FOUR
Stone Church
FOURTEEN.
It wasn’t so bad. He’d paid money to stay in motels that were worse than this. But the bright orange jumpsuit…now, that was ridiculous. The thing had its own inner glow, and you still saw it pulsing when you closed your eyes. The huge black-lettered word JAIL across the back wasn’t too cool, either.
The situation being what it was, though, Nomad was impressed by the Pima County jail. It was clean, well-managed and seemed more like a strictly-run—very strictly-run—dorm for wayward men. The roach-overrun lockup was dead in the modern era of physical confinement. Now the “cells” were cubicles fronted with impact-resistant glass. Each cell held eight inmates, and eight cells made up what was called a “pod”, each pod with its own dayroom. The place was cheerfully lit and the air conditioning was kept on the chilly side. Books, magazines and a TV were provided. He’d already seen himself on the television screen, several times in fact, and he was a real celebrity around here.
It was nearing ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. He’d been in jail for about fifty-four hours, but who was counting? He didn’t care that he’d come to the end of this particular road; at his arraignment he’d been so tight-lipped and uncaring about the whole thing that the judge had wanted to run him through a battery of psychiatric tests. Nomad had just shrugged. “Whatever you want to do, man,” he’d told Your Honor. “Fuck it.”
Which had not gone over so well. He wasn’t going anywhere soon, because Your Honor had decided to postpone a decision on setting bail until the nutbag questions were done and some mental health geek had filed three hundred and thirty-three reports on the state of Nomad’s mind. But Nomad didn’t have anyplace he really needed to be, The Five was over, everything was done, so why not just stick here for a while?
His call had been to the University Medical Center. He’d asked to have Ariel Collier paged.
“John?” she’d answered. “Where are you?”
“Around. Any word on George?”
“They think he’s going to make it. They’re not sure yet, but they’re saying his vital signs are looking good. John, tell me where you are.”
“I went out to get something to eat. Maybe I went a little too far.” He heard a drunk guy shouting and raging over in the booking area. The cops would take care of that outburst in a hurry, but he figured Ariel had probably heard it too. “I might not be able to get back for a while.”
“What’s that noise?”
“Loud party goin’ on.”
“On a Sunday morning? What’s the number there? And what’s wrong with your voice?”
“Listen to me.” His voice was tired and scratchy. Tear gas was not gentle on the vocal chords. He’d been scrubbed clean, all the purple dye washed out of his hair, and he’d been allowed to curl up in a holding cell and rest until he had enough strength to talk, but it had taken some time. “I’m glad George is going to make it. I’m just going to hang out where I am, so don’t worry. Okay?”
“John.” The way she spoke his name told him she knew. “Are you in trouble?”
“A little.”
“Tell me where you are,” she said tersely. “I mean it.”
Nomad allowed himself a slight smile. It tugged at the scratches on his left cheek, which wore a pink shine of disinfectant. He’d never seen Ariel angry, never heard her lose her temper. She sounded close to it, right now. That would be a sight, he thought; Ariel Collier, in sympathy with the vibrations of the cosmos, going batshit. “You need to get back to Austin,” he said. “You, Terry and Berke. When Ash gets there, tell him… I don’t know, just tell him to get you guys home.” The drunk dude was really hollering now, about his rights and all that, as three cops were dragging him into a holding cell. “Go back and start over,” he said.
“Start over? What do you mean, start over? We’re still The Five, John. We don’t have to start over.”
“Oh yes, you do. Believe me.”
“What’ve you done?”
“I don’t want to talk about that. Get home,” he told her. And then he was silent and she was silent and he didn’t know what she was thinking but he was thinking he had really let them down this time, he had screwed up when they needed him the most and he couldn’t stand to look into her face again and see her disappointment. He couldn’t stand to look into the faces of any of them again, but especially not hers, because…because he thought she really didn’t need The Five, she was talented enough to go out on her own, and in these last three years he had known that and had never said anything. Never encouraged her to at least think about it, because he was the emperor and emperors could hide their jealousy under their crowns of tarnished tin.
He remembered her saying I’m still with you back in Sweetwater. Her loyalty was like a knife to his heart. She was wasting time in this party band, and that’s what The Five was. A band pumping out pablum to be washed down by a flood of cheap beer. A broken-down, sad merchandise machine. One song like ‘When The Storm Breaks’ didn’t make any difference. He knew she was a better guitarist and a better singer and a better songwriter than he, and he believed his leaden earthbound influence was keeping her from finding her own path, because—Christ love her—she meant it when she said I’m still with you.
So now was the time for him to find his guts and say it.
He did.
“You ought to go out on your own.” He had to pause for a few seconds, to clear his throat. “Put your own band together. You front it. Audition the players, make the sound you want. You can do it. You could’ve done it straight out of The Blessed Hours, if you’d wanted to.”
“Oh, no,” she answered, in a quietly stunned voice like a child being told to leave the house. “Oh, no.”
“You can,” he said. “It would be all yours. What would be wrong with that?” He recalled all the times they’d been working together on songs and he’d steamrolled her, just plowed her under when she’d made a suggestion to transpose it to a different key or add this or take away that or whatever. Even though down in his deep dark grudge he’d known she was right—usually right—he couldn’t have let her take control. Once she figured out she didn’t really need him, then where would he be?
But now it was different. Day was night and up was down. Mike was dead and George was shot, the Argo had sunken in a sea of broken drywall, The Five had played its final gig and Johnny, there is no roadmap.
“I couldn’t do that,” Ariel replied. “I couldn’t leave my family.”
“Your family?” It was said with incredulous sarcasm. “Oh, a few people travelling together in a busted-up van? That family?” He hesitated, but when she didn’t respond he went on, because his blood was up and he was ready to hurt her to make her let go. “Musicians are a fucking dime a dozen,” he said. “Bands fall apart every day, so what’s the big deal? When it happens, you just go latch onto some other group of nobodies. So we were together a while, we went through some good shit and some bad shit, but that doesn’t make us a family. Far from it.”
“What, then? What does it make us?”
“It makes us nothing. Because we’re over. Don’t you get that? Now, if you want to live in your land of rainbows and moonbeams, that’s up to you. But I’m not living there. I’m telling you, The Five is finished. Okay? And I’m not coming back, so you and Berke and Terry get yourselves to Austin and do whatever the fuck you need to do. I’m out of it.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Listen, stop holding onto me!” he said, with maybe more vitriol than he’d intended. “Either put your own band together or go home to Massachusetts, but quit fucking around with losers like Neal Tapley. If you want to try to save sick animals, go be a vet.” He knew that was a hard punch, because Ariel had tried her best to get Neal off the crack, the speedballs and everything else he was loading himself up with to fight his depression, but she couldn’t hold him strongly enough to keep him from flying off that two-lane in his Volvo clunker. Nomad didn’t know if there was more to that story, if there’d been a “romance”—that’s how they would’ve put it in those godawful old English novels, “romance”—but he’d figured long ago that Ariel was searching for someone to believe in, to trust and to follow.
It ain’t me, babe.
“Go back to Austin,” he said, wearily now. “Just go.”
Still she didn’t leave him.
She spoke softly, but with grit in her voice: “Don’t you know that we’re all over the news? Front page of the morning Star, with pictures. We’re on NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and CNN. The sniper story has gone nationwide. Haven’t you seen a TV?”
“No.”
“We need you back here with us. I’m speaking for Berke and Terry, too. Wherever you are, come back.”
“No,” he repeated, very firmly, and with that he had hung up the phone.
Hey, amigo! You that guy on the TV? Right there! You that guy?
Early Sunday afternoon, an officer had come to get him from his cell. Police Captain Garza was here, he was told. Wants to talk to you.
“No,” Nomad had said again, and had stretched out on his bunk. The officer had gone away, and there had been no further word from Captain Garza or, for that matter, anyone else.
So, it wasn’t bad. A clean bunk, good food, plenty of people to talk to when he decided he was ready to talk. Didn’t a lot of cool musicians pay their dues in jail? Not so bad. Except for the Day-Glo orange jumpsuit with the JAIL stenciled across the back. But he would bear that indignity, too.
He was out in the dayroom sweeping the floor when two of the badasses came up behind him. Not prisoners, but guards. Moates, the one with the bald skull and a mole on his forehead, the one Nomad had been warned by some of the other dudes not to look at because he really really really did not like to be looked at by pond scum such as themselves; and Kingston, the thin black guy with the goatee, the constant unsettling half-smile on his face and the snakes tattooed on his ropy forearms.
“Charles,” said Kingston, “somebody wants to see you.”
“Right now,” said Moates.
“Who is it?” Nomad asked.
“Move,” said baldie-with-a-mole, and he hooked a thumb toward a red-painted steel door across the dayroom.
“I don’t want to see anybody,” Nomad said.
“Ain’t askin’ you,” said Kingston. “Put the broom aside. Let’s go!”
Nomad weighed his options. The two men planted themselves before him, relaxed but ready. They were the real deal, citizens of the world of hurt. Nomad put his broom aside, and he followed Kingston with the bald dude right at his heels.
A plastic pass card was used on a slot in the door, followed by a key. Nomad was led into a stark hallway painted off-white, with several doors on either side. The door was closed and locked behind him. Moates gave him a shove just because he could.
Kingston opened another door without having to use a key. “Get in there,” he directed. “Sit down and wait.”
Overhead fluorescents spread even light on a table and three chairs, one across from two. The walls were the same stark blankness as the hallway. A cork bulletin board held no bulletins or pushpins. There was a smell in here as if it were a place the guards sneaked in to smoke cigarettes.
“Who am I—?” Waiting for, he was going to say, but Moates and Kingston were already going out and the door closed. Nomad didn’t hear a lock turn.
He sat down on the side of the table that faced the door. Damned if he knew what this was about. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. He had the feeling that if he walked to that door and opened it, he might return to his cell in the shape of a pretzel.
In about thirty seconds, the door did open. A man entered. He was carrying a brown folder. He shut the door behind him and he did not look into Nomad’s eyes until he was sitting down on the other side of the table.
They stared at each other.
“You’re in some trouble, John,” the man said.
Nomad’s first urge was to shrug off the comment, to present a stone face like he’d seen the other inmates do when they were trying to act all-that in the presence of pressure or despair, but he didn’t because he knew the man was right, and the way the man had spoken was no-nonsense and required respect. But Nomad didn’t answer, and he spent a few seconds putting together impressions of his visitor.
The man was about fifty or so years old, in very good physical shape. He had a ruddy, outdoors coloring. His gray, close-cropped hair was retreating at the temples and sat on his head like a tight cap. He was so clean-shaven a razor might have been his religion. A military man? Nomad wondered. The man’s thick eyebrows were still black, his eyes a pale sky-blue. He had the square chin of a comic-book hero but the crooked nose of a boxer who has gone a few bad rounds in his life. He was wearing khaki trousers and a dark gray polo shirt. Nomad had seen that he was wearing a black belt and black wingtip shoes. The man stood maybe six-one, had wide shoulders and forearms that looked as if he could chop wood for a living. His hands were veiny, one of the few signs of the toll of years. He had a few deep lines in his face, bracketing his mouth and at the corners of his eyes, but he didn’t have the saggy look that old people get. He didn’t have their sad look, of lost chances and yesterdays receding into the rearview mirror. In fact, this dude didn’t look like he’d lost any chance that came his way. The pale blue eyes were keen and careful. He wore a thin gold wedding ring and a nice but not flashy wristwatch. He kept both hands pressed flat against the brown folder on the table in front of him.
“Who are you?” Nomad asked.
“My name is Truitt Allen. I’m an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, based here in Tucson. Want to see my ID?” He made a move for his wallet.
FBI, Nomad thought. Almost military. This dude was a tough old hoss. But he said, “Yeah, I do,” and he waited as the wallet was opened to display a gold-colored shield and the official identification card that bore a picture of Allen’s unsmiling, all-business visage.
“Okay. Now…do you want to see who killed Mike Davis and shot George Emerson?”
That question hit Nomad like a double blow to both heart and stomach. “What?” he managed to croak.
“Here he is.” Allen slid from the folder a sheet of paper and pushed it toward Nomad. On it was the color photograph of a man’s face, his eyes hooded in shadow. “This is his most recent driver’s license photo. His name is Jeremy Parker Pett, born January 5th, 1978 in Reno, Nevada. Ever seen him?”
Nomad was in a daze. He thought he shook his head. “No.”
Allen let him stare at the face in the picture for a few more seconds, and then he returned it to the folder. “The doctors are giving Mr. Emerson an eighty percent chance to pull through.”
“That’s good. Thank…um…why…” Nomad couldn’t make sense of what he was trying to ask, so he waited for it to come together. “Why…is this…Pett guy after us?”
“You’ve figured that out, have you? That Jeremy Pett is following you? Stalking your band, I guess would be the better way to describe it.”
Nomad swallowed thickly. “What’s he got against us?”
“We’ll talk about that,” Allen said, his gaze steady. “First we have to talk about some other things. You’re pale. Want some water?”
“I’m all right.”
“Sure about that?”
“Yeah,” Nomad said, and he meant it. He drew a long breath and let it out. “This isn’t…what I expected to be happening today. So how did you find out this was the guy?”
“Later. Right now we have to talk about your future. I understand you refused to see Captain Garza when he came here. I’ve talked to Miss Collier about the phone conversation you had. One would think you wanted to curl up in here and try to make the world stop turning. Is that what you want, John?”
“I want to be left alone.”
“Hm,” Allen said. “Sorry, I can’t do that. You’re much too important to me to be left alone.”
Allen leaned forward slightly, his hands still on the brown folder that held the picture of Jeremy Pett. “I want you to walk out of here with me,” he said. “Today. In fact…” He checked his wristwatch. “Within the next half-hour.”
“Oh, right!” Nomad couldn’t supress a crazed grin. “Just walk out of jail! After the shit I stirred up? Right!”
“Yes,” Allen said. “Right.”
Nomad searched the man’s eyes, which had taken on a flinty color. “Are you serious? How the fuck can I just walk out of here? I’m a prisoner!”
“I can take you out. Simple as that.”
“You can…take me out? Uh uh!” Nomad leaned back in his chair; he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t think Truitt Allen would like the sound of it and he decided he’d better not piss off Truitt Allen. “It’s not simple, man. I don’t know what this is about, but I know it’s not simple.”
“You did cause some damage, yeah. You did kind of fly off the handle. But, some things have come to light since you were brought in here.”
“What things?”
Now it was Allen’s turn to lean back, and cross one leg at the ankle. Nomad saw he was wearing socks the same color as his shirt. “Number one: the wall you tore down. With the mural on it.”
“Okay, so what?”
“The building inspector found an electrical wiring hazard behind it. If you hadn’t broken the wall up and exposed it, the place might have caught fire sooner or later. So maybe you saved the restaurant, and maybe the owner is grateful to you.”
“I’m sure he is,” Nomad said sarcastically.
“The nightshift cook had no permit for his pistol,” Allen went on, his expression nearly the same as in his picture ID. “So he’s in a little trouble himself. The waitress you attacked turned out to have a few skeletons in her own cupboard. One big one, like being wanted under her real name for the sale of crystal meth in Amarillo two years ago. Seems her current boyfriend has been cooking the stuff in a rented house on North Edith Boulevard.”
“What’ve you been doing?” Nomad asked. “Beating the bushes?”
“Beating them ’til they bleed,” Allen said.
“I hit a guy in the mouth. I think I might have broken his jaw.” Nomad cocked his head to one side. “Are you going to tell me he needed oral surgery anyway and I saved his folks some money?”
“No. He’s an honor student at UA with a father in the banking business. Big Wildcats supporter. The other kid whose shoulder you dislocated is a trombone player in the marching band. So…you’re still up for assault and battery, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
A slow smile crept across Allen’s mouth, but his eyes remained cool. “A real tough guy, huh? Mad at the world? Think it owes you something?”
“Wrong. Nobody owes me a fucking thing.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word.”
“What word?”
“The four-letter word, and don’t play stupid. How come you people use that word all the time? You use it so much it doesn’t mean anything. Noun, verb, adjective…using it says your mind is lazy because you can’t come up with another descriptive.”
“What people are you talking about?” Nomad asked, doing his best Clint Eastwood squint.
“Young people,” said Allen. “If this is the voice of the future, I’m glad I won’t be around a whole lot longer to hear it.”
“That’s your problem,” Nomad said, and he wished he had a cigarette because in the time-honored tradition of prison movies he would’ve spewed smoke in the old fucker’s face.
Or maybe not, because he didn’t particularly care to wind up in the infirmary today, and anybody with the first name of Truitt probably had a lot of practice putting people in plaster casts and bandages. And to tangle with an FBI agent, even a geezer like this? No way.
After a long pause during which Nomad thought he could hear the geezer’s wristwatch ticking, Allen said, “Let’s talk about your problem, John. Which I think is not going to go away anytime soon.”
“What would that be?”
“Jeremy Pett,” came the answer. “You know, we think the bullets that hit Mr. Emerson were fired from the top level of a parking deck. We didn’t find any brass, he cleaned up after himself, but we believe we’ve calculated the firing angle pretty well. It definitely was a downward shot. A difficult shot. You know how far away that parking deck is from where Mr. Emerson was hit?” He didn’t wait for a guess, which wasn’t coming anyway. “Across the street and three blocks away. He had a sliver of a view to work with, but he found a position to watch the van, and he might’ve been sitting there for hours. Just waiting for somebody to come get it after the show. Probably didn’t matter who it was, as long as it was a member of your band.”
“George is our manager,” Nomad said. “He’s not on stage. How could this fu…how could this guy recognize George?”
“He may have seen him at one of your shows, or—”
“Gigs,” Nomad corrected, for the sake of it.
“Okay, thank you for that. Or, as I was about to say, he probably got a good look at Mr. Emerson when he was scoping you at that gas station outside Sweetwater. Bear in mind, Pett has likely—I’d say without a doubt—gone to your Internet site and made note of your stops during this tour. Am I getting anywhere with you? Impressing you on how serious this young man is?”
He was. Nomad frowned and looked down at the green-tiled floor, but no answers lay there. “Why does he want to kill us? We haven’t done anything to him.”
“That you know of,” Allen said.
Nomad lifted his gaze back to meet the other man’s. “What’s that mean?”
“It means,” Allen said, in a slow and deliberate voice, “that Jeremy Pett is probably not going to stop what he’s doing—for whatever reason he has, whatever grudge he’s holding—until he’s satisfied. I’m telling you that Mr. Emerson—”
“George. That’s his name.” Nomad felt both clammy and feverish. Wasn’t the air-conditioning working in this part of the jail?
“George, then. I’m telling you that George is very, very lucky. It helped him that UMC has one of the best trauma teams in the country, and they got him within what they call ‘the golden hour’. But in time he’ll be wheeled out of here, and—”
“Whoa! ‘Wheeled out’? You mean he’s going to be crippled?”
“No, he’ll walk again, but that bullet to his upper chest did tremendous damage. It’ll be a slow process for him to come back.”
“Oh, shit,” Nomad breathed, and came close to slamming his fist on the table. But he didn’t, because there’d been enough of that just lately.
“He will come back,” Allen said. “But at the very best, he’ll be in the ICU for several weeks, and they’ll be watching him for infection or other complications.”
“You sound like you’ve been there.”
“Not me personally, but I know some who have.” He checked his wristwatch again. “In a minute or two there’s going to be a knock at the door. It’ll be someone bringing your clothes and shoes wrapped up in brown paper and the contents of your pockets in a plastic bag. There’ll be some forms for you to fill out and sign. I’ll step into the hallway and give you some privacy. Just leave the jumpsuit and the jailhouse clogs on the table. Then we’re going to walk down the hallway to another door, we’re going to go through that, past a guard at a security station—who you will not speak to or look at—and out into the parking lot to my car. You understand that I’ve pulled a lot of strings and called in a lot of debts to get you out of here?”
