Nobody spoke, because they just didn’t know what to say. Then Nomad struck at the heart of the problem: “If you remember…we lost our bass player yesterday.”
“Yeah, there’s that. Ash says he can get Butch Munger to meet us in El Paso, or Trey can supply a local talent.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Berke said. “I’m not playing with a gator off the street!”
“Not Butch Munger!” Nomad’s tone was just as vehement. He was up off the bed and crouched like a fighter about to throw a right hook. “That bastard wrecked Hemp For Shemp last year!” Not only that, but Munger had a reputation for temper and had been arrested for breaking his girlfriend’s nose, charges dropped because she just loved him so fucking much.
“Guys?” said Terry.
“Look, it’s just the one show,” George said. “I know Munger’s rep, but he is good. And he kind of plays in Mike’s style—”
“Don’t you say that!” Berke came forward, crowding him, and George feared he was about to be torn apart by a ferocious lesbian. “Nobody plays like Mike! You hear it? Nobody!”
“Guys?” said Terry.
“Not Butch Munger!” Nomad almost shouted. “I won’t step on a stage with him!”
The telephone on the bedside table rang, a shrill A above high C. George reached carefully between Nomad and Berke and picked it up. “Yes? Oh, sure. We would like the Cattleman’s complimentary breakfast this morning, absolutely. Uh…that would be six. I’m sorry…that would be five. Just a minute.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Who wants coffee and who wants orange juice?”
“Orange juice,” said Terry, and then he added, “Guys, I can pick up the bassline.”
“Two orange juices so far,” George reported into the telephone.
“Coffee. Black,” Nomad said.
George paused with his ear to the receiver. “Yeah, that’d be great. Thank you.” He hung up. “She says they’re not real busy, so she’ll bring a pot of coffee, five cups and five glasses of juice.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Terry asked. “I can play the bass parts.”
George didn’t answer, waiting for Berke’s reaction. She looked down at the floor for a long time, as if pondering whether Terry was strong enough to carry Mike’s weight. Conflicting emotions fought on her face.
Then she lifted her gaze to George and said firmly, “That works with me.”
Nomad nodded. “Me too.”
“I can’t believe this! We’re going to go on without Mike?” Ariel’s was not the voice of reason, but a cry of bewilderment. “I don’t care if it’s just one show!” she said before George could respond. “Shouldn’t we…like…go home and…mourn him or something? It doesn’t seem right to keep on playing!”
“I think,” George answered, “you’re wrong about that. Let me tell you what’s happened, according to Ash. The story about Mike is in this morning’s newspaper here. It’s also in the Abilene paper. But last night it got picked up by the Associated Press and wound up on Yahoo in the news items. You know what the headline was? Sniper Kills Member of Touring Band.”
“Sniper?” Terry frowned. “Who said anything about a sniper?”
“I’m just saying what Ash told me. The newspapers reported it as a ‘rifle shot’. When it got on Yahoo, it became a ‘sniper’. Let me just tell you…a lot of people have seen that item on the web. So even though they called us ‘The Fives’ on Yahoo, we sold a hundred and sixty-three CDs of Catch last night. In one night.” The Little Genius waited for that to sink in. “We got some awesome numbers of hits, and I’ll bet if I looked at the numbers again right now they would’ve gone up…who knows how many. Ash had a call in to cancel at the Spinhouse, but they want us because suddenly we are newsworthy.” He caught Ariel’s pained expression and he didn’t dare even look at Berke. “Okay, I know it’s a shitty way to get some media shine, but why do you think all of a sudden they want us to headline? Huh?”
No one answered, so George plowed on. “Any media shine sells tickets. We can think of ourselves as great and sensitive musicians, or rebels without a cause, or raging flames of angry righteousness, or whatever…but all the business cares about is, do you sell tickets? Okay, what I’m saying is—and we don’t have to like it, but that’s life—we need to buckle up and act like professionals. If we can headline and get a good merchandise split from the Spinhouse, we go play there. Any disagreements with that?” There were no replies, but George had one more point to make. “You think Mike would disagree? After working his ass off so long, and now we’re invited to headline?” He directed the next question to Berke. “You think he’d say pack it in and go back to Austin?”
