S-Duality: A Marauders Novella (11 page)

“How much of this do we have in cash?” Sisco asked.

“About seventy percent. Thought we'd keep half of that as cash and put some of the rest through the Booty Bank before wiring the rest.”

Sisco didn't understand half of
how
the wires worked, but he knew they worked, and that was all he cared about.

“Sounds good. Make sure I get the numbers.” He stretched his back and lit a smoke. “We need to buy some guns and stuff, so make sure there's enough cash for that.”

“Okay,” Mitch mumbled as his fingers kept flying over the keyboard. “You know, we could do a lot of this as automated programs. It would make it easier.”

“Okay...” He didn't know what else to say.

“Mech could help me.”

When Mech had started as a hang-around, Sisco'd just figured he was another guy who liked beer and women. He had long black hair, a goatee, and didn't talk much. Soon Sisco'd realized that he was either a suici
dal gay man who was into bikers or in a very committed relationship because he never looked at the women in the clubhouse. It had been the latter. Mech had married his high school sweetheart and had two kids. The kids were both in their late teens or early twenties by now.

Even more surprising was that he was a well-known hacker. Like some sort of geek guru to all the pimpled kids who lived in front of a computer in their mother's basement. Sisco knew Brick'd sent Mitch to Mech when he'd figured out Mitch was dabbling in hacking, and even though Brick might not have a problem with his son breaking the law, he
did
have a problem with him not being smart enough about it. The two of them got along really well, and Mech'd been Mitch's sponsor when he prospected.

“Yeah. He probably could,” Sisco said with a chuckle. “Better if you talk to him. I don't speak
Geek.”

Mitch just laughed and was about to say something, but
his phone beeping interrupted him. When he read the message he smiled. Sisco knew that smile, and Mitch hadn't been at the strip club much lately.

“Booty?”

“Yeah,” Mitch nodded.

He was curious about what kind of girl it was, since she was apparently able to hold Mitch's interest for more than a few weeks. That wasn't common.

They started to pack up the stuff, and just as they were about to leave, Mitch turned to him.

“Hey, I never asked, but who taught
you
all this stuff?”

“Booty,” Sisco
answered with a smile.

“Really?”

“Yeah. She taught me a lot of things.”

-o0o-

Seattle, Washington

They'd mentioned it now and then, a kid, but didn't want to do it while he was touring. Eventually he got fed up with being away from Trudy all the damn time, and he wanted things to start. He wanted their family to start, and she said she wanted the same thing. So they sat down and went through their finances.

They still had a lot of cash hidden away, but Trudy had managed to launder a lot of it. Between the two of them, they'd made more money over the past few years than he'd thought he'd make in his entire life, and they were living cheap. He hardly spent any money while he was on tour, since he got per diems just like the rest of the band, and Trudy's main expense was art supplies.

“I'm doing this last tour,” he said to Trudy. “But I'm gonna talk to Decker at the garage and ask him if I can start working there again when I get back.”

“You sure?” she said, but she looked relieved.

“Yeah. I've had it with this shit. It's not fun anymore, and I'm not that important. A trained monkey could do a lot of the job I'm doing for them. They'll be fine without me.” He'd already mentioned it to Pete, who understood. Sisco leaned over the table and gave her a kiss. “It kind of sucks being away all the time.”

“It does,” she smiled.

It wasn't just being away all the time that was getting to him, though. The entire grunge hysteria in the media was starting to sicken Sisco. He was so fucking fed up with it, and he wasn't the only one.

He'd flipped through a fashion magazine and seen pictures of flannel costing ninety dollars. It was a fucking joke to him. Ninety fucking dollars for a flannel shirt! He bought them in bulk for like twenty, and they looked about the same as the one in the picture. The phrase 'the emperor is wearing a flannel' became sort of an inside joke among those who'd been a part of it from the very beginning, and it was very fitting.

He felt like it was getting out of hand completely. It wasn't that fucking long ago they were driving around in a shitty van and sometimes got paid in beer—or even pot, as some venues in Seattle had done.

Riot Act had just released their first album, not long after they'd actually formed the band, and now they were playing for huge audiences.

Jonah was bummed out. He'd wanted those hard years and to some extent felt like they hadn't deserved their success. He definitely didn't want to be seen as some fucking music guru or the spokesman of a generation. It freaked him the fuck out.

Trudy was freaked out as well. She was selling paintings to guys wearing suits in New York, all because she happened to live in the 'right' town and had the 'right' look. She was making money,
Sisco was making money, and it should be good, but it really just felt insane. He couldn't deal, and he wasn't even in a band—instead he was backstage watching it all blow up in all their collective faces.

He did the last tour, and while he was standing on the side of the stage watching a piss drunk Jonah climbing on the lighting rigs, hoping he wouldn't fall down and die in front of 50,000 people, Sisco was really fucking pleased it would be over soon.

He was even more pleased when a label rep came to talk to him after the show about how he had to make sure the guys took it easy with the drugs. Like he was their fucking babysitter, which he had to admit to himself he sort of was sometimes.

“They don't use drugs,” he said as he loaded the tour bus. He didn't mention pot, because he didn't consider it a drug, not like other drugs.

“Oh?” the guy said with a surprised face. “I've heard about the Seattle musicians and heroin, and we can't really spare time for rehab now, so I thought it'd be good if you kept an eye on them. Just to make sure it doesn't get out of hand.”

That sort of summed it up. It was okay if they were junkies as long as it didn't get out of hand, since they didn't have time for rehab.

