that this publication would steadfastly present its Continuing Coverage Of The Apocalypse in this turbulent summer of 1970.

The second box held more, all pristine, all protected in plastic. In the third box, the front covers became full color and the paper quality slicker. As Chappie returned to the house to get some more coffee, Terry encouraged Berke to keep going to the bottom. It took Berke a while to get to the last paper, which was dated April 29, 1982, and had on its cover the black-and-white photo of a very sad-looking dark-eyed, dark-haired man whom the caption identified as John Belushi.

“An interview with Sun Ra,” Terry said, carefully holding one of the early papers open. The images and typeface bloomed large in his specs. He sounded like he might be about to faint from ecstacy. “Oh my God.”

Nomad was regarding a cover picture of Elvis Presley decked out in black leather. Ariel had just turned a few pages in the Stone she was holding and abruptly stopped. On the page before her was the wild, ink-spattered drawing of a distorted, one-eyed, American-flag-draped figure whose mouth was stretched impossibly wide, and from that cavernous drooling hole spurted forth a vomit of spiky missiles and speeding jet airplanes. The artist had signed a name in crazed and crooked letters at the bottom of the art, and that name was Steadman.

She closed the paper. It was a little too disturbing.

“Three hundred and forty five issues, give or take,” Terry said when he’d recovered himself. Most of them had been replaced in their plastic and returned to the boxes, though not in order this time. A few of the older papers were still lying about. “You’re gonna need another U-Haul.”

“Yeah.” Berke nodded. “I guess I am.” Her mind was reeling from the faces and names these boxes had yielded up to her: Van Morrison, Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Marvin Gaye, the Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, The Grateful Dead, David Bowie, Cat Stevens, Joan Baez, MC5, the Doors, Steely Dan, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, Steve Winwood, Elton John, Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry and Keith Moon and John Paul Jones and…it just went on and on.

Ariel picked up another issue, because on the cover she recognized the face of a very young Joni Mitchell, whom she’d liked to listen to as a teenager in the solace of her room and who actually had influenced her own playing and writing. The date was May 17, 1969. Joni Mitchell looked out at the viewer with a hint of anger in her eyes, as if adamant that her private space not be invaded. In purple hippie-type letters was the headline The Swan Song of Folk Music.

“The letter.” Chappie had returned with her Eagles cup. “Aren’t you going to read the letter?”

“Oh. Yeah, I am.” Berke picked up the envelope from atop a set of encyclopedias where she’d put it aside. As she tore it open—carefully, so as not to damage the letter—she realized her fingerprints were being left upon it in forty-year-old ink. Chappie stepped back to give her privacy, and the others quietly continued their inspection of the long-dead counterculture, and from the two-page letter that was probably printed out on the computer in the den, Berke heard the voice of her stepfather.

Dear Berke, I hope you enjoy these. I found them years ago in a warehouse in San Francisco, and I’ve been saving them for you. I guess I’m dead now. Ha ha.

I didn’t really have a premonition of when it would happen. I just had a feeling that my time was running out. Through the hourglass, like on that soap opera your Mom watches. My hourglass was getting empty.

I’m no musician or expert on music, and I can’t say that I care much for the modern stuff. (When I say ‘stuff’, I don’t mean to be disrespectful :) I was a pretty conservative young man, everything Rah Rah and Apple Pie. I voted for Nixon. You can imagine.

But I did know what the Rolling Stone is. I read some of these from cover to cover, and they made me realize how proud I am of you. I know you didn’t want me around very much, or to come to your shows, and I understand that, but I hope that now you’ll give me a chance to speak.

You can look at these and see what you’re a part of. This world you have chosen to live in. I guess you chose it, but maybe it chose you???? I think you should know, if you don’t already, that you’re a citizen of a blessed and magic world, though I’m sure sometimes blessings can seem like curses, and there’s not much magic to be found in a dingy old motel room. (Your mom has clued in me on The Road. At least as much as a stodge like me can handle :)

I remember when we went to the Battle of The Bands in August of 1996. It was at the auditorium.

Oh yeah, Berke thought. She remembered it was something she’d decided to forget. Her mom and Floyd Fisk had just met and he was trying to get to know her.

I remember you were watching one of those bands and the drummer was going strong, and I saw you start playing along with him on your knees, just using your thumbs, and your foot was tapping the bass. He really tore it up (at least I thought he did) and when I asked you what you thought of him you looked me right in the eyes and you said, “He was good, but I can do better.”

You said it so positively, from that moment on I believed you.

I’ve seen you on those YouTube videos. You were right. But I never doubted you.

I wish you could have been my real daughter. Then again, I couldn’t have given you the talent that your Dad gave you, but I’d like to think that I gave you something.

So…these papers in the boxes.

If you ever doubt what your place is in your profession, or if you ever doubt what changes for the better music can make in this world, open these and start reading. Oh yeah, there’s the sex and drugs and rock and roll part of it, but I mean the soul of it.

I believe that at its best music exists to give a voice to people who sometimes can’t speak on their own. I believe it helps weak people find their strength, and frightened people find their courage. I believe it helps people understand with their hearts what their minds can’t comprehend. I think it may be the truest link to a higher power, if you believe in that. (And I know you don’t, but I had to get that last one in ;)

Never, ever doubt that you have an important place in this world. Look at these papers and see who came before you, and then think about who came before them, and on back to the hornpipe players and the troubadours and the poor man who played a Jew’s harp in a cold house for the pleasure of his family.

This may be hard to think about, but someday someone is going to watch you playing, either at one of your shows or on your videos, and they’ll say ‘She was good, but I can do better’. And that’s how your blessed and magic world works.

Please take care of yourself and your Mom. She’s the most fun woman in the world.

Love, Floyd.

Berke read again the final five paragraphs. Then she returned the pages to the envelope, and she sat down on a box full of dead men’s ideas and turned her face toward the wall, and she sat there so long without moving that her mother asked her if she was okay.

“Yeah,” Berke answered, her voice very soft and very distant. “Okay.”

It had occurred to her, sitting in this garage she’d not visited for many years, that pain had a way of pushing everything else out of a person. It had a way of owning you, and you didn’t even know you were being owned. She felt she had a long road ahead of her, to escape from that particular master, and maybe she never would—not completely—but it seemed to her that to recognize how it had enslaved you day-in and day-out for so many years was a first step in breaking the chain.

“Ariel,” Berke said, because sitting here holding the letter in her hand and surrounded by all these old decaying books and magazines that were once so new she’d had a sudden clear and pressing thought.

“What is it?” Ariel asked.

“Our song.” Berke turned around to face her bandmates and her mother. Berke’s eyes were red, but she was a big girl, a tough girl, a strong girl, and she was not going to cry today. “My part for our song,” she said, and she drew it up from memory: “Try and try, grow and thrive,” she recited. She decided to alter one word. “Because no one here gets out alive.”

“Weird,” said Terry, and Berke thought that was exactly how Mike would’ve expressed it.

“Have I missed anything?”

They all turned to see Truitt Allen, wearing a white polo shirt and gray slacks, standing in the open doorway. Before anyone could answer, True took stock of Nomad’s eye. “Ouch,” he said. “That even hurts me.”

“Where’ve you been?” Nomad asked.

“Why? Did you miss me?” True was carrying a leather satchel that held his laptop.

“Like salt misses pepper in vanilla ice cream,” Nomad told him. He still felt dazed and his eye was throbbing. “If I even liked ice cream.”

“I think you need to go back to bed for a few days,” True said. “But not starting today.” His voice had gotten serious, and he looked from one bandmember to another. “Come on, let’s go inside and I’ll tell you how you music stars are going to handle this…” He glanced again at Nomad. “Gig.”

TWENTY-THREE.

“I can tell you more about him now.” True was eating a bowl of vegetarian stew and having a glass of iced tea at the kitchen table. Joining him at lunch were Terry and Ariel, while Nomad, Berke and Chappie stood at various points in the kitchen. “His name and address on the driver’s license checked out, and his parents were notified yesterday evening. The information was released to the press while I was there, so it’ll probably be on the next news cycle.” By there, he meant the FBI field office on the corner of Aero Drive and Ruffin Road. He’d spent the morning planning security for the ‘gig’ tonight and smoothing everything out with the San Diego police, at the same time keeping a call in for details from the FBI and the police in Tucson.

“I told you already he was nineteen and from California.” True spent a few seconds to wipe his mouth with a red-checked napkin. “His name is Connor Addison. He’s from a nice middle-class neighborhood in Oceanside. From what we’ve learned, Connor took his father’s car on Wednesday afternoon, hit the San Diego Freeway using the dad’s credit card for a fillup, and headed to Stone Church. Where he got the pistol from, no one knows.”

“It was a .25, right?” Terry asked.

“Yeah, a .25 Beretta Jetfire. You’ve had experience?”

“I just figured, from the sound. My dad’s a pistol collector. He took me to the range a few times.”

“Small gun,” True said, speaking to all of them again. “Easily concealed.” He didn’t say that when he’d heard the pistol fire at Stone Church he thought it had been at least a .38, due to the sound being amplified by the microphone Nomad had knocked over. “Anyway, Connor lives at home with his parents. He doesn’t have a car of his own. He’s gotten into some trouble with meth and cocaine, flunked out of community college, lost a couple of jobs, wrecked his car last year…kind of a mess.”

“He was copycatting Jeremy Pett, wasn’t he?” Chappie asked. “That’s what Nancy Grace said last night.”

“Maybe.” True took a sip of iced tea, which was very cold and very minty. It had been released to the press right after the incident that the shooter was not Jeremy Pett, but Addison’s name hadn’t been put out there for the media until the details were taken care of. “He’s not talking. They can’t get him to utter a word.”

“He’s a nut,” Nomad said. “They ought to go ahead and throw him in the nuthouse.” He was a nut with a hard fucking head, though.

“Addison has an interesting story.” True continued to eat his stew, taking small spoonfuls and then some of the wheat bread that had been offered with his lunch. The agents outside, God bless ’em, would have to make do with trips to the nearest fast food window. “His family was in the news there in Oceanside in 2003. One evening his parents went out and left him at home to watch his eight-year-old sister. Addison evidently got pissed, called some friends over to do drugs, and he told the little sister to go out and ride her bike. She did, and that was the last anybody saw of her until her bones were found in a trashbag in the marsh just off Jefferson Street, five months later.” He took another drink of tea, to wash down the bread. “Some material in the bag was traced to a laundry, and they got a Russian immigrant who lived maybe five miles from Addison’s house. This individual’s great pleasure in life was driving through neighborhoods searching for little girls to kidnap, rape and murder, which he had enjoyed doing in Portland and in Sacramento. And oh boy, did he enjoy talking about it to the Oceanside cops. Just painted a very beautiful picture of it, which wound up in some of the sleazier news rags.” True decided he’d had enough lunch, because he’d seen the digitized articles the field office guys had pulled up for him.

“So what does this have to do with a scumbag druggie nut trying to kill Ariel?” Nomad asked. “And where’s Jeremy Pett?”

Good questions, True thought. He’d been going over both of them at the field office, in a conference call connection with the Tucson office, the Tucson police, the San Diego badges, the city attorneys and, it seemed, everybody else with any splinter of a stake in this. He’d even gotten a call from Austin about an hour ago, and that brought him to his next statement.

“Hold onto your questions,” he said. “Roger Chester called me. You’re headlining at the Casbah tonight.”

“Oh whoopie whoopie yay yay!” Nomad was nearly back to his bristling, snarly self. “Where’s that fucking Jeremy Pett, is what I want to know!”

“Just listen for a minute.” True couldn’t begin to tell John Charles what he’d been going through with the Casbah management to meet the security standards. One big problem was that, being out by the airport, the area was full of parking decks. There were a couple of them right across the street, and he was going to have to put men on every level. “After the Casbah is what I’m talking about now. Tomorrow night. The tickets have sold out at the Cobra Club, and you’re headlining there too, by the way. They’re wanting you to headline again on Sunday night. Then, on Monday night, you’re booked into…wait, let me get this.” He reached for his wallet, a slimline, and brought out the piece of paper with the FBI seal at the top that he’d used to write down The Five’s new schedule. “Okay. You’re booked into the Sound Machine on Santa Monica Boulevard on Monday night. Headlining with—I cannot believe I’m saying this—Sack Of Buttholes.” True looked at Ariel. “Is that for real or did I get set up?”

“It’s for real,” she told him. The SOBs were also out of Austin and were repped by the Roger Chester Agency.

“Jeez,” True said. “Alright, then. Pardon this paper, I’ll get all the info to my PDA. Now…on Tuesday night, you’re playing at Magic Monty’s in Anaheim. Chester thinks you’ll sell out of merchandise tonight, so he’s making direct shipments to Hollywood and Anaheim. You still with me?” He looked up at his charges.

“This is crazy,” Chappie said, her eyes wide. “Are you wanting them to get killed?”

“Mom,” Berke cautioned. “It’s our job, okay?”

“You don’t need to be killed for it! Christ Almighty! Get back to Austin and wait until they catch him!”

“Go ahead,” Berke said to True. “What else?”

