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. Be
yond 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 dru
g 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?”
She is startled just a little bit, and when she turns her face to him Jeremy sees a slight quiver of her pale pink lips that means she doesn’t know whether to be afraid or not. He quickly says, “I’m lost, can you help me?”
“Lost?” she asks. She has the throaty voice of a lifetime cigarette smoker. Maybe she’s in her middle sixties, with a sharp chin and deep lines bracketing her mouth. Lots of worry lines across her forehead. “What’re you looking for?”
“LaPaz Estates,” he answers, and instantly—instantly—he knows this is something he should not have said.
“Well…it’s—” She glances in that direction, and then Jeremy takes the gun out and holds it just south of her takeout food, and he says, “I’ll shoot you if you scream. Get in the car.” And he’s had to say this as if he really means it, because she must obey him before somebody else comes out to the lot.