The Five (19 page)
“Why are they calling it that?” The Little Genius’s question into the phone snagged Nomad’s attention. George was silent again as Ash spoke. Nomad propped himself up on a pillow, watching George’s facial expressions to get some clue of the conversation. “We’re supposed to hear from them this morning,” George said. “I guess they’ll tell us we can leave.”
Talking about the detectives, Nomad thought.
“So…what’s the deal?” At this question, Nomad’s ears again went up. “Better than what? Fifty percent?”
Berke and Ariel returned to the room, one with a hand pressed to her stomach and the other rubbing the side of her neck. In the bathroom, Berke had gotten down a couple of glasses of water and felt a little better. She was deciding whether or not to pursue this tale of the farmhouse shooter.
“Jesus,” George said. “Is he really
serious
?”
The toilet’s flush announced Terry’s exit from the bathroom. He looked quizzically at Nomad, who replied with a shrug.
George scratched his chin. “Can he go to seventy-five percent on the merchandise?”
“What’s he talking about?” Berke asked, but no one could respond.
Nomad didn’t want to say, but it sounded to him as if George and Ash were talking about a gig. He remembered, not without some bitterness, George’s voice of reason in the Subway last night:
We’re going home in the morning. Tour cancelled. All done
.
Well, it was morning, the tour was cancelled and The Five were all done. So what was this shit about?
“I hear you. I understand,” said the voice of reason. “I’ll run it by everybody. Yeah.” He nodded, as more instructions came through the digital air from Austin. “Okay, thanks,” he said, and put his cellphone away. Then he sat exactly where he was without moving, staring at the floor, as second after second ticked past.
“Are you going to make us
guess
?” Berke asked sharply, which was a very good sign.
“You would never,” George answered in a quiet, measured voice, “guess this in the proverbial million years.” He looked first at Nomad, then at the others. “Trey Yeager left a message for Ash last night. He wants us to keep the date at the Spinhouse.” Yeager was the Spinhouse’s booking manager, had been in the business for about thirty years at various clubs across the Southwest. “That’s not all. They want to bump us up to headliner. It’s a little more money, but Ash thinks we can get a way better percentage on merchandise.”
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 had 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 wristwatch 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.
You’re not lost
, Gunny had said, but Jeremy hadn’t recalled speaking aloud.
You’ve been
found
.
Don’t you get that
?
Maybe Jeremy shook his head; he didn’t know.
Pull off where you can see the highway
, Gunny repeated. The voice was soft, caring, almost fatherly.
Then we’ll straighten some things out
.
Jeremy sped past another exit.
Gunny said,
Oh, my
.
Don’t you know yet that without me
you’re nothing
?
So…if you want
to be nothing again, you can stop at the next gas station and let me out.
Jeremy stared straight ahead. In another moment he realized he was alone, because he could no longer see Gunny from the corner of his eye. Yet he knew he’d always been alone; what he saw and heard as the image of his gunnery sergeant from training school wasn’t there and had never been. It was something from within, just like when a lonely person starts talking to the mirror. He remembered some line from a movie, maybe he’d seen it on the base in Iraq, where the guy says you’re not crazy if you talk to yourself in the mirror, but if you answer back you’ve gotta be fucking nuts.
He thought his image of Gunny, just as regulation spit-polished, side-walled and crisply buttoned-up as the man had been in real life, had to do with perfection. Maybe it was how he himself had wanted to be…had
planned
on being, until things messed up. He could’ve been an instructor at the school, no doubt about it. He could’ve served a long and useful life in the Corps.
Semper Fi
, that’s what it was all about. So he knew that Gunny wasn’t there, could never really be there, but he would accept any part of Gunny he could get because it took him back to when he was somebody, doing something important in this world.
It occurred to him as he was driving eastward, about midway between Sweetwater and Abilene, that his fingers on the steering-wheel seemed longer than he recalled. The knuckles were thicker, too. He wasn’t excusing himself for those poor shots—no way, he was a professional—but his long fingers might have fouled up his trigger pull. It was something he hadn’t noticed until now, and it hit him like a small shock that he did not recognize his own hands. When he moved the fingers, they rippled on the steering-wheel like the legs of a spider touched by a hot needle. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw with a strike of terror that one eye was the wrong color, and then he started talking himself down, muttering and gasping things that had meaning for him, like
grape popsicle
and
their daughter Judy
and
my name is Gladiator, my name is Gladiator, my name is Gladiator
. Until finally his spider-fingered hands pulled the pickup off at the next exit and Jeremy stopped at a gas station to get a cup of coffee.
He left the truck parked at the far corner of the lot, its bug-smeared grill aimed toward I-20.
It is nearly one o’clock by Jeremy’s watch. In this pretend playhouse, with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ now cranking from the speakers and the flamehaired girl taking her turn on the pole, the Hispanic dentist has had enough beers, even of the watered variety, to be swaying in his chair. Miss Ponytail is always a tit’s touch away from him, guarding her gold mine. Jeremy has been to three other joints like this tonight. The first and second had a security guard out front, patrolling the parking lot, the third had floodlights and video cameras up on the corners of the building, but this one out in an industrial area is a windowless cinderblock slab designated by a portable sign on wheels to be Club Salvaje, Where The Wild Angels Play. There are lights in the parking lot, but they’re angled so they throw huge pools of black shadow amid the cars, SUVs and trucks. Up on the building itself are two video cameras aimed down at the front door, which might have been a problem except for the fact that Jeremy thinks they’re fakes because no red Record lights are showing. He thinks this joint is too cheap, too temporary, to afford a real video security system. The batteries for the false lights have probably burned out.
He needs money. He’s used his credit card too much as it is, for gas, food and motel rooms; it was on the critical list when he left Temple, and pretty soon it’s going to be shut down. If he doesn’t have enough cash, the police will be called and that won’t help him any. He was out last night, hitting some other strip clubs, spending his money on the crappy beer because they won’t let him sit in these places if he doesn’t buy something. But no opportunities had come up. He hasn’t eaten today, saving his last few dollars for tonight. He watches the Hispanic dentist, and he wonders where in the lot is the man’s car parked.
If you have any doubt about what you’re doing
, Gunny had said when Jeremy was back in the pickup with a styrofoam cup of coffee and a Milky Way bar,
know that you’re making a
new life for yourself
.
You’re coming out of retirement
.
How does that feel
?
Jeremy hadn’t answered, because if he did he would be talking to himself. His fingers were okay now, his hands back to what they were. He checked his eye in the rearview mirror and found that it too had returned to normal.
You’ve missed being useful
, said Gunny.
Being needed for a task
.
A mission
.
Being the go-to guy. That was everything to you, wasn’t it
?
Jeremy slid down a little in his seat and watched the passage of traffic going east and west on I-20.
Everything
, Gunny repeated.
Well, you’ve got a mission again. Maybe you’re not as good as you used to be, but hey…who is
? This time Gunny didn’t pause for a response.
You’re still very talented. Very able. And you still enjoy the hunt, don’t you?