“Then you’re back to the regular schedule: the Red Door in Phoenix on the 8th; the next night Staind Glass in Albuquerque; on the 15th the Lizard Lounge in Dallas; and on the 16th back in Austin at the Vista Futura.” True had realized, after speaking with Roger Chester, that he was facing a massive endeavor in scouting out all these locations and setting up security, much less keeping the mobile teams rolling. City lawyers were not so keen on putting their citizens at risk, the police departments didn’t want to feel they were being pushed around by the FBI, and for the first time today True had heard from the Tucson office the mention of all the money that was sinking into this operation. Though True was the big dog, he was not the only big dog and there were large hands on the leashes. Also today, the large hand on the leash in Tucson had pointed out that, while reports were coming in of Jeremy Pett being sighted in a dozen states including Alaska and Florida, if Pett had any sense of survival he would have headed straight to Mexico while he was so close to the border. Had he made it in soon after his description had gone public? Had he already gone before? The pickup truck’s tag hadn’t been seen on any of the cameras at the border crossings, but a man who wanted to get through could walk it.

Careful with this one, Truitt, the warning had been delivered. This could really blow up in your face.

This road managing job was hard work. He was a detail guy, sure, but planning the gas stops and the meal stops and where the band was going to stay in all those cities, and then putting together the security both outside and inside the clubs and clearing his operation with the local police and mobilizing agents from different field offices…it was tougher than he’d expected.

He wouldn’t be doing this, if he wasn’t—

“How about Pett’s family?” Nomad asked, breaking into True’s thoughts. “His mother and father. Have you checked his house?”

“The first day,” True answered. “We’re watching the house and we got their okay to set up a tap and an intercept. They haven’t heard from their son since the accident in Houston. He briefly visited them before he went back to Iraq. I’ll tell you that Mr. Pett is also a veteran Marine, of the hard-bitten old school, who I am told seems to think his son lacked the toughness to make it a career. Pett’s mother, I also am told, is hardly a presence in the house. The agent who went there described her as ‘trying to make herself invisible’.”

“I think he’s probably gone to Mexico.” Terry finished his stew and put the spoon aside. “I think he’s done what he wanted to do, and he’s gone.”

“You don’t know that!” Chappie said. “I think it’s insane, you putting yourself out there like—” The Clash played their little snippet of ‘London Calling’ again, and Chappie looked at another number she didn’t know on her cellphone screen. “Sitting ducks,” she finished, before she answered. “Hello? Oh, Jesus. Wait a minute.” She asked the gathering if anyone wanted to talk to the National Star.

“Another thing,” True said when Chappie had refused the call. “At your sound check this afternoon—in about ninety minutes from now—there are going to be all sorts of media folks present. Roger Chester clued me in that People magazine is sending a reporter and photographer. The local news will be there. Maybe some other magazines and who knows who else.”

“DJ Talk It Up will be there,” Nomad said. “Trying to get a little piece of Ariel.”

“Who?”

“Don’t mind John,” Ariel advised. “It’s a guy with a podcast. He called this morning.”

“Nobody gets past me.” True’s blue eyes were burning bright. “That’s what I want you to know. I see all credentials and talk to everybody who wants a piece of whomever. Right?”

“You’re the road manager,” Berke said.

“And I thought I used to be fucking crazy,” Chappie muttered into her coffee cup.

True grunted but said nothing more. All this talk about crazy and insane.

He had decided not to tell them the rest of it, either about Connor Addison or the guy with the .22 rifle who’d been captured making his torturous climb up Hell Mountain. No, best not to tell them. He didn’t want anybody to get—what was the term Berke had used?—‘creeped out’.

“I’m going to take a nap for an hour,” True said as he stood up. He took his bowl and glass to the sink, and he realized he was avoiding eye contact with everyone. Then he went directly to the couch in the den, where he had set up his ‘command center’ on the desk next to the computer and wireless cable modem that Floyd Fisk had used.

When the Scumbucket pulled up to the Casbah just before three o’clock with True at the wheel, it was clear the circus had come to town. Satellite trucks bearing TV news logos were nearly blocking Kettner Avenue, and the police were on hand to try to keep everybody moving. The Casbah’s crew helped with unloading the gear. The music room was small—intimate, they would say—and only held about a hundred and thirty or so patrons, but there were at least forty news media people milling around waiting for The Five. The ceiling was low and the stage was backed with a wall of what appeared to True to be black leather seat cushions. He introduced himself to the owner and the manager and talked to them for a few minutes, and then as the equipment was set up on stage True put himself between the band and the media hounds and tried to maintain some order.

Ariel was amazed at this turnout, at the shouting for attention and the glare of the camera lights that followed her as she made her way across the room. Berke didn’t look right or left. Terry ducked his head down, suddenly a lot shyer in a spotlight than he’d ever thought he would be. Nomad just laughed; here were all these cameras grabbing his image for national exposure, and instead of a young long-haired, street-tough Elvis he looked like the loser in a four-man cage fight.

The Casbah’s owner, a bearded man named Tim Mays, got up on stage and told the assembly that they were welcome to do their interviews for one hour—starting now—but after that they had to clear out so the checks could be done and everything prepped for the show tonight.

True was true to his word and started asking to see credentials—business cards, personal identification, whatever—of people lining up for interviews, which seemed to piss some of them off but he couldn’t care less about that; the way he blocked the path to the table where The Five had parked themselves said he was the big dog in this room, and if anybody didn’t like it they might as well pack up their digital capture gear into their black bags—which had to be searched, for the sake of security—and move their asses on out da doah.

The People magazine team, a young Asian-American woman wearing pink eyeglasses and a lanky guy with curly brown hair who carried his expensive Nikon like it was a five-dollar basketball, came on in and set up to do their interview. How does it feel to suddenly be so successful? Now, how long have you guys been together? John, what did you think about when you made that jump? Oh…yeah…you go by the name Nomad, right? Do you guys have any idea how you got on Jeremy Pett’s radar? What about Connor Addison? Tell me a little bit about yourselves, just a brief bio. What’s your plan after this tour is over?

Everybody looked to Nomad for the answer to that one. He said, “We’re working on it.”

“Good luck,” said the People reporter, after the pictures had been taken of The Five on stage against the black cushion background, their faces pressed together as if they were one single entity, their right hands extended, palms out, each five fingers strong. No smiling, exude confidence and toughness, and let your shiner and the fading scratches on your cheek speak to every poor man’s son.

“Ariel? Hi, there.”

The voice caught her as she was returning to her seat at the table and her bandmates were in their own conversations with other reporters. A hand touched her elbow. She looked to her left, at a smiling, heavy-set young man wearing a white ball cap with DJ on the front in gold glitter.

“How ya doin’? Okay if I set up and get a couple’a questions in? Your manager passed me through, I’m clean.” His smile never quit. His wide shoulders strained against a white nylon jacket that was really a couple of sizes too small; he stood about five feet seven and had big front teeth. The cap was pushed down low and tight on his head, with a huge curved bill. His hair was a sandy color on the sides and his deepset eyes were light brown. He had a bulbous nose that could round a corner before his Pumas did. “Just be a minute,” he told her. He was already setting up a tripod for a video camera next to the table. A black camera bag lay at his sneakered feet. “Go ahead, siddown.” Somebody else behind him told him to hurry up, and he shot a dark glance at the guy and said, “We’re all pros here, right? You shoulda got here early.” Then he switched his smile back on for Ariel, and he reached in to help her with her chair.

“DJ Talk It Up,” he said when Ariel was sitting. “A.K.A. Dominic Jankowski, but don’t let that get out. Pleased to meet ’cha.” He offered his hand and she shook it; he was wearing a ring on every finger. “Lemme get this thing ready, we’ll be off and runnin’.” He was attaching the camera to the tripod, which had seen heavy use and suffered some mishaps. One of the banged-up legs looked to be secured by a thick winding of duct tape. “I didn’t mean to cause nobody no worry when I made that call,” he explained as he worked. “I just believe in goin’ for what you want. Got to, all this competition out here. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said.

“You are a talented person,” he said, throwing another smile at her. “I saw your videos. Got a fan-fuckin’-tastic one of you on YouTube doin’ the snake song. You wrote that?”

“I did.”

“I like what that says. Very beautiful. Okay, we’re ready.” The camera was positioned on her face. “Just…lemme…get this little fuck turned on.” The switch was fighting his finger.

Ariel shifted in her seat. The next two people behind him were trying to get her attention, waving cameras at her. “Can I ask what this is for?”

“My website, Rock Da Net Dot Com. Didn’t you check it out?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s where DJ Talk It Up lives, my lady. Where he fries the night wires, talkin’ it up. There ya go.” The red light came on. “In business.”

“Talking up exactly what?”

“Ariel!” DJ Talk It Up spoke to her as if they were dear friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. “Talkin’ about you. And your band. And every other band I think is shootin’ straight for the stars. We’re recordin’ now, this’ll be for my Sunday night show.” He came around to peer into the lens over her shoulder, his cheek next to hers. She thought he was wearing a cologne that smelled like Band-Aids. “DJ Talk It Up on da Sunday night, yo yo yo!” He slung the fozzie finger. “We’re down here in San Diego at da Casbah, talkin’ to Ariel Collier, she be da dream girl of Da Five, check ’em out on this clip right here.” He straightened up and adjusted his cap. “I’ll edit the clip in, you’ll like it. You from up Boston way?”

“Manchester.”

“Philly,” he said, with a heart thump that went into a peace sign.

“Detroit,” said Nomad, who suddenly came up beside the DJ. “Can whip Philly’s ass.”

“Hey, my man!” DJ Talk It Up gave a crooked grin and balled up his fist to bump knuckles, but he only punched air. “Mr. Nomad, lookin’ mean!” He dropped his ghetto-by-way-of-bad-acting-lessons accent. “We’re recording here, see the light?”

“Rock Da Net Dot Com,” Ariel said, lifting her eyebrows.

“Excuse me, I’m with the Globe magazine.” A bearded man in a dark blue coat and open-necked shirt leaned in, a camera ready. His voice was a little testy. “Do I have to make an appointment to ask a few simple questions, or should—”

“Don’t push me!” DJ Talk It Up spun on him with a ferocity that even made Nomad step back. “I’m standin’ here, don’t push me!”

“I’m a professional, don’t you raise your—”

“Get your motherfuckin’ ass to the back of the line, dickweed! I’ve been waitin’ here for hours!”

“What the hell is this about?” True shouldered the Globe reporter, or freelancer or whatever he was, to one side. “Anybody causes any trouble in here, they’re going out. Are you causing trouble?” He directed this question to the Globe man.

“Sir, I am waiting my turn. That is all. This individual is wasting the hour that we professionals have been given to—”

“Bite my dick,” said DJ Talk It Up.

The upshot of all this was that the Globe spun toward the door, True walked away rubbing his temples because he had a ferocious headache, and after the crimson heat receded from DJ Talk It Up’s face he said this video would go over great on the website, his fans would go crazier than shithouse rats.

The interview went on for about seven more minutes, during which Nomad learned that DJ Talk It Up recorded the podcast in his aunt’s basement in L.A., where he was staying until his new crib in Westwood was redecorated. DJ Talk It Up said he’d just put the finishing touch on track number finito for his new CD, his own style of music he called grindhop, and both Dizzy D at Walkaround Records and Jasper Jack at Mutha’s Angry Boy were interested, and he’d used lots of samples from bands like Insane Clown Posse to make his statement. Maybe Ariel and Nomad would like copies? He could bring them to the Cobra Club tomorrow night.

“I don’t really have a lot of time to—” Nomad began, but Ariel said, “Sure, I’ll listen to your music.”

DJ Talk It Up smiled. “Okay,” he replied. “Yeah. Great. I’ll get it, like, cleaned up.” He stood silently for a few seconds, staring at her. Nomad thought the dude was zoning out. Or maybe he was in love. Then the DJ’s smile widened and he said, “I guess that does it.” He turned off the camera. “Hey,” he said before either of them could turn to the next person waiting. “Ariel, can I ask a big favor? I might have some more questions for you. Could you—and you might say no, and I’d understand—work me a backstage pass? Since I’m coming anyway. I could shoot some more video.” His grin showed the big front teeth. “Swear to God I won’t bring my fucking Uzi.”

“No can do,” Nomad said. “And you know, that’s not very funny.”

DJ Talk It Up smiled broadly at Nomad, but his eyes were vacant. “Sorry, man,” he amended. “Us Philly guys, we don’t got no class.”

“I can get you a pre-show pass,” Ariel told him, as Nomad looked on in astonishment. “You can come back before our set. Will that do?”

“Like honey on money,” he answered, which Nomad thought must’ve been something this guy had heard in a ’70s black exploitation flick, something like Super Fly Goes To Hell Up In Harlem.

When DJ Talk It Up had packed his camera and taken his tripod and gone, Nomad asked Ariel if she had lost her mind today, if she didn’t smell the whiff of bozo like he did, and if they wanted a loser like that anywhere near the Cobra Club, much less backstage.

“Pre-show won’t hurt,” she said, and her voice was firm. “Everybody deserves a chance.”

Nomad didn’t reply, but he knew the City of Angels. It made people want things before they’d earned them. And anyway, deserve was not a word in his dictionary.

TWENTY-FOUR.