“Yeah, I do. But why?”
Allen stood up from his chair, gripping the folder between his hands. “You come with me, and I’ll tell you. Not only that, but I’ll tell you Jeremy Pett’s story.” He walked to the door and then stopped. Nomad thought he moved with the crisp economy of a man who could without a doubt take care of himself in a fight. Again…military? Maybe more than the FBI?
“I’m not sure I want to go,” Nomad said. “Seems like it’s safer in here than out there with a sniper trying to kill me.”
“One big problem with your attitude, son.”
Son? Nomad had almost winced at that particular cheese sandwich.
“Your three bandmates aren’t in here with you,” Allen continued. “So to save them… you’re going to help me catch Jeremy Pett.”
Came the knock at the door. Allen opened it and went out, Kingston entered and dumped the package of clothes and shoes and the plastic bag of pocket stuff onto the table in front of Nomad. Kingston put down a ballpoint pen and a clipboard with some forms in it. Then he also left the room, without speaking a word.
Nomad sat looking at his belongings.
For better or for worse, the emperor had his clothes back.
He tore open the package. Then he got himself out of the jailhouse suit.
FIFTEEN.
Nomad realized he might be out of jail, but he was still definitely in custody. This message was sent to him by the sound of the doorlocks engaging on Truitt Allen’s black Acura TL sedan as soon as the engine started. The interior of the car was to Nomad disturbingly spotless, not an errant Kleenex nor crushed paper cup nor old hamburger wrapper in sight. Even the dashboard had been polished, and everything metal gleamed with psychotic perfection.
“Where’re we going?” Nomad asked as they pulled out of the lot.
“The medical center.” Allen had his sunglasses on against the glare. In profile he looked like a hawk with a lopsided beak. “Everybody’s waiting for you.”
“For me? Who’s waiting?”
“Sit back and relax,” Allen said, a command both benign and emphatic.
Nomad obeyed, figuring he couldn’t do much of anything else. As they approached the medical center, he saw a crowd of maybe forty or so people across Ring Road from UMC. They were gathered around two camera trucks, one from KVOA and the other from KMSB. Some of the people were dressed in long white robes and held handlettered signs. Nomad caught sight of what a few of the signs said as Allen drove past them, things like ‘God Hates The Devil’s Music’ and ‘Secular Music Praises Satan’.
“Are they protesting us?” Nomad asked.
“Protesting your music in general, I guess,” Allen replied, steering for the parking deck. “Any chance to be on camera, and people get themselves worked up.”
Nomad nodded. He had a secret. It would have amazed the other members of The Five, at least as much as it had astounded them that Mike Davis was a fan of Moby Dick, to learn that from age twelve, just after the death of his father, to about age fourteen John Charles had been an interested listener to WQRS-FM classical radio in Detroit. He’d discovered it after listening to the Cramps’ Stay Sick late one night on his record player and his mother had come into his room and asked him—begged him, really—to cut out the loud noise. So he’d gone radio surfing, hitting the FM rock stations, until suddenly he’d found a man talking about a piece of music called the Resurrection Symphony, which he’d learned later was Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number Two. The man—a music professor—was talking about the vocal parts of the Fifth Movement, translating them from German to English, and what stopped Nomad’s travels across the dial was the man’s calm, measured voice saying, O believe, You were not born for nothing.
Sometimes in the dark and the quiet, especially after his father was gone, he’d wondered what he’d been born for. Where was he going? What was he supposed to do with his life? They were heavy questions for someone his age, and there were no answers, and in the dark and quiet he could hear his mother reading Bible verses to herself in her own room, and sometimes crying a little bit as if what the Bible had to give her was not nearly enough of what she needed, and that was why he grew to despise the dark and the quiet.
But that weird music with the strings and the piano and the horns and the harps on WQRS pulled him in. Some of it could put you to sleep for a hundred years. But some of it sounded like war. Some of it sounded like the questions he asked himself about his life, if he were to put them to music. Here and there would jump up a piece that made him think of his dad swaggering across a stage, and then there would be music that sounded like a procession of ghosts carrying their lamps through a cemetery at midnight.
Kind of like the Cramps, only not as loud.
From the public library he’d checked out a book called The Lives of the Composers. He’d kept it way overdue until he’d finished it. Now, some of those fuckers had waded through swamps of deep shit. Writing by candlelight and thrown out into the street when they couldn’t pay their rent, and people hating them and acting like they had no place on earth because they heard things in their heads the mundanes didn’t.
Those protesters back there. Nothing new about them, Nomad thought. People hated that Resurrection symphony, the first time they’d heard it in Berlin. That Russian guy Stravinsky, the first time his Rite of Spring was played, in 1913, there was a huge riot. And there was that story about Mozart, the Michael Jackson and the Prince of his era, writing an opera for an emperor and the emperor saying, when it was over, “Too many notes, my dear Mozart!”
To which Mozart had replied, “Just as many as are necessary, Your Majesty.”
Even Mozart had had to deal with the suits, Nomad thought. The dudes who timed the songs and checked the notes in search of a single. The Dustin Daye-killers.
Same as it ever was.
Nomad couldn’t fail to note a police presence around the hospital. A cruiser was prowling slowly along Ring Road and a second was sitting at the front of the hospital where its occupants could see and be seen. Allen found a slot about mid-level up in the parking deck and pulled in. The door locks clicked open. Nomad got out and followed his new warden into the hospital. Allen carried the brown folder with him. They went past the elevators and took the stairs. Allen paused in the hallway to show a police officer his ID, and then they entered the waiting room that Nomad had walked out of early Sunday morning.
It was reunion-time. Ariel, Terry and Berke were there, all of them looking as tired and haggard as if they’d been the ones spending two nights in the lockup. Also present were three other people: a brown-haired young man in a dark blue suit and a red-striped tie whom Nomad didn’t recognize, and two others he did—Ashwatthama Vallampati and, unexpectedly, Roger Chester, the ‘RC’ of RCA. Everybody but the unknown young man, who wore a Bluetooth headset, had been sitting down when Allen and Nomad walked in, and now they stood up to show their good Texan, Oklahoman, Massachusetts, Californian and New Delhi manners.
“Dude!” said Terry, smiling as he came forward to bump shoulders and knuckles. “You enjoy your state-paid vacation?”
“No swimming pool,” Nomad said. “Not a lot of chance to sunbathe, either.” It was obvious they knew where he’d been; Captain Garza had probably told them on Sunday. Nomad saw sleeping bags folded up in a corner. He guessed the floor and sofa were not very comfortable. Maybe his bandmates had changed clothes and cleaned up in the public bathroom, but a scatter of soft drink cans, water bottles, candy and granola bar wrappers completed the story. They had been right here at UMC since Sunday morning.
Berke came over to slap him a high-five and comment on the bitch kiss he’d taken to the cheek. Suddenly Ariel was standing right in front of him. He looked into her eyes. Today—this moment—they were dark gray, the color of rain from a troubled sky. He recalled the things he’d said to her from the Pima County Jail. Your land of rainbows and moonbeams. Do whatever the fuck you need to do. If you want to try to save sick animals, go be a vet.
And maybe the worst: Stop holding onto me.
Because he knew it was the other way around, and without Ariel’s presence he feared his anger—at the world, at his father for betraying his mother and being so damned good at it, and at himself for being not nearly as talented as he pretended to be—might rise up and eat him alive.
She hugged him.
She put her arms around him and leaned her head against his shoulder, and he realized that the most awesome thing…the most totally amazing thing…
…was that he did not pull away.
Then after a few seconds she looked at him and nodded, to welcome him back to his family, and he said a little nervously, “I missed you guys.”
“John?” Roger Chester thrust a brown hand at him, and Nomad shook it. “Glad we could get you out of that situation.” He had the kind of voice that takes over a room. He was trim, in his early sixties, and was tanned year-round from either playing golf or spending time at his second home in Cozumel. He wore tortoise-shell glasses that slightly magnified his dark brown eyes. He had curly white hair and a neatly-trimmed beard. His blue jeans were the trendy dirty denims, and he wore a red cowboy-style shirt with pearl-snap buttons under a dark blue blazer. Nomad had met him only once before, on the day he and the others had signed the contract for representation, and even then it had been brief because Roger Chester had just stopped by Creedy’s office to ask a question about the new CD from Creedy’s hot zombie-goth band I Died Yesterday. Creedy was Ethan Creed, who’d been The Five’s agent for about three months before he took off for another talent group in Miami. Then The Five’s career was handed over to the new man at the agency, Ashwatthama Vallampati.
“Hello, Ash,” Nomad said, and Ash said in his clipped accent, “Hello, John.”
He didn’t really care much for Ash, and he didn’t think Ash cared much for The Five. Ash was twenty-six years old, tall and fashionably slender, was handsome in an exotic way that could slay the Texas chicks—or the Texas dicks, because it was unclear which way he swung—and he always wore black suits and white shirts with neon-colored ties. His blue-black hair was always combed straight back and fixed with glistening pomade. He always smelled of bitter lemons. He always looked to Nomad as if he wore a faint half-smile of smug arrogance. The Roger Chester Agency handled maybe thirty bands and another dozen or so single acts. They had a couple of country-western heavy hitters, the Austin All-Nighters and the Trailblazers, both of whom had won Grammys. Roger Chester handled those personally, as well as the monster heavy-metal thrash band Shatter The Sky, who’d just recently returned from a European tour. Of the rest of the bands fighting for attention and a place in the public sun, The Five was probably down in the basement with the mutts. Or at least that’s how Nomad felt Ash viewed them. To Nomad, Ash was all talk, big plans and no energy, and when something fizzled Ash just shrugged and let it go like he wasn’t responsible.
Nomad figured Ash was on his way to Los Angeles, and thought of his job as more of a babysitter for spoiled wailing brats than a professional working to break a band out. Yeah, he did some things, like getting the spot with Felix Gogo, and obviously he was doing something for the other five or six bands he handled, but Nomad always remembered that one time in Ash’s office Ash had said to him, “Your band doesn’t really make any money for us, but we keep you around because we personally like you.”
Nomad and Ash didn’t shake hands.
“I am grieved about this tragedy.” Roger Chester was standing so close to Nomad that Nomad could smell the orange Tic-Tac on his breath. “Mike Davis was a great bass player, a great musician. As for George Emerson…thank God he’s going to live.”
Nomad doubted that Roger Chester even knew who George was. “Are his parents here?” He’d directed the question to Allen.
“They flew in Sunday night. I’ve spoken to them, they’re good people.”
“Like I say, thank God he’s going to live,” Roger Chester repeated, as a way of gaining control of the room again. “All right then, Mr. Allen—or should I say Agent Allen?—where do we go from here?”
Nomad had already assumed that Allen had previously paid a visit to this room, speaking to Berke, Terry and Ariel as well as to George’s parents, but he had no idea what Chester was talking about. Nomad frowned. “Go from here? Back to Austin, that’s where. The tour’s over.” He got no response from anyone. “Listen, if we’ve got a fu…” He decided he didn’t care what Allen thought about his language. “If we’ve got a fucking sniper after us, I think we’d better go home! Don’t you?” He looked back and forth between Chester and Allen.
“It’s not that simple,” Allen told him, and those four words had the sound of doom. “Why don’t you sit down?” He motioned toward one of the folding chairs that had been brought in for the extra people. “Everyone take a seat. I want to tell you what you’re facing.”
Nomad sat down in a chair beside Ariel. He was thinking of what Allen had said at the jail: You’re going to help me catch Jeremy Pett. When all the others had settled, except the young man in the dark blue suit who remained unintroduced and who stood silently by the door, Allen took the central position in the room and opened the brown folder.
“I’ve already told you who he is, but I haven’t told you what he is,” Allen said to the group. “He’s a veteran Marine. He served two tours of duty in Iraq as a sniper, so he knows his business. Training to be a sniper is the toughest discipline in the Corps. They teach the doctrine of one bullet, one kill.” He paused for emphasis. “That’s the ideal. It doesn’t always go that way on the battlefield. But Pett’s record says he had thirty-eight confirmed kills and another forty-two probables. His last kill was in 2004, though, and now is now. He’s been through some hardships. They’ve worked on him. He’s probably let himself slide physically. Mentally, too. So he’s not nearly as sharp as he used to be…but…he’s given himself a cause of some kind. He’s invented a mission. Which obviously involves killing the members of your band. He followed you to Sweetwater and got himself in position across from that gas station. He must have been right behind you all the way from Dallas.”
“Hold it!” Berke said, lifting a hand. “How do you know all this? How do you even know this guy is the one?” She’d seen Jeremy Pett’s driver’s license photo when Allen had introduced himself to them this morning, and he’d told them he would explain everything later but he had to go get John Charles out of jail first.
“The police passed along to us some information from a Detective Rios in Sweetwater. She did some digging after you’d left town. Nothing was making sense to her, but the fact remained that the shooting looked professional. So she went to your website and saw your latest video. She started thinking that maybe the video had triggered somebody with a military history, somebody who had experience with long-range shooting. If that was true, then this person might have decided to follow you to your gigs.” Allen glanced quickly at Nomad, to show he had a good memory for a guy his age. “To stalk you, and to set up his shots. That sounded to her like a military sniper. The question was: where did he start from? So…she took it upon herself to make calls first to the Austin PD and then she spread out to the PDs of the towns between Austin and Dallas.”
“Looking for what?” Nomad asked.
“A recent missing person report, filed around the 20th. The problem was that, if this sniper fits a psychological profile, he’ll probably live alone in a rented house or apartment, he’ll have trouble making social contacts and trouble keeping a job. So if he’s taken off on the road to follow you, there might not be anybody left behind to notice he’s gone. But…in this case, Jeremy Pett had made a contact, and there was a missing person report that caught her interest, filed on Monday the 21st, in Temple, Texas.”
Allen pulled up another sheet of paper from the folder to be sure he got the name right. “Pett’s apartment manager, Teyo Salazar, told the Temple police he went into the apartment with his key to leave a sack of tamales because, as he said, Jeremy was very depressed about his finances. Inside, he found blood on the carpet, on the wall and in the bathroom. The tub had been drained, but there was blood evidence in there as well. Also a box cutter, and some drugs in the apartment. So Mr. Salazar calls the police, and they start looking for Jeremy Pett but he’s nowhere to be found. They relayed this information to Detective Rios, who started a search of Pett’s personal history. She discovered that Pett was a decorated Marine sniper, discharged in January of 2005 after the second battle of Fallujah. Then she turned to his credit card history. She learned he’d used his credit card to buy gas at a station about ten miles west of the one where Mike Davis was killed. The time on that transaction was twenty-some minutes after Mr. Davis’s death.”
“Oh, shit,” Terry said, a stunned exhalation of breath.
“That’s not the kicker.” Allen’s cool blue eyes scanned his audience. “He used his credit card again on the night of the 20th, to pay for a room at the Lariat Motel.”
Berke made a noise, kind of a soft gasp, but no one looked at her.
Nomad said with a mixture of shock and anger, “The fucker was right in the motel with us? Christ, man! What the fuck have we done to him?”
Roger Chester stood up. “Take it easy, John.” The real reason he’d stood up was that his hemorrhoids had flared on the flight from Austin and his folding chair wasn’t making him feel any better. He looked at Truitt Allen. “It’s got to be more than a video. Who kills somebody because they don’t like a video?”
“I can’t say. But I do know from experience that people can create extraordinary circumstances in their own minds. Especially disturbed individuals, which I think is fair to say is the case here. They can create scenarios that would boggle the imagination of anyone we consider ‘normal’. Do you remember the Beltway sniper shootings in 2002? In Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland?”
“I do.”
“Ten people were killed and three critically injured,” Allen went on. “Four people were killed in a single morning, during a two-hour time span. As you may recall, it turned out to be the work of one man and a boy. The man was an Army sergeant in the Gulf War, qualified as an expert with the M16 rifle. After he was caught, he explained his motives. He’d planned to kill six people a day for thirty days. He was going to extort millions of dollars from the government to stop the killings, and then he was planning on travelling to Canada, stopping at YMCAs and orphanages to recruit children who could also be trained as snipers.” He raised his black eyebrows. “He was going to be a father figure to an army of young snipers. They would then be sent to major cities across the United States to carry out mass shootings. Insane? To us, yes, but to him it made perfect sense. It was an achievable goal. It gave him something to—shall I say—shoot for.”
That’s not fucking funny, Nomad wanted to say, but he kept his mouth shut.
“I’ll point out that a check of Jeremy Pett’s firearms licenses shows that he owns a Remington Model 700 SPS rifle, which fires the same .308 Winchester caliber long-range bullet that killed Mike Davis and hit George Emerson. The rifle is similar to what he would’ve used in Iraq, and with a decent scope and an open field he can make shots at over five-hundred yards. Maybe not every shot, because he’s lost some of his ability and he doesn’t have a spotter. He also owns a .45 automatic, so he can be deadly at close range too, but I think he trusts his sniper skills more than his pistol ability.” Allen managed a sad smile. “It’s what he’s good at.”
“So find him, then!” Nomad realized his voice was a little too strident. “Trace his credit card or something! Do you know what kind of car he’s driving?”
“Just before I came to get you, his license tag number and a description of both him and his pickup truck were released to the media. It should start showing up on the local channels this afternoon and on the national broadcasts as soon as they’re ready to put it in rotation. As for the credit card, he’s stopped using it. The last credit purchase was again for gasoline in El Paso, on the afternoon of the 23rd. He’s gotten himself some money. Maybe pawned the pistol…who knows?”
“Okay, great,” said Terry. “But can’t you…like…call around to the front desk of every motel in town and try to find him? I mean, could it be that hard?”
“We’re working on that. Nothing’s turned up yet,” Allen answered. “I love my town, but I’ll be the first to tell you that there are some pay-by-the-hour holes here he can disappear into, and if he’s paying up front with cash nobody’s going to ask for an ID or write down his plate number. He might have decided not to use his real name. Understand that this man may not be who he once was, but he still has his Marine training and he knows how to improvise.”
“Maybe he’s gone,” Ariel ventured. “Maybe shooting Mike and George was enough.”
“Maybe. It depends on what’s happening in his head.”
“But he could be gone?” Roger Chester’s gaze had sharpened. “It’s a possibility?”
“A possibility,” Allen agreed, but cautiously. “He could be in Mexico by now.”
“That would be a good thing for The Five.” Chester looked at the bandmembers in turn and then directed his attention to Nomad, because Ashwatthama had briefed him on who the leader and decision-maker was. “John, are you aware that in the last forty-eight hours, your band has sold almost twenty thousand CDs?”
Nomad couldn’t speak. He thought he’d heard a voice talking to him from another world.
“Twenty thousand?” It was Berke, sounding choked. Her throat was not used to such a number.
“Eighteen thousand, three hundred and forty-six at last count about an hour ago, and that’s just the new CD,” Chester said. His voice was growing muscles, taking over the room once more. “We’re getting orders from all over the country, Canada and Mexico. We’re starting now to see orders from England, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Your backlist has picked up and is also selling in the thousands, and your single downloads on iTunes at nine o’clock this morning was more than forty thousand. Your YouTube and MySpace hits are off the chart and your website crashed with the traffic on Sunday night. You’re a lead story—most viewed and most emailed—on Yahoo. It’s in newspapers everywhere. People magazine called the office this morning. Yesterday the sniper story was running every hour on CNN and Fox News. It’s on the World News Network.” He paused to catch his breath; his face had become flushed. “I don’t have to tell you what national—correction: international—media exposure can do for product and for artists,” he said. “We’re all lucky you guys look so good on television.”