Berke was staring across the room, at the green notebook sitting atop the vanity. As far as she knew, Mike had never written a verse in his life, nor had he ever wanted to. Why suddenly now, just before he’d been shot dead by a…
…sniper?
“Mike would say go to El Paso and play the Spinhouse,” Berke answered, speaking more to herself than to the others. “He’d say…”
No one here gets out alive?
“…buckle up,” she went on, “but maybe not in those exact words.”
“It doesn’t seem right,” Ariel said, but her conviction was wavering.
“We play the gig, and we tear the roof off the place, and I say Mike’s family gets his cut just the same as if he were here.” George’s eyebrows lifted. “Everybody cool with that?”
They were, and Nomad spoke for them all: “Sure.”
“Then it is right,” George told Ariel. “Anything else would be wrong.”
To that, Ariel had no reply.
Their complimentary breakfasts came, the biscuits, the jelly, the coffee and the orange juice. The woman who brought the tray looked quickly around the room to make sure it hadn’t been trashed by this bunch, whom the police had told her were musicians, and she went back to her office relieved. There was no further mention of Mike as they ate, but Berke put the green notebook in her own bag for safekeeping. She had decided not to say anymore about her experience on the road; it was just too weird to kick around, and George might want her to tell the cops, and now she wasn’t sure of her own mind and she just wanted to get out of here. So she stayed quiet, and she went to the bathroom to take a shower and wash the dust out of her hair.
Around ten-thirty, with the sun up high and heat pressing against the window, the two detectives knocked at their door and came in to talk. Lucky Luke and the Digger both looked tired; it had been a long night and a hot morning in those scraggly woods, and neither luck nor digging had revealed more than they’d known before sundown. “I’ll tell you,” said Detective Rios as she and her partner stood next to the air-conditioner to catch a breeze, “that we haven’t found fresh casings on the ground where we think the shooter was positioned. So either we’re wrong about the location, or the brass was cleaned up. And that’s kind of puzzling, because it’s not something a kid in need of a course on rifle safety would do.”
“Where does that put us?” George asked.
“In between theories, until we find the brass or somebody tells us something.” Luke had his toothpick in his mouth and his cowboy hat sat on his head cocked a little to one side. “We may find the casings today, or they may be rattling around in the floorboard of junior’s ATV. Hard to say.”
That statement brought a flush of anger up in Nomad’s cheeks. “Hard to say? Our friend’s dead, and that’s all you’ve got?”
“Easy, man, take it easy,” George cautioned.
“See, this is our situation,” Luke went on, his voice unhurried. “Was it an accident, or was it intentional? Was it a kid out dicking around or a random shooting, with intent to kill? If that’s so, we’ve got a real problem.”
Berke knew now was the time to speak up, if she was going to; but the moment passed and she kept her mouth shut because she wanted out of this town right now and they would get all tangled up with something she wasn’t even positive ha
d happened. The open road had never before seemed so inviting. Or so safe, for that matter.
“There are other possibilities,” Detective Rios said, focusing on Nomad. “Somebody with a grudge against the gas station’s owner. Or the oil company. We’re bringing in for questioning some people you might call ‘sketchy’. Got their guns and their anger issues. So we’ll see if that leads us anywhere.”
“Get the wrong person upset over any little thing, and that’s why we’ve got jobs,” Luke added.
“Sorry we can’t offer you more,” the woman said. Her voice carried a tone of finality. “You’re going back to Austin?”
“No, on to El Paso,” George told her. When she looked blankly at him, he decided to say, “We’ve got a gig there on Friday night, it’s a pretty good deal.”
“I guess you have to be dedicated to your music,” she said, but no one replied.
What the detectives had really come to say, the Digger went on, was that the family had worked out transfer of the body back to Bogalusa from the mortuary, and that if anything further developed the Sweetwater police department would be in touch with Mr. Vallampati at the Austin number George had given them. She said Mr. Davis’s belongings could be shipped from Sweetwater to Bogalusa at the UPS office, or that could be done in El Paso or wherever was most convenient. George said they’d do it in El Paso. He was thinking that he wanted to get on the road as soon as possible and that the bag of Blue Mystic weed in Mike’s duffel ought not to be in there when the family got his stuff.