The hour passed and the sound check went on. They returned to Chappie’s, rested as True went into the den and hit his cellphone making sure all the last-minute security details were in place, they ate the dinner Chappie made for them, whoever wanted to change clothes and shower did so, and then they headed back to the Casbah. The place was overflowing. First up were the Mindfockers, six guys from the San Francisco area who delivered heavy-guitar distorto-and-vibrato-drenched head-banging rock, and after the Mindfockers’ double encores the Mad Lads got up there in front of the black leather seat cushions and the big clunky air-conditioner that looked like it was about to fall out of the wall and those four dudes laid down some serious vibe with funky guitars and a bright red Elka X-705 combo organ that made Terry salivate. The Mad Lads’ lead singer opened a music case, brought out an accordion and knocked the house down with a rollicking Cajun-peppered version of ‘In The Midnight Hour’.

It was half past the midnight hour before The Five took the stage. They started the gig with ‘Bedlam A-Go-Go’, slowed to its original tempo. By the middle of the show, when Berke did her drum solo and Terry came in on the gutsy growling Hammond to trade back and forth with her, they were a smooth and powerful engine of sonic flight, up in the orbit of the spinning spheres, way up where the music looked to the mind of the player like geometric shapes constantly changing themselves against the pure black of space, collapsing inward and reforming like a multitude of kaleidoscopes or, the best that Nomad could describe this sensation of being one with the music, as existing for a short time within a Kenner Spirograph drawing set, where you put the tip of your colored pen in a series of interlocked wheels placed on a piece of paper, and when your talent and discipline took you where you were supposed to be—with guitar, or vocals, or drums, or keyboard—again and again and again, an intricate design began to appear that was a perfect and stunning combination of both mathematics and art. After going that far into the dream, the applause and appreciation of the audience was like a call to let go and return to earth, because no one could stay at that height very long, and wanting to get up there once more was part of the drug called creativity.

They were back at Chappie’s house around three-thirty, drained of energy but satisfied—like good sex—after two encores and a version of ‘Blackout of Gretely’ that had nearly lifted the roof off the Casbah. Chappie had some cold cans of beers on hand, and passed them around as everyone sprawled, half-dead, in the living room. Terry was sitting on the sofa between Ariel and Berke, with Chappie in a wicker chair and Nomad lying on his back on the gold-colored carpet. True sat in a green chair and gratefully accepted a beer; the night had passed with no incidents, and all the agents who’d put their lives on the line for him and The Five were by now at home with their families. Except, of course, the ones in the Yukons on sentry duty out front.

He drank his beer and listened to them talk. They were tired, sure, but they were still ‘up’, as they would call it. Terry was fretting about an intro he thought he’d flubbed, and Nomad told him to forget about it. Then Nomad sat up, turned his lasers on Berke and said he thought some of the songs were still running fast, and she said he was wrong, the beat was right in the pocket. He faced her down for a few seconds, and then they both shrugged and returned to their beers and that was the end of it but the point was delivered for Berke to rethink her timing. The small talk came back up, they laughed at the recollection of the Mad Lads’ lead singer going buck wild with his accordion, and suddenly Chappie got to her feet and asked, “Anybody want a nightcap? Something a little stronger than beer?”

“Mom,” Berke said, “don’t get started on that so late.”

“What’s late? Jesus, I hardly ever see you and you’re here two nights and leaving again at…what?…ten in the morning?”

“We can stay until eleven,” True said.

“Okay, eleven then! You! Mr. Secret Agent Man. You want a Jack and Coke?”

“Um…well…”

“Coca-Cola,” she told him, in case he was that much of a stranger to the human race.

“I’ll take one,” Terry said.

“What the hell,” Berke said. She shrugged and leaned back, throwing her sneakered feet up on the coffee table and in the process kicking some magazines off to the floor. “Sign me up.”

“That’s my girl. Anybody else?”

True looked at the others in the room. They were so young. He had the sudden feeling that he was very far from home, and after this was over all of him might not want to go home. It had been, to him, an amazing night. Maybe most of it had been senseless noise and barely-controlled chaos, but still…all that youth, and passion, and life under one roof…it was eye-opening, is what it was. In his day, it would have been ‘consciousness-expanding’. If you believed in that.

“I’ll take a little drink in a shotglass, if you have one,” True decided.

“Do I have a shotglass?” Chappie grinned at him. “What color, and from which bar?”

“Mom,” Berke said. “Stop fucking around.”

“You ought to help your mother,” True told her when Chappie had gone to the kitchen. “With the drinks, I mean.” He glanced at her well-worn sneakers. “And you probably ought to take your feet off the table.”

“Oh my God!” Berke spoke with breathless mock surprise. Her eyes had widened with pretend shock. “Guys, our road manager has become our barracks sergeant! Yeah, I knew that was coming. It doesn’t bother my mom, why should it bother you?” She did recall, however, that it had bothered Floyd.

“It’s not ladylike,” True said.

Countdown to blastoff, Nomad thought. Five…four…three…two…

“Go help your mother,” True said, and this time his voice carried the hard stamp of official business. “She needs you.”

One, the loneliest number, never fell.

Berke’s face seemed frozen, her mouth partly open and her black eyes as shiny as new glass. She slowly blinked, she said, “Okay,” with a quiet that nearly blew her bandmates’ minds, and then she got up and left the room.

“‘Danger’ is your middle name, huh?” Nomad asked True.

“My middle name is Elmer,” he said, as he retrieved the magazines from the floor and put them in a neat stack back where they were, and Nomad, Ariel and Terry thought that name sounded just fine.

True finished his beer. The drinks were served from a wooden tray painted watermelon green. True’s shotglass was full to the brim and had a logo that said it was from the Funky Pirate on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. He took half of it down and did not fail to note that Chappie had opened a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels and it was on the coffee table where her daughter’s feet used to be. Berke returned to her place on the sofa with her drink, and nary a hiss was hissed nor a curse unfurled like a battleflag.

But those fucking drums would sure take a beating tomorrow night, Nomad thought as he settled in with his potion. Or…maybe not.

True came to the bottom of his glass. He was still thinking about the Casbah, and how the audience—a decent audience, an appreciative audience, not like that mob at Stone Church—had responded to The Five’s music. This was a different world. He couldn’t imagine how courageous a person would have to be, to get up for the first time on stage in front of strangers who could cut your dream to pieces. Chappie was offering him another pour, and he accepted it. They were talking about the gig tomorrow night, how they needed to tighten up here or stretch it out a little bit there—‘let it breathe’, Nomad said, as if the song were a living thing—and the talk was easy and relaxed, the conversation of people who respected each other and, it was clear, really did share a strong bond of family, of professionalism, of…honor, really.

He understood that kind of bond.

He’d almost gone through his second shotglass when he said, “I used to be in a band.” It had come out of him so abruptly he hadn’t heard it coming, even in his own head.

The easy and relaxed talk silenced.

“Look at all those eyes,” True said, and when he smiled he thought his mouth felt heavy. “It’s true. I mean, I’m True. But it is true. Really.”

“What’d you play?” Nomad asked, with a semi-smirk. “Bone fiddle for the Cavemen?”

“No, honest to God.” He was aware of Chappie refilling his shotglass, and that was okay, they weren’t leaving until eleven. He would sleep until eight, he never needed much sleep anyway, this was a nice night and it was okay. “I played acoustic guitar in a band called the Honest Johns. Three guys. And me. I mean, three guys in all. When I was a junior in high school.” He took another drink, and boy was he going to sleep well tonight. This morning. Whenever. Time got weird when you were in a band. “Well, we never actually played anywhere. We just rehearsed in my friend’s rumpus room.”

“Say what?” Nomad asked.

“Downstairs room,” True explained. Jeez, these kids acted like adults but they knew as little about the world as children did. “My friend had an eight-track reel-to-reel. Tape recorder.”

“Cool,” said Terry.

“We played…let’s see… Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’. We did ‘One Toke Over The Line’, by Brewer and Shipley—”

“My man,” said Terry with admiration.

“We did ‘Blackbird’, by the Beatles. And I guess the nearest we came to perfection was ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ by—”

“Crosby, Stills and Nash!” Ariel was nursing a glass of orange juice. Her smile was sunny. “Oh, wow! I used to play that song all the time!”

“Really? I remember it had a strange tuning.”

“Oh yeah, the E modal tuning.”

Nomad just had to ask the next question: “Who sang the lyrics?”

“We all did,” True said, not realizing what kind of trap he was stepping into. “We did the three-part harmony.” He took another drink, and thought of himself as a young man in a rumpus room, two friends on either side, singing into a microphone while the reels of a huge tape recorder caught the moment, to be forever lost except for the imprint in his mind.

“Sing the first few lines for us,” Nomad said.

“Huh? Oh, no. I haven’t sung that song for years.”

“Don’t you remember the words? You’re not that old.”

“John!” Ariel caught his gaze and shook her head.

“You’ve got to remember the tune,” Nomad went on. And why he was pushing like this, why he was showing a little streak of mean he didn’t know, except for the fact that the gig tonight had been a big success, the media thought they were a big success, the People magazine article would say they were going to be a big success, the future for this dead band said Big Success in huge flashing neon with dollar signs twenty feet tall, and he felt like a creepy-crawly piece of shit because it wasn’t about the music, it wasn’t about their talent and dedication to their craft, it was about death and sniper’s bullets, and how could a person with any ounce of self-respect call that a big success? He thought that the others, for all their smiles tonight and their afterglow of accomplishment, had to be feeling the same, or they just weren’t letting themselves think about it.

“If you remember the tune,” Nomad said, unyielding, “the words may come back.”

True nodded. “I do remember the tune.” His shotglass was empty once again, and Chappie moved to refill it because it was fun having a new drinking buddy, even if it was an FBI agent, but she stopped when she looked into her daughter’s face and those steady black eyes said No more.

“I’d like to hear some singing.” Nomad drew his knees up to his chin. “Man, you might be like…a lost talent or something.”

“Come on, John,” Terry said, and Nomad looked at him fiercely and asked, “Where are we going?”

Without warning, without an intake of breath or an explanation that his voice was rusty or that he couldn’t do this in public and he was sorry he’d even brought any of this to light, True began to sing.

His pitch was perfect. His voice was softer and higher than they would’ve expected. It had an element of a junior high schooler in it, singing for his friends in a downstairs room.

“It’s getting to the point,

Where I’m no fun anymore.

I am sorry.

Sometimes it hurts so badly

I must cry out loud.

I am lonely.

I am yours, you are mine, you are what you—”

True’s voice faltered. He stopped and looked at his audience, who were all staring at him. He started to take a drink and realized the shotglass in his hand had nothing in it. Now I’ve gone and made a damn fool out of myself, he thought. Damn old man, he thought.

Damn old man.

Maybe someone should have clapped, to break the silence. Ariel thought about it, and came close to doing it, but she did not.

It was Berke who stepped into the breech. “I bet John hopes he can sing like that when he gets your age,” she said to True.

“Well,” True said, and shrugged, and looked at his polished black wingtips.

“Not bad,” Nomad had to admit, after a few more seconds had drifted past. “You want to sign up for vocal lessons sometime, I’ll only charge you a hundred dollars an hour.”

True turned the shotglass between his palms. He had forgotten himself, he realized. He had forgotten why he was here, and what he was about. It was time, maybe, to let them know so he wouldn’t be allowed to forget again.

“In the van,” he said. “On the way to Stone Church.” He was still staring at his shoes, but he was speaking to John Charles. “You asked if you were supposed to feel sorry for Jeremy Pett.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

True nodded. He felt a pulse beating at his temple. “Have you ever fought in a war?”

“No.”

“Ever been in the military? Ever served your country?”

“Served my country?” Nomad’s voice had taken on a defensive edge. “Like how? Getting killed so a contractor can make big bucks and the flag-maker’s stock goes up on Wall Street?”

True lifted his gaze to Nomad’s. The agent’s eyes were sad. “Don’t you believe in anything?” He directed the question again, to all of them. “Don’t any of you believe in a higher calling than…what you’re doing?”

“A higher calling?” Terry asked. “I believe in God, if that’s what you’re—”

“I’m talking about service to your country,” True emphasized. “To the fight for freedom. Not just here, but around the world.” His gaze fixed again on Nomad. Maybe he was still feeling a little light-headed and stupid from the Jack, but he had to get this out. “You can say whatever you want to about Jeremy Pett, and I’m not going to defend him for what’s he done, but that young man…that young Marine has served his country to the best of his ability, and no matter what he’s done or what he’s planning to do, no man who refuses to be a Blue Falcon can be all bad.”

“A Blue Falcon?” Ariel asked, frowning. “What’s that?”

“A military term for a soldier who leaves a wounded buddy on the battlefield. It means Buddy—” He just couldn’t say that word, it was undignified. “Effer.”

It hit Nomad. Hit him hard and square, right in the brainpot. Our barracks sergeant, Berke had said.

“You never told us where you were a cop before you joined the FBI.” Nomad’s voice sounded thick. “You were in the military, weren’t you?”

True’s gaze did not waver. “Military Police. United States Marine Corps.” He had joined right after college, knowing the MP experience would put him on the fast track for the job he really wanted.

Nomad saw the whole picture, even as it came clear for the others. “This isn’t about saving us. It’s about saving him.”

“That’s right,” said True.

“Shit,” was Berke’s caustic response. She leaned toward him in full attack mode, her teeth clenched. “You’re hoping he’ll try to kill us?”

“Planning for it,” True corrected.

True is False, Nomad thought. “Our road manager,” he said, the old familiar rage growing in his heart, “wants to save his boy. His little wayward nutbag Marine. Doesn’t matter if one or two or all of us get drilled. Is that it, Gomer?”