Nomad felt light-headed and woozy. He felt a little bit sick, really. How could he be happy, at a time like this? He realized that The Five was suddenly a success, though the only thing that had changed in two days was the fact that a sniper was after them, the media had jumped on it and the public was intrigued. He figured a lot of those CDs were being sold as morbid collector’s items, or to be resold on eBay after…what? After all of them were dead?
That damned Little Genius, Nomad thought. Got that media shine going bigtime, but I don’t want it this way.
“Can’t you people say anything?” Ash prompted, and Nomad nearly got up and smashed him in his bag of curried nuts.
“What do you want us to say?” Ariel stood up. For a few seconds the glint of volcanic flame beneath the sea in her eyes made Nomad think she was going to do the job of smashing Ash herself, which amazed him so much all he could do was sit there and gape. “Thank you? For what? We did all the work. And the thing is, we’re no different a band than we were on Saturday night, but suddenly we’re famous? Because Mike is dead and George is in the ICU? What are we supposed to say?”
Roger Chester cleared his throat to get her attention. “You can say,” he answered calmly, “that you’ll keep going to the end of your tour. You have…what?…eight more dates? What’s the schedule, Ash? San Diego on Friday and Los Angeles on Saturday, I think you said.”
“Yes sir…but there’s the other thing, if they want it.”
“What other thing?” Berke asked.
“Stone Church.” Ash chose to look at Nomad instead of the woman. “An invitation to play Stone Church came into the office yesterday afternoon. They’re offering—”
“No,” Ariel interrupted. “Not Stone Church.”
“May I finish?”
“Not Stone Church,” Ariel said again, defiantly. “I won’t play there.”
Nomad realized something of what he’d said to her over the phone had taken hold. You ought to go out on your own. Put your own band together. You could’ve done it straight out of The Blessed Hours, if you’d wanted to.
He saw in her face—the set of her jaw, the new fire in her eyes—that she believed him.
But the new Ariel Collier wasn’t yet ready to take the stage on her own after all, because the old one peered out like a little child and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Chester.”
“I’ve heard of Stone Church,” Allen said. “Used to be a mining town, wasn’t it? Up near Gila Bend?”
“Yeah, now it’s an outdoors music festival.” Nomad gave him a sardonic glance. “If your idea of a music festival includes badass biker gangs, death cultists and Satan worshippers, that’s your nirvana.”
“What are we talking about?” Berke demanded. “Somebody’s trying to kill us and we’re just going to go out and play more gigs? Not me. I’m heading—” She abruptly stopped. To San Diego, she realized she was about to say. To open Floyd fucking Fisk’s boxes in her mother’s garage. Her mother was going mental; she’d been calling Berke every few hours to make sure she was okay.
When it was apparent Berke was not about to finish her declaration, Roger Chester said, “Let me spread this out for you. They’re offering six hundred dollars for one show. The festival opens up on noon Thursday. You’ll be the headliner on Thursday night. We can negotiate with them on the merchandise split.” He aimed his attention at Nomad. “One show, six hundred dollars. Local and national media will be there. You play an hour and a half and you’re done. They need to know by two o’clock today, to put you on the promos. We’ll find you a new road manager. You say the word, and Ash goes out to buy a new van; you just tell me what you need.”
The Scumbucket belonged to George. There would be no more Scumbucket in the lives of The Five. Nomad didn’t know what to say. He could feel Ariel urging him to reject it. “The only reason they want us there,” he said, meeting Chester’s gaze, “is because of the death thing. You know that.”
“They won’t like our kind of music,” Ariel added. “We don’t play what they want to hear.”
“Garth Brickenfield wants you there.” Chester was unyielding. “He’s asked for you personally.”
“Who’s Garth Brickenfield?” Allen asked.
Chester told him. Nomad knew that Garth Brickenfield was the Big Dipper in the Southwest promoter’s sky; he ran his business out of Tucson and had created the Stone Church festival. He was in his sixties, a hermit in his sunset years, and legend had it he’d twice attempted to climb Mt. Everest, he had a private airstrip and a collection of vintage planes, and he owned an alligator farm in Louisiana. When he was a top gun in the record business, he’d had long-standing bad blood with Bob Dylan and once had challenged Mick Jagger to a swordfight.
“Let me ask you a question.” Allen was speaking not only to Nomad but to Terry and Berke. “If I can get you eight hundred dollars and I can provide security, would you play? And we’re talking about an afternoon spot, not night time.”
“Sir?” The tone of Roger Chester’s voice was a little frosty. “We’re in control of this, thank you. I’ve dealt with Garth Brickenfield many times, and when he makes a money offer, that’s it. Also, no way in Hell is he going to pay that much for an afternoon…spot, as you call it. Those are for the hasbeens and wannabees. The Five is star material.”
“How about letting the stars talk?” Nomad asked, dripping acid. He got to his feet, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ariel. “What’s this about, man?” He was addressing Roger Chester. He’d been gentleman enough to leave out the old. “A crazy guy’s killed one of us and almost killed another, and he may be in Mexico or he may still be after our asses, and you’re wanting us to finish our tour? Why? Because we’re worth more to you dead than we are alive?”
Berke and Terry remained seated; one was thinking about the contents of three boxes in San Diego, the other about a rock legend with a strange keyboard in a house outside Albuquerque.
“Continuing your tour is my idea.” Truitt Allen was speaking to the floor. “I ran all this past Mr. Chester this morning.” He looked up into Nomad’s eyes. “Why do you think I got you out of jail? I told you already, I need your help to catch Jeremy Pett.”
“Oh, I get it! We’re supposed to be fucking bait, right?”
“Cheese for a mousetrap,” Allen said.
“I’m allergic to cheese,” said Nomad. “Especially the kind that can get me—us—killed.”
Allen shrugged. “Okay, so you go back to Austin. Go back to your routines. If Pett’s still hunting you, how does that make you any safer? He can pick you off one by one, when you’re alone. Until he’s found, believe me…you’re safer together, on the road. Especially if you do what I say.”
Nomad scowled. “Yeah, right! What are you gonna do, be our new road manager?”
The man scratched his perfectly-shaved chin. “Well,” he said, “that would solve one of your problems.”
This was too much for Berke. “You’re a whackjob, man! We don’t need an FBI agent as a road manager!” It had taken all her willpower not to drop the f-bomb on him.
“Yes,” Allen answered, “you do. Because you need the security I can put together for you. You need a team of my men trailing you on the highway, watching your backs. You need a team travelling in front of you, to check out where you’re going. And this Stone Church thing…you need to play there on Thursday afternoon, and there need to be promos flooding local TV and radio and items on the newscasts building it up, so Jeremy Pett will see them and bring his rifle to Gila Bend, where I’ll have tac teams up in the hills waiting for him. That’s why you need to play in daylight. And that’s why I jumped through hoops to get you released into my custody…Mr. Charles,” he finished.
“Un…fucking…real,” said Berke, but she sounded resigned to whatever lay ahead.
Ariel tried her protest again. It, too, had weakened. “That’s not our kind of crowd. We shouldn’t play there. Not Stone Church.”
“Your being their road manager aside,” said Roger Chester to Allen. “The elephant in this room is that Garth Brickenfield wants them at night. Once he makes up his mind, it’s done.”
Allen nodded thoughtfully. “How about if I give him a call and ask him? And while I’m at it, I also ask for eight hundred dollars instead of six? Just to show I can do my new job.”
Ash gave a mocking laugh. “Nobody calls Garth Brickenfield! You call his office and talk to his people!”
“Really?” Allen looked at the young man standing next to the door. “Ken?”
“Yes sir?”
“Get the home phone number of Garth Brickenfield. Then get him on the phone for me, please,” Allen told the young man, who started talking to someone on his Bluetooth.
“That’s ridiculous!” Ash said. “You’re not going to find a number for him. It’s unlisted and his people make sure that no one gets through without—”
“They’re bringing it up now, sir,” Ken announced. “Garth Orwell Brickenfield, on North Summer Moon Place. Call’s going through.”
“He owns several houses,” Roger Chester said; his face had gotten flushed again. “I doubt if—”
“Hello ma’am, I’m Agent Kenneth McGuire with the Federal Bureau of Investigation here in Tucson. I’m trying to reach Mr. Garth Orwell Brickenfield. Is he in?” There was just a short pause. “Would you tell him that Special Agent Truitt Allen would like to speak with him, please? It’s very important.” Ken gave a nod to his boss. “Yes ma’am, I’ll hold.” He said to Allen, “She’s calling him out at the hangar; he’s been working on his planes today. She says it should just be a few minutes.”
The door opened.
A young auburn-haired woman wearing blue scrubs looked in. “Excuse me,” she said. “Mr. Emerson is awake. He’s asking to speak to his friends.”
They knew who they were.
On the way to the ICU, they were briefed that they were not to touch anything in George’s room and that they could stay only a few minutes. They came to a middle-aged man and woman standing in the hallway just outside the unit’s cream-colored doors. Nomad stopped to speak to them in his most decent and caring tone of voice. They thanked him for what he said about their son. Nomad would’ve recognized George’s father anywhere: not by his short stature, but by the shiny pennies in his loafers.
Nomad, Ariel, Terry and Berke followed the young woman through the doors. It was cooler and quieter in this area of the hospital. There was the low hiss of respirators in action and the electronic beep of crucial machines, but otherwise everything was hushed. Doctors and nurses in scrubs moved about, either talking calmly to each other or checking their clipboards. Along the corridor between rooms separated by closed curtains there was a blue-cast underwater light.
“This way,” said their escort. She took them to one of the rooms on the left and drew aside the curtain.
They moved into the room, Nomad first and Ariel right behind him. Terry was last in, and his thought when he saw George lying in the bed at the center of all the monitor screens and gray wires and IV drips and black rubber cables was that George was now more machine than man.
Nomad had the feeling that he was not looking at George, but at a wax replica of the Little Genius. Surely this moon-colored face wasn’t the real thing. George was wearing an oxygen mask, he was packed into the bed with the sheet up to his neck and there was something over his chest, bandages or medical dressings or whatever, that made it bulge like a muscle man’s. Tubes snaked out of the bed to and from various receptacles. Clear fluid was dripping in and yellow fluid was dripping out. A vertical bank of monitors about six feet tall stood next to the bed. Things chirped and beeped and suddenly George’s legs rustled the sheet—a heavy, painful sound—and he looked at them with his bleary, swollen red eyes and said in a voice like the scrape of a dead leaf blown by the wind along a sidewalk, “Hi, team.”
Ariel turned away from the bed. Berke put a hand on her shoulder and left it there like a steel clamp until Ariel could get control of herself again.
“You’re all wired up,” Terry said, and he gave a weak little laugh.
“Oh yeah,” George answered, more of a breath with words than a regular voice. The sound was made hollow by the mask. “Getting tuned,” he said. “Weird thing. I can see better now.”
Nomad walked to the side of the bed, wary of all the life-sustaining machinery. He didn’t know what to say, so he said what welled up when he looked into the pale, waxen face. “They’re going to get the bastard, George.”
“Same guy,” George said; it was not a question, because he knew.
“Yeah. We’re going to finish the tour.” Just that fast, smelling the lingering burned scent of a critical wound that he recalled had hazed the air around his father’s body there in the Louisville parking lot, Nomad had made his decision. “We’re going to help get him.”
“Finish…?” George blinked, maybe thinking he was more out of his mind than he’d realized. “The tour?”
“Thanks for asking us,” Berke said, but when both Nomad and George looked at her, she frowned as if she’d stepped on the crack that broke her mother’s back. “Shit.” The lines on her forehead only deepened. “Okay, screw it. I’m in.”
Terry said, with a shifting of his shoulders that was not quite a shrug, “I guess I’m in too.”
Ariel didn’t speak.
“Crazy.” It was a distant voice from a faded man. “All of you.”
A silence stretched. Nomad was not good with hospitals; this was torture, wanting to be gone but needing to be here.
“I almost let go,” George said.
Ariel had composed herself. Her eyes were red, but she came forward to stand where she thought she should be, beside John Charles.
“It was up there.” George lifted his chin toward the ceiling. Toward the corner of the ceiling, up on the right where the curtain guide was.
“What was there?” Nomad glanced up to where George had indicated. Ceiling, curtain guide, nothing else.
“Folded up,” said George. “Sharp edges.” He took a few slow breaths before he spoke again. “I couldn’t see a head. No face. But I knew. It was watching me. It was like…the wings of a crow. Or like black origami. It was waiting. Right up there.”
“Waiting for what?” Ariel asked.
And George answered, “For me to die.”
Terry gave that nervous laugh again. “You’re not going to die, man! Get real!”
“You’re not going to die,” Berke said. “You’re past the worst part.” She hoped. “Listen, we probably need to go so you can rest. Okay?”
“That’s not all,” George said. “I was fighting. Really fighting. Hard. And I don’t know…when it was…but I heard somebody speak my name. It was like…a voice I knew. Maybe… a teacher I used to have. Somebody who cared about me. I knew that voice.” He made a noise that sounded as if he were struggling to breathe, and Nomad almost went for the nurse’s call button but then George said, “I opened my eyes and that girl was here.”
“Who?” Ariel asked.
“That girl,” he repeated. “Where they were picking the blackberries. You know.”
Nomad and Ariel exchanged glances. Terry looked quickly at Berke, but Berke was just staring down at the floor.
“Standing in the corner. There.” George lifted his chin toward the left-hand corner. “She said, ‘I believe in you, George,’ and then…she smiled at me…and she nodded. That voice…somebody else’s voice… I don’t know whose. I was afraid. Closed my eyes. Tight. I thought…if I burst a blood vessel…least I’m in the hospital already.” He had to stop and take a breather. “She was gone when I looked,” he said. His eyes found Nomad’s. “John… I thought…she was the angel of death. But now… I think she was the angel of life.”
“You had a dream,” Berke said quietly. “That’s all.”
“Right. A dream. But listen…if you guys…drove back there. To that place. She’d still be there…right? That whole place…it would still be there. Right?”
“Yeah,” Nomad told him. “It would.”
“Go back…and find out,” George said.
Nomad had no idea what he was talking about. It was time to leave; past time, really.
“Take the Scumbucket,” George said. “Old warhorse. Good for nothing…but following the music.”
“We can’t do that,” Ariel said. “It’s your van.”
“Done with me. ’Member, John?” His voice was getting weaker. His eyes were wanting to close and stay shut. “I said… I was with you guys. Said I’d take care of you. Like always.” He moved his legs again under the sheet, seeking some kind of comfort. “Dad’s got the keys. I’ll tell him.”
The young woman with the auburn hair came in. “George,” she said in a light, friendly tone, “I’m afraid your visitors are going to need to leave.” She made a quick visual check of the monitors and systems.
“Hey.” George roused himself from his impending slumber. “The song. Don’t you want my part?”
“The song?” Nomad shook his head.
Ariel knew. The song Mike started, probably the last song they would ever write. “Yes, George,” she said. “We do want your part.”
“I’m adding…what the girl said. To you, Ariel. I wish you…safe travel…courage when you need it.” The Little Genius offered them a wistful smile. His eyes glistened. “You need it now,” he said.
“I’ll see you on the other side of this,” Nomad vowed.
They said their goodbyes. Terry, who had been last going into the room, was the last out. Berke walked on ahead, moving quickly, her head lowered.
Ariel kept pace with Nomad. Heavy-burdened, they went back to the room where the suits were waiting, and where their new road manager had just gotten them eight hundred dollars for ninety minutes in the afternoon sun at Stone Church.
SIXTEEN.
“Tell me what I don’t already know about Stone Church,” said Truitt Allen.
“What do you already know?” Nomad fired back, from his seat behind Ariel.
“Damn, look at that fool!” Allen tapped the Scumbucket’s brake. The purple-and-blue spray-painted camper just ahead had swerved into the right lane without a turn signal. “Nothing pisses me off worse than a careless driver.” There were maybe a dozen stickers on the camper’s rear bumper, things like Eat Me, Not Meat and What Would Jesus Shoot?
Nomad thought Mr. Driver’s Education had better get used to it, because the train of huge recreational vehicles, campers, Volkswagen vans, pickup trucks and motley rusted-out mutts on four tires heading up I-10 was only going to get longer and more piss-worthy the closer they got to the junction of I-8 and the straight shot to Gila Bend.
The U-Haul trailer was an orange thumb that indicated they were on their way to Garth Brickenfield’s little bitty ole festival, as he’d described it to Allen over the phone. It was indeed thirteen years old, but it was no longer little bitty. The highway, at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, was already a demolition derby in the making. The troopers were out in force but so were the wreckmakers. A few minutes earlier, they’d passed the blinking lights at a fresh mess and seen crashed in a ditch one of those gargantuan black pickup trucks meant to carry Paul Bunyan’s lumber. Around it on the ground sat seven or eight people who looked to be made out of tattoos. One of the shirtless baldheaded young men was raging at the troopers as the plastic cuffs were being locked on his wrists, and none of The Five could fail to note on the man’s sunburned back a tattoo of a downward-facing pentagram with a red goat’s head at its center.
Have fun in the Pima County Jail, Nomad had thought. But what concerned him was that there were many more music-lovers just like that guy who weren’t going to crash their rides today.
It was going to be crazy on the two-lane road that left I-8 a few miles west of Gila Bend and twisted up into the mountains on its way to Apache Leap. The weathergirl on KVOA had said it was going to be cloudless skies and a hundred degrees at noon, so maybe at three o’clock, when The Five took the stage, it would be in the upper nineties. But it was dry heat, so they would bake instead of steam.
“I have a question for you.” It was the first time Berke had spoken since she’d climbed into the back seat about thirty minutes ago. She was dressed, appropriately for the weather of this 31st day of July and her current state of mind, in black jeans and a black wifebeater T-shirt. One thing new she was wearing was a small silver pin in the shape of a bass guitar that she’d bought yesterday in a crafts shop on North Campbell Avenue. “What handle are we supposed to give you?”
“What handle?” A pair of intense blue eyes glanced back in the rearview mirror.
“Your name,” Berke clarified. “Like…what? Allen? Mr. Allen? Truitt? I mean, if you’re pretending to be our road manager, then—”
“No,” he interrupted, and she stopped dead because she could tell when he spoke that word he meant it. “I’m not pretending. If I’m asking you to do…what I’m asking you to do…then you need to make some money off it. And if Pett doesn’t show up here, we’ll be ready for him in San Diego. Or Los Angeles, or wherever. But believe me…are you listening?” He’d seen her look away with a pained expression.
“I am,” Berke said, but she still stared out her window at the white sea of sand and clumps of spiny vegetation, darkened green by the newly-tinted glass.
“Believe me,” he repeated, “I’m going to do a real job.” He didn’t have to tell her he’d gone over his new role very thoroughly with Roger Chester. Organization was his mantra; how difficult could this be? “By the way, are you feeling the air-conditioning back there?”
“It feels great,” Terry said.
Nomad grunted. He had to give credit where credit was due. Mr. Pep Boy had taken the Scumbucket somewhere—maybe the agency garage—and had the van scrubbed and detailed, though scrubbing and detailing didn’t do much for beat-up battleship gray. Still, it was amazing that there wasn’t a single crumb of last year’s marijuana brownies anywhere on the floorboards, not a forgotten straw nor a plastic cup lid. In fact, there were new rubber mats, still with the new rubbery smell. The multitudinous variety of soft drink, tea, beer, mustard, hot sauce and other stains that had blotched the seats for years like a collection of Rorschach inkblots was gone as if absorbed by a magic ShamWow. The air-conditioning worked like an oil sheik’s dream. And it was nearly silent.
But what really blew the top off the Awesome Meter was the fact that Mr. Dark Glasses At Night had gotten that tint job done within a single day. For the ordinary man, it would’ve been a week on the wait. Windshield, side windows and back glass: all were pimped with the cool green, which made sunglasses unnecessary and also helped the air-conditioning.