“We’re very sorry about this,” Detective Rios said, speaking for both of them. “I hope we’ll have some news for you soon.” With that, their visit had come to its conclusion. The two detectives left, closed the door behind them, and George scratched the back of his neck and said as he had said so many times before in so many different motel rooms, “Let’s saddle up, people.”
They paid their bill, Nomad took the Scumbucket’s wheel because it was his turn to drive, Ariel rode shotgun with George and Terry in the seats behind, and in the back Berke sat next to an empty place.
They pulled out of the Lariat Motel’s parking lot, and beneath the scorching sun they took the entrance to I-20 West on toward El Paso. They were silent for a while, and then Terry began to talk about a particularly memorable gig they’d done last June in Myrtle Beach, it was a club right on the beach, and it was early evening with the breeze blowing salty off the sea and the light was soft and blue and the place was crowded, everybody appreciative and cheering for the songs and only rowdy enough to be fun, and in the brief quiet between numbers Mike had come over to him, leaned close and said, Bro, drink it up ’cause this is as good as it gets.
Yes, the others said. They did remember the gig. They remembered it very well. And everyone agreed that now that Terry mentioned it, it seemed like it was only yesterday.
TEN.
When White Wedding’ blasts from the speakers, Jeremy Pett allows himself a passing smile because he knows that he is in the right place.
“Are you a captain?” he asks the black-haired girl with the two silver bars piercing her nipples as she leans her head down to him (she smells like bubblegum and coconut suntan lotion, he thinks) and she returns the smile that she believes is for her and tells him he can call her anything if he’ll buy another beer. He says yeah, sure, and she goes away into the purple light that is edged with crimson. He returns his attention not to the other black-haired girl who is coiled around the pole ten feet from him but to a table over on the right side where he saw Gunny sitting a minute ago but Gunny is not there anymore. Gunny is a prowler, and can’t stay still very long. But Jeremy knows by now that Gunny is never far away, and this knowledge gives him comfort.
Damn straight, does he know! Gunny was all over his ass when he missed that first shot at the gas station. Jeremy could say it was a cold bore shot, he had no spotter to verify the range and the wind drift and maybe he had been unnerved when the trooper pulled in. He could say that he’d first taken aim at the lead singer, but the guy was walking back and forth from deep shadow into eye-zapping sunlight and that had thrown him off, and his second target—the guy pumping gas—had been obscured by the trooper’s raised hood, and then also there was the traffic on I-20 to consider and it wasn’t so easy to shoot between cars and trucks flashing past on a highway, but Gunny accepts no excuses. Then…oh Jesus, then…when Jeremy had heard someone walking past his door and looked out through the blinds thinking it was the old woman bringing his complimentary breakfast, but it was her, the drummer girl, all decked out in her jogging duds, and Jeremy had given some thought to the situation and decided he might could finish her off if the place and time were right, so he’d checked out, gotten into the pickup truck and actually passed her on the road looking for a shelter to set up his rifle and bipod. Maybe she would come this far, maybe not, but if she did he was locked and loaded.
It was another cold bore shot. The sun was in his eyes this time, too. That bullet couldn’t have missed her by half-an-inch. It must’ve burned the tip of her nose on the way past.
But oh, Jesus, did Gunny give it to him when he drove out of there and swung east on I-20. I thought you were supposed to be an expert, Gunny had said, quietly at first but with a nasty bite of rising rage. Supposed to be such hot shit at this. Killed how many ragheads over there?
“Thirty-eight confirmed,” Jeremy had answered, because he knew the count.
Great for you, Pett, but tell me this then…how many of ’em weren’t kids?