“Not exactly, but close.” True again stared at his shoes. He liked to keep them well-polished. He liked everything neat and clean and polished, but unfortunately life had a habit of getting very messy. He could feel, of all them, the girl staring at him with hurt on her face. He liked the girl. Really, he liked everyone in this room. Life had a habit of getting so very messy. “No one wants any of you to be injured,” he said, keeping his face lowered. “I knew there was a chance Pett might come after you at Stone Church. Every possible precaution was taken.”

“Yeah, except for one fucker getting in with a pistol.” Nomad’s voice was a whipstrike.

“Every possible precaution, except metal detectors. And, yes, I was hoping he’d show. I was hoping he’d try something when we stopped on the highway.”

“Christ!” said Berke. “Are we that worthless?”

“With the gear they’ve got—what you’ve seen and what you haven’t seen—my men only need a single shot from the dark to pinpoint a location. I’ve already told you how good a sniper Pett used to be. He set up that shot on Mike Davis with some of his old precision, but he didn’t hit with the first bullet. Did he?” True watched Chappie pour herself another drink. Her hand was slightly trembling. True waited until she was finished before he went on. The way the girl was looking at him—he could see her with his peripheral vision—made him wish this hour had never arrived.

“So Pett’s skills have diminished,” he told them. “It’s unlikely he can make a kill with a first shot, unless he gets lucky or close, which he doesn’t want to do. You knew you were bait when you agreed to do this. I believed then and I believe now that if Pett is still in this country, if he’s still following us and he wants to kill any one of you, he’ll try again. It doesn’t matter where. You go back to Austin and call it a day…guess what? It’s his call.” True aimed his cool blue eyes at Nomad, whose mouth was twisted with disgust. “But you’re absolutely right, John. My first priority in this situation is capturing Pett alive and getting him the help he needs.” He paused long enough for Nomad—for all of them—to absorb that. “That’s why I’m here, and not an agent from the office who wasn’t a Marine. Let’s just say, veterans look out for each other. For life. Or let me say…they should. What this young man has gone through, both in Iraq and here after he was discharged…that’s a tragedy I’m not willing to let continue by having someone shoot him in the head and drag him off like a piece of filth. Which he is not.” True felt the heat rising in his face, and maybe it was the Jack or maybe it was because he was just plain effing angry.

“I want to get this straight,” said Berke. “You’re saying you value his life over ours? And if he pops up somewhere, your people won’t shoot to kill?”

“My men are well-trained in what I expect them to do,” came the answer. “I want him in a mental hospital, getting the best possible care. Not in a cemetery.”

“Our government in action,” Chappie said, with a bitter smile. Her eyes had gotten small. “Fuck the people!” She lifted her glass in a toast.

Nomad had finished his own drink. He wondered how quick the old man’s reflexes were, and if he could dodge a glass thrown at his skull. “If your men sighted Pett before he could get off a shot at any one of us, they wouldn’t try to put him down for good? They’ve been ordered not to kill him if it comes to that?”

“Pretty much,” True said. “Yeah.”

Ariel got up from the sofa and carried her empty glass to the kitchen. True avoided looking at her, and she did not immediately return.

Silence filled the room. Or, rather, it hollowed out the room.

“You don’t understand,” True said, with a harsh note of steadily increasing anger, “what those young men have gone through. You don’t understand what they’ve seen. You can’t understand, because you take everything for granted. Everything you have. You’ve never fought for anything worth dying for, have you? Answer me!”

“Who gets to say what that is?” Nomad fired back. “You? The President? Some corporate chairman who’s got plans to build a shopping mall and a megaplex in the middle of Baghdad? Who?”

“See?” True gave a crooked smile, but his cheeks were flushed. “You don’t get it. Some things, like freedom, are worth dying for whether you think so or not. If everybody turned their backs on their responsibility, where would they be?”

“A lot of them,” Terry said, “would be alive.”

“Easy to sit here and not have to do anything. Nothing required of you. Just sit and take.” True almost got up and put an end to this, because it was about to get very messy and it was not going anywhere, but he had something important to say. Something he wanted John Charles and everyone else to hear, whether they wanted to hear it or not. He was aware that Ariel was standing in the kitchen doorway. Good. She should hear this, too.

“What you don’t understand and can never understand is that the young men and women over there are fighting for you,” he said. “For your future.”

“Oil for my car?” Nomad returned a ferocious grin. “Is that what you mean?”

“That’s part of it. Our way of life, until we can get other energy sources going. But you don’t get that Jeremy Pett and young men like him went over there with courage and purpose, to do a job they were obligated to do as soldiers in the service of this country. It didn’t matter if they wanted to go or not; they weren’t asked, and they didn’t want to be asked, because this is what they were trained to do. And I can tell you, Pett’s training as a sniper was far harder than most. It’s incredibly difficult, and only the best of the best pass through. You couldn’t qualify to carry his socks.” A stabbing finger drove that point. “So he’s the best of the best, doing what he’s been trained to do, and then something terrible happens to him there and at home and the spirit drains out of him and leaves him basically a broken shell. But he has no serious and long-lasting physical injuries, and maybe he can cover up his psychological wounds because he’s been trained to be tough and to deny pain, and his own father has taught him a lot of that, so nobody follows up on Sergeant Pett. No, the VA hospitals are understaffed and overworked, so solid, tough guys like Jeremy Pett are given a certificate that says how much the Marine Corps appreciates their service. Maybe they’re awarded a medal too, like Pett was, so they can remember what sets them apart from men like you. Then this broken young veteran who’s been trained to kill people at over eight hundred yards goes out into the world looking for work.” True’s blue eyes were no longer cool; they were aflame, and they dared Nomad to interrupt him.

The dare was not taken.

“Well, it’s a tough world out here,” True continued. “We all know that. We use whatever skills we have, don’t we? And there’s so much competition for jobs, and people having to take whatever they can get. And maybe, if you were Jeremy Pett, you’d had plans set out for your entire life, that you were going to work harder than anyone else—I mean bone-hurting, back-breaking hard—and earn yourself and your family a home in the Corps. But you know, plans sometimes just don’t work out. Little things go wrong, here and there. Oops, sorry. Here’s your certificate, and this fine medal for you to look at and remember the day you were somebody. But now, you need to go out in that world of civilians and find yourself a job, you with your training to be the best of the best and to kill people at over eight hundred yards.”

True leaned forward in his chair. “And maybe in time…after you keep hitting a wall that will not move…and after you realize you live in a world that can’t ever measure up to what you once knew…you start trying to find a new enemy, because only a battlefield makes you feel worth living.” True nodded. “I think that’s his story, and I won’t be another bastard who’s kicked him to the curb. If it’s within my power, I’m going to save his life.”

True stood up, with the shotglass in his hand. “Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Fisk. I’m going to bed now.” The couch in the den, he meant. “I’ll set my alarm.” There was no need to set his alarm, he woke up at whatever time he decided to awaken the night before, but he wanted them to have confidence that he would not oversleep. He never overslept. He headed for the kitchen, to place the shotglass in the sink, and Ariel retreated to give him room.

Before True entered the den and closed the door, Nomad said, “One question, man. What if Jeremy Pett aims the rifle at you first? Still figuring to save his life if that happens?”

True didn’t answer. The door closed at his back.

Near six in the morning, True’s cellphone buzzed. He was on it at once, his eyes bleary and his mouth tasting like wood shavings from a barroom floor but his senses already sharpening.

< >

“Good morning, Truitt,” said the familiar voice. “I’m sending you an email attachment. It’s something you need to see post haste.”

“What is it?”

“Connor Addison started talking around midnight. It’s all on the video.”

“Okay.” True rubbed his eyes with one hand. “Send it over.”

“Go ahead.”

“We’ve got a few dozen Pett sightings to go through, but there were two yesterday in Nogales. Made within hours of each other. One by a local policeman. We’ve got some people asking questions down there, strictly unofficial and very low-key.”

“Alright. Good.”

“He could’ve made it over,” said the man at the office in Tucson. “You know, we might need to talk here pretty soon about cutting back. This is taking a lot of resources.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”

“A lot of manpower. I’ve got other things going on.”

“Sure, I know,” True said. He had slept in his clothes. Every part of him felt wrinkled.

The question came, as he’d known it was going to: “Can you make do with one team?”

True sighed. Heavily, so it could be heard.

“Just asking. Would you consider it and get back to me?”

“Yeah,” True said. He worked a tight muscle in his left shoulder. “I’ll get back.”

When the caller had finished, True put his laptop on the desk and turned it on. He checked that all the lights were where they were supposed to be on the den’s wireless cable modem, and then he yawned so wide his jaw muscles cracked and he went to work.

TWENTY-FIVE.

True didn’t like their two rooms at the Days Inn Motel on West Sunset. He thought the windows were too open to a parking lot on the east side of the building, and though the teams in the Yukons would be sitting out there taking turns on shift with their day binoculars and night goggles he just didn’t feel good about it. He had their rooms changed to the west side, where the windows were blocked by another structure. Then he went to his own room down the hall, unpacked his gear, splashed some cold water in his face from the bathroom tap, and lay on his back on the bed while he called his wife and asked her how her day was going.

Everything’s good here, he told her. California sunshine. Traffic wasn’t so bad. The band’s doing a remote interview from the Cobra Club—yeah, that’s the name of it—with Nancy Grace this afternoon, you might want to watch that show tonight. You remember the talent agency guy I was telling you about? Roger Chester? He set it up. Greta van Susteren’s people are supposed to call me. We’re doing a couple of radio interviews before the gig. Do you like that word? So, anyway, it’s shaping up to be another mad minute like yesterday.

Her phrase: mad minute. A period of chaotic activity where you just put your head down and held on like a cat in the curtains.

He told her everything was under control. He had what he needed. Yes, he knew he’d forgotten his fish oil supplements, he’d left them on the vitamin shelf. His clothes steamer wasn’t working like it should, he thought they’d gotten a bum one from that whole stack of them at Target. But he had what he needed. He told her there were palm trees lining the boulevard outside just like in the movies, and she would go crazy to see the huge Off Broadway shoe warehouse that was almost right across the street. He said for her not to worry, he was going to find a place with a good salad bar.

He didn’t tell her about the IHOP across the way, because she knew how he liked to mix syrupy pancakes, crumbled-up bacon and yellow-drippy eggs into a scrumpdiliumptous feast that laughed a hearty big fat man’s laugh at Omega-3 pills, but he didn’t have that very often. Only when there was an IHOP within range.

Love you, she told him.

Love you, he answered. I’ll call tomorrow.

Needless to say. He called her every day he was out of town.

Be careful, she said.

Always, he answered.

Their ritual, their touching of hands over distance.

He put the phone down and lay back on the bed, and he stared at the cottage-cheese ceiling and wondered if and when he should do it.

Before their sound check? After the gig?

Should he do it at all?

Would he want to know, if he were one of them?

This was one of the decisions they paid him to make. It was his call. Those young people up the hall were adults. It wasn’t right, keeping this from them, but then again…what good did it do, to show them?

He asked himself another question: if he was the father to any one of them, would he want his son or daughter to know?

He lay there a while longer, turning his decision this way and that to give himself an out if he wanted it. Then he got up, took his laptop and left the room.

“Mr. True,” said Nomad when he answered the knock. “How do you do?” The air had been a little tight today, a little frosty on that drive up from San Diego, but True had survived tighter and colder climates.

“I have something to show you,” True said. “While I set up, would you go get the girls?”

“The women,” True corrected.

When everybody was in the one room and True had the laptop powered up, sitting atop a writing desk that had never seen a pen put to a letter, he asked if all of them could see the screen clearly. It was displaying the white seal of the FBI against a black background.

“What is this, show and tell?” Berke asked, sitting cross-legged on a bed.

“Yes.” True guided the trackball pointer over the shortcut to his image program and clicked. He hit the Browse All Images and a series of fifteen color thumbnails came up. He had gotten these pictures in a secured email attachment from Tucson yesterday morning, when he was at the field office in San Diego. “These are graphic,” he warned, and found himself looking at Ariel.

“I think we can handle graphic,” Nomad said with a hint of a sneer. His eye was mostly green today, and he could see out of it. He was still burning about that mess unloaded on them last night. To tell the honest truth he was deeply and bitterly disappointed in Mr. Half-True.

“Okay. First picture.” He clicked on a thumbnail and an image filled the screen in high resolution.

They didn’t know what they were looking at. From his chair, Terry asked, “What is that?” The image showed what looked like…pale, freckled flesh? And on it was…what? A shiny brown tattoo of some kind? The depiction of a wine glass with an ‘X’ at its center, and a ‘V’ at the bottom under two curling tails?

“It’s a brand,” True said. “It would be right about here.” He touched an area just above his left shoulder blade. “Those who know this kind of stuff say it’s a portion of the seal of Lucifer from a book called ‘The Grimorium Verum’, printed in the 18th century.” He clicked on the next image. Again there was a shiny brown mark against pale flesh, but the flesh was puckered by long ragged scars.

“Somebody’s been using a whip on him,” True said before he could be asked. “Somebody who really likes to use a whip. This symbol is supposed to be an all-seeing eye, again as related to Satanism.”

“Hold it!” Nomad had been sitting on the other bed, next to Ariel, and now he stood up. “What is this shit?”