Nomad knew the reason for that, as they all did: somebody—Jeremy Pett by name—wanting to fire a shot into the van wouldn’t have as clear a target as before.
On first seeing it, Nomad had asked their Scumbucket benefactor if the pop-up machine-guns, the oilslick shooters and the automated armor shields were in working order, and which seat was the ejector?
“I’m not sure of that other stuff,” came the reply, “but how about riding shotgun today?”
Which was how Ariel had wound up in that front passenger seat, though of course Nomad had known Mr. Fit-At-Fifty was just pulling his chain.
He hadn’t slept very soundly the last couple of nights, and today he was feeling it. When he closed his eyes, he saw George’s face with the oxygen mask strapped to it, in that bed in the hospital whose smell took him back to a death in Louisville. He saw George looking into one corner of the room—It was waiting. Right up there—and then into the other.
I opened my eyes and that girl was here.
Why would George have dreamed about that girl? Of all people…her?
I believe in you, George.
It was creepy, Nomad thought. Way creepy. And then adding that line about safe travel and courage to the song. Ariel had written it down in her notebook, with the other lines begun by the word Welcome.
That single word had been powerful enough to bring tears to Mike’s eyes. And powerful enough for him to dare to start writing a song.
Creepy, he thought. But it could be explained. Dreams were just dreams and Mike had been a lot more sentimental than he’d let on. So there was really no big deal. It was a song. And what else would it be?
“So how about it?” Berke persisted, speaking to their driver. “What do we call you?”
He thought it over. There had been a name for him, back in the day. Before he’d gotten so serious…well, no, he’d always been serious…but, still…
It had been given to him…no, he’d earned it, as he’d earned everything in his life, the hard way…by his fraternity brothers at the University of Oregon. He decided it was good enough for now, as well.
“True,” he said. “With an ‘e’. Opposite of ‘false’.”
Berke tried it out, to see how it sounded and felt: “True. Okay, I guess that works.”
“I can’t see calling you that,” Ariel said.
True frowned. A big fat-assed red SUV was right in front of him, he couldn’t spare even a quick glance at her. “Why not?”
“I don’t know, I just can’t.”
“Oh.” He got it. “Right. Because I’m old. Because you’re thinking you need to be saying ‘sir’ to me, and calling me ‘mister’?”
“I didn’t say you were old.” She paused, trying to figure out exactly what she was trying to say. After a moment more of uncomfortable silence, she asked, “How old are you?”
“Fifty-three. Coming up to fifty-four in November. My story: met my wife in college, at Oregon, married her after graduation, been married—very happily—for thirty years. We have two daughters, one in enviromental science for the city of Tucson, and another an FBI agent in Dallas. We have one grandchild, a boy named Wesley Truitt Adams. My wife and I like to go on cruises when we can, and we enjoy river rafting and mountain biking. I like reading military history. I have a stereo room, and I listen to a lot of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles but I also like Tony Bennett and bluegrass. What am I leaving out that you might like to know?”
“Big jump from Oregon to Arizona,” Nomad said. “How’d that happen?”
“I was actually born in Yuma. Went to high school there. Played football with the Criminals. Senior quarterback until a Kofa High King got through the defense and knocked me into orbit, three games from the end of the season. But I guess I wanted to see something green. I wanted to see a forest and hear rain and…you know…do something that you feel you need to do. So you go do it. Anything else?”
“You were a policeman before you joined the FBI?” Ariel asked.
“Oh, yeah. Did all that grunt work.” True was trying to read the white-on-black sticker on the bumper of that red SUV. He sped up a little bit, getting closer. The SUV had a Texas tag. The part of the sticker he could read said Have Some Fun. Underneath that were small words he couldn’t make out. Nun? He gave it some more gas.
Nomad asked, “You were a cop in Tucson?”
“Hold it, hold it, I’m trying to—” And then he was close enough to read the smaller words. The second line read Fuck A Nun. About two seconds after seeing that, he saw a black decal with an upside-down cross on it at a corner of the rear glass, and then he realized something was staring at him from the back of the SUV.
He could see the whites of two eyes and below them a gleam of bared teeth. It was a black dog, he thought. A big dog. Its eyes were fixed upon him as if it could see him clearly and distinctly through the green tint. Maybe it could. The way the thing stared at him, immobile though both the van and the SUV were doing about sixty miles an hour and the highway was flashing past underneath, made True think that if that dog could get at him it would rip his throat open from ear-to-ear.
A Melville quote came to him: I saw the opening maw of hell.
True felt the small hairs on the back of his neck tingle. Suddenly a white arm braided with a barbed-wire tattoo emerged from the dark within, hooked around the animal’s neck and pulled the dog away from the glass…
…and then the SUV’s brakelights flared red, True saw a rear-end collision about to destroy his perfect driving record and perhaps the way his head sat upon his spine, and he swerved the van and trailer into the left-hand lane directly in front of a Winnebago painted a sand-colored camo scheme. He came within inches of scraping that hideous sticker off the metal and he felt the whipsaw of the trailer shudder through the van’s frame. The trailer swayed back and forth a few times, as True cut his speed to keep the rig from dragging them off the interstate. The shriek of tires and blare of horns followed.
“Jesus Christ!” Nomad hollered.
“Hey, man!” Terry said, righting himself after his seatbelt had nearly cut him in half. It was a pain, wearing these seatbelts, but with an FBI agent at the wheel, what were you gonna do? “I thought you could drive!”
“Sorry.” True checked the sideview mirrors. Thank God, he was leaving no accidents in his wake. The driver of the red SUV dropped back, turned on the blinker and merged smoothly into the left-hand lane a few vehicles behind the Scumbucket.
“That was different,” Berke said. “I used to have a drum kit back in that fucking trailer instead of shit and splinters.”
“It’ll be all right,” he told her. He felt such animosity from her, he couldn’t resist saying, “It would’ve been busted up if it hadn’t been repacked.”
“Repacked?” Terry asked; it had also gone through his mind that his keyboards, even in their hard cases, weren’t up to that kind of rock-and-rolling.
“I had everything repacked by experts,” True said, feeling a little superior. “They filled in the empty spaces with styrofoam cubes and put color-key labels on everything.”
“Color-key labels?” Berke leaned forward as far as her sealtbelt would let her. “What for?”
“There’s a diagram taped to the inside of the trailer. It shows how everything should be packed, according to the colors.” When no one spoke for a time, True said, “More efficient this way.”
“Yeah, well, George had a system.” Berke wasn’t ready to let it go. This guy with his pressed khaki trousers and his dark burgundy-colored polo shirt and his white sidewalls and fucking control-freak attitude was starting to crawl up her butt. “He just knew where everything went. He didn’t need…like…an agency full of government flunkies figuring out what color label ought to be stuck on my snare.”
“I’m sure he did a great job.” True’s voice was cool; he was somewhere else now, though, concentrating on the task ahead.
“He was one of us,” Berke said, and let the obvious rest of it hang out there. No further comment came from the government man. She leaned back and closed her eyes to escape the moment and recharge her batteries. There would be a huge sunshade awning up over the stage, she’d been told, but hot was hot and drumming made its own heat. Fuck it, she’d be ready; she always was.
“If your boys had seen that move,” Nomad said to True, “they might take your Good Driver’s badge away. That wasn’t them crashed in that ditch back there, was it?”
“No.” His ‘boys’, dressed the part of Stone Church music fans, were in two vehicles ahead of them and two vehicles behind. Another team of ‘boys’ had gone to the site early this morning to get everything organized, and more ‘boys’ were at this moment setting up on their stations. True had had an interesting meeting with his site coordinator yesterday, when True had said he needed metal detectors in operation between what they called the ‘Midway’ and the entrance to the ‘Amphitheater’.
Metal detectors, sir? The site coordinator was thirty-two years old, an ex-SWAT guy and a big fan of a band called Green Day, which True had never heard of. Sir…do you realize how many times those detectors are going to go off with this crowd? It’ll be a constant buzz. And…begging your pardon, sir, but some of these people are going to be carrying metal in places you’d rather not know about. Male and female both.
True had taken it upon himself to find on the Internet some examples of what was being talked about, and when he was looking at a picture of a split cock with metal rings dangling from both halves his wife had happened to come up behind him in the study and spilled his nightly Ovaltine all over the carpet.
So much for the metal detectors. The undercover guys were going to have to eyeball the crowd, but it was unlikely Pett would try to get in close for a shot. The rifle was his instrument, and long range his protection. The biggest responsiblity would be with the tac teams surrounding the venue. But to this point, everything had been going as planned. Pett’s picture, his tag number and a description of his dark blue pickup truck had been on the local news and on CNN and Fox. Last night Nancy Grace had put up the information before every commercial break; she was a bulldog about such things and could be counted on to help. On the other hand, the media was always hungry for hot stories and the sniper story had lost some of its heat, being knocked off centerstage by new developments about the missing little girl in Florida and the fourth rape by the so-called Duct Tape Rapist in Los Angeles.
The local TV stations had been helpful in promoting Stone Church. They’d been running the frenzied, quick-cut video ads that Garth Brickenfield had paid for, and also getting in on the newcasts mention that The Five—you’ll remember they’re the rock band that’s been struck twice in sniper attacks both in Arizona and Texas—would be playing there for one show at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon. Promoter Garth Brickenfield assures us that of course security will be tight and every precaution will be taken. Brickenfield had insisted on that last bit, and he said he didn’t give a shit if the FBI or the IRS or GWB himself had some questions about his last three years’ tax returns, he couldn’t scare off his paying customers.
Didn’t really matter, True thought. For sure Pett knew security would be tight. Would he see it as a challenge? A way to show what he could do, now that he was back in the arena?
Time would tell.
By the looks of the crowd on this highway, nobody was being scared off. They’d be pouring in from the eastbound side too, coming from California. Brickenfield’s promotional efforts—on TV, radio, and newspapers—covered the entire southwest and half of the left coast, and the website was slick and professional but the band pictures were nearly as disturbing as the image of the cock with two half-heads. In True’s day, bands had wanted their faces to be seen; they didn’t want to wear over their heads executioner’s masks, wire cages and coiled things that looked like French sex toys.
The first band started up at noon. Stone Church went until midnight Sunday with bands playing around the clock. He’d gone over the roster, but he didn’t know any of the names: Triumph Of The Dark, Skullsplitter, FTW, The Black Dahlias, Rat Scab, Monster Ripper, Anus And Candy, The Descenders, Mjöllnir, The Bleeding Brains, The Luciferians, Dear Mother’s Blood, Fist Deep, Dreams Of Sharp Teeth, The Sick Crabs, The Slain, and on and on.
He recalled thinking how weird Adam and the Ants seemed back at the beginning of New Wave. Now they were as quaint as the sound of the Mitch Miller records his own father used to listen to after dinner.
The question was…what was coming next, to give these current bands the scent of moldy age? His tac leader had called them ‘death-thrash bands’. True remembered what John Charles had said to Roger Chester: The only reason they want us there is because of the death thing.
Garth Brickenfield had not gotten where he was by being dumb. Or being caught napping in an easy chair. He knew what his paying audience would pay to see. Those other bands might thrash all they wanted to about death…but The Five had seen it up close, in its bloody truth.
They were going to be real celebrities at this shindig.
“Jeremy Pett,” Terry began, and then he let that sit for a few seconds. “He might have headed to Mexico. Right?”
“Maybe,” True answered, watching the road and all the vehicles in front of him. He was dreading that traffic on the two-lane. “Like I told you, it depends on what’s in his head.”
“You mean if he decides killing one of us and putting another one in the ICU is enough?” Nomad prodded. “To satisfy him, I mean?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, what is so fucking bad about that video? Okay, it criticizes the war. Other bands do videos criticizing the war, but they don’t get popped because of it! Why us?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“I’m asking you!” Some fire jumped into Nomad’s face. “You’ve seen it! What’s so bad about it that we should get killed?”
“John,” said Ariel, in a soothing voice, “he can’t answer that. He doesn’t know. Nobody knows but Jeremy Pett, and he must be out of his mind. Maybe he saw something in the video that reminded him of what he went through. Maybe something he doesn’t want to be reminded of. That’s what I think.”
“Yes,” True agreed. “I’m thinking that, too.”
“Should I go on TV and apologize?” Nomad asked, speaking to both of them. “Should I get up on the stage and say I’m sorry we did this video and got Mike killed for it? Or maybe it’s the song? Should I say I’m sorry we wrote this song, and never again will there ever be another song written in the world that has the power to piss anybody off? You know what you get when that happens?”
“Yeah,” Berke said. “Lame Van Halen tunes. Which I’m sad to say we’ve done a lot of. Like ‘Bad Cop’.”
“What’s wrong with Van Halen?” True asked.
“What’s wrong with ‘Bad Cop’?” Nomad twisted around in his seat to the limit of his restraining belt. “It’s a party song, people like it.”
“Drunks like it,” said Berke, with a wicked little smirk. “The bartenders like it.”
“And the club owners like it.”
“It’s not going to fly with this audience,” she pointed out. “We go out doing shit like that and they’ll bum rush the stage. You want to join George in that ICU? Not me, bro.”
“What?”
She realized what she’d said; a message delivered from another world. “I mean…not me. Period.”
“I like Van Halen,” True said to Ariel.
“I’m just saying,” Berke went on, now that she was geared to go, “is that we need to play for this crowd. If we don’t connect with them in a hurry, they’re going to take out their fucking power drills and give us new assholes right in our foreheads. So I’m thinking…maybe we ought to kick it off with ‘Bedlam A-Go-Go’. Distort the shit out of it. Go fucking monster loud. In fact, distort and go freak wild on everything. And when you sing, John, get your mouth right up on the mike and scream it out so nobody can hear what you’re saying. Just eat the fucking mike. How about it?”
There was a silence.
After a while, Nomad nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Distortion is my name,” Terry said.
“And we ought to pick the tempo up on everything,” Berke told them. “What was slow gets fast and what was fast gets ridiculous. Okay? You guys follow my lead and I’ll carry you through.”
< >
“My kind of gig,” said Ariel. “If my hands fall off in the middle of ‘Sympathy’, will somebody please put them in a refrigerated box?”
“We’ve got this knocked,” Nomad said, with a smile that might have been described as jittery. “Yeah. Ninety minutes of noise, distortion, and speed. We may have to play some songs twice, but we’ve got this knocked.”
I-10 curved into I-8. About six miles past Gila Ridge, True and nearly everybody else heading westbound turned off on the two-lane that stretched out flat for a distance and then began its climb into the heat-hazed, brick-red mountains toward Stone Church. The road was jammed and traffic slowed to a crawl. In front of them the passenger of a gray van lowered their window and threw yellow liquid from a bucket onto the pavement, where it bubbled and steamed. Young men wearing umbrella caps that bore the red legend Stone Church 9-2008 began appearing, walking among the vehicles to sell bottled water, T-shirts and umbrella caps that bore the red legend Stone Church 9-2008.
“A decorated Marine,” Ariel suddenly said. It had come to her as she was thinking about George lying in his hospital bed. “You said Detective Rios told you Pett was a decorated Marine.” She waited for True to acknowledge her with a glance. “What decoration?”
“The Bronze star for valor.” True stared straight ahead, guiding the Scumbucket ever onward. The mountains had grown rugged and huge. “It happened in Fallujah, in November of 2004. He was in position in an abandoned building with his spotter, looking for targets. Evidently they’d been seen and tracked by an insurgent scout. The report I read says that a rocket-propelled grenade was fired into their hide. The blast wounded Pett’s spotter. It was a cranial wound, ended up being severe brain damage that put him in the Veteran’s Hospital in Temple for life. Right after the RPG came in, an estimated thirty to forty insurgents with assault rifles stormed the building.”
True’s jaw was set. In it, a muscle twitched. Ariel thought his blue eyes had turned the color of steel.
“According to the report, Pett was in shock and bleeding from his own wounds, but he started making shots,” the man continued, in a slow and even voice. “He hit a few of them. Knocked them back on their heels. Then they brought in a truck loaded with more RPGs, and they started blowing the building apart room by room. According to the report, Pett dragged his spotter with him as he kept on the move. Gave him whatever first aid he could. Pett was calling for help on his radio, but by that time the building was surrounded and there was no way out.” The steely gaze wandered toward Ariel. “Can you imagine what that must’ve been like? What that young man must’ve been thinking? He was trained, sure…but that kind of warfare…trapped like a dog in a cage…the RPGs tearing in and blowing holes in the walls all around you and your buddy with his brains falling out of his head…what does a man do, in a situation like that?”
After a short pause, True said, “What he did, was to get himself and his spotter down to the basement, in the dark, and find a protected area where he could get his back to the wall. Then he waited. There were battles going on all over the city. Help was coming, but it wasn’t going to get there quick and it was going to have to fight to get to him. So, according to the report, Pett stayed in that basement with his spotter for nearly three hours, with his buddy’s head cradled in his lap and his rifle aimed at the square of a doorway at the top of the stairs. They kept firing the RPGs in, but they wouldn’t come in after him. It was almost night when a squad got him out. He had killed six insurgents, likely wounded twice that many. The squad had trouble separating him from his buddy, so they let Pett carry him with them up the steps. That was Pett’s last combat mission. For staying with his friend and showing heroism under fire, he was awarded the Bronze Star. The Temple police found it in his apartment, up on a closet shelf in a box with letters from his wife.”
“His wife?” Nomad was amazed to hear this fact. “Where is she?”
True didn’t answer for a time. He was watching the mountains come nearer, and now they looked to him like a massive line of broken teeth.
“One night in February of 2004,” he said, “Pett’s wife and his seven-year-old son—Nick was the boy’s name—drove out of a mall’s parking lot. They were hit at the next intersection by an SUV travelling at what the Houston police say had to be nearly seventy miles an hour. The two teenaged girls were high on pot and the driver was arguing with her boyfriend on her cellphone. Witnesses said she never braked for the red light. I read the police reports and the newspaper article.” The picture in the Chronicle had been horrendous, showing what used to be a minivan reduced to a shapeless mass of metal, the impact having spun the wreckage through the front window of a Popeye’s Fried Chicken restaurant. “Pett’s wife died at the scene. The little boy lingered until the next day. As for the teenaged girls, the driver died a few days later and the passenger was crippled. Pett went home to the funerals of his family, but he turned around and went back to active duty a few weeks later.”
“Why?” Terry asked, sounding stunned.
“I’m sure,” True said, “he knew they needed him in Iraq. They were his second family. I’m supposing from everything I’ve read that Pett intended to make the Marines his life career. He was very good at his fieldwork, but I doubt you can sustain that too long. I’m thinking he wanted to be a gunny. A gunnery sergeant. Teaching the discipline to the new boots. Maybe training new snipers. But after what happened in Fallujah…the sad thing is that you can be tested and pass the test, but something fundamental is changed about you. Something is pulled out of shape. I’ve seen the same thing happen to agents in violent situations. They do everything right, they go by the book, maybe they even win citations for bravery, but you look in their eyes—you look deep—and you see…something has gotten down in the dark, in that basement, and it presses its back against the wall for protection and it knows…it knows…that next time, the fear might win. And it’s the fear that causes you to make an error and get yourself killed. I’m thinking that after Fallujah, the next time Jeremy Pett fired a rifle he couldn’t hit a red barn at two hundred yards, because when he held that weapon everything came flooding back. So the Marines discharged him with his Bronze Star and sent him home to Houston where the bodies of his wife and son were lying in the cemetery. It wasn’t too much longer before he moved to Temple. Obviously he wanted to be close to the VA hospital. The visitors’ records say he went to see his buddy every Wednesday.”
“Wow,” was Berke’s quiet response. If anything, she could relate to loyalty.
Nomad was having none of it. “Are we supposed to feel sorry for him?”
