Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (3 page)

* * *

Julianne Martin, Anna Mae Gunn, Brose
Fairchild, Willie MacKai, Faron and Ellie Randolph, Terry Pruitt
and her boyfriend Daniel Borg crouched beside the muddy bed of the
Rio Grande. Julianne had become even more psychic in the last seven
years, ever since she had spent a lot of time living in the bodies
of long-dead ballad heroes. "Shush, Lazarus," she said to the magic
banjo, which lay across Willie MacKai's back. Even muffled up in
rags, it was still trying to noodle out "The Rivers of Texas." "I'm
listening."

She heard a land full of silence and noise.
Dogies, now scientifically slaughtered on the premises of their
host ranches, no longer bawled, since they were pumped full of
tranquilizers as well as other additives to make them as hefty and
tasty as Brazilian beef. Since the cattle were stoned, cowboys no
longer sang to them and could devote their spare time to reading
Bible tracts, survivalist catalogs, and cleaning their weapons in
anticipation of a chance to use them on something other than
rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. Off to the west and up north in
Oklahoma, on the Indian lands, drums were silent, voices stilled,
powwows all commerce and no dancing, the night air full of the thud
of fists, the roar of truck engines, the howls and screams of the
injured. On the Mexican side of the river, behind her, the guitars
were silent and the borders devoted to murder. No songs told the
tales of the slain, or the exploits of the runners while big
companies from the U.S. poured filth into the waters of the Rio
Grande and unsafe machinery chugged away, pumping poison into the
fragile desert air with the blessings of both governments.

Willie MacKai, who was a little more psychic
himself these days, put his arm around Juli and said, looking
across the river at the ranch land he used to patrol, "Ooo, deja
vu, huh?"

"I just don't see why we couldn't come back
the normal way," Terry Pruitt complained. She was tired, had been
too hot all day and now was too cold.

Willie MacKai said, "Because if we did,
darlin', all our troubles would have been for nothin'. They had to
slack off on us back in England where you live and the music is so
strong, but the sooner them music-hatin' devils figure out that
we're back and we got the goods with us, the sooner we're going to
have to think about what they're gonna do as well as what we need
to be doin'. I don't reckon they'll be foolin' around with cute
tricks this time, not if they can just get us outright." Not that
the devils ever had been fooling around exactly, except for the
Debauchery Devil, who had a sense of humor that was way beyond
warped.

In the time preceding the flight of Willie
and his friends and the banjo to the British Isles, musicians had
been dying—murdered, really, though it never appeared that way—not
just by ones and twos but in groups. Killed in fiery car and plane
crashes or dropping dead of diseases that were custom-made to
silence makers of music.

Willie had been more of a fooling-around
kind of guy back then. He'd changed some and he knew it. Back in
Scotland, under a spell engineered by the long-dead Wizard Michael
Scott, ancestor of Sir Walter Scott, and the Debauchery Devil,
Willie and three others in the group had put in considerable time
living the lives depicted in ballads. The songs that it fell to
Willie to live in were not the rough-and-tumble kick-ass adventure
ballads he had always loved, not the cut-bait-and-keep-moving kind.
He'd seen the old times through the eyes of young girls tossed
around on those stormy years like pieces of driftwood—used, abused,
impregnated, murdered—and he'd come to understand and care for
those poor lost little girls. Not only could he sing their songs
now with conviction, but something else inside him changed. He had
started thinking of women a little differently. Not that he didn't
still hanker after them. He felt more tenderhearted now and sort
of, well, not even brotherly was the right word. Sisterly, really.
He was having a hard time coming to terms with that and mostly
chose to ignore it and concentrate on what Anna Mae called their
primary mission.

Once he and the others were freed of the
spell, they spent the rest of their time learning songs and music
as Willie had never learned them before—and he was someone who had
already learned and forgotten maybe a thousand songs, maybe two
thousand, though until the trip he had retained only a couple
hundred of them.