“These are brands, the scars of several different kinds of whips, razor slashes, wounds made by fish hooks and broken glass—and other implements the experts haven’t figured out yet—on the back and chest of Connor Addison. They found them when they took him to the medical trailer after that melee. The Tucson police took these pictures.” True clicked on the third image, which showed in closeup more scars, these crisscrossed as if inflicted by the furious digging of a small metal object in the shape of a sharp-tipped, five-fingered claw.

“Je…sus,” Berke breathed.

“On his lower back, right side,” True said. The images were tagged with the locations of where they’d been found on the body.

The next image caused Ariel to shrink back, Nomad to narrow his eyes and Terry to whisper, “Oh, man.”

It was the brand of a large downward-pointing pentagram, with the head of a half-animal, half-human goat at its center, the eyes completely blackened burn marks, the horns outlined and quite artfully decorated in burn, a ‘666’ burned across the forehead, everything done with detail and obvious passion and creativity, if working with red-hot irons and electric pyrography chisels was the artist’s joy.

“This one is at the center of his chest,” True said. “You can see that his nipples have been burned off, as well.”

“I can’t look at any more.” Ariel put her hand up and averted her face.

“Okay, we don’t have to go through all these, but I wanted you to see a few.” True closed the image program and navigated to another file. “Now…this is Connor Addison speaking to the police around midnight, last night. He suddenly wanted to talk, so they wanted to hear what he had to say. You ready?”

Nomad was still on his feet. He’d moved between Ariel and the laptop as if to shield her from these hideous images of tortured meat. “Why are you showing this to us?”

“Because you need to know what’s out there,” True replied calmly.

“We already know, man!” Terry said.

“No,” said True. “No, you don’t.”

He double-clicked on the video file, and it began to play.

The scene was a view of one of those small interrogation rooms from every reality cop show on the planet, taken from a camera positioned in an upper corner. Two men, a gray-haired dude in a white shirt with a red-patterned tie, the other in a dark blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, sat on one side of the table. The gray-haired cop was rubbing his eyes, as if it had been a long hard slog to midnight. The man in the blue shirt had short-cut brown hair and was husky, with the broad back and shoulders of a wrestler. A notepad, pens and what looked to be a voice recorder was placed between them. On the other side of the table sat a thin, pale young man wearing the eye-shocking orange jumpsuit that Nomad had known and loved so well. Addison’s hands were folded on the table in an attitude of prayer. His neatly-combed blonde hair looked damp, as if he’d just taken a shower before coming clean.

Time and date stamps sat down on the lower left of the frame, and a frame counter on the right. The time was twelve-oh-nine.

“Let’s get started, then,” said the older cop. He had a radio rumble of a voice, like the bass presence was turned up a little too loud. “You can state your name.”

“Apollyon,” said the young man. He spoke with composed authority, in a soft voice that suited his looks but not the raging nightmare under his jumpsuit.

“Say ’gain?” asked the second cop, who sounded like a hardcore cowboy type: careful there, feller, I got five beans in the wheel.

“Apollyon,” the soft voice repeated, and then he spelled it out.

Cowboy wrote it down on the notepad.

Radio’s fingers tapped the tabletop. “And what’s your home address?”

“You know all that,” said the young man, Connor Addison or Apollyon or whatever he was calling himself.

“We’d like to hear it from you.”

The young man looked up directly at the video camera. He had a black and swollen left eye. A bandage covered his chin and his lower lip was puffed up. Nomad suddenly felt awfully proud of himself, though he knew most of the damage had been done by the Nazi Six.

“Call me Apollyon,” said the soft voice to the camera. “I am not from this place.”

Cowboy tore the page off the notepad and started to leave his chair.

“I can tell you what it means, you don’t have to go look it up on the Internet.”

Cowboy paused, thought about it, almost went anyway because his horses were restless, and then he sat down again, smoothed the page out on the table and stared across at Apollyon.

“I am the destroyer,” said the pale young man. “I am everything you fear, and I am everything you would like to be.”

“That so?” Cowboy asked, and he looked down at his piece of paper.

“That is so,” said Apollyon.

“Would I like to be in jail facing a very serious charge of attempted murder, Connor?” Radio rumbled.

Apollyon looked up again at the camera, and his battered face beamed. “They need their ears checked here.”

“Okay, then. Apollyon.” The way Radio said that, he could be announcing an ’80s hair band. “You wanted to talk, so we’re listening.” His chair creaked as he leaned back. He spread his arms out, palms open. “Let’s hear it.”

“I’d like a candy bar. Something sweet.”

“After you talk to us. Let me start you out a little bit, with a question. Why did you intend to commit murder on Thursday afternoon? That was your intention, correct? To shoot as many people on that stage as you could?”

“That’s three questions,” said Apollyon.

“Answer the first one, how ’bout it?” Cowboy directed.

“I’d like a Snickers. Really, anything chocolate.”

“Okay, let’s stop this foolishness.” Radio stood up. “Come on, we’re through here.”

Apollyon didn’t move. After a few seconds, he said, “The seventh mansion the Furies possess.”

“What?” Cowboy asked, straining to understand.

“I was told to go to Stone Church,” said the young man. He folded his arms around himself, around that thin body bearing the savage multitude of scars and burns. “I saw the ads on TV. I saw who was going to be there. That band the sniper’s after. Playing on Thursday afternoon, at three o’clock. One show. I looked them up on their website. I looked up the website for Stone Church.” Then he stopped speaking.

“Go ahead,” said Radio. He sat down once more, but he perched on the edge of his chair ready to jump up and rattle the sword again if he needed to.

Apollyon remained silent.

Cowboy tried his hand: “Who was it told you to go to Stone Church?”

Apollyon began to very slightly rock himself back and forth. He had a fixed smile on his face. Looking at it, even from this distance of time and space, made Ariel’s flesh crawl.

“Who was it told you to go to Stone Church, Apollyon?” Cowboy repeated.

The young man said something. It was so soft they couldn’t make it out.

“What was that?” Radio asked. “Who?”

Apollyon spoke a little louder. A name, spoken quickly. Spoken like something that even a destroyer should be afraid of.

A girl’s name.

True froze the video.

“Bethy was—” he began, but Ariel interrupted him because she already knew.

“His sister,” she said. “His raped and murdered sister.”

True stared at her as if seeing something in her face he’d never seen before, or hearing in her voice a firm certainty that he didn’t quite understand, and Ariel was aware of the others staring at her too, and she didn’t fully understand her own feeling either, but watching this video—seeing this young man’s sick smile and hearing his eerily soft voice speaking the name of a dead little girl—made her aware of places in this very room where the light did not completely settle, and where a shadow seemed to shift and shudder at the edge of the corner of the eye.

“This kid’s a lunatic,” Nomad said. “A fucking nutbag.” Even as he made that statement, he was wondering about the lunatics and fucking nutbags who’d decorated Apollyon’s body with fire and blood.

“There’s more,” True told him.

“Show it,” Ariel said.

True clicked on the small circle with the Play arrow in it.

“Who’s Bethy?” Cowboy asked, proving he hadn’t fully done his homework, but as Apollyon sat silent and motionless Radio wrote something on the pad. He slid it in front of his partner, and Cowboy read it and gave a brief nod.

“Bethy told you to go to Stone Church and kill people. Is that correct?” Radio asked.

Apollyon didn’t reply and it looked like he wasn’t going to, as the time counter displayed the passage of twelve seconds. Then he answered, “She told me to find a gun, to steal one if I needed to from Cal Holland’s house, and go kill the girl.”

“What girl?”

“The girl in the band.” Apollyon’s bruised mouth showed the faintest curl of annoyance. “The girl singer. Bethy told me to kill her, because if she dies they won’t finish it.”

“Finish what, Apollyon?” Cowboy asked.

“What they’re doing.” He continued to rock himself back and forth. “Bethy says they don’t even know.”

“Hm,” Radio said. “So…did Bethy tell you what it is?”

“Oh, no.” Apollyon shook his head. He gave a sad smile, the smile of an intelligent but nerdy high school kid who has been snubbed by the cool dudes at the cool table, and who finally and forever knows his role. “I’m not allowed.”

“Stop it!” Nomad commanded. True’s finger was slow. “Stop it now!”

The video froze.

True looked at Nomad, his dark eyebrows upraised.

“How do you figure this is helpful to us?” Nomad’s face was fearsome with its angry mouth and swollen sick-green eye. “You think this is helping us go out to the sound check, meet-and-greet the news people, do interviews and keep ourselves together? This is supposed to pick us up for what we have to do?”

“John?” Ariel said softly. “We need to watch this.”

“No, we don’t.” He pointed at the video frame. “This is a crazy, pain-addicted Satan freak. Nothing else. Okay?”

“What else would he be, John?” asked Terry, and in that question Ariel realized Terry was sitting next to her again, in that seat she’d saved for him on the bench under the eucalyptus tree, but now he was listening to her. He was listening to every single word.

Nomad was unable to answer. He looked from Ariel to Terry and back again, and then to Berke for her caustic acid that dripped upon every unmanagable thought or uncomfortable idea and melted them down to Silly Putty.

This time, it didn’t drip. This time, Berke chewed on her lower lip, and she gave a small nervous laugh and shook her head as if to say she had nothing to say.

“Finish what?” True asked, directing the question to all of them. “Just for interest’s sake. Do you think that’s a reference to your tour, or—”

“The dead don’t speak!” Nomad had nearly shouted it. “Ghosts don’t come back and tell people to do things! The dead are dead! They’re nothing!”

But as he said it, he heard his own ghost tell him that Johnny, there was no roadmap.

No, that was different, he thought. That was a memory. His father was not a ghost telling him to steal a gun and kill a girl because if she was dead, a song would not be finished.

Oh, yeah. Here we go, he thought. Here we go. The communal song. And that girl at the well. That girl in her raggedy straw hat with her ladle of water, trying to stuff him into her sack of buttholes. The angel of life, George had said. God’s voice speaking to Terry in church, and Heaven and Hell and all that garbage for people who were afraid to think for themselves. Oh, yeah; here we go.

“Set it up,” he told them, “so I can knock it down.”

Ariel’s eyes were dark gray with hints of sapphire blue, like gleams of something mysterious in motion just beneath the surface of a sea. “You know what this is about, John. You know best of all, because it was your idea.”

“It’s a song,” he said, almost pleadingly. “Not even finished yet. No music to it. It’s just some words strung out in lines. There are no hidden meanings. No big flash of light. It was just…a way to keep…”

“Us together,” Ariel said, helping him. “I know that’s how it began, but now I think it’s more.”

“A new song?” True asked. “You’re writing a new song? Is there mention of it on your website?”

“No,” Terry said. “We just started thinking about it when we left Austin.”

“How would Connor Addison know about it, then? And according to him…according to his sister…you don’t know what you’re doing. So how can that be?”

“That freak’s sister is dead! Stop talking about his sister!” Nomad feared he was about to blow his circuits; they were going to have to load him into an ambulance and take him to the Hollywood ICU, and maybe the girl would come to him in his room and say I believe in you and he could shout back, Fuck you, I don’t believe in you!

True said, as calmly as he could, “There are just a few more minutes of the video. I’d like to show you the rest of it.”

“Berke!” Nomad said. “Come on, let’s go find us a fucking bar!”

“No,” she told him, and she glanced quickly at him and then away. “I think I’ll stick here. Anyway…it wouldn’t be safe, just walking around.”

True clicked the Play arrow. Nomad did not leave.

Cowboy tap-tap-tapped his pen on the edge of the table. Radio rubbed his mouth, readying it for another rumble.

“Who gave you those marks, Apollyon?” Radio asked. “They’re Satanist symbols, aren’t they?”

“Two questions, one answer: the seventh mansion the Furies possess.”

“Yeah, we heard that already. Is there a meaning to it, or is it gibberish?”

“It has a meaning to me,” said Apollyon.

“Enlighten us.”

“Would I ever like to,” came the reply, “but you wouldn’t understand the game.”

Cowboy jumped in with both boots. “Game? What game would that be?”

Silence from the destroyer.

Tap-tap-tap went Cowboy’s pen. Radio cleared his throat like a burst of static. “Your father told me yesterday that you used to be a model student—”

“I’m still a model student, but I’ve changed schools.”

“We’ll get to that. He said you were active in the chess club. Is that the game you’re talking about?”

“You wish,” said Apollyon, with a crimped smile. “Am I ever going to get my candy? I would talk so much better with something sweet in my mouth.”

“Uh-huh.” For a few seconds Radio searched the young man’s bandaged face, and then he said with the resigned air of a weary soul who really, really wants to go home. “Billy, would you go get him something? What do you want? A Snickers bar?”

“Anything chocolate,” Apollyon said.

Billy the Cowboy got up, dug for change in his pocket and left the room.

“Bad idea,” Nomad heard True say under his breath.

No one spoke on the video until Cowboy returned. “This suit you?” He put a small bag of M&Ms down in front of Apollyon.

“Fine, thanks.” Apollyon delicately tore open the bag and dumped its contents into a pile. He began to separate the candies into areas of blue, green, yellow, red, brown and orange. He took a yellow and a green and chewed them.

“Would you tell us,” said Radio, “how Bethy told you to go to Stone Church?”

Apollyon kept arranging the colors, eating a candy or two or three.

“Did you hear that question?” Cowboy asked, his patience growing thinner than a snake on a dust diet.

When Radio spoke again, his bass voice was dangerous. He was done playing. “Your sister is not among the living. So how can you sit there and tell us—and try to make us believe—that she told you to steal a gun and kill someone? That just kind of defies logic, don’t you think?”