A grim smile moved across True’s mouth, and then it went away. He said in an empty voice, “Feel the way you need to feel. No skin off my back.”
They were climbing into the jagged brown teeth. The traffic would move for a few minutes and then it would clog again with an exclamation of brakelights all down the long line. A helicopter swooped low over the road.
“Hey, a chopper!” Terry said. “I’m impressed!”
“Not mine,” True told him. “Might be media or Brickenfield’s security men making a display. My guys aren’t meant to be noticed.”
Nomad thought that was an understatement, considering how smoothly Truitt Allen had stashed a small soft leather bag down beside the driver’s seat when he’d gotten behind the wheel. Cellphone? Walkie-Talkie? Compact handgun? Probably all three.
“Question?” True asked, as if he were reading Nomad’s mind.
“I don’t have a question, man.”
“I’m saying I do have a question. I was about to ask…what’s the story behind Stone Church? It didn’t start out with that name.” True knew that much; it had been the Apache Leap Festival when it began in 1995. In the year 2000, it became Stone Church. “The highest peak up here is called Apache Leap, correct?”
“I guess.”
“Well, who knows? I’m interested in why the name changed.” He’d never thought to ask Garth Brickenfield or Roger Chester or even his own tac leader, with all the other million details that had to be worked out for this operation, and anyway it was hardly an essential point. But still, he was curious. “Anybody help me out?”
“I’ve read about it,” Ariel said, though she was underestimating her knowledge. She’d talked to other musicians who’d played Stone Church, and from their experiences she’d dug into the subject like Detective Ramona Rios on the track of a missing persons report. “The legend about Apache Leap is that—”
“A brave climbed up there to fight an evil spirit,” True interrupted. “He jumped off the peak when he realized the evil couldn’t be beaten, because it was part of himself. Yeah, that’s schoolboy stuff. I want to know about Stone Church.”
“The legend and Stone Church tie together,” she explained. “It’s been a place of evil spirits for a very long time.”
“You’re quoting someone?” He gave the Scumbucket some gas; they were moving again, but once more the line of brakelights flared ahead. The helicopter passed, throwing its shadow like a huge dark bird. “Or is that your opinion?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve read and what I’ve heard, if you want to listen.”
“Shoot,” he said, and instantly thought that was a very poor choice of words.
Ariel began.
SEVENTEEN.
She was good at painting pictures with words, and so now Ariel painted them for Truitt Allen: yellow dust blowing through the mountain air, the stillness of the red-rimmed stone, the sun burning hot upon the cracks and fissures of a dry, old earth, and deep down below that baked brown crust the men sweating in the light of their lanterns as they swung pickaxes in the sweltering rooms of Silver Mine Number Three.
The Spanish had worked the mine before, using Indians as slaves, but not until 1887 did the industrious white men find the hole in the ground and haul up a taste of what was in it. They brought their pack mules, their tent canvas, their lumber boards and their picks and shovels by the hundreds, and then with the arrival of the barrels of nails and a proper team of construction surveyors paid for by the San Francisco investment company, wooden buildings took shape. The two whorehouses were given painted signs. The four bars earned their solidity, their batwing doors and their brass spittoons. Wagons began bringing in the wives and children. At night the wind picked up, and under the stars it sang through the telegraph wires that stretched down along the poles to Gila Ridge. A school was built, well away from the saloons and houses of ill repute. It was the third silver mine owned by the Company, and by now the managers knew how to build a town around a dream of wealth.
A lot of silver was coming out of that mine. Some other things too: a little lead, a flash of zinc, enough gold to quicken the pulse and cause women to crave the gleam and men to go buy a pocket pistol, just for protection. But a lot of silver was coming up, and Silver Mine Number Three was going to make a lot of people very rich.
A man of God arrived, in the summer of 1890. He introduced himself at a town meeting as the Reverend Daniel Kiley. He brought with him his own wife, his two young sons, his baby daughter and a wagon full of Bibles and hymn books. He was a good man. He was an intelligent man. He was a man who had his own dreams, of making a difference in a world that needed salvation.
He was a man.
Daniel Kiley had had some difficulty in Denver, their last place of residence. It might have had to do with the power of whiskey, or the power of a woman who whispered things in a man’s ear that a wife would not dare to speak, and who did those things laughingly and then laughingly watched a man’s face crumble along with the plans for a new church on Blake Street. He had been cast out of that Eden, and had wandered long in search of a purpose to redeem himself in the eyes of God, in the eyes of his wife and in the hearts of his children. He had to win his way back, and the only way he knew to do that was to build something holy, something that would last, something like a beacon to lead sinners home from the dark path. Because he knew what lay at the end of that; he had seen his destruction in a pair of green eyes and a pair of green-gloved hands. He had seen it in the distorted reflection of his own face in a mirror down along the hallway where a red curtain hid his secrets.
It was to laugh at.
The Company was all for what Daniel Kiley proposed: a church to settle the community, to give the beginnings to the law and order that towns needed, to give the people a place to wed, a place to bring their babies for baptism, a place to prepare for the journey that every man and woman must make. The church kept workers satisfied. It would go up at the center of the fledgling business district of Silver Mine Number Three, and at Daniel Kiley’s urging the Company would build this church not of ordinary timber and tar, nor of bricks fired from the town’s new kiln, but from the stone of the mountain itself. It would be built to last a hundred years, and in mid-1891 a great hurrah rose into the red-dusted air as the shovels bit first earth, after which there was a pause while the photographer loaded his glass plates into the camera, repositioned the scene and memorialized the moment with a bright flare of magnesium powder.
When the church was finished, it was a thing of beauty. A thing of pride and of promise. The stones were tight and precise, the mortar as white as God’s beard. In front of the door, stone steps stood chiseled and firm underfoot, to guide the needy to their places. Who knew what the future of the town might be? The silver was still coming up, and much more to be found. This town of over four hundred people might be a city one day. A city on a mountaintop, to rival even Denver.
Oh yes, said the Reverend Daniel Kiley, from his new pinewood pulpit to his congregation in their pews. That’s a nice thought.
Within a month of the church going up, the mayor called a meeting. With the Company’s permission, he was suggesting a new name for their town. He was suggesting Stone Church, and may it stand for a hundred years as the beacon of this community.
“No one knows exactly how it started,” Ariel said, as the Scumbucket crept up the mountain road. “But it did start.”
“What started?” True asked.
“The end,” she said.
Maybe it started with the mine itself. But it wasn’t that the silver ran out. It didn’t stop gleaming in the walls when the lantern light touched it. But the streams of silver ran deeper down, and to get to them the miners went deeper too, and day after day—week after week and month after month—the miners went deeper. And deeper still.
Who was it who first had a nervous drink at a saloon and said he’d seen something, down in the passageways and gloomy rooms where heaving pumps brought in the gritty air? What had he seen? What did others see, that made them come up from that hole, pack into their wagons their picks, their shovels, their wives and their children, and leave their houses with bedspreads still on the bed and dishes in the cupboard?
Some talked, before they left. Not going back down in that hole, they said. No sir, not for any coin on this earth. Because there are things down there. There are things that watch me from the dark, and when I hold my lantern up I only see their shadows as they pull back into the rock. Did you hear me, sir? I said…into the rock.
The town’s doctor was an old man named Leon Lewis who had seen his own share of visions among the lotus eaters of San Francisco. He told the mayor and the council that he thought these hallucinations were a result of bad air down in the chambers. The bellows pumps were outdated and inefficient at the depth the mine had reached, he said, and it was time to present the Company with a plan for a steam boiler that would run a new air circulation system.
The Company’s response was to study the plan. In the meantime, more men were emerging from the rooms and vowing never to go back. Most would not talk, not for money or whiskey. When one of them spilled his story to a prostitute, it was likely the town would be less both one miner and one prostitute in the next day or two.
More than the shadows, more than the glimpses of figures standing where they should not be, more than the quick shine of eyes in the dark, it was the music that began to shred their nerves.
It was always faint. Always just at the edge of hearing. But all who did hear it were sure it was a brass band playing a march. Down in the deep dark of the mine, down in a place where picks and shovels had just begun to pierce the earth, a brass band was playing a John Philip Sousa march. There was some difference of opinion over whether it was ‘The Washington Post’ or ‘The Gladiator’ or some combination of the two, because there were only seconds of it to be heard, drifting amid the wheeze of the pumps and the scrape of the shovels.
Doc Lewis said working at that depth could affect a man’s inner ear, in such a way that phantom music might indeed be heard. He volunteered to go down himself, with Sheriff McKee and the head foreman.
“Ariel, you’re creeping me out,” Berke said. “You’re making half this shit up, anyway.”
“I wish. There are three books I know of on the subject, and last April there was a documentary on the History Channel.”
“What’ve you been doing? Studying this?” Nomad asked. Christ, he wished he had a cigarette! The higher they climbed up this freaking mountain, the more nervous he was getting, and he did not as a rule get nervous.
True followed the car ahead through an open orange metal gate. A small adobe-style building stood next to it and out front were a couple of guys in white shirts and sand-colored shorts. They wore caps that had GB Promotions on them. The security men looked like fleshy ex-football players, and one was making the devil horns hand to four girls in a Jeep while the other was hollering at somebody over a cell phone. True saw a sign ahead: Campgrounds. An arrow pointed to the left. He was supposed to keep going straight on, to the artists’ area.
“I think maybe you’ve been reading too much Stephen King,” he told Ariel. “But go ahead.”
She did.
When the doctor, the sheriff and the foreman came back up from the mine, they spoke to none of the other men waiting at the entrance. They walked straight to the stone church, and it was seen that Sheriff McKee had to help Doc Lewis because the doctor’s knees buckled at the foot of the steps. Then they went inside and didn’t come out for a while. Nobody followed them in, but one of the miners ran to get Daniel Kiley, and when the reverend arrived and went into his church he didn’t come out for a while, either. Finally everybody went home, and that was the first night the telegraph in the Company office started tapping out the message News! News! News! Stone Church has been destroyed over and over again from somewhere down the mountain, but nobody in Gila Ridge was sending it.
What got out, over the next few days, and what was whispered in the saloons over the half-guzzled bottles and the forgotten whores, was that the three men who’d gone down into the mine had followed the faint snippets of music, the ‘Washington Post’ or the ‘Gladiator’, whatever it was, the kind of music that ordinarily would have made a man doff his hat and salute his flag in a fine frenzy of patriotism. They had followed the music from chamber to chamber, armed with lanterns and in Sheriff McKee’s big ruddy paw of a hand a Colt Navy revolver. And, the whispers went, the music drew them deeper and deeper, until suddenly it stopped and the woman stepped out into the lantern light.
She was a striking-looking woman. A beautiful woman, in an elegant dress. She wore green gloves, and—so the whispers went—she told the three men she wanted to speak to the Reverend Daniel Kiley. She said it would go hard for the town, if he wouldn’t see her. She said it would go hard for the town even if he would see her, because that was how things were. But, she said, at least from such a righteous gentleman as him she expected a courtesy call.
The wagons began to roll out. The head foreman and his wife were gone the next morning after it had happened, left everything behind that couldn’t be thrown into a single trunk. Sheriff McKee had to be awakened from a drunken stupor by the thin Chinese girl who slept on his porch like a lovesick mongrel. Even Doc Lewis thought about running for it, but he was on his last legs anyway, he had no family, he was a horse waiting to be shot. He decided to stick it out, with a little lotus leaf to steady his nerves.
Daniel Kiley called a gathering in front of the stone church. It had to be in broad daylight, because no one walked the streets after sundown. He addressed the remaining seventy or so frightened people in what many considered a voice carved from the Rock Of Ages. He stood firm before them, with his family at his side, and commanded the crowd to also stand firm. He lifted up his Bible and told them he had found his purpose here, his calling, his truth. He had found what he’d been looking for, in one way or another, all his weak and miserable life.
He had found a fight with Satan. And by God he was not going to let Satan take his town.
At that point, about thirty more people headed to their wagons at a pretty quick clip, but the forty who stood their ground spat their tobacco and scratched their balls and hollered back at the reverend in the Greek language, in Chinese, in the Nordic tongue, in the brogues of old Ireland and the burrs of Scotland and in the toughened timbres of men who have learned to sleep standing up with one eye open.
They would send their wives and children down the mountain to safety—if they could, because some of the wives spat their tobacco and the children scratched their balls just like Papa did. But what was life if it was lived like a scared sheep?
“Now that’s where it runs off the tracks,” Nomad said. “Nobody would’ve stayed in that town. Nobody. My ass would be going down that road.” He realized, quite suddenly, that his ass was currently going up that road.
“Maybe.” Ariel saw, as True did, a double sign pointing to a turnoff on the right. The top sign said Vendors and the bottom one Artists. “But, according to what I read, the people who elected to stay were told the Company was sending a bonus for every man who would go back into the mine. The Company didn’t know what was happening—they thought it was a work stoppage over the air pumps—but they were sending a strongbox of gold dust from San Francisco. And no one had been hurt yet. There was the music, the woman, and the threat of harm from the telegraph, but the telegraph had stopped its chattering.”
“What do you mean, no one had been hurt ‘yet’?” Berke frowned. “That sounds fucking ominous.”
“For a few weeks, nothing else happened. The miners went back to work. The music had stopped. There were no more half-seen figures in the dark. Even some of those people who’d left came back. Then whatever it was…evil, Satan, whatever you want to call that force…left the mine and entered the town.”
Did Daniel Kiley want to go into the mine, to meet the woman—the creature—who called him? Did the reverend’s wife throw herself in his way, and beg him not to go? He didn’t go. Then…one morning they found their little girl dead in her bed. There were bruises on her face. The reverend’s sons woke up to the noise of horror…and one of them said he’d had a dream, a bad bad dream, in which he’d walked quietly into their room while they were sleeping and looked into his sister’s bed and had seen a snake coiled next to her head. And in this dream he’d had a pillow already in his hands, and he’d smashed it down upon the reptile, had pressed down hard with all his strength, and when he’d tried to call for help…the strangest thing…his voice was gone. His voice had been stolen from him, there in the night. But he kept pressing down, and pressing down, and at last he’d lifted up the pillow and seen that the snake was dead. He’d told his father that he thought he was a real hero, in that dream, and maybe he ought to earn a medal.
A Company wagon bearing the strongbox of gold dust from San Francisco arrived the next day. It was accompanied by four men with the names of Barton Taggett, Miles Branco, Jerrod Spade and Duke Chanderley. They wore dirty Stetsons on their heads and notched Colts in their holsters. They were ready to declare war, in the name of the Company, on sluggards and malingerers and weak-willed sonsofbitches who didn’t want to dig for silver just because of an old air pump. When they found fifty or so people where four hundred used to be, and the new head foreman a red-bearded Scotsman with one leg, they changed their attitude. When they heard the stories and talked to Sheriff McKee and Doc Lewis and Daniel Kiley, and when they saw the body of the little girl in its casket and the haunted eyes of the boy who’d suffocated her in a bad dream, they sat down for a while in the last remaining saloon with the last of the soiled doves looking on, and they drank some whiskey and smoked some cigars and figured they were getting too old for this shit.
But the thing was, they were moral men who had had immoralities thrust upon them. So as the night went on and the lamps burned across Stone Church, and the church itself stood silent and solid in the center of the town, the Company enforcers decided they didn’t know if demons could bleed, red blood or black, but maybe it was up to four Civil War hellraisers to find out.
“They went down into the mine with Daniel Kiley and Sheriff McKee,” Ariel said, as the Scumbucket passed a huge gated parking lot full of trucks, vans and trailers. Vendors Park Here, a sign directed. “They went down to find the woman. The thing. Whatever she was. It was. And that’s the end of the story.”
“The fuck it is!” Berke had nearly yelled it.
“Come on!” Terry said. “That can’t be the end!”
“There’s no good end,” Ariel clarified.
True scanned the vehicles in the vendors’ lot. Rings Of Saturn Tattoos, Inc. Body Art by Sarafina. ShockIt Tattoos. Tribal Attitudes. The Living Needle.
“Finish it,” he said, as he drove on.
“I’ve heard and read about a daily journal in a library somewhere. Kept under lock-and-key, available for study only to parapsychologists and the clergy.” Ariel said quietly. “It was written by one of the Stone Church prostitutes. The story is that she and all but two others of her profession left on a wagon as the enforcers, the sheriff and the reverend were walking into the mine. The women didn’t look back. But all the details come from that journal. They talked about it in that documentary on the History Channel. The women heard nothing. They just kept going. But when the Company didn’t hear anything more, they sent a Pinkerton’s detective from Tucson to find out what was happening with their investment. The detective found…nothing and no one. Fifty-something people, and the four enforcers, were gone. There was no evidence of a fight. The horses, mules, cows and pigs…all gone. There was not a living thing left in Stone Church. But clothes still hung on lines, dishes were stacked up in washbasins, and mops and brooms leaned in corners as if their owners had just stepped out for a minute. A pan of browned biscuits sat on a table. Some of the doors to the houses were open, some closed. The strongbox was locked in a cell in the sheriff’s office. All the sacks of gold dust were still there. An empty casket was found in the parlor of the reverend’s house. Child-sized. Two other things…the Pinkerton detective found that all the gravestones in the cemetery had been knocked flat, and the windows had been blown out of the church from the inside.” She’d been looking to her right, through the green tint, and now she narrowed her eyes slightly. “There it is,” she said.
They saw what she was seeing.
It was maybe two or three miles away, commanding a slightly higher elevation. The roof had collapsed; if there ever had been a steeple, there was not one now. The stone walls formed a shell around a hollow center. Even at this distance, in the midday sun, some of the lines of mortar could be made out. Below the walls the earth was an ashen color. Here and there piles of timbers lay jumbled about. The open frame of a building that the wind had gnawed to pieces was still standing, but its days were numbered. But the stone church itself…it had lasted for a hundred years, and might last a hundred more though its congregation now was likely only the lizards and the scorpions. Nomad could see a massive iron gate across the road that wound up to Stone Church. It was secured by what might have been a dark fester of chains and coils of barbed-wire. The wire was strung all around the mountaintop, like spiky hair circling a scabby pate. Day-Glo orange signs were set at intervals in the ground. He couldn’t read them, but he imagined what they probably said: Danger. No Trespassing. Proceed At Your Own Risk. Trespassers Will Be—
What? he wondered.
Swallowed up by Hell?
“That whole story’s some jimcrack bullshit,” he said, but he didn’t say it very loudly.
A wall of brown rock stubbled with brush came up between the Scumbucket and the stone church, and it was gone from view.
EIGHTEEN.
True was thinking. The answer to his original question was that Garth Brickenfield had decided to retire the name ‘Apache Leap’ for a darker image for his annual music festival. It was the kind of story you could email ten people about and a hundred—several hundred?—would know it by the end of the day. Publicity, publicity, publicity. That and a note of weirdness, a smell of Satanic brimstone, and bringing in the vendors that Brickenfield cultivated for this thing and there you had it: an old guy pretending to putter around with antique airplanes while he was building a flying zoopalooza.
Around the next bend, they could feel the music.
It was always the bass, first. It vibrated through the Scumbucket before they could hear it. Somebody’s big huge speakers were cranked up to big huge numbers. The amphitheater’s gates had opened at noon, and by the schedule True had gotten the first band to take the stage was The Bleeding Brains.
They were very, very loud.
True slowed the van down. It rolled toward the orange gate where the GB Promotions security boys were checking the entry passes with hand scanners. True lowered his window and caught the full thunder of bass guitar and bass drum echoing off rock walls and maybe a couple of hundred shaved skulls. He felt like one of the Company’s enforcers; he was way too old for this kind of mess, but to call himself a man he was going to have to go down into that mine.
“Thank you, sir,” the security guy with blue sunscreen on his face said to True when the passes were scanned, and then he looked past True into the van and shouted, “Kick some ass!” as he pumped his fist into the air.
