“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?”