Apollyon ate a few more candies, and then he met the cop’s gaze. “Logic,” he said. “is a creation of men. It’s a narrow door to a very large house. In that house are lots of rooms. Some you’d want to live in, others…not so much. Logic is a shirt that’s been dried too hot, so when it comes out of the machine it’s too tight around your neck, it chokes you and it binds your shoulders, and your mom tells you you’re going to wear it no matter what, because you were wearing it that night and she’s never going to let you throw it away. Then when you do outgrow it, and there’s no way you can fit it on you, she makes a pillowcase out of it for your bed. Is that logical? To make a pillowcase from a shirt?”

Neither cop said anything for a few seconds. Cowboy shifted his weight in his chair. Radio rubbed his fingers together, his elbows supported by the table. He said, “We’re talking about your sister. How did she come tell you to do this? Did she…like…materialize? Out of the air?”

“She just comes. She’s there and then she’s not.” Apollyon continued to eat the M&Ms, as if he had all the time in the world.

“And you do whatever she’s tellin’ you to do, right?” Cowboy asked. “This is her fault, is that it?”

Apollyon stopped chewing.

He did not move nor speak, as the seconds ticked past.

The two cops looked at each other, as if they suspected a trigger had been pulled, or a rope twisted, or a shirt tightened enough to make a person scream.

“Her fault,” said Apollyon, staring at nothing. And again: “Her fault.”

They waited, and in the Days Inn Motel room the viewers could see that the young man’s face had become shiny with sweat, and his smile flickered on and off with erratic speed, and he had placed his index fingers on two M&M candies like they were the opposite poles of the battery that was keeping him alive.

“I was about to hang myself,” he said hollowly, “when she came the first time. I was about to step off the chair. And then Bethy was sitting on my bed looking up at me, and she said, ‘Connor, don’t do that.’ She said, ‘Someone likes you a whole lot, Connor, and they want you to know how much. But you have to show them how strong you are, Connor. They don’t like weak.’ So she told me to go to a place in front of a carwash and wait and somebody would pick me up, and it was a man who gave me a drink from a water bottle and then he drove, and I got sleepy. When I woke up… I was in a room in a house, and the people there asked me if they could do things to me. They were very polite. They were smart people, I could tell that. At first I had to drink a lot from the bottle, but…after a few times, it was all right. When my mom and dad saw, they were going to go to the police but I told them what Bethy said to me, that if they didn’t test my strength here, they were going to test hers there. And she told me all of it. She told me how much that man had hurt her, and what he’d done, and she was afraid they would find out she wasn’t strong enough and they would cast her out where the weak things walked, and she begged, ‘Connor, would you please please pretty please take it for me?’”

“I said I would,” the young man told them. “And she said, for that, she would try to forgive me.” His eyes moved from Radio to Cowboy and back. His smile flickered: on, off, on, off. “They gave me a new name, and they birthed me. They told me why I was born. They made sense out of everything. And when you finally, finally see the sense of things…you know a power that is beyond…” He paused, searching. “Logic,” he said.

Apollyon continued eating his M&Ms, crunching them a few at the time.

When Radio spoke again, some of his bass presence had been muted. “Why’d you say Bethy told you to go kill that girl?”

“She was upset. Bethy was. Early Wednesday morning, when she came. She said it was something I had to do to show I was strong. She said Connor had died, and Apollyon had been born. Born in pain. I was the destroyer now, and that was my job. To destroy.” He frowned, with a red M&M held to his lips. “I think I fucked up, though.” He slowly eased the candy into his mouth. “I was going to shoot the lead singer first. I hated his voice. Then… I thought I’d better do what Bethy wanted, or they might get mad at her. They might hurt her, and I couldn’t… I couldn’t take that. Because…you know…she’s such a little girl. So I think I fucked up.”

“I think I fucked up,” he repeated.

“I think I fucked up,” he said again.

“I think I—”

With sudden terrible speed he grasped a handful of M&Ms, threw them into his mouth, crunched down and inhaled with a hideous rasping howl. He took hold of his own throat and squeezed with both hands. He went sideways off his chair and the two cops scrambled around and over the table to get at him before his airway was blocked. Cowboy started trying to get the hands loosened as the body kicked and writhed beneath him, and Radio ran out the door shouting a garbled unintelligible shout that sounded like he was hollering through a boom box.

True clicked the video off.

Nomad suddenly realized where he was.

He was nearly in the corner. He’d been backing up, a few inches at a time, until the corner was right behind him and there was nowhere else to go.

He felt an incredible pressure, as if he was in one of those centrifuge things the astronauts use, he was spinning around faster and faster and the flesh was being pushed back from his skull. He thought of a crazy thing. The thing that musicians shouted when everything went wrong, when the fuses blew, when the speakers made everything sound like muddy shit, when the lights malfunctioned, when half the CDs were broken in their cases, when the crowd lost their patience and hollered for blood or refunds, when every note you hit was a clam and every word you sang was lost in a looping shriek of feedback.

He thought: More cowbell.

But down below that, down deep in a horrible place, he was thinking that he had never dared to consider the possibility of an afterlife, the possibility of something human beings called in their limited knowledge Heaven and Hell, never dared to, because if he considered those things, if he let them in, then he would have to believe that his hero…his idol…that man…would be called upon to suffer for the pain he had inflicted on a woman who’d loved only him.

And John Charles would remember that when they told him in the Louisville hospital his father had died from a trinity of gunshot wounds, his first silent judgement and ever to remain silent had been: He deserved it.

Oh my God, John thought, behind the hand he’d put up to cover his mouth. Oh my God.

“They rushed him to the hospital,” True explained. “He’s all right. Physically, that is. If you can look beyond…all that damage. But he’s gone inward. They’ve got him on suicide watch.”

Terry breathed out with a whooshing noise. Berke couldn’t look anywhere but at the floor. Ariel’s gaze went to John.

“We caught another man,” True told them. “Coming up the side of the mountain with a .22 rifle. Obviously he was intending to get in position for a shot, though I can tell you he probably would’ve shot himself first, by accident. He’s a part-time handyman and full-time…what was your term, John?…nutbag. Lives in a trailer park about forty miles north of Stone Church. His neighbors say he’s always talking about hearing voices. He’s mounted all sorts of homemade antennas up on the roof of his trailer, says he was an electronics expert in the Navy. Not verified. Anyway, his neighbors say he thinks his trailer is sitting on what he calls a ‘comm line’. Know how he described it to the police? An ‘angel line’.” True’s smile didn’t stick. “He says there must be a really important reason for the girl in that Five band to be dead, because the angels are very disturbed with her. Disturbed with the whole band, really. He says the angels are putting it out on the line everywhere, every second of every minute of the night and the day, to everyone who can hear. He says they’re getting a little…his word…frantic. Kind of like a telegraph line of the spirits, I suppose,” True said, and he shrugged. “If you believe in that. So this guy, he decides if the angels want her dead, this is a good way to show what side he’s on. If you believe in that.”

He closed his laptop.

He arranged the notepaper on the writing desk that had never seen a pen put to a letter.

Then he turned to The Five, and very clearly and as forcefully as possible without sounding—as Berke would say—‘creeped out’, he said, “I want you to tell me—right now, nothing held back—what you people have gotten yourselves involved with. Whatever it is, and it may sound strange, or…illogical, or whatever. You may not even know what kind of boundary you’ve crossed. But listen…do not hold anything back. Anyone want to speak?”

“They’re two crazy people,” Nomad said, but for one time in his life his voice was weak because he knew he was lying. He was still standing with his back against the corner, his hands up at his sides and curled into fists, ready to knock something down.

“I’ll speak,” said Ariel.

TWENTY-SIX.

From the front on the sparkling, electric-bright Sunset Boulevard the Cobra Club was a dreary brown-painted building with no windows, no sign and no evidence that it was in use except for clear plastic displays on the walls showing band posters and an ornate black gate that was locked over the entrance until eight o’clock.

Inside, at a little past midnight, the club’s stage crew had finished setting up for The Five. The place was packed and noisy. It was another black box club, the walls deepest ebony. The bar in the lounge was lit by yellow bulbs behind ceramic fixtures shaped like cobras. Behind the stage was a backdrop of a large red-eyed cobra rising from a basket, painted on black velvet. The big, silent black-and-silver JBL speakers, still cooling down from the hard harmonics of the previous band, Twenty Million Miles To Earth, promised the moving, chattering crowd a continuation of mind-blowing entertainment to go along with the three-dollar beer, the mixed drinks and the house specialty, the Cobra Cock.

Rock and roll, baby.

The particular difference on this night, of any other night of the club’s checkered and sometimes violent existence, was that everybody who wanted to come in had to stand just beyond that open black gate while two men in Cobra Club T-shirts scanned their bodies with metal detecting wands. The women had to open their handbags. Everyone and everything coming in had to be scanned. If a nipple ring or a Nefertiti piercing or a labia bead made the wands squeal, or in the case of the male a dydoe, a dolphin, an ampallang or any of the other insertions into or through the summer sausage, then it was either go let the female or male police officers stationed inside pat you down in a curtained-off room or take your metalled pride somewhere else, like the Viper Room further along the boulevard. No likee, no have to stayee.

Some left. Most stayed, because they wanted to say that not only had they been felt up by the cops, they had seen the Band That Will Not Die.

It was a hectic scene backstage. The road manager and four members of Twenty Million Miles To Earth were still moving their gear out along the narrow green-painted corridor to the stage door while being trailed and delayed by a knot of various people who wanted something. There had been a problem with the Lekolites and the techs were going over the wiring. Two of the crew were arguing with the stage manager about who had last had possession of a missing gobo, and someone had left a handcart full of coiled elecrtrical cables out where its metal edge nicked the ankles of anybody going past, like a cobra bite.

Through this confusion, Ariel moved in a hurry because she had to pee.

The several bottles of silver needle tea she’d consumed during the long afternoon and at dinner had been going right through her. It was nerves, she thought. It was from the video of Connor Addison’s attempted suicide by M&Ms and True’s story of the man who heard voices in the trailer park. It was from her own revelation of what she believed the song to be, and her belief that the girl at the well was using them to write it for reasons unknown. It was from her retelling of the dream, and her revisiting the image of Jeremy Pett vomiting forth his dark air force. It was from the interviews with the news media here at sound check, and from the guy who’d shown up with a business card saying he was the head of A&R at Manticore, and he had some great ideas for their future but since there were no longer five of them they shouldn’t be called The Five, they should be named Death Ride. It was from talking John down when he wanted to tear the guy’s head off his neck, because John was in a fragile state, and she would never have said that about him but he wore the sick and uneasy look of a little boy caught walking through a cemetery at sundown. It was from warding off other A&R people with other business cards and other great ideas, and from the radio interviews and the throngs of people who were waiting outside the radio stations with CDs to be signed and more questions to be answered.

And it was from True’s instruction, given in his very clear and forceful voice, that nothing seen or spoken about in that room at the Days Inn should be discussed with anyone outside it.

Silver needle tea in, silver needle tea out.

She got past the handcart without being bitten and she went into the bathroom.

It was small and the white-tiled floor was not the cleanest in the world, but neither were musicians. It was unisex with two stalls and a pair of urinals, one sink and a mirror. The ceiling light, a simple glass bowl, was stark and harshly unflattering, as a glance in the mirror told her. She entered the stall furthermost from the door, closed the stall door and latched it, unzipped her jeans, pulled down her lace-edged panties, sat down on the toilet and went “Ahhhhhh.” She had a sudden fright and looked to make sure there was paper. About half a roll, so she was okay.

As she relieved herself of the silver needle pressure, she worked her hands, moving her fingers back and forth, getting them ready for the guitar.

There was always the guitar. And the wonderful thing was that it always waited for her.

She had to get all this off her mind and focus on the show. That’s what it came down to, no matter what. Focus on one performance at a time. Actually, it was focus on one song at a time. No, down to even smaller increments than that. One bar at a time…one note. That was how you did it, when you were troubled or anxious or scared. One note after another, and then suddenly you were free.

What was really bothering her, apart from Jeremy Pett and Connor Addison and the idea that the spirit line was lit up and the angels were very disturbed with her and her bandmates, frantic even in their disturbance, was that she hoped she could hold her next pee until Berke’s drum solo.

She heard the bathroom door open and close.

She heard the lock on that door turn.

She heard the click of a dirty switch, and the light went dark.

“Hi, I’m in here!” she called out.

No one answered.

“Hello! I’m in here!”

She heard someone walking across the tiles. The squeak of sneakers.

“Please turn the light back on!” Ariel said, and she fumbled to find paper. The roll moved on its cylinder with a metallic squeal.

Music began.

It was a thump…pathump…thump…pathump. Low bass beat, low-fi, scratchy. Maybe from a voice recorder?

Ariel blotted herself, grasped her panties and jeans and stood up. She wriggled her bottoms back on. She was about to ask whoever this was to stop playing around when the gasping, gutteral echo-enhanced male vocal kicked in, backed by a clattery rhythm of tambourine, cabasa, and drumsticks being cracked together.

“When I come ta kill ya,

I’ll come right through ya door.

I’ll bring my best man and my little midget whore.

We’ll cut off ya face, won’t it be groovy,

then we’ll sit down and watch a shemale porn movie.

That’s right…that’s right…that’s right…that’s right.”