They drove onto the dirt lot behind the huge stage, which like any lot behind a festival stage was a phantasmorama of many elements: the military encampment, the neighborhood block party, the mad scientist’s cluttered lab of crates and boxes and strange electronic gizmos, the power station in a constant state of emergency, the lineup of battered trucks, trailers and vans from that seedy auto dealership in the bad part of town, the grimy place behind the colorful banners at the state fair where all the half-eaten candied apples seem to end up.
True found a place to stop, in between a line of green Port-A-Potties and a purple van painted with grinning silver death’s heads. They had arrived.
The first thing for The Five to do was to go to the large black hospitality trailer with GB Promotions in red on the sides, get their stage passes and some bottled water, eat whatever sandwich and chips they were offering, and figure out exactly what the set was going to be. They had about two hours to settle in. The equipment would have to be unloaded, everything plugged in and checked as best as possible in this environment. They wouldn’t have to worry about unloading any merchandise, because that had already been shipped from RCA to Brickenfield’s company and would be for sale up on the ‘Midway’ where the sea of vendors was located. But it would be barely-controlled chaos, no matter how it was sliced.
True’s first task was to take his leather bag out of the van, walk to the other side of the Port-A-Potties to get some relative quiet from the Bleeding Brains, unzip the bag and reach in next to the lightweight aluminum Charter Arms .38 Special. He removed his small black Motorola Walkie-Talkie with its eighteen-mile range and secure codes. He turned on the voice activation capability.
“This is Prime setting up shop,” True said. “Scout, you guys out there?”
“Affirmative.” The reception was so clear Tony Escobar could’ve been standing right next to him.
“Knave, you copy?”
“Affirmative.”
He went through Lance, Logic, Shelter and Signet. He’d chosen the names from the Admirable Class of minesweeping ships in World War II; the guys rolled their eyes at him, but he was the big dog. “All I can tell you is to stay sharp,” he said when the teams had reported. They knew their business, they had their high-powered binoculars and wore camouflage suits that blended them in with the mountain terrain. Their rifles, all Remingtons with scopes similar to what Jeremy Pett would be carrying, were also camouflaged with earth colors. The tac teams were spread out around the clockface of the amphitheater, and were experts at staying invisible. A thought struck True. “Hey, Clark!”
“Yes, sir?”
Clark Griffin was the leader of the Shelter team. He and his men would be hunkered down in a position nearest to that place up on the higher elevation. That place.
Watch your backs, he almost said.
But that would’ve sounded stupid. It would not be wise for the operation leader to sound stupid. So he said, “This is your kind of music down here.”
“Nobody in that lineup can hold a candle to Buckethead,” Clark answered back. “I’ll make you a fan yet, sir.”
“I’m still in my Crosby, Stills and Nash period,” True said. “Okay, let’s put on our bigboy faces. One reminder: we are not shooting to kill. Check you.” He switched off the voice control. Then, satisfied at least that everyone was where they ought to be, he walked back around the line of portable toilets and went into the nearest one to relieve his aching bladder.
On their way to the hospitality trailer, Nomad’s pace slowed. Ariel noticed and also slowed down. He was staring at something off to the right. “John?” she said, and followed his gaze to an Airstream trailer where a nearly-naked man with tattoos on his arms and chest and long hair the color of butter was sitting on a lawn chair in the sun, his face offered to the rays. Nomad told her to go on ahead, that he’d be there in a few minutes. She hesitated only briefly, as Nomad began to walk toward the Airstream, and then she followed Terry and Berke across a landscape strewn with cables.
Nomad had known this man was going to be at Stone Church. His band Mjöllnir—pronounced “Mole Near”—was scheduled to take the stage at eight o’clock tonight. He had gotten here early, to kick back, mix and mingle, to check out the flashy young tail, to score some good dope, to listen to the new bands. Maybe also because his tour calendar was a lot lighter than it had been ten, twenty years ago. Mjöllnir was the name of Thor’s mythical hammer. The man in that lawn chair, catching sun with his eyes closed against the glare, was a fallen god.
Nomad came up on him silently, as the Bleeding Brains thrashed and screamed onstage about a hundred yards away, but fallen gods still retain their sixth sense, and the man opened eyes as green as new emeralds and with The Look speared Nomad in his tracks.
“You just passing through, or what?” Nomad asked, unable to keep a grin off his face.
“There’s the kid!” said the blonde-haired man, in a raspy growl that used to be known by the millions and imitated by dozens of lesser vocalists. He stood up, matched Nomad’s grin and opened his arms wide, permitting entrance. “Come on over here, you little motherfucker!”
The man was wearing only a black Speedo and brown sandals. The lump at his crotch was huge. Nomad said, “I’m not getting any nearer to that thing.”
“It’s been tamed,” the man said. “Hey, I’m not wasting it on you. Come on, gimme a hug.”
Nomad walked forward. Suddenly the long-haired man with the black Speedo and the huge crotch-log crouched over and rushed him. In the next instant a shoulder as hard as reinforced concrete hit Nomad before he could brace himself. He staggered back. He would have gone down had not the buttery-haired bastard grabbed him around the waist to keep him from falling. Then he swung Nomad around like a ragdoll and neatly set him down in the lawn chair.
Thor Bronson gave an explosive cat squall of a laugh into Nomad’s face. “That’s for fucking my mind, Johnny! I thought I was opening for you tonight! How come I’m not?”
“Ow! Jesus! You trying to break my ribs?”
“I ought to break your ass! Come ’ere, I love ya!” Thor grabbed the back of Nomad’s neck and gave him a big wet kiss right on the forehead. “You little shit, you never heard of email?” A shadow passed over his face; the half-crazed grin slid away and the emerald eyes darkened. “About Mike and George. Oh man oh man, is that a bad scene. Who the fuck is Jeremy Pett and what did you do to him?”
“You saw that on TV?”
“Every fucking station. For a while. Then the world spun on. Did you know the fucking Duct Tape Rapist nailed somebody I used to date? A secretary at Rhino Records. Man, I do not like the way things are headed. Beer. You want a beer? Sure you do.”
“No beer,” Nomad said. He saw a pack of Winstons and a lighter on a little table next to the chair. “I’ll take a cigarette and some bottled water, if you’ve got it.”
“Light it up. Let me go get another chair.” Thor went into the trailer, leaving Nomad sitting alone in the harsh sun. Nomad got his cigarette going. In another minute Thor came back out, gripping two bottles of beer by the necks and carrying a second lawn chair under his arm. He handed Nomad one of the cold brews and set up his own chair. “Hey, we can’t have a pale pussy like you getting a little sunburned!” he said. “Here you go.” He reached over into a plastic bin and brought out a large red-striped umbrella, which had a rubber vise-grip on the handle. He opened the umbrella and screwed the grip to one of Nomad’s armrests so his guest would be sitting in the shade.
“Comforts of home,” Thor said. He sat down and clinked his bottle against Nomad’s. They both drank, and then Thor stretched his wiry legs out and uptilted his sun-lined, rough-weathered face to the celestial Sol.
Nomad’s gaze slipped toward the man on his right and then away again. He took another drink. He hadn’t seen Thor in a couple of years; the last time had been at an outdoor festival in Santa Cruz in June of 2006. Thor was about forty-five years old, give or take. His website said he’d been born in 1963, but that was up for debate. His website also said his own musical influences growing up as a rebellious kid in Bayonne, New Jersey included Judas Priest, Blue Oyster Cult, Mountain, Black Sabbath and of course Led Zeppelin, with special props to Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band, and Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas. That part was true, but Thor Bronson was a fiction.
He’d been born Saul Brightman to a father named Maury, also known as ‘The Lighthouse’. Many beers, tequila shots and spliffs of whackyweed had gone into these revelations, drawn out over the course of several months when John Charles had been a hanger-on and band wannabe in Hollywood in 1997. At age 18, Nomad had taken the bus from Detroit with great expectations of quickly finding a band and making his mark; within a couple of weeks he was walking the streets looking for any place to play, living on chili dogs and crashing in a dumpy apartment on North Mariposa Avenue with four other big shots like himself. He had finally found semi-steady work as a house painter. And lucky to get that, too. But he had wound up painting an apartment for a young woman in Hermosa Beach who, when she’d found out he wanted to be a musician, had told him her sister was dating an “old guy” who used to be somebody famous in music. Like he was named after that dude in the comic book, that guy with the helmet and the horns.
That guy was playing on Saturday night at the Addiction in Downey, and maybe if a girl could get a discount from her handsome painter there might be an introduction?
That guy was on the cover of many of the old records John Charles had left behind in his teenaged bedroom, in there along with the Aerosmith, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses and Motley Crue vinyl. That guy used to take the stage with his heavy-metal band, him with his long flowing Nordic-blonde hair, his bared chest thrust out to the world, his body lean and ripped and his voice “a dark broth of pure grimy rock mixed with black-lacquered soul mixed with red mud field hollers mixed with the primal scream of urban desperation”.
That had been straight from the back copy of Mjöllnir’s first album, Hit It, which had done some monster sales, especially in Germany, Norway and Sweden.
“They’ll find the sonofabitch,” Thor said after another swig of beer. “Nobody gets away clean these days. They’ll find him on a satellite picture or something.”
“Yeah, they probably will,” Nomad agreed.
“I like it hot,” Thor said, and then he grinned at Nomad because the Bleeding Brains had come to the end of a song and up rose the ragged voices of the multitude, the throng, the infernal engine that kept the wheels of rock ’n roll on the burning rails to Hell. The voices, hundreds strong, merged together into a mass of knotted noise and came rolling across the lot behind the stage like the thunder of a medieval siege machine. “Listen…listen,” said Thor. Nomad saw him close his eyes for a few seconds as if he were hearing a choir of angels, be they however deranged. The sound rolled over them and past, and before it was gone The Bleeding Brains’ drummer started pounding his bass and two guitars shredded the air as they fought for supremacy.
“New band,” Thor told him. “Young dudes, scared shitless. I told the lead singer that if he ever felt things getting out of control, he ought to drop his jeans and moon the crowd. Nothing like an asshole on display to show ’em who’s in charge of the party.”
“I think you gave me the same advice.”
“I guess I did, huh?” Thor turned his chair slightly so he could face the kid, which was what he’d always called John Charles. Where’s the kid with my fucking water? Where’s the kid with the fucking Phillips screwdriver? Where’s the kid with the fucking electrical tape?
That’s what John Charles was, at first: the gofer, unfit as yet to move speakers and carry equipment alongside the guys who’d been with Mjöllnir for years. He had started at the bottom of the crazy birdcage, where all the shit dropped down on a young punk’s feathers.
“How’re you doing?” Thor asked him. “Really.”
Nomad could’ve asked Thor the same question. His old friend—the first person who’d given him a chance to show what he could do, after that long hard summer of grunt work—was looking much older than his years. But then, rock years were like dog years. Thor had been an iron-pumping brute in his prime; now he was more shrivelled than ripped. Coiled around the remains of his biceps were bands of jagged black tattoos. Over his heart and much of his left shoulder was the black-and-red tattoo of the Viking symbol for Mjöllnir, topped with a skull. He hadn’t had those adornments until he’d needed them to stay current. True, he could still knock Nomad sprawling, yet he seemed thin and diminished. Knots and veins stood out under the burnished, sunfreckled skin. The hair plugs were showing in the front, the dreaded “doll’s-hair” effect. His expensive set of teeth had worn down, like those of an old lion that has chewed up too many calcified bones. But he still had the gleaming green eyes, and he still had The Look, and with those two things alone you could go a long, long way.
“This has been tough,” Nomad answered. “About Mike and George. I don’t know if you heard, but George is going to be okay.”
“That’s good. You’ve got guts, kid. Keeping on keeping on. I wouldn’t be out here, if I was you. I’ll get my little tight ass home.”
“Would you?” Nomad asked, and blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke.
Thor didn’t respond. He just gave a small laugh and shrugged his shoulders and drank some more, and then he said in a lighter tone of voice, “I see you’re still riding with the lesbo, the geek and the hippie.”
“Still am.”
“You fix me up thirty—fuck, no—fifteen minutes with that butch babe and I’d leave her blinkin’ and thinkin’.”
“I don’t think that’ll ever happen.” Nomad listened to the Brains bleeding on the stage. He drank his beer and heard all sorts of clams coming out of those widowmakers. “Who’s with you tonight?”
“Guys you don’t know. More fucking kids. But they can’t—” and here he balled up his fist and gave Nomad a painful shot to the right arm “—keep up with the sugardaddy. It’s like fucking music kindergarten with those guys behind you. But they’ve got great hair, I’ll say that for ’em.”
“Here’s to great hair,” Nomad said, and lifted his bottle.
“Used to have it, now I buy it,” Thor said. He clinked Nomad’s bottle and drank his beer almost empty. “You want another?”
“No, I’ve still got plenty.”
“Okay.” Again Thor lifted his face toward the sun. After a moment of silence he said, “My dad passed away last December. If you ever emailed or called people who give a shit about you, I would’ve let you know.”
“I’m sorry.” Nomad had heard the stories about Maury ‘The Lighthouse’ Brightman, drawn from the memories of the son who’d tramped along with his father and mother to the hotels and clubs in the fading sunset of the Borscht Belt, the Jewish Alps, otherwise known as the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. The Lighthouse had played such resorts as Grossinger’s, The Concord, the Friar Tuck Inn, and Kutsher’s Hotel and Country Club. His show had been called “The Boardroom”, in which he sang and did skits in the voices of Tom Jones, Ray Charles, Vic Damone, Al Martino, Jerry Vale, Sammy Davis, Jr., Billy Eckstine and Steve Lawrence, among others, ending of course with Mr. Sinatra the Chairman.
“I bought a black suit, a black tie and a white shirt at Penney’s,” Thor said. “I stood up front and sang ‘My Way’ for my father. Blasted that mother out, made the fucking walls shake. I think he would’ve liked it.”
Nomad nodded. Maury’s gift of vocal prowess to his son was Saul’s ability to speak with no accent at all, or to pull up a dirty drawl in the South or conjure a New England drone or a Midwestern nose-horn or for that matter a British street cockney or a German staccato. His voice was a citizen of the world. All you had to do to hear it was listen to his stage patter, connecting with his audiences like a hometown boy wherever he was, on the Mjöllnir Circles The Globe double album released in 1986.
John Charles recalled something this man had said to him once, after sound check in an empty Long Beach club ten years ago: You want to be like me, kid? Four ex-wives, a taste for the white lady, about sixteen ulcers in my fucking gut and debt up to my ass? You want to be like a fucking nomad wandering the desert? Okay, then, if it means so much to you…and you can take it, which is real doubtful…then you pick up that fucking guitar, you stand up there and sing me something. And you better make it good, because I am not about to let you enter my world if you’re just a fucking slacker.
“Funny,” Thor said after a while, as he looked at the world through his bottle’s amber glass. “A dream I’m having lately.”
Nomad smoked his cigarette down and tapped ashes on the red dirt.
“I can see a woman dancing in a club. All alone. And everything’s dark in there, I can’t make out her face…the color of her hair…nothing. Just occasionally a light passes behind her, so she’s like…outlined. You know.”
“Silhouetted,” Nomad offered.
“Yeah. That. So she’s dancing…slow…like she’s waiting for somebody. The music…it’s not my music. Maybe she keeps looking toward the door…expecting somebody to come in, and when they don’t she just keeps dancing, but there’s something about the way her shoulders slump, or the way she brushes her hair back from her face with one hand…that says she’s getting tired of waiting.” Thor angled his face toward the stage, where a particularly bloody B-minor chord had just been launched from the quivering strings. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I lost my time.”
“Lost your time? Get real, man!” Nomad tried to bring up a caustic laugh, but nothing would emerge.
“I’m not talking about the so-called fucking golden days. Can’t remember half of ’em, anyway. I mean that I lost my time to find my soulmate.”
Nomad didn’t know what to say, so he stared silently across the lot at the vans and trailers that continued to pull in. A Fox News truck was among them.
“I’m incomplete, man,” said Thor. “That’s my fucking problem, right there.”
“Incomplete? What’ve you been smoking today?”
“Not anything nearly strong enough.” Thor’s eyes had again taken on a deep green shine. “Listen, Johnny. I’m serious. I think this woman in my dream is my soulmate, but I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where to go to find her. And she’s waiting for me, but she doesn’t know she’s waiting, and pretty soon…real soon now…she’s going to give up waiting because it’s been years and years…and I never came to her. Maybe I met her somewhere, but she didn’t have any flash about her, and back then it was all about the flash, and I didn’t see her for what she was so I just brushed her off. Or maybe I never met her. Maybe it’s not my music she’s dancing to in the dream, because she doesn’t even know me. Never even fucking heard of me. But my dream is telling me she’s out there, but the time I spent…the time I lost…it may be too late for me to find her before she just…goes away.”
“Soulmate,” Nomad said, and he took the last draw from his cigarette before it burned his fingers. “I never understood if you’re supposed to…like…instantly know your soulmate, or if this person—saying there is a person who fits you like that—grows on you over time, or what. I don’t even know if I believe in that or not.”
“Oh, I do,” Thor said, his face getting animated. “Absolutely. It’s your Bashert, man. The Zohar talks about it. You know, the Kabbalah. It’s like…when God makes a soul, He creates the male and female together as one, but as it enters this world it like…gets fucking ripped apart. A whole soul is the combination of male and female, those two that got torn away from each other. God Himself is supposed to bring the two halves together again. See?”
“I don’t mean any disrespect for what you believe,” Nomad said, “but I’m not sure that idea’s been working out so well in the last few thousand years.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is how it’s supposed to be. I mean…you’re supposed to find your missing half, and when you find it…if you find it…you’re not incomplete anymore.”
“So how come God doesn’t put a big neon sign over your soulmate’s head? How come He doesn’t tell you in that dream exactly where she is? Huh?” Nomad didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s kind of cruel, not to let you know something so important. Right?”
Thor heard an element of the music that he liked, and he listened to that for a moment with his head tilted to one side. The sun was radiant in his hair. Then he said, “God is not a nice guy. He’s a hard teacher, Johnny. He’s tough, nothing soft about Him. Oh yeah, He can show mercy. He’s all about mercy. But He’s all about teaching, too. He’s the hardest fucking teacher you could ever have. Sometimes you don’t want to hear it, so you turn your back. Sometimes the lessons are pushed right in your face, you can’t turn away. What we call cruel, maybe He calls…necessary, in some way we can’t wrap our minds around because we only know the right here, right now. How come He won’t put a sign over her head in that dream and say, ‘There she is, Saul, there’s your missing half, and go to this exact address and find her and then marry her like you did those four other women and go crazy in the middle of the night and fuck your soulmate up with drugs and bad shit because that’s who you are, Saul, and you would even screw up this thing if I was to let it happen.’”
Thor seemed to catch himself, to hear what he was saying as if some voice other than his had spoken it.
He blinked and looked at his own right hand, and curled the fingers up before his face as if trying to envision it holding something that was not there.
“So,” he said. “‘Here is your lesson, Saul. And it is that I will let you know that there was a person meant for you, you alone out of every other person in this world, but you’re so fucked up with yourself that you would destroy even your soulmate. She’s better off walking alone than with you, and I’m not going to help you find her, Saul. I’m going to let you know she’s there somewhere, and she’s getting tired of waiting, and maybe…maybe…if you do ever find her by that time maybe…maybe…you will have learned how to be a man, you brainless wasteful piece of flesh’.” Thor gave Nomad a startling, ferocious and terrifying grin. “Class dismissed.”
Nomad may have made a noise. A quiet murmur, a hiss of breath, whatever. At last, when Thor looked away from him, Nomad dropped his cigarette butt into the beer bottle.
