A Song to Die For (35 page)

Passing by the bar, he stepped into a dark hallway that led to the owner's office. He checked the pull of his automatic tucked in the back of his jeans. A light came from the open doorway of the owner's office. He heard voices—Kathy, Luster, and the owner.

He tiptoed down the hall and listened.

“Well, you can't get blood out of a goddamn turnip,” Karl's voice was saying.

Kathy: “And we didn't just fall off the turnip truck, either.”

Her spunk impressed Creed, but he didn't like the tone of the confrontation.

“Let's go over this again,” Luster said, remaining the calm voice of reason. “You've got the contract right there in front of you. You signed it. It guarantees us a thousand dollars for this show.”

“That was an obvious mistake,” Karl complained. “It should have guaranteed you the door
up to
a thousand dollars. The door only took in six hundred.”

“You signed the contract,” Kathy scolded. “You should have read it more carefully. You owe us four hundred more dollars and we're not leaving without it!”

“What am I supposed to do?” Karl said. “Pull it out of my ass?”

As Creed walked back toward the bar, he heard Luster continuing to play good cop: “I'd say you sold several thousand dollars worth of beer tonight…”

Creed stepped out of the hallway and back into the barroom. “Hey!” he said to the bartender. “I need to talk to you.”

“What do you want? I'm a little busy here.”

Creed drew his autoloader and cocked it. The bartender heard it, and looked. Tump and Trusty also turned—Trusty shocked, Tump bemused.

“Are you armed?” Creed said.

The bartender shook his head.

“Come here. Get your hands up.”

“Are you robbin' me?” The barkeep lumbered out from behind his bar.

“Just gettin' paid. Assume the position.” Creed noted that the barkeep knew what that meant. He leaned on his own bar and Creed quickly patted him down in the obvious places. “Where does your boss keep the cash?”

The bartender looked at the muzzle of the forty-five. “Bottom left-hand desk drawer. The drawer that locks. Can you get my last week's pay, too? I've been livin' on tips.”

“You're on your own there, Slick. Now get in the men's room and stay there. Tump, Trusty … Don't let him out of the crapper.”

Tump got up from his bar stool and grabbed a pool cue off the rack. Trusty just stared, his mouth hanging open.

“Easy, boys,” said the barkeep as he headed for the men's room. “You won't have any trouble from me.”

Tump tossed a second pool cue at Trusty. “Go outside and watch the men's room window. Don't let him out of there.”

Trusty caught the cue stick and ran for the front door.

Creed slipped back down the hallway, pausing to listen long enough to determine that the stalemate still held fast, the owner refusing to pay, in spite of the contract he had signed.

Karl: “… your slick, big-city booking agents and their tricky, goddamn contracts.”

Luster: “Son, I am ten times the country boy you are, and where I come from a deal is a deal.”

Creed eased the hammer down on his sidearm so that he could recock it in Karl's fat, red face when the moment came. The sound of that hammer latching back always had a stirring effect. He peeked into the doorway to check out the best approach.

“I'll tell you what,” Karl was saying. “Let me see what I can find in here.” With that, the seedy barman opened a drawer, pulled out an ancient little revolver, and lay it on the desktop for all to see. “Oh, well, lookie there!”

Perfect. Creed charged in, his automatic leading the way. Luster quickly gathered his intent, and reached for the revolver on Karl's desk. Kathy gasped. Karl rolled back in his chair, his hands reaching for the ceiling. The moment came. Creed cocked the weapon in Karl's face.

“Whoa, now!” the bar owner said.

“Roll your fat ass over in the corner and shut up!” Creed ordered.

Karl scooted his wheeled office chair up against a stack of beer cases.

“Cover him, Boss.”

“I got him, Hoss.”

“Kathy, stand over here, please,” Creed said.

With half of the room cleared the way he wanted it, Creed angled his muzzle down toward the lock on the desk drawer and blasted a bullet hole in its place.

Kathy screamed. “Sorry, I wasn't ready for that.”

Creed forced the wrecked drawer open, grinning at the gunpowder smoke that stung his nostrils.

“Kathy, you want to count out what he owes us?”

Coolly, she grabbed a stack of twenties. “Uh-oh. This stack has a bullet hole in it from somewhere.” She left the damaged twenties on the desk, reached in for another stack, and began counting with bank-teller precision.

Creed heard footsteps coming rapidly down the hallway. Trusty Joe's face appeared, eyes wide. “Everything okay?” He had a pool stick in his hand, holding it at the ready like a club.

“We're fine. Go back to your post.”

Trusty scurried away as Kathy finished counting the four hundred. “I've got it, Creed.” She shook her finger at the bar owner. “You messed with the wrong band, mister!”

Karl frowned, and rolled his eyes. He was getting tired of holding his hands up.

Creed grabbed the cord leading to the telephone on the desk, took a couple wraps around his fist, and ripped it from the wall.

“Now, why'd you have to do that?” Karl groaned. “What am I gonna do, call the sheriff? That son-of-a-bitch hates me.”

“Well, he loves us!” Luster sang. “But you won't be callin' any of your gun-totin' redneck pals or inbred cousins now, either, will you?”

“No need to get personal!”

“Stepping out of this bar before we're gone down the road a good piece would not be healthy,” Creed warned.

Kathy shook the money at the owner. “Nice doing business with you, Karl,” she said with royal sarcasm.

They all backed out of the office, into the hallway.