“Hey, stop it!” Ariel said. She heard her voice quaver. “Turn the light back on!”

“When I come ta kill ya,

I think I’ll eat ya brain,

then I’ll stand with my bloody teeth out in da rain.

I’ll curse da sky above and da fool who made me,

then I’ll go kill another one, or two, or three.

That’s right…that’s right…that’s right…that’s—”

The music abruptly stopped.

He came right through the door.

It burst open in her face, propelled by a single savage kick. The door hit her and knocked her back over the toilet, she thought her nose had been smashed and her lips split open, and before she could do anything but make a soft bleat of terror he was upon her. She put her arms up for protection, as if from a whirling mass of crows coming at her through the dark. A hand flailed for her and caught her hair. A fist crashed into the side of her head. She saw stars and lightning bolts and tasted blood. Her knees gave way, and she felt something sticky being wrapped around her mouth. Around her head. Catching in her hair. Around and around and around.

She realized it smelled like Band-Aids.

He grabbed her by the neck and threw her, and she skidded out in the dark on the dirty tiles. She was on her stomach, she tried to get her knees under herself and stand up, but her arms were wrenched behind her to their breaking point. She screamed beneath the tape that sealed her mouth. He had her arms, and he was wrapping the tape around her wrists, binding them together.

He was very fast and he was very strong and he had done this before.

He grasped her jeans and yanked them down, scraping her flesh with his fingernails.

Then he started pulling off her panties.

Dazed, bleeding, her mind full of cold shock, she thought someone was going to come save her. Someone was going to put a stop to this. It was ridiculous, is what it was. She had a show to do. One note after another, and then suddenly you were free.

She felt his hard penis, pressing against her vagina from behind.

No, she said but her mouth would not repeat it. No.

His grasped her hair with both hands, and he began to push himself in.

No one was going to save her. She realized that, finally and fully. She could lie here and be raped waiting for the rescuer who would not arrive, or she could fight until this man killed her.

Ariel twisted her body away from him. He wrenched back on her hair and kept driving in. She twisted once more, and she heard him say, “You fuckin’ bitch,” and then he hit her again, an open-handed, disdainful slap swung against the right side of her head just above the ear. Hard harmonics buzzed in her brain. Tears were hot in her eyes, they were spilling over down her cheeks, but when he tried to push into her a third time she arched her body backward and flung her head up as hard as she could and the back of her skull hit something—collarbone, shoulder, chin, something—and his weight was suddenly off her.

She pushed forward, feet and knees, across the floor.

“You dirty little fuck,” he said from the dark. “You little shit.”

She heard the squeak of his sneakers, coming after her. She turned over, the weight on her trapped arms causing her to gasp with agony behind the tape, and she kicked out with both feet toward the sound.

Her right shoe hit something solid. A shin? A knee?

“Fuck,” he said quietly, a painful sound. “You’re fuckin’ dead.”

She recognized that voice, only now it was a gutteral growl dripping with snide menace. It was the voice of a thousand horrorcore and death rap songs. She kicked at him again but found nothing. He was coming at her from the side; she thought she could see the smear of his movement. She scrabbled backward and clunked her head against what felt like a metal pipe. She was up under the sink. A shoe grazed her ankle. She kicked at it and missed. She was pulling her leg back when his fingers caught her foot. He jerked her out from her little unsafe haven and dragged her across the floor, and she kicked out with her other foot, swung it wide and hard, missed on the first swing but tried again with the heel, and this time she hit bone and he made a hissing noise but held on tight. His shoe came down into her crotch and started pushing there as he wrenched at her leg, and she thought he was trying to tear away the part of her that interested him and take it home to his aunt’s basement.

Someone was at the door. Ariel heard the knob being worked.

“Ariel!” It was Berke. “We’re on! Let’s go!”

He released her.

“Ariel?” The knob was turned back and forth. “You okay?”

Ariel got up on her knees, facing the door. She tried to scream, tried as hard as she could. The sound came out as a muffled moan, and then he was down on the floor with her, one arm snaking around her throat from behind and his face buried in her hair. He was breathing raggedly into her ear. As he breathed, the pressure of his arm steadily tightened.

“Open up!” said Berke.

Ariel felt pressure building in her head. Felt it begin to push her eyes out of their sockets. His arm was crushing her windpipe.

The doorknob rattled once more, back and forth.

And then Berke was gone.

Outside in the hall, Berke was about to go back and get John. She thought Ariel must be sick, and what were they going to do?

Then she saw a camera tripod leaning against the wall next to the door. It was a pitiful thing. One leg of it was wrapped with duct tape. On the floor beside it was a black camera bag. She unzipped it. The video camera was in there. It was a nice one, it said ten-point-six megapixels on the side. Who would leave something like this sitting around? With a light meter in there, and a battery pack, extra lenses, filters, the works. Ripe for the stealing.

She knew tech people swore by it and used it in all sorts of situations, but, she wondered, who really needed to carry around four fucking rolls of duct tape?

In the bathroom, behind the locked door, he was choking Ariel to death.

She tried to fight him. She tried to twist, to arch her back, to thrash him off, to strike with a backwards blow of her head. But he had her, and he breathed in her ear as he was killing her, and his free hand was working on himself, fast fast fast, and he started to make the noise that men make when they have mistaken possession for love and pornography for sex, a high keening whimper and to the world an announcement of, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna cum, oh yeah I’m gonna—”

The bathroom door blew off its hinges.

Berke hurtled through, shoulder-first.

The light that streamed in fell upon the swollen-eyed face of DJ Talk It Up, his lips wet with saliva and his hair sticking up in spikes stiffened with product. He was wearing a dark brown hoodie, the jacket twisted on his torso and the hood lying down across his shoulder. Tonight he had left his rings at home, because he’d wanted to dress down.

Berke saw the duct tape over Ariel’s mouth, saw the terror in her eyes and the guy’s arm squeezing her throat. She saw blood streaming from both of Ariel’s nostrils, making a mess of her pretty lavender-colored blouse with the puffy sleeves that Berke herself would never have been caught dead in.

Berke thought she was going to have to kill him. She was ready.

He shuddered, came to himself and his current predicament with a jolt, and he let Ariel go. He pushed her aside and sprang up, like a stocky panther searching for escape. The zipper of his jeans was open. Before Berke could think to shout for help, DJ Talk It Up charged her and swung a fist at her face, but Berke saw it coming and warded it off with one arm while the other punched five into the fool’s bulbous nose.

She gave it all she had, and she had one hell of a lot to give.

His nose exploded like a blood balloon. But that didn’t stop him, he was enraged and desperate and so he kept flailing at her, grabbing at her hair, her breasts, trying to claw her eyes out.

Fucker fights like a girl, Berke thought just before she drove a knee right up into his balls.

Maybe that did hurt him, from the way he whined, but he was running on nerves and adrenaline and he was not going to be stopped by a bagful of smashed nuts. His face might have gone ghost-white, but he still wanted out. He clawed his way past Berke and through the door, tearing himself out of his jacket as Berke grabbed hold of the hood, and then in his flagging white T-shirt stained with tonight’s Hungry Man dinner he started to limp to the left but there were still people who’d gotten backstage passes from Twenty Million Miles To Earth in the corridor, jamming things up, and now they were gaping at him and Berke was shouting, “Stop him! Stop him!”

So DJ Talk It Up turned to the right and tried to get past the handcart that nearly tripped him up and took a bite from one of his ankles as he passed. Two more ball-dragging staggers in search of a way out and suddenly from a door in front of him stepped the Detroit dude.

“Stop him, John!” Berke shouted, holding a dark brown hoodie with nobody in it.

Maybe Detroit couldn’t always beat Philly’s ass. It had been a general statement.

Tonight, though, it was pretty much true.

Nomad got three punches in before DJ Talk It Up realized he was being pounded. They weren’t just ordinary back-behind-the-bar or parking lot disagreement shots; they had some meaning behind them, some muscle, and they were well-placed to make DJ Talk It Up understand he was on his way to the hospital. Another trio of punches, fast fast fast, and DJ was speechless and also toothless in front.

Nomad gave him one to the throat, not as hard as he’d given Quince Massey in front of the Olive Garden that day years ago, but one that would be remembered.

Then the DJ was on his knees. His face was not so much a face as a model for an abstract painting. Nomad stood over the Study In Scarlet With Nose On Forehead. Terry looked out from the door at his back, his eyes wide behind his specs, and he determined to stay right where he was, out of harm’s way.

There was a frozen moment, as happens in the aftermath of sudden violence.

“John! Terry! Help me!” Berke called, and the way her voice trembled pierced Nomad’s heart.

He looked along the corridor. Berke was supporting someone he could not possibly recognize. They were walking slowly, painfully, toward him, and the crew and techs and people with backstage passes and even members of Twenty Million Miles To Earth were around them trying to help.

Nomad saw the duct tape across her mouth, wound around her head and caught in her tangled hair. He saw the blood. He saw her rubbing her wrists, and how a long silver ribbon of tape hung down from one of them. He saw how the lavender-colored blouse with the puffy sleeves had been ruined. One of her favorites, he knew. She lowered her face when she saw him looking, as if in shame to let herself be seen like this.

“Oh, Jesus!” Terry cried out, and he rushed past Nomad to go to Ariel.

< >

Somebody flashed a camera.

Nomad would have torn that person’s eyeballs from their skull and made them examine their own asshole, but he didn’t have to. One of the stage crew darted in and grabbed the camera. There was a protest and two Cobra Club guys suddenly were taking out the garbage.

Nomad looked again at Ariel, being supported by Berke as Terry worked to get the tape off her mouth and out of her hair. The people around them were stunned into silence. When the tape came off, Ariel took a step forward and then she bent over and vomited on the floor. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Berke said, rubbing her back. Ariel had to lean against the wall, and somebody offered a towel to hold against her bloody face.

Beyond the door that led to the stage, the audience began to chant for The Five.

Nomad stared down at DJ Talk It Up.

The rage came up in him. It sizzled through his veins like life’s blood. Maybe for him, it was. He decided he would end it now.

He reared his right foot back to kick the DJ’s brains out of his head.

The young man lifted his chin. The bleeding face was weeping. Tears mixed with blood coursed along the corners of the mangled mouth. His eyes were sightless, fixed on something far beyond the dude from Detroit.

Nomad was about to let swing.

He wondered what more he could add to this cup of suffering. He heard the DJ’s chest rattle as the sobs rolled out. He saw the DJ put his hands up to his eyes as if to hide from the blinding light. Nomad wondered what kind of shrunken shirt this young man had had to wear, and what had been burned and scarred into his mind and soul. He could imagine this kid leaving Philly with a big-lid ball cap and big dreams. Gonna be a big star, Mom. Gonna set ’em on fire.

Instead, he came to the place where people want things before they’ve earned them, where you are nobody without power and money, where the heat of the dreams melt you down to size, and hey, Mom, lookit me now.

It was not for Nomad to add anything more.

He lowered his foot. When he turned back toward Ariel, he saw that True and two cops had come into the corridor, along with the club’s manager, a spindly guy wearing all black with a trimmed black goatee. True was talking quietly to Ariel, his face close to hers, and Nomad saw her nod. The two cops came over and pulled DJ Talk It Up to his feet. His knees promptly gave way, so they half-dragged, half-guided him into the Green Room. True said tersely, “Call an ambulance!” but Ariel shook her head and grabbed at the manager’s sleeve.

“No,” she said. “No ambulance.”

“Go ahead,” True directed.

“No!” Ariel’s voice was louder. “I’m not going to the hospital!”

Berke said, “Listen, baby, you’ve got to go. We’ll be right there with you.”

“No,” Ariel repeated. “No, I’m going on.”

“Going on?” Terry shot a quick glance at Berke and then at True, whose flesh seemed to have tightened over the facial bones just in the last half-minute. “Going on where?”

“On stage,” Ariel answered, holding the towel against her bleeding nose. It was numb, she didn’t know if it was broken or not. She’d already explored with her tongue to make sure her teeth were still there, and though she’d discovered a few unfamiliar edges she thought she was okay. “They’re calling for us,” she said. “He hurt me, but he didn’t rape me.” She repeated it to make sure they understood. “He didn’t rape me.”

“You’re going to the hospital,” True said, searching her eyes. “Whether you want to or not. Go call the ambulance,” he told the manager.

Ariel took the towel away from her face and screamed.

It was a word.

The word was: No.

The manager stopped and no one else moved either, not even the dude who was mopping up the mess. Out front, the chanting went on, louder and louder and time to get this party started.

Nomad walked to her. He saw her eyes tick toward him, and they were her eyes, yes, but they were different now. They had seen things he wished she’d never had to see. They were bloodshot and they were frightened down in their gray depths, but most of all they were angry.

“Nobody’s stopping me!” Ariel said, to all of them, and maybe to the world too. Her teeth clenched; she could taste her own blood and feel all her new sharp edges. “Nobody’s going to stop me from doing this! Nobody!”

She pulled loose from Berke and from Terry. She stood on her own.

“This is what I do!” she cried. “I was born to do this!”

When Berke reached out to touch her shoulder, Ariel pushed the hand away.

“No, just let me…let me…” Ariel shook her head and put the towel to her nose again, and when more of the blood was captured she dropped the towel to her side and her eyes blazed into True’s. “Nobody’s stopping me,” she told him, “from doing what I was born to do. This. Music. I didn’t work this hard… I didn’t come all this way…all the bands…the people…everything…to have someone tell me I can’t go on when I say I can.”