He and his friends had gone to bring
the songs back alive and they by-God had done it, Willie thought.
He had amazed even himself. After he, Julianne Martin, Brose
Fairchild, and Anna Mae Gunn had returned from ballad times with
the help of counter-enchantments their friends had conjured up,
they had set about learning old and new music with a vengeance. All
the music Willie had learned in his whole life before was like a
drop in the bucket to the way he learned then. He had already known
how to play five or six instruments, more or less. He learned to
play a dozen others, learned to read music, from the necessity of
helping Faron Randolph and the others revive songs that hadn't been
sung in years, but
had
once
had a little tune written down by some school-trained musician. He
spent most of his days talking to and playing with musicians of all
ages, all levels of skill, people who could play music and people
who could just remember a few odd lyrics here and there. He learned
the songs he himself had lived in dozens of variations, though
sometimes there was only a line or two of difference. He learned
the songs the others had lived and more besides. Not all the songs
were good songs, or powerful, or funny, but sometimes even the bad
ones had the power to evoke a piece of someone's life, or at least
somebody else's opinion of it.

He learned to do something else he had never
done much before too. That was to sit around and just play the
music with other musicians—though he was a word man himself, with
stories and scraps of poetry in his head all the time. He silently
heard the words to the tunes he played with, or made some up as he
went along. Faron Randolph did this constantly too. It used to be
common, back in the old days before SWALLOW, when everybody felt
fine about plundering everybody else's material, stealing a pinch
of this and a handful of that and coming up with a new recipe that
fit the current situation.

He had begun to feel a new way about the
music and his role in it at this time too. Always before he had
been a performer. Although he was inclined to be generous with his
spotlight and promote new talent, when he was performing he
liked—as did most entertainers—to be the sole center of attention.
For the past few years he had felt almost impatient during the
times when it was his turn to share a new song with a new group of
musicians, even though he knew that teaching songs was a big part
of what he would be doing when he got home to the States. But he
knew what he knew, and he didn't know what the others knew. The
desire to know more and more songs, to sift and sort through them,
investigating them as if they were a brothel full of beautiful
women, developed into as much of a thirst as the one he had once
had for booze and, while it fortunately didn't replace the lust he
had for the ladies, it calmed it down considerably.

So here he was now, a changed man, focused
and ready. Of course, just at the moment his new skills weren't as
much use as those he had learned as a boy—skills learned at the
same time he first began to love music, but having very little to
do with it, except that those skills, like all others, were fodder
for song. He remembered the lay of the land, when to move and when
to be still, what was edible or provided water in a pinch, what to
do if someone got heat stroke during the day.

"Once we're across, then what?" Brose
asked.

"We'll call a cab," Dan said hopefully.

" 'Fraid not," Willie said. "We're in for a
long walk to the road. If Gussie made it to the rendezvous point
okay and didn't get stopped along the way, we'll have a ride."

"You should have let me call my folks,"
Ellie complained. "After all, they just live in Tulsa, and Gussie
had to come from Washington State."

Willie didn't say anything, but Brose told
her, "Your folks are good people, Ellie, but they ain't been smack
in the middle of this like Gussie has. She knows enough to expect
damn near anything to happen and be ready for it. You gotta admit
some of the shit we been through would be a little startlin' to
most individuals. While your mama and daddy was tryin' to sort it
all out, they could be taken suddenly dead. They don't have Lazarus
to help 'em the way we do, remember."

"Neither does Gussie," Faron said
grimly.

CHAPTER 2

Now fully in Lulubelle Baker persona, the
Debauchery Devil drove her red sports car across Nevada so fast
even radar couldn't detect it. She screeched to a halt in Las
Vegas.

"What are we stopping for?" Gussie
asked.

"I'm sorry, sweetie, this is work,"
Lulubelle apologized. "This is one of my other responsibilities,
one I kind of enjoy now that all my other pet projects have been
modified to such a borin' extent. Come on in if you want to."