Jeremy’s foot had stomped down on the brake pedal and the pickup travelling at nearly sixty-five miles per hour had shivered and shrieked as if all the bolts were coming loose at once, and suddenly the truck was turning sideways and sliding, leaving smoking black streaks on the asphalt. He was aware of Gunny, the sarcastic shotgun rider, fading out to a gray presence. Jeremy thought for a second that he should go ahead and die, he should have died in the bathtub and this was just marking time, but then the survivor’s will—the Marine spirit, the gladiator’s fight, call it any of these—kicked in. He took hold of the wheel and fought to keep the truck from going over, a struggle that seemed epic but only lasted for a husky inhalation of burnt-rubber air. Then with a shudder and moan the truck gave its life back to him to control and it was slowing down, slowing down, its tires going into the weeds on the right-side shoulder…and WHAM came the burst of air and the indignant wail of a semi’s horn as the beast whipped past, followed by a white BMW whose driver shook his head in disbelief at Jeremy’s skill of four-wheel Mexican hat dancing.
Jeremy looked into the sideview mirror. No troopers yet, but they might be coming if they saw the dark pall of smoke rising off the treadmarks.
Drive, said Gunny, who was himself again. When Jeremy hesitated, Gunny said, Get your mind back where it needs to be. Drive.
He started off. The engine gave a rattle like a bagful of broken plates, but then everything must have fitted itself together again, God bless the American auto industry, and the pickup truck rolled on more lamb than lion.
The girl with the silver captain’s bars through her nipples emerges from the gaudy glare, bringing his beer. She has the tattoos of thorny vines and roses on both arms and a small sad teddybear on her belly beneath the navel ring. He pays her from his wallet of dwindling money and then she leans her head toward him again, the better to be heard over the thundering music—a rap song, somebody Jeremy doesn’t recognize singing about getting pussy twenty-fo’ seven—and as she asks if he wants a lap dance she reaches down to place a hand on his right thigh. But instantly Jeremy has intercepted the hand and turned it away, earning from her a puzzled look in the sparkling dark. “Maybe later, okay?” she prompts. Her accent is strange; she appears to be a mixture of Hispanic, black, and Asian. They all do, except for the one with the flame-red hair and the thin blonde with the ponytail.
He says maybe later without meaning it, and she goes away again. He drinks his beer-flavored water and checks his wris
twatch to see that Wednesday night has turned into Thursday morning. He does not want the girl touching him because she might feel the lump in his pants, hidden by the folds of his extra-large black T-shirt. The crowd—was there ever a crowd in here?—is thinning out, but the pole dancer is still energetic and the music is loud enough to churn a brain into oatmeal. He is watching Miss Ponytail give a lap dance to a Hispanic man in a dark suit who was in here when Jeremy arrived about an hour ago. The man is maybe forty, forty-five or so, with a bald brown pate and gray hair on the sides. There is a little gray tuft up top that Miss Ponytail plays with as she gyrates her ass on his crotch. The man is sleepy-eyed and grins too much. His teeth are very white, and Jeremy wonders if he’s a dentist out on the town or visiting El Paso for a convention or something. Whatever he is, he likes to show Miss Ponytail his heavy wad of cash and she likes to lighten it for him, and Jeremy has been entertained by watching her set her lower jaw like a bulldog and scare off the other chiquitas who wander over behind their implants and try to score some of what he’s throwing down.
Pull off where you can see the highway, Gunny had said. It was not a request, it was a command.
Jeremy had bristled up. Had clenched his fists on the wheel and given the engine more gas. Yesterday he had killed one of the members of that band, he had shot at another one today and he wasn’t too happy with his record of one hit out of three bullets. The fact was, he wasn’t nearly as good as he used to be. Couldn’t even hit a slow-moving target at about two-hundred yards. Pitiful. But more than that…he couldn’t remember exactly why he had followed that van and U-Haul trailer from the club in Dallas, had parked overnight in some suburban neighborhood to keep watch, and when they’d left Dallas he’d gotten on the highway behind them, knowing they were playing next in El Paso from the schedule on their website. He couldn’t remember exactly why he needed to kill them, except for the fact that on that cable show they’d made some pretty vile comments and accusations about the soldiers in Iraq—which they hadn’t repeated during their show at the Curtain Club—and that maybe he was going to embark on a new career as a hitman for the federales in Mexico. Call it training, then. But still…what had they ever done to him, really? It wasn’t like lying in wait, hour after hour, for the enemy in Iraq. You knew then what your purpose was. You knew then that every bullet you sent would save the life of a brother, or maybe many lives. But this…he felt lost in his own mind.