And there was more to it, but she was about to sob and she feared breaking apart and not being able to pick up her pieces, so she didn’t say that she thought the darkness that had just tried to destroy her wanted her to tuck her tail between her legs and go speechless and spineless to the hospital. She didn’t say that she thought the darkness revelled in the wounded silence of broken hearts and raped spirits, that it grew strong on the bitter memory of the crushed dream. She didn’t say that she thought to not go on would be the biggest surrender of her life, because to fight that darkness, to push back its encroachment, meant you had to be determined to stand up. You had to play your guitar and sing, if that’s what you were born to do. You had to go out there, bruised and bloody, and let them know you were where you were supposed to be in this world, and nobody—surely not that greedy, stupid-minded little thing that had tried to throw you out of it—was going to stop you.

She didn’t say any of this. But she did say, “Now listen to me. My nose might be broken. There might be a doctor or a nurse or a med student out in the crowd. Somebody who can look at me. I know there’s got to be a first-aid kit here. My head’s hurting, maybe he can find out if I have a concussion. The doctor,” she said, so they’d understand. “I need one hour. If I pass out or keep throwing up, then okay…call an ambulance. But I need one hour. And I…shit… I need a new top.”

“You can’t be serious,” True said.

“I need to get cleaned up,” she continued, as if he’d never spoken. “Wash my face. I can’t go back in there, though.” They knew what she meant. “Oh Jesus,” she said wearily, “I’ve got to pee again.”

“You’re in shock,” True said.

“No,” she answered. “Too much tea.”

True was about to say something, to deflect her crazy arrow, but he couldn’t remember what it was going to be. He didn’t smile, he kept his face as grim as a rock. But the determination on this girl’s face got to him. He knew why he liked her. She was probably the toughest one of the bunch, but before this moment she’d never needed to be.

“Will you let me—allow me to—take you to the emergency room after we’re done?”

“Yes.”

“You need one hour? That’s all?”

“That’s all,” she said, and he knew she meant it.

“Suit you?” True asked the manager.

“You got it.”

“You guys okay with this?” True asked his band.

Terry and Berke looked to Nomad.

“Solid,” he replied. If Ariel could go on with her busted nose, he could go on with his swollen knuckles. This was going to be a gig for the ages.

< >

The corridor was clearing out. In the Green Room, the cops had called for a cruiser to take into custody a suspect they thought was most likely the Duct Tape Rapist. The manager went out on stage, faced the happy beer-sodden and Cobra-Cocked crowd and got to speak into the microphone a question he never thought in a million years he would ever ask: “Is there a doctor in the house?”

Suddenly, when True and Terry and Berke moved away, Nomad was right there in front of Ariel. He stared at her, as a wry and admiring smile slowly crept over his face. He didn’t understand about Jeremy Pett, about that girl at the well, about that song or what it meant, but he did understand that he could fall in love with Ariel, if he let himself.

And maybe he was halfway there.

He touched his bad eye and then he tapped his nose. He said, “I think we’re two of a kind.”

Who reached for whom first? It was too close to call.

He hugged her and she held tightly to him, and he found himself crying, just small tears squeezed out between his eyelids, because he was so very very sorry that this terrible thing, this soul-sickening thing, had happened to her, that though—thank God—the DJ had not violated her, some part of her had to have been touched by his ugliness, by the vileness that had been shaped by his suffering, whatever the cause. But those were things of the world, and he couldn’t protect her from them any more than he could protect himself, or any of them. Besides, all that went into the stew they called ‘writing’.

He put his head against her shoulder and breathed in her aroma. It was a faint smell of honeysuckle, like a sunlit summer meadow. It was the proper aroma for a heroine in one of those Victorian novels who is doomed to fall in love with the callous cad.

But that would not be him, because though he was his father’s son he was not his father, and he would never be.

Ariel pressed her hands against his back, and when she heard him sniffle like a little boy she whispered in his ear, “It’s all right.”

And again, so he’d be certain of it.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

The wheels on the bus go round and round…round and round…round and round.

A children’s song, Terry thought. He wondered if that was how it had begun, for all of them.

Music, heard when they were children. A tune from a local TV show, one of those disappearing breed where the host in a captain’s cap shows cartoons to kids and does magic with balloons and napkins, somebody always named ‘Cousin’ or ‘Cappy’. A snippet of a Christmas carol in a department store, with all the festive lights ablaze and Santa on his way. A tinkling outpouring of silver notes from a music box that holds a tiny dancer, slowly pirouetting. A guy playing a harmonica in one of those old black-and-white westerns or war movies. The distant keening of a train’s whistle, lonely in the rainy night.

Something had been awakened in them early, of that Terry was sure. Something that other children might hear, but not keep. He was sure they all had heard something and kept it, and had it still, hidden away in a place of safety. He knew what his was. He knew very well.

True tapped the brake. The Scumbucket slowed at the top of a rise. Not much of a rise, on this straight and flat stretch of Interstate 40, also known as Route 66, but enough of one. He checked his sideview mirror, looking past the U-Haul trailer.

That white car was still there.

Maybe half a mile behind? Now this was kind of ridiculous, he thought, because there was all sorts of traffic heading west from Albuquerque this Sunday afternoon. There were small cars and big SUVs and tractor-trailer trucks and vans and pickups, all makes and all colors. But that white car—a foreign make, maybe a Honda?—had for a while been close enough for True to catch a glimpse of a man behind the wheel. Wearing sunglasses—duh, heading west into the sun, right?—and a ball cap bearing some kind of logo. But then the white car had slowed down and dropped back, had let three or four cars get in between them, and now seemed to be maintaining a constant speed. Or, rather, matching the Scumbucket’s speed.

Which was slow.

A white car. Foreign make. Young driver, he looked to be.

How come he didn’t blow right on past?

“What’re you slowing down for?” Nomad asked, from the seat behind Terry.

“Resting my foot, I guess,” True answered, and he gave the old engine some more gas.

A white car. Foreign make. Not a dark blue pickup truck.

True looked straight ahead again. The first layer of this highway could have been laid down using a single gigantic rubber band stretched on stakes across the New Mexico desert. Just pull it tight and pour the asphalt in its shadow. He didn’t know if they’d had rubber bands back then, but they could’ve done it that way if they’d had them.

He was getting loopy, he thought. Life on the road. No wonder these people started smoking dope, drinking too much and throwing television sets out of motel windows. He jumped a little bit—just a hair, nobody noticed—when a tractor-trailer truck roared by, sending an insulting wind slapping against the Scumbucket. True noted it was a Hormel meats truck. A meatwagon, he thought.

He’d never smoked dope before. He wondered if anybody in this van had some in their possession. He’d never asked; he didn’t really want to know, but at least they hadn’t lit up in his presence. This highway was so straight it was hypnotic. On both sides the desert was stubbled with small brown clumps of vegetation that he figured could stab thorns in your ankles at the slightest graze. He wondered how many rattlesnakes were out there, coiled under those ugly clumps, their forked tongues vibrating on the scent of prey.

He knew he was going loopy, because he was starting to think about asking his band what marijuana tasted like.

He shifted in his seat.

“You okay?” Terry asked from the passenger side, and True said he was fine.

True glanced quickly in his rearview mirror. Ariel was drowsing. The bandage was still across her nose, hiding the bruise, but the darkness under her eyes had gone away. Her sniffer hadn’t been broken, though it had really swelled up and hurt her the next day and she’d blown out dried krispies of blood until after Anaheim. She had two cracked front teeth that were going to need some work. She was one hell of a trooper. John Charles was staring into space, thinking. His right eye was ringed with pale green. He had a lot to think about. In the back, Berke was listening to her iPod, eyes closed, head slightly nodding to the beat pumping through the earbuds. That girl could play drums like a machine, but True had made the mistake of asking her what she thought about drum machines and for that he’d gotten a year’s supply of f-bombs packed into his ears. Terry was alert and excited, of course. This was his day.

There were lots of cars on this highway. Every sort of make and model, big and small. But that white car back there…well, he couldn’t see it now, but he knew it was still there.

What was making True so jittery was the fact of the slow decay. The reality of the money pit, even for the FBI. The large hand on the leash, pulling the little dogs home.

After Anaheim, that next morning, the call had found him.

He would have to make do with one team. The money this was costing was out of all proportion to the situation, he was told. He just loved that bean-counting language. He was told, and to be truthful the voice that told him was not as warm and ole-buddy-buddy as usual, that this whole thing might well be a wash. I know this was important to you, but—

Ouch. It hurt when you realized you weren’t as big a dog as you’d thought you were. And, really, nobody was that big of a dog.

The team in the metallic gray Yukon had peeled off the caravan. So long, guys. We’re going on.

And then, this morning, after the gig at Staind Glass last night.

True had been shaving in his bathroom at the Comfort Inn when the call had found him this time. “Good morning,” True had said, with lather on his upper lip. “Are you being a heathen and skipping church today?”

“Truitt, we need to talk.”

“Obviously. You’ve called me.”

“Are you sitting down?”

“No, but I have a razor in my hand.” He’d known what it had to be. He’d hoped a phone call was going to lead a team of agents to a motel where Jeremy Pett was holed up, afraid to open his curtains or door to let in a sliver of sunlight, afraid to leave his crummy flea circus of a room for a takeout pizza because of the media noise, but hoping wasn’t about to make it happen. Pett had plain and simply vanished. Gone to Mexico? That was the theory. But where was his truck? It hadn’t shown up, so where was it? Abandoned somewhere on the border, was the theory. Driven into a gulley, or parked amid the mesquite trees and head-high sticker bushes just north of many of the paths grooved into the earth by the shoes of Mexican illegals. After all, those paths went both ways. Another theory: maybe Pett, trained in the art of going to ground, had actually gone underground. Maybe he’d found a tunnel across. Those things were out there.

Jeremy Pett would have to be totally insane to stay in this country with his face and his license number all over TV. That was the theorists talking. He would have to want to be caught. And why in this world should he follow that damned band to California when he could slide right into Mexico from Tucson?

“Truitt,” said the Sunday morning heathen, “we’re pulling the second team.”

Ouch. True had nicked himself under his left nostril.

“There’s no need for you to stay out. Call it off and bring them in.”

“Slow down, take it easy.” He’d realized he was talking to his heart. “The tour ends six days from now, and they’ve only got two more gigs, in Dallas on the 15th and in Austin on the 16th. Then it’s done. We’re checking out this afternoon and driving to see somebody Terry wants to visit. That’s the keyboard player.”

“I saw the story in People. Hell, I know their names.”

“Okay. We’re hitting the road right after that and driving to Amarillo. Then, tomorrow, on to Dallas. I figured they could hang out in Dallas for—”

“Excuse me, did you say ‘hang out’?”

True had heard himself sigh. It was a sound of exasperation; those mundanes—Terry’s word—just don’t get it. “They’re good people,” he’d said. “Hard workers. You wouldn’t believe how hard.”

“I know they’re a big hit now. Selling thousands of CDs, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.” Not only that, but every gig since that night at the Cobra Club had been jammed solid. Which actually put a strain on him, trying to get the security locked down. The news that The Five had aided in the capture of the Duct Tape Rapist had really made the engines rev. Roger Chester was calling him, giddy with glee, saying he had offers from three networks to do a The Five reality series and publishers were calling with quickie book deals and somebody wanted them to be spokespeople for a new energy drink. It was off the hook, as John said. Yet he didn’t say it with a convincing display of joy. So what was up with that?

“Six days, two more gigs,” True had said into his cell, as he’d dabbed the small red dot under his left nostril with a bit of tissue paper. “Can I finish it with them? And can I get some support from the field offices?” Boy, did that sound like begging.

“Truitt,” said the voice attached to the large hand that held the leash. “You do understand you’re not really their manager. Right? You do understand your role, don’t you?”

“I do. But…you know… I told them I’d finish it out.” He’d paused, trying to think of something else to say to pierce the silence on the other side. “They really are good people.”

“I heard that the first time.”

“I can’t leave them,” True had said.

“I hear the word won’t in that, Truitt.”

“Yes, sir,” True had replied. “That’s correct.”

The silence had stretched a little longer this time, and had been a little more solid.

During it, True had wondered if he should tell his old friend and compatriot and superior that Ariel Collier thought the song they were writing was being directed—well, not really directed exactly, but guided in a way, but not exactly that either—by a girl who was not exactly human, but something more than human if you believe in that, and this song they were writing was just a regular song, nobody could see any big thumbprint on it, no hidden meanings or mystical codes as far as they could tell, and if it was supposed to break them through into being a success it was a little late, because the song wasn’t finished yet there was The Five in People magazine and their CD catalog was going back for a hundred thousand more pressings, and they were selling big numbers now all over the world, so they were already a success, and by the way Terry Spitzenham—oh, I forgot you know their names—believes the same thing, that this song has a divine inspiration, and Berke Bonnevey and John Charles don’t quite know what to make of it but they’ve come around to admitting nothing ever shook their foundations but this was putting some cracks in the mortar, and also—a big also—Ariel thinks there’s a link between Jeremy Pett, Connor Addison and our trailer park communications wizard, maybe even the Duct Tape Rapist too, because this thing—this greedy king crow, she calls it, only she says that’s not exactly what she means—wants to stop the song from being finished so it has reached out to human hands to do the dirty work.