“Okay.”

It was all he said. Truth was, he knew a lot of musicians who had already overdosed a couple of times, but as long as they could get up on stage the next night, no one really gave a shit. He could've mentioned how fucking disgusting he found it that the dude's main concern was they didn't have time for rehab, or that he was fine with them shooting up as long as it didn't get out of hand, but he didn't. He shut his mouth and kept reminding himself he'd be away from it all soon.

He told the band about the conversation with the label rep, though, and they all just sighed and concluded that they needed to find another tour manager they trusted who could do the job. He suggested a guy named Rick. He'd been the tour man
ager for a few of the smaller bands earlier, so he knew the basics, and what he didn't know Sisco could teach him.

“Might take him some time to get into it, but I know he could do the job,” he said.

“Yeah,” Frank agreed. “He could. Think he'd do it?”

“Pretty sure. Don't think he's doing anything else at the moment.” Sisco smiled. “And he's not afraid of telling people to go fuck themselves, no matter who they are.”

“That's true,” Pete laughed. “That's the kind of people we need around us.”

When they came home to Seattle, he talked to Decker who said he was welcome back to the garage, and that he might even get up to full time. A few of their employees had retired, and one of the younger guys had quit to give music a try. Decker eyed him and asked him if he was planning on 'giving music a try.' Sisco told him he already had, and that he hadn't liked it much.

The first few months he got some calls from Rick. They'd prepared most of the tour together, but Rick had more of the 'does this shit happen often' questions. Sisco generally had to tell him, yes, that was pretty fucking common.

Once he was out of the touring, he realized exactly how fucking crazy things had gotten in Seattle as far as the media went. Everyone was fed up with it and had started to just fuck with the journalists. When people asked them questions about other band members, they just came up with
stuff—anything really. He'd had journalists at the garage asking him questions, and he'd given them crap answers, which meant they came back a few days later and asked him if it was true he had a Tuesday barbecue once a month with the drummer of some band. Whoever he'd outed for some shit was getting back at him, and he always confirmed anything they asked—before making a new insane claim.

He was amazed by how the media completely missed the fact that there was a lot of humor among the bands and their friends. Somehow they all thought it was all about misery and nagging. When in fact it was often the opposite—a bunch of people having a lot of fun giving each other shit
any chance they got. But they'd swallowed 'the concept,' hook, line, and sinker.

When Vanity Fair did a spread on Grunge Fashion, he'd had it. Decker was more than willing to pretend to be
him and answer any questions, and his answers were a lot funnier than Sisco's anyway.

Around that time, he and Trudy decided to finally try for a kid, and she came off the pill. He thought it was the perfect. They'd seen enough death. It would be nice to see a new life for change.

For a while, things were really good. On occasion it hit him that he'd become all those things he used to despise. A blue-collar guy, working the garage during the day and going home to the missus for dinner, but he really didn't give a fuck. It was good. They were good, and he enjoyed it a lot more than he'd ever thought he could. In a way, he enjoyed
life
a lot more than he'd thought he'd ever be able to. He'd stopped selling pot, too. He wanted to do things the right way for a change. The honest way.

Then shit hit them again. Early one morning, while he was still in bed with Trudy beside him, he got a call from Simon. The evening before, Sisco'd helped him out by setting up the stage at his club for a gig. He'd left early, since he needed to be at work to open up at six in the morning.

“When did you leave last night?” Simon asked.

“Like...” Sisco cleared his throat, since he'd been asleep. “Fuck, around ten, I think. I just set it up, listened to the opening act, and then I went home.”

“Who is it?” Trudy asked with a yawn.

“Simon,” he answered before returning to the call. “Why?”

“Letty's missing.”

Letty was one of the bartenders at Simon's club. She knew everyone and everyone knew her. Both because she was working where she did, but also because she was in one of the bands who’d been around for a long time—a band he quite liked. He'd talked to her a little before going home, but that wasn't unusual; she talked to everyone, and he'd known her for years. He looked at the alarm clock on his nightstand.

“It's four-thirty in the morning, she might still be out partying or something. Who else did you call?”

“Not that many, but Shannon called and was really upset.” Shannon was the drummer in the same band as Letty, and they shared an apartment. “Letty'd said she was tired when we closed up, and she didn't want to go out with them, so she went home, but when Shannon got home she wasn't there. She's called everyone. Thought maybe you'd seen her.”

“No. Like I said, I went home a lot earlier than that. I'm sure she'll show up.” Sisco sat up in the bed and decided it was best to just get up and go to work. No point in sleeping for another hour or so. “Call me when she does.”

Simon said he would, and they hung up.

Sisco wasn't that worried about it. Letty had probably just hooked up with some guy; she was fully capable of taking care of herself. He went to work, did his shift, and went home.

That night he got a call from Shannon.

“Letty's dead,” she sniveled.

“What?”

His
first thought was that she'd O.D.'d, since that seemed to be how everyone around him was dying, but he thought it was a bit strange because Letty had always been very against drugs. She smoked pot on occasion, drank a lot on other occasions, but that was about it. It hadn't surprised him when he heard she'd gone home when her shift was over the night before, because she often did.

“They found her in an alley behind a dumpster.”

“Why the fuck was she in an alley?”

Even the most hardcore needle heads among them usually did their shit at home. Not in a fucking alley. You had to be jonesing pretty fucking bad to do that.

“She was dumped there,” Shannon bawled. “She was murdered, Sisco!”

He was sure he'd heard that wrong. “Say what?”