“I guess I’d better go check in,” he said, and he got out from beneath the umbrella and stood up. “Jesus, it is hot out here.”
“The deal is,” Thor told him in a quieter voice, “I should’ve found somebody who wanted to help me drive the car.”
Nomad had no idea what that meant, so he waited patiently for the rest of it. God might not be a nice guy and He might not be so patient, but God hadn’t been given his first chance on stage by Thor Bronson, nor had Thor Bronson given God the names of some dudes he knew in Tucson who were looking for a solid lead vocalist/guitar player.
“Every woman I ever found,” Thor said, “wanted to ride in the car. Wanted to kick back and let the sugar daddy do it all. And driving that car…it gets mighty fucking hard. Mighty fucking lonely. Yeah, they wanted the money, the clothes, the parties, the drugs, the glamor.” That last word had come out like a drool of disgust. “But not one of ’em wanted to help me drive the car. Hey, maybe that’s why I had so many fucking wrecks.” When he looked up at Nomad he was now not so much a lion as a puppy begging for affection.
Nomad smiled. “Maybe.” He was thinking of one wreck in particular, the one with the blue Porsche Targa on the Pacific Coast Highway that had happened years before John Charles had met him, the one that broke both of Saul Brightman’s legs, shattered his jaw and injured his spine, ending his onstage gymnastics and his amazing and fabled leaps from the thundering speakers through walls of pyrotechnic flame. The doctors thought he’d be lucky if he ever again managed to hobble on crutches, but that long-haired Jew from Bayonne, New Jersey…he was one tough shtarker.
“The one who wants to help you drive the car,” Thor said. “Maybe she’s the soulmate, maybe not…but she’s definitely the keeper.” He reached out to rub his scarred kneecaps, which felt so much better in the heat of the sun. “Having a party after our gig. Fun to be had by all. Bring your condoms and your fucking youth.”
“We’re pulling out after we play,” Nomad replied. “Hitting the Casbah in San Diego tomorrow night.”
“Okay, yeah, I saw that on your website. Hey, how about checking out my site? And before you pull out, let’s exchange email addresses. Of course, I’m not up in your range anymore, fuckers like you getting eight hundred smacks for ninety minutes on an afternoon gig. Yeah, everybody knows about that, man, so don’t try to look dumb, and don’t shrug like a gutless motherfucker either. You’re either worth it or you’re not, and you’ve got to believe you’re worth it to be worth it. Anyway, you guys have been chosen by somebody up in the penthouse, some Jew momzer smoking a big Cuban and looking for his next meal ticket. So go and enjoy it and work like a sonofabitch and don’t fuck it up, and what is there left to say?”
“I guess that says it all.” But Nomad knew it didn’t. He knew he should say this is our last ride or we’re ending it after Austin or I’m going to hunker down for a while and figure out what to do next, but then Thor would’ve gotten up on his wiry legs and scarred knees and blasted him with Norse fire and the statement Don’t give me that, Johnny, because you know just like I do that the show must go on.
To which Nomad would’ve answered with a question: But does it have to go on and on and on and on?
Thor stood up. He and Nomad exchanged high-fives, bumped fists and shoulders and then, running out of affectations, they hugged each other.
“Think about me out there, kid,” Thor said.
How could it be otherwise? How could Nomad go onstage and not think about Thor Bronson and the long shadows of the road warriors who had gone before?
“Catch you later,” Nomad told him, and he walked toward the hospitality trailer. Before he got there, he looked back over his shoulder and saw Saul Brightman, the dutiful son of a great and loving father, sitting in his lawn chair again with his legs outstretched, like any middle-aged fan at an outdoor concert. Nomad saw him give a fist pump, at some part of the music that he thought particularly deserving.
Then Nomad turned his face away, and he went on.
NINETEEN.
“You guys ready for your intro?” asked the skull-faced clown in the red Stone Church 9 T-shirt, the sparkly green shorts, cowboy boots and black tophat. The curls of his orange fright-wig boiled out from under the hat. He wore a red nose with a blinking light powered by the battery pack at his waist.
“Ready,” Nomad said, speaking for them all.
The clown, whose handle at this gig was Eezy Duzit, headed out onto the stage through a corridor lined with black curtains. A chorus of whistles and a roar of anticipation went up from the audience, which Nomad hadn’t seen yet. The clown had said he estimated about eight or nine hundred people were out there, and more would be coming in from the ‘Midway’ as their show went on. There were no seats; the audience brought their own or stood up, and the front half of the place was a mosh pit where people danced or thrashed or fought as they pleased. However many there were, they sounded hungry.
As Eezy Duzit went to one of the mike stands, a ragged chant started up and gained both strength and volume: The Five…The Five…The Five…The Five…
“Are they saying ‘You Die’?” Berke asked.
In the space between Duzit picking up his mike and the chant quieting down, somebody out in the midst of the crowd shouted, very clearly, “The Five fuckin’ sucks!” which brought a storm of laughter and more wicked shouts and catcalls concerning The Five’s abilities to suck donkeymeat, eat shit and take cocks up their collective ass.
Nomad turned around and looked into the faces of his friends. On Terry’s scalp and chipmunk cheeks shone an oily sheen of sweat, his eyes huge and frightened behind his Lennon specs. Ariel’s mouth was a grim line, her face pale but her eyes the dark gray of a stormy sea. Though Berke wore a faintly bemused expression, her eyes were dead black and her hands were on her hips in an attitude of somebody ready to kick dogturds off the sidewalk.
Nomad was the emperor. He had to say something in this moment of heat and pressure. He had time for only three words, spoken in a whiskied rasp that even Thor Bronson would have admired: “Tear them up.”
“You’ve heard about ’em!” Eezy Duzit’s amplified voice came out of the huge speaker stacks capable of sixty thousand watts of mind-blowing power. The voice hit rock and came echoing back. “You’ve seen ’em on TV! Welcome to the Stone Church stage, from Austin, Texas, the band that will not die… The Five!”
As a raucous and not altogether sober cheer went up, Berke pulled in a deep breath, squared her shoulders and walked out through the corridor. Nomad stared into Ariel’s face, and she into his. They were following a short set by the Cannibal Cult, whose Asian female lead singer Kitty Kones had, at a breakthroat tempo, screamed songs into the Electrovoice that seemed to be the Korean language mixed with a shrill outpouring of English profanity, as far as Nomad could tell. Whatever she was saying, the crowd had responded with basso woofs and the kind of noise that could bend metal. Her response to their response was to throw her microphone on the stage in the middle of Cannibal Cult’s fifth song and storm off, teeth bared in her white-powdered face.
The stage crew had come on to clear away Cannibal Cult’s mess and set up for The Five. While the band got themselves ready in whatever way they needed to, the crew swarmed the stage to move the Cult’s drumkit off and bring in The Five’s, set up the keyboards, plug everything in, check the sound levels and the stage monitors, and generally get the transition from band to band done as smoothly and quickly as possible.
As Nomad had been waiting for the crew to finish, he’d thought of an incident that had happened in the hospitality trailer just after he’d left Thor. He’d gone into the trailer’s air-conditioned chill and walked between the chow tables set up with pre-packaged sandwiches, chips, fruit, candy bars, soft drinks and the like. His available choices of sandwich had been chicken covered with melted American cheese, turkey with melted provolone cheese, ham and melted Swiss, and some kind of pimento cheese nightmare. Pizzas were on display, all layered with his throat-closing favorite. But when he’d gone to the check-in table to get his stage pass, the very nice older lady on duty had looked at the green mark next to his name and said, “I see you get a special lunch. Are you allergic to dairy?”
“I am, yeah.”
“I’ve got a couple of sandwiches without cheese set aside for you.”
“Oh…okay. Well, that’s great. Um…how did you know?”
“Your manager told us,” she’d said.
Nomad remembered saying to Truitt Allen at the hospital: I’m allergic to cheese.
Where was he, anyway? There’d been no sign of him since he’d unlocked the trailer and they’d taken the gear out, over an hour ago. He hadn’t even walked them to the stage.
Some manager he was.
Over the surly noise of the crowd, Berke started her drum intro to ‘Bedlam A-Go-Go’. It was a snap of snare, a flurry of toms and a bright hiss of cymbals. Then on the bass she pounded a beat that was nearly double what they’d done on the original song, from their first CD.
It was time to get it done. Nomad nodded at Ariel, who walked out along the corridor; he clapped Terry on the shoulder and Terry walked out, and then Nomad got in step right behind him.
The light was a harsh white glare. A dry wind blew into their faces. Above them, a huge canopy of black cloth flapped and twisted. The crowd hollered again, and surged forward against the waist-high chainlink fence that stood about twenty feet from the stage. Uniformed GB Promotions security guards were waving them back, while between the chainlink and the stage, photographers were snapping pictures and news teams were aiming their video cameras.
The band that will not die, Nomad thought as he crossed the stage to his position and picked up his Strat from its stand.
He kinda liked that.
Terry slid behind his Hammond, with the Roland on his left and a rack of effects boxes on his right. He turned up the Fuzz and Distortion settings to their max. On the other side of the stage, Ariel stood in front of her mike and picked up her Tempest. She adjusted for tone. Without looking at the audience she hit the song’s first howling chords—B-flat, D-minor, G—which brought Nomad in to repeat them and add an F chord to the structure. Terry came in with an ear-piercing little stab of notes, and then Nomad got his mouth up to the microphone and half-sang, half-shouted the words as Berke drove the drums into a frenetic, warped disco beat.
“In my dream I had a third eye.
My dog and I we liked to fly
High above the wasted earth,
High above the dirty surf.
We saw a city burning red.
We heard some voices
And what they said,
Come join us it’s party time,
Come join us the party’s fine.
Come on down we never close,
Come on down enjoy the show.
We live it, we love it
But we never can rise above it.
Bedlam A-Go-Go.
We live here, we love it.
The kings and queens of nowhere scenes,
In Bedlam, Bedlam A-Go-Go.”
Nomad looked out across the audience as Terry launched into a short instrumental strut—a demonic boogaloo—between the choruses. He saw the oval shape of the natural amphitheater, which was about the size of two football fields. A control tower stood at its center, topped with a glassed-in booth and bristling with multicolored parcans, follow spots, strobes and other special effects lights. Back and to the left were the turnstiles of the entrance area, and beyond it the ‘Midway’, where vendors from all over the southwest and California had come to display their artistry.
Business was booming among this demographic. He saw blue, red and purple flames tattooed on bald heads. He saw faces transformed into Escher artwork. He saw the calligraphy of a hundred hues written across shoulders and chests and breasts and stomachs, each man and woman their own Book of Life. Here, dancing and capering, was a bearded figure whose original color of birthflesh had disappeared beneath the new skin of blue ink and black proclamations; there whirling ’round and ’round was a topless female with red pigtails and an intricate painting of a multicolored dragon clinging to her back, its arms extending down across her shoulders and the black nails of its claws circling her nipples. Technicolor serpents coiled around throats, arms, thighs and calves. Flowers grew from navels and foreheads were crowned by shooting stars and pentagrams. Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Alice Cooper and Hitler pushed their faces forth from sweat-glistening meat. And there in the crowd…and there…and over there…stood in this blur of constant motion the few motionless figures who stood staring at the performers on the stage with eyes in a visage no longer recognizable as being earthly; they were creations from another realm, a strange and frightening beauty of human matter carved upon and recolored by needles both insane and awesome. There was the face made of layered scales like the gray hide of a desert lizard; there was the face created from a dozen interlocking other faces like a grotesque human jigsaw puzzle; and there was the face that was none at all, but rather a pair of eyes, nostrils and a mouth suspended against a bruise-colored, crackled parchment of indecipherable markings. It seemed to Nomad to be a document of rage.
He almost missed his cue. The disco beat became nearly a slippery-slidey rap, echoed back to him as if the mountain itself had a voice:
“Bedlam A-Go-Go!
Two wrongs, they make a right.
Peacekeepers, they want to fight.”
The song had been their first video. The Five had danced down a Soul Train of demons and angels. A UT computer graphics major had digitized James Brown dancing down the line, followed by, among other public figures, George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Saddam Hussein, Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey, a black-and-white leering Satan from an old movie called ‘Dante’s Inferno’, Godzilla and John Barrymore’s hunchbacked Mr. Hyde from the silent film. The video had been up for two days on YouTube before the plug was pulled, in a big way.
“Vampires, they sleep at night.
My straitjacket, it’s way too tight!
Bedlam A-Go-Go!
Mad mister murder he came to play,
Brought a butcher knife and he carved away.
The homeless sit on barren fields
While the bankers sit on their golden steals.
President says to embrace that fear,
But he’s on the first plane out of here.
Bedlam A-Go-Go-Go!”
At the end of the song, sweaty and energized, Nomad stood at the edge of the stage as he took in the response, so far so good, and he shouted into his mike a statement for that other Gogo, the Felix, over in Dallas or Fort Worth or Temple or Waco or wherever he was today, selling his cars and grinning his grins: “Fuck your role!”
Which got, really, a stronger response than the song had.
By the end of the third song, the Terry-penned ‘Don’t Bleed On My Paisley Shirt’, Ariel was dropping chords and lagging behind the beat. Her concentration was out of the groove and it wasn’t just because of the speed and intensity. Those she could handle; it was the feeling here that was eating at her. It was the atmosphere of Stone Church itself, a hard steely dark sense of…what was it? Hatred? Contempt? She was out of her element here, she felt vulnerable and threatened. She felt, quite simply, like an easy target. She’d realized, as well, that the stage’s backdrop and wings were painted to look like mortar lines and red stones.
Everybody else was going full-throttle. Occasionally she would get a questioning glance from John or Terry, a lift of the eyebrows to urge her to tighten up, but her nerves were betraying her talent. As the show went on and the hot wind blew around the folds of the black canopy above their heads and more and more bodies came through those turnstiles and ran to join the slam-dancing, bone-smashing tribe, Ariel felt herself falling away from her friends.
It had bothered her so much, since that visit to George in the ICU. Day or night, bright or dark, she couldn’t shake it.
It was up there, George had said. Folded up. Sharp edges. The wings of a crow.
< >
Waiting for him to die, he’d told them.
And then…the appearance of that girl.
I believe in you, George.
I thought she was the angel of death, he’d said.
But now I think she was the angel of life.
Ariel dropped another chord and stumbled over a trill in the first chorus of ‘Your Body Not Your Soul’, which really earned her a puzzled look from John Charles. She had a solo coming up at the bridge of this song, she had to focus, but…why had George seen that girl from the well in his hospital room? Of all people he might have dreamed of seeing? Of all the people he had ever met?
Why her?
And that thing about driving back and finding out if the place would still be there…why wouldn’t it be there? It was there, they saw it, why wouldn’t it be there?
Don’t you want my part? George had asked.
The song.
She thought about Mike, writing the first word: Welcome.
Again, drawn from that girl at the well.
And George’s part: I wish you safe travel…courage when you need it.
The song.
Her solo was upon her.
She was a half-step late, but she swung her Tempest up and stepped toward the edge of the stage, and she was shredding metal and flailing it out in thick dripping incandescent blue-white coils above the heads of the Stone Church crowd when some of the people on the left side started sliding over the chainlink fence.
She faltered in her playing, mangled a hot handful of notes and stepped back, but then she picked it up again because she was a professional. Nomad, Terry and Berke had also seen the tattooed bodies coming over the fence. Garth Brickenfield’s security men were trying to push them back but now on the right hand side they started coming across, and over there the security men were shoving back and shouting but Ariel could only hear the voice of her guitar through her stage monitor. There was a human crush against the fence, a straining of flesh against chainlink, and suddenly the fence collapsed. It just went down and disappeared under the boiling wall. The bodies rushed forward, swarming around the security guards who were caught up in small battles of their own. The camera crews struggled to get out of the way, but there was no way to get out of the way; they were caught in a floodtide and shoved hard against the stage, and when there was no more empty space before the stage the real party, the hard-core crash of tattooed, sunburned and red-eyed music fiends, could begin.
< >
“Prime, this is Shelter.”
“Go ahead, Clark.”
“We’ve got a vehicle coming up the road behind us. Black Range Rover. We’ll get a visual on the tag in just a few seconds. Yeah…okay, it’s an Arizona tag. Driver’s stopping at the gate. Doors opening. Looks like…three males and a female. Two males, two females. Not quite sure there.”
Join the club, True thought. He’d been walking around the lot, checking things out with his Walkie-Talkie ready, strolling in between the trucks, vans and trailers, and so far he’d seen plenty of unidentifiables. True stopped alongside a small U-Haul truck and faced in a southeasterly direction, where the Shelter team was located. The gate Clark mentioned was the one festooned with chains and barbed wire. “What’re they doing?”
“Um…well…it looks like they’re wanting to climb the gate. One’s trying it. No go, he’s backing off.”
“Kids who ought to know better,” said True, though he could remember climbing over plenty of barbed wire and locked gates when he was one of those who ought to know better. He started walking again, his black wingtips stirring up puffs of red dust. “They moving on?”
“Still in place, sir. Looks like…checking with the glasses…looks like they’re smoking some pot now.”
“Prime, this is Signet,” another voice came in. “Fly on the wall. Do you copy?”
True felt his face tighten. All joviality at pot-smoking unidentifiables vanished in the fraction of an instant. “Copy that,” True said. “Got a distance?” He was already turning toward the northwest. The music was thundering from that direction. The fly was coming up from the opposite side of the mountain, and would seek a clear shot at the stage.
“Three hundred and twenty-seven yards.”
That distance, calculated by a range-finder, would put the fly more than five hundred yards off the stage. Still climbing up, unable to get a shot yet until he reached Signet team’s height. True said, “Give me some details.”
“Definitely carrying a rifle,” said the Signet leader.
True wasted only the time to swallow. “Go get him. You know what I want. Logic, you’re on standby. Copy?”
“Copy that,” said the Logic leader.
True kept walking. After a few minutes he realized he was going in circles. He checked his wristwatch. He checked the sun. He walked past a nearly-naked guy with long brown hair and a topless, scrawny girl sprawled together in the water of a small blue inflatable baby pool. He brought the Walkie-Talkie to his mouth.
“Signet, you copy?”
No answer. They might be a little busy right now.
“Signet, this is Prime. Copy, please.”
He heard a sound from the amphitheater. The sound of wailing guitars, the driving drums, the fiery keyboard and the raw voice of John Charles, yes, but something else too. It was a sound like the wings of a thousand birds. When True looked up he saw only a sky of white fire.
John Charles abruptly stopped singing. There was an explosive boom and feedback shrieked. Something made a horrendous crash and twang.
True heard the next two noises and knew exactly what they were.
Crack. Crack.
Gunshots.
He ran for the stage.
< >
Ariel had seen the goose-steppers. There were six of them, bald-headed and pale, wearing white T-shirts, black jeans and shiny black boots. They were going back and forth through the crowd at full-speed, doing their Nazi salutes as they jammed into other people and fought through the crowd like battering-rams. No one was listening anymore; no one in her range of sight was actually paying them any attention, but they were hearing the music like escaping prisoners hear the sirens at their backs, and all they wanted to do was smash through every obstacle in front of them.
She was playing rhythm guitar to ‘Desperate Ain’t Pretty’ and trying to keep up with Berke’s frenetic beat. Terry sounded like he was playing the Hammond with his fists, and even John had started to miss notes. He had his mouth right up on the microphone, he was bellowing it out like a hundred-year old field hand scarred by a Georgia bullwhip.
“Some fine woman you made yourself out to be,
If you had your evil way they could hang me from a tree.
You take my money and then you spit in my face,
Somebody ought to take you from this human race.
Won’t be me, not today, not me,
’Cause I want you to live to see me go free,
Want you to live to see your pretty face fall,
Want you to cry before that mirror in the hall.