"I thought all your debaucheries had been
done away with," Gussie said. "Surely gambling counts as one."

"Well, it's sort of an exception since it
deals directly with money, and the boss feels that the connection
to greed is a redeeming factor."

"Uh-huh," Gussie said, gawking at the
neon like any rubberneck tourist. Well, what the hell. She figured
that she was at least three days ahead of time already, since she
had originally planned to take the glacially slow
Silver Snail
bus all the way from
Seattle to San Francisco and switch there to a pickup truck
belonging to a friend before driving for another day or so to get
close to where she was now.

Night had fallen as they drove toward Las
Vegas, but now, on the street, it was bright as day from the
brilliantly flashing signs. Gussie lost Lulubelle in the crowd of
people—some of them in jeans and sweats, some of them in fancy
evening dress—milling around the one-armed bandits in one room,
waiting for a show to begin in a hallway that looked as if it could
hold a grand ball. In another direction, Gussie saw roulette wheels
and heard the voices of the dealers, the exclamations of winners,
and the swearing of losers. She also glimpsed a snatch of red hair.
There were, of course, a lot of people with red hair there, many of
them women, but that particular shade was the one she had been
looking at for the last several hundred miles. Sure enough, there
was the Debauchery Devil, who, having made a lightning change of
clothing into a red-sequined strapless number, was all snuggled up
to some boy who didn't look old enough to drink, much less gamble.
The boy grinned as he raked in his winnings.

"I didn't think you ever did anything nice
for anybody," Gussie said to the redhead.

"Why, sure, honey. In this place they call
me Lady Luck. Now that I've encouraged that sweet young thing, he's
going to be a true love of mine the rest of his life. Doubt if
he'll ever get over me."

"I see."

"Oh, don't be so prim and schoolmarmish.
Honestly, for a bartender you are the awfulest old prude."

"I'm just not sure I believe this," Gussie
said. "You seem to be a whole passel of people."

The redhead deserted the young man with a
peck on the cheek. "Okay, I'll show you," she told Gussie. "What's
your pleasure?"

"I don't even play Lotto."

"Well, not here you don't, but if you wanted
to I could fix it for you. To tell you the truth, I'm partial to
poker myself, and the horses. The boss says I'm reactionary—still
kinda like tradition. The cards and I go a long way back, what with
tarot and all. You play poker?"

"I don't reckon I have enough to get in a
game around here," Gussie said.

"Sure you do, sugar. Whatcha got on
you?"

"About twenty-five dollars."

"Get you some quarters and try the one-armed
bandits."

"No. I need that money."

"Don't be such a spoilsport. Come
on.
One
quarter."

"Okay. Just one," Gussie said grimly, and
she dropped her quarter into a slot and waited. Torchy-Lulubelle
didn't wait, however. With a bored look on her face she thumped the
machine with the heel of her hand, and the pictures all came up
dollar signs while the coins came pouring out. "Now there's your
stake. Let's go play us some poker."

As they passed the line of people dressed in
splashy sequined and beaded dresses and tuxedos, Gussie couldn't
help craning her neck to see who was in the floor show. "What is
it?"

"Just another damn lecture."

"But I can see there's chorus girls or
something on the sign even though I can't see what it says."

"Yeah. Well, it's about how to use sex in
advertising."

"No singers or dancers or comedians?"

"Shoot, no. Nobody wants that stuff anymore.
Where's the profit? Although they do have some snappy advertising
jingles during the lecture, and the chorus girls do lots of high
kicks to keep the audience interested. It's all the rage these days
to have meaningful, profitable entertainment. Part of what my boss
is promotin'. Now how 'bout that game of poker?"

"I feel more like another tequila
sunset. A
lecture
?
Really
? What have things come to?
That's the most boring damned excuse for a show I ever
heard."

"Yeah, they don't pass out programs anymore,
just informational pamphlets. Barrel of laughs."