’Cause desperate ain’t pretty, baby, you’re gonna know that’s true,
Desperate ain’t pretty, baby, ugly’s gonna show on you.”
Nomad stepped back from the microphone while Terry went into his organ solo. The hard, heavy vibrato was full of glittering golden pain. Nomad looked out at the audience, at the figures who slammed into each other and, snarling, twisted away again. He saw at the very edge of the stage a few people who had ceased their warfare for the moment and were staring at him with glazed eyes. When they saw him looking, they reached out to him their tattooed hands and arms, and the inked figures and shapes moved on their necks and shoulders and shifted on their naked chests as if a multitude of souls were confined in each body and trying to climb out by using him as their ladder. He saw a big burly dude with close-cropped black hair staggering around, clipping people left and right with dangerous elbows. His red T-shirt read Nug Nug Nug. Another formidable guy with a goatee and Celtic tattoos blackening his throat ran head-on into one of the Nazi freaks and knocked the goose-stepper on his ass. Nomad thought of something his mother used to say: It’s all fun until somebody starts to cry. In this case, starts swinging fists.
As Terry ended his solo and Ariel picked up her rhythm part again, Nomad stepped up to his mike. He caught sight of a slim kid with neatly-trimmed blonde hair pushing through the crowd to the front of the stage, moving slowly but avoiding elbows, knees and skulls with the grace of a dancer. The guy was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting gray T-shirt with a color travel picture screened on the front and the green legend Vietnam Golf Vacations.com. He had his eyes fixed on Nomad, who got his mouth right on the mike once more.
“This part you’ve been playin’, you know it has to end,
Nothing worse in the world than the murder of a friend.
Could’ve been so much to you, been the steady one,
But what I have to say to you won’t be spoken from a—”
Gun.
The sun sparked off metal.
The wind rustled through the black canopy overhead. Nomad stopped singing.
He saw it in the blonde kid’s hand. It was a small pistol. It had come up from underneath the T-shirt. The barrel’s eye looked at him.
Then the kid blinked, his eyelids maybe freighted with drugs, and he turned the pistol toward Ariel.
Nomad had no time to think; he just jumped.
He knocked the mike stand over and carried with him the guitar on its strap around his shoulder. There was a hollow reverberating boom as the mike slammed down, followed by a squeal of feedback. An effects box or something crashed to the stage and made a noise through the speakers like a Strat in its death agony.
His guitar hit the kid first, and then Nomad. From the pistol in the outstretched hand came two shots, but the shooter was already going down to the dirt. Nomad was on top of him and fighting for control of the dude’s arm, which snaked this way and that and then suddenly the kid’s head came up and slammed against Nomad’s right eye. Sizzling lights and pain zigzagged through his head; he thought his skull had been fractured, but he had to get that fucking gun. He just started beating the kid, started whamming at him with both fists, every damned thing he had.
Somebody grabbed him under the arms and pulled him up and somebody fell on the shooter like a blanket. The blanket was wearing a red T-shirt, and as he pinned the kid’s gunhand to the ground with one knee, he looked up at Nomad and the guy holding him and said tersely, “Get him on the stage! Now!” His T-shirt read Nug Nug Nug. Another figure knelt down and started twisting the kid’s white fingers off the pistol’s grip. He had a spiderweb tattooed—painted?—on one side of his face and hexagonal steel gauges—definitely real—in his ears.
“Back! Everybody get back!” shouted the dude who was helping Nomad climb up over the edge of the stage. Ariel was there, her face drained of blood; she reached down and grasped his hand, and Terry leaned forward to grab hold of his shirt.
Nomad scrambled up onto the stage and then fell to his knees. The socket of his right eye was throbbing. Maybe it was already swelling shut. God, that was going to get black! Fucking took a shot! He felt like he was going to puke, the smell of gunpowder was still in his nose. He saw that the guy who’d helped him had a headful of spiky brown hair, a brown beard and on his bare chest a—fake?—tattoo of a horned red devil sitting astride a Harley. The bearded devilish Harley fan was holding out an open wallet and showing a badge to the crowd.
Berke knelt down beside Nomad and said something. It was all gibberish, he couldn’t make it out. “I think I’m going to puke,” he told her, or thought he did because he could hardly hear himself either. He began to try to fight free from his guitar, but it wouldn’t let him go.
Ariel was trembling. She backed away from the crowd. She could feel what was coming just about to break; she saw it in their faces, in their clenched fists, in their rage at having been born between the wasted earth and dirty surf. As the young man who’d tried to shoot her was being pulled to his feet, his gun now in the possession of Agent Nug, one of the Nazi Six stormed in and kicked the kid in the ribs with a black boot.
Maybe their anger was spilling over because he’d screwed up the show. Maybe they just wanted to beat somebody to death. Whichever it was, they started coming in at him and in another moment the FBI agents were fighting for the life of their prisoner.
Nomad sat on the stage. Ariel turned away, and thinking she too was going to be sick she headed through the corridor lined with black curtains. She ran into Truitt Allen, who looked questioningly at her and then ran past her to the stage. His .38 Special was in one hand, his Walkie-Talkie in the other.
Berke sat down behind her drumkit, where she felt the most comfortable in the world. She stared into the distance, at nothing. Terry stood watching fights break out across the amphitheater. He saw a young man in a blue shirt being knocked back and forth between two tattooed and grinning bruisers; the young man fell to his knees, blood streaming from his nose. Another dude, thin and bearded, was being stomped on by a guy in a Wildcats T-shirt.
Terry went to Ariel’s mike. Through it he shouted, “Stop it! Please, stop it!” but no one listened, and no one stopped.
True came to the edge of the stage, and looking out upon the madness he raised his gun into the air and began to fire bullet after bullet toward the silent red mountain.
TWENTY.
When Jeremy Pett finishes the job of shaving his hair off with the new electric clippers he’s just bought, he emerges from the men’s room at the Triple-T Truck Stop just off I-10 about nine miles southeast of Tucson.
He has taken a shower and used the facilities, and now—clean and refreshed and shaven to the pink—he goes out to the grocery section to buy some food. He needs items that don’t have to be cooked or even heated up, because there’s no electricity in his hidey-hole. The truck stop is only a few miles from where he’s been living since seeing his face, the description of his pickup and his tag number on television. He saw it yesterday when he was lying on the bed in Room 15 at the Rest-A-While Motel on South Nogales Highway, and after he saw it he stood up, quickly got his gear together, paid the old Hispanic man who’d asked him when he’d checked in on Saturday if he wanted a nice young college girl for company that night, and then he had hit the road. But not too fast, because he wanted to stay invisible.
He roams the aisles, picking up a few cans of pork ’n’ beans, a can of chili, three bottles of water, a pack of doughnuts and a bag of potato chips. He needs the sugar and salt, because it’s very hot where he’s living. He sees a rack of ball caps, and chooses a tan-colored one that has the red Triple-T logo. A candy bar or two would be good. He has parked around back, in among the protection of the semis at rest. His eye is always on the front entrance. In the waistband of his jeans beneath his light blue cotton shirt is his automatic pistol, loaded with a clip of eight.
At the Rest-A-While, which came equipped with many nice young college girls who knocked on his door after dark and smiled at him with meth-rotted teeth, he kept up on the news. The cable reception was fuzzy, hard to look at, but it had shown him what he’d needed to see.
One dead in Sweetwater, one in the ICU in Tucson. Sniper Stalks Rock Band. Tucson police and the FBI need community help in finding this man, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and may still be in the area. GB Promotions Presents Stone Church Nine at Gila Bend Thursday July 31st through Sunday August 3rd. The Five Appearing Thursday July 31st at 3:00, one show only. Tickets on sale at the site or available online through Ticketmaster. GB Promotions assures the fans that security will be tight and every precaution taken.
Don’t go there, Gunny had told him in Room 15, as Jeremy had been packing his stuff. Gunny had been standing in the bathroom door, his boots in the puddles of the toilet overflow from last night, the soggy towels lying like dead white dogs. I want you to rest today and tomorrow, Gunny had said.
“I’ve got to get out. They’re on me.” Jeremy was thinking one word and one destination: Mexico…Mexico…Mexico.
Gunny had told him they were not on him until they had him. Now, it was true they knew his name and face and the make and color of his pickup truck and his tag number, but…they’re not here, are they?
“Matter of time,” Jeremy had said.
Then you know what you need to do, Gunny had answered as he moved across the room. Dig yourself in.
“Mexico, Mexico, Mexico,” Jeremy had said. He’d zipped up his rifle case.
You’re not ready. Jeremy? Dig. Yourself. In.
And the way Gunny had said that, with all the iron-hand-in-the-velvet-glove persuasion that made a man admire another man, caused Jeremy to look toward the corner where Gunny was standing, just at the edge of the blazing light that slipped around the crooked curtains.
“Dig yourself in,” Jeremy had repeated, as if he’d come up with the idea. “How? Where?”
You’re supposed to be the Marine, Gunny had reminded him, with a dark stare.
Translation: guy with a pussy last name ain’t gone be no pussy, not in this man’s Corps.
Jeremy stands at the Triple-T Truck Stop’s cash register, waiting as the lady bags his groceries. She is also talking on a cellphone, so she’s working one-handed. And slowwwww. Up on a shelf behind the counter is a small TV for her entertainment, and it is from a KGUN-9 News Minute that he sees a young female reporter holding a microphone. At the bottom of the scene is the legend Violent Afternoon At Stone Church. That sounds like one of the many paperback Westerns Jeremy had read at Camp Fallujah.
“It happened about an hour ago, Guy,” the reporter is saying to, presumably, the anchorman. Her mane of brown hair whips in the wind and she makes a move to control it but no luck. Behind her, people with tattoos are milling around, mugging at the camera over her shoulders, showing the devil horns and sticking their tongues out. “During a performance by The Five band, a man drew a handgun and fired two shots. There were some minor injuries in a scuffle, but no one was seriously hurt and the shooter was taken into custody. We have some pretty startling video to show you.”
There is just a brief clip of bodies flailing around, the camera getting knocked back and forth, a glint of what may be a gun in someone’s hand, and then a figure with shoulder-length black hair jumps off the stage into the crowd.
Jeremy knows who that is.
“Guy, we’ll have more of this video, more details on this story and interviews with the actual Five band members at six o’clock. For now, a GB Promotions spokesman says Stone Church will continue as planned through Sunday night.”
“Amazing video, just amazing,” says Guy.
“Cap?” asks the woman behind the counter.
Jeremy focuses on her and realizes what she’s asking. “I’ll wear it,” he answers, and then he breaks eye contact because that’s one way to stay invisible. But she’s back on her cellphone as soon as he has the bag in hand, and he walks out into the hot yellow sunlight of late afternoon and goes around to his truck. He drives away, slowly and unhurriedly, but he keeps watching all his mirrors for a flashing light.
Jeremy drives to the southeast, toward what he found yesterday afternoon when he left the Rest-A-While in search of a place to dig in. He found it when he followed a series of signs that said Houses For Sale and repeated underneath it was Casas para la venta. It is not quite four miles from the truck stop. It is on a main road past a residential area of middle-class homes with cactus gardens and red tile roofs, three different types to choose from. Many of the houses here are For Sale. Some appear to have been For Sale for a long time. It is past a stripmall with a drugstore and a Mexican takeout joint and a consignment shop and a nail parlor, but the grocery store and the video rental store are For Rent though their signs still hang in place over empty windows. It is the next turnoff on the right, within sight of the dying mall. It is built upon God’s own country, hard desert earth under a stark blue sky with cactus-stubbled foothills and gray mountains to the east. At the turnoff, there is a stand of mesquite trees and among them a rock wall with the words LaPaz Estates hammered into it with tarnished brass letters.
And beyond the turnoff and the trees and the wall are dusty streets with no names that lead to the empty driveways and bare garages of nine small houses built in the adobe style, three different types to choose from, all with red tile roofs. Beyond the nine houses, there are two more half-built and one hardly started. The streets wander a distance past wooden stakes that define the borders of their estates. Here and there are sacks of concrete and forgotten wheelbarrows and black garbage bags melting in the sun. Past the last estate where any work has been attempted, marked by piles of stones and brown cactus, the streets surrender to the desert, and that is the end of someone’s dead dream.
Dead it is. Jeremy steers toward his very own adobe-style piece of heaven, which stands back off the main road far enough to be careful. The For Sale signs are everywhere, though some have collapsed due to wind and fatigue. Open House, some of them proclaim. New Low Price, some of them plead. He has seen a coyote here this morning, trotting down the middle of his street.
No one is home in any of these houses. Jeremy figures it was a construction deal gone bad, or somebody ran out of money, or the bank stopped throwing away good cash until some of the existing LaPaz estates started selling. Whatever. Somebody’s loss, his place to dig in.
He has to go there now, and think. Figure things out. He is so close to Mexico he can smell the freedom in the breeze. He can smell the new beginnings, like the odor of onions frying in a pan. He pulls into the driveway, the ninth of nine, and he lets the truck idle as he gets out and pulls up the garage door, which normally would be opened by someone’s electronic garage door opener but that person is not coming here today and Jeremy has previously disengaged the latch.
Then he drives in and pulls the garage door shut again, and when he takes his bag of groceries into the kitchen he almost feels like calling out Honey, I’m home.
There is no kitchen yet, really. There is a white counter and some cupboards, you can tell this is supposed to be a kitchen, but there are no appliances. The new linoleum floor is protected from workmen’s dusty boots and spatters of paint by a bright blue tarp. The same sheet of blue in every room, protecting the carpets. The money must have run out suddenly, because the painting was never finished and several empty paint cans lie around.
There is something about this color that bothers him. There is something about it that makes him want to run away, and in the room where he sleeps he has taken up the blue tarp and gotten it out of there, so he can curl up on the thin sand-colored carpet with a pillow of clothes under his head and find some rest.
He thinks maybe he remembers it as the color of a body bag. He remembers seeing it on the roofs of New Orleans houses on TV. Or…maybe…something else…something…
He wants and needs and badly desires a nice powdered doughnut.
You need a car, says Gunny, whose face slides in across Jeremy’s shoulder.
It is hot in this house. The air is still, the sound of humanity absent.
A car, Gunny repeats, as if to a mentally-deficient child. Do you understand why?
Jeremy does. He’s been lucky so far, going back and forth to the truck stop. He hasn’t seen a police cruiser, and neither has one seen him. But the thing about digging in is, digging in can be a trap of your own making. He can’t get out on the highway to Mexico in his pickup truck. He can’t make it to freedom and lose himself in his future. So, yeah, he needs a car.
Gunny asks him, in that quiet and penetrating way that Gunny has, where Jeremy thinks he might find a car.
“A car dealership?” Jeremy asks, but he knows the correct answer.
Some place where cars are parked.
He takes his powdered doughnut and his bag of chips and a bottle of water into the room where he sleeps. Before he sits down in his corner he removes the .45 from his waistband and puts it on the floor at his side. Then he eats a little and drinks a little and thinks as he stares at the gun.
He is proficient with his rifle, but a pistol is a different animal. You have to be close. You can so easily miss with a pistol, unless you’re really close. He has always thought of a pistol as a defensive weapon, a rifle as offensive. That’s why he didn’t try to use his pistol on the drummer girl back in Sweetwater. Sure, he could’ve just driven up beside her and shot her, but what if she’d been quick enough to dodge a killing bullet? Then she’s got his face behind her eyes, and if she’s able to talk the police have his face too. And if somebody drives up before he can finish her off…wow, that’s messy. Well, they’ve got his face now—and how that happened he couldn’t figure out—but still, at the time he didn’t think he should risk a close encounter. Look what happened to that amateur at Stone Church. Two pistol shots, wasted.
Kind of an interesting thing, though, why somebody else would’ve wanted to take those fuckers out. Maybe he wasn’t the only one their lies had stirred up?
He can feel that Gunny has entered the room, and is standing right over there.
Jeremy eats and drinks and stares at the gun.
The rifle is a creature of dignity. To die by a long-range rifle shot is, really, a dignified death. It is the coming together of engineering, geometry, and God-given talent. But death by pistol is nasty and brutish, and way below his standards.
What he does is art.
But he knows what Gunny wants him to do.
“Do I have to kill an innocent person?” Jeremy asks, with powdered sugar on his chin.
Gunny tells him again that he needs a car.
Jeremy remembers a day when he had some downtime and he was connected through the Internet with Karen and Nick on her laptop. It was morning in Iraq and near midnight in Houston. He remembers that she had put on makeup for him, and how pretty her hair looked. He remembers that Nick had stared at him through the screen seven thousand six hundred and a few miles away and asked him one question: Daddy, when can you come home?
And Jeremy had answered, I can come home when the good guys win.
“Don’t make me kill an innocent person,” says Jeremy, but there is no begging in it. A Marine does not beg. A Marine gets the job done, and then he can go home.
Gunny tells him that he doesn’t have to kill anyone today. What he has to do is get a car, and if that means taking a person out in the desert two or three miles from a road, giving them a bottle of water and directions in which to go and making them walk in the cool of the evening, then what is the problem with that?
“You make it sound so easy,” Jeremy remarks.
Gunny says that the sooner he gets this task done, the safer he will be and he will not be trapped in this place with those blue shoes on the floor.
Jeremy doesn’t move; he’s not sure he heard what he thought he heard.
Gunny asks to be forgiven. He says he meant to say blue sheets.
Neither of them say anything more for a while after that.
Jeremy knows that Gunny is right. There’s not much use in arguing with Gunny. If he wants to get out of here, he needs a car and he needs to go to a place where cars are parked.
Like that stripmall up the road.
He picks up the gun. He stands up and puts the gun in between his flesh and the waist of his jeans, under the shirt’s flagging tail. He needs to get this done in a hurry, but it occurs to him that he should leave his pickup hidden right where it is. He will need time to transfer his gear from the truck to whatever car he can jack. So with the Triple-T cap on his head and the .45 automatic under his shirt he leaves the house through the back door and sets out, walking around the house to the street and then along the street toward the stripmall.
A few cars pass him, but not many. This could go very, very bad. Or very good. Or it might not happen at all. Maybe when he gets to that stripmall, he’ll decide to buy a burrito and go back to his hide. He walks not briskly, but he doesn’t amble either. He is a man with a purpose, but to anyone passing by it wouldn’t look very important.
When he reaches the parking lot there are ten cars in it, most in front of the drugstore. They look to be grandpa cars. Sedans with lots of room and old American gas guzzlers, except for one white Honda Accord. As Jeremy stops and pretends to examine the sole of his right shoe, a man and woman in their fifties come out of the drug store. The woman is carrying a bag and the man has his arm around her shoulders; he looks toward Jeremy and nods, his eyes cautious. Jeremy nods back and moves on as if he’s heading for Mexican food, and the couple get into a silver Buick and lock their doors before the engine starts. Jeremy pauses at the door of the Mexican joint as the car pulls away.
Maybe he will get a burrito after all, he decides, because his heart is beating hard and he thinks he needs to sit down in some air-conditioning.
As he starts to go in, a woman with shoulder-length gray hair emerges carrying a brown paper bag. He waits for her to pass. The interior of the Mexican place is dark, nothing much to see in there but an old dude walking back through a swinging door into a kitchen. Then Jeremy sees that the woman is heading toward the Honda. She is well-dressed, crisp like someone who works in a bank or a real estate office. She is wearing sunglasses, and has the strap of a dark blue leather handbag around one shoulder. A red-white-and-blue scarf is tied around her throat. A real Grandmother America.
She is not very much overweight and has a young walk. She probably has young legs under her turquoise-colored pants suit. Jeremy decides she’s the kind of woman who could walk herself out of the desert.
She is unlocking the driver’s door when Jeremy comes up beside her and says in an easy, nonthreatening voice, “Excuse me, ma’am. Ask you something?”