“You'll never play the Red Rooster again, you cocksuckers!” Karl shouted after them.

Passing through the barroom, they collected Tump. Kathy was tugging at the cord of the phone behind the bar, so Tump angled her way, grabbed it, and helped her pull it loose. He also grabbed a bottle of scotch for the road. As they passed through the front door, Tump whistled for Trusty, who came running from the men's room window.

Luster was the last to exit the building, guarding the retreat with his captured revolver. “See if the bus will start, Hoss!” he ordered.

Creed jumped aboard and cranked the ignition. The starter growled, but the Detroit diesel refused to fire. He heard Kathy praying behind him. He tried the ignition again and the engine turned over. Luster chunked the revolver onto the roof of the saloon and jumped aboard the Silver Eagle. Creed drove off with the muzzle of his pistol stuck out of the driver's window, but saw no one emerge from the dark saloon. Trusty Joe Crooke started howling like some kind of desperado who had just robbed a train. He still had the pool cue in his hand as a souvenir.

*   *   *

An hour later, Creed was watching the white lines roll past the bus, safely out of the county and onto Interstate 10. Metro, Trusty, and Lindsay had found bunks and turned in. Tump was sitting right behind Creed at the bus's Formica-covered dinette table. Having drunk half his bottle of scotch, he started blubbering about some vague, horrible thing he had done.

Kathy sat beside him. Creed could keep an eye on her in the rearview, the headlights of oncoming cars painting weird patterns on her pretty face.

“What are you talking about, Tump?” Kathy asked him.

“I didn't mean to, Mama. I swear, I didn't mean to…” he slurred, then passed out with his face on the dinette table of the rocking bus.

“Is he going to be all right?” Kathy asked.

“As long as he doesn't start drinkin' like that before the gig, he'll be all right,” Luster said, cracking open a beer. He sat in the front, right-hand bench seat where Creed could glance at him over his shoulder.

“I didn't mean as a band member,” Kathy said. “I meant as a human being.”

Luster shrugged. “He's a bass player, not a human being.” He laughed along with Creed. “Anyway, he's a grown man. I've seen worse.”

Kathy sighed. “Okay … That was crazy tonight. Does that happen often?”

Creed spoke over his shoulder as he drove. “Tomahawk should have known better than to book that gig. You need to chew some ass over there, Kathy. Tell them no more honky dives.”

“I will!” She took the beer Luster gave her. “Have you ever seen anything like that before, Luster?”

“Here and there,” he admitted. “More so in the old days.”

“What about that shootout outside of Fort Worth?” Creed asked. “Any truth to that?”

Luster pretended to search his memory. “Oh, on the Jacksboro Highway? Aw, that was no big deal.”

“Shootout?” Kathy said, intrigued.

Luster chuckled a little and leaned back in his seat. “There was a rough strip of nightclubs out there in those days. I had some money coming in, so I bought one of those clubs. I had figured out that if you own the bar, you don't have to audition. So when I was off tour, I always had a place to play if I wanted to.”

“What did your wife think about owning a bar?” Kathy said, her upper lip a cute snarl in Creed's mirror.

“She didn't like it. I asked her if she wanted to run the bar with me, and she said, ‘No way! You'd be PR, and I'd be peon!' She refused to have anything to do with it. I should have listened to her in the first place. That place almost got me killed.”

“What happened?” Kathy scooted to the edge of her perch.

“Well, the mob was trying to move in on the Jacksboro Highway and take over the whole strip. One day, this little piss-ant Mafia wannabe punk who called himself Josh Gold, or Goldie, came into my bar—I called it Luster's Last Stand—real clever, huh? Anyway, this Goldie character came in there and tried to extort some protection money from me. I threw him out by the scruff of his neck.

“Next thing you know, he comes back with two thugs. I got the drop on 'em with a scattergun. I marched 'em out into the parking lot and told 'em I'd give 'em ten seconds head start, and that bird shot would hurt a lot less the farther away they got. I peppered their asses pretty good with some number nine pellets. Didn't hurt 'em much, but I had made my statement.”

“That was the gunfight?” Kathy said.

“No, that was just the prelude. Goldie came back and tried to ambush me in the parking lot a few nights later. He was trying to make a name for himself as a mobster, and I had embarrassed him pretty bad. He was out for blood. The two of us shot up the parking lot pretty good until I got off a lucky shot on a ricochet and caught him in the butt cheek. He was hurtin' so bad he couldn't run. My car had a flat tire from a bullet hole, so we took his car, and I drove him to the hospital.”

Creed cracked up, the bus careening around a curve, the wheel wallowing around the steering column in his hand. “You shot the guy, then drove him to the hospital in his own car?”

“Seemed like the right thing to do. I gave Goldie enough time to get out of Texas, and then put in a police report, so he couldn't rightly come back and mess with me again without flirting with some jail time. Last I heard, he was out in Vegas, working as a collector for some casino boss.”

“Well, that was exciting tonight,” Kathy said, “but I'd prefer not having to do that again.”

“You stood right in there with us,” Creed said. “You did good.”

“Creed's right. You showed some spunk with that big peckerwood, Karl.”

“I can stand my ground if I'm sure I'm right. We had a contract. Still, we need to be playing a higher class of venue.”

“To say the least. I felt like I was back in a garage band back there.”

“Aw, just think how nice Houston will feel by contrast,” Luster said, always looking for a bright side.

Kathy yawned. “No doubt. I'm going to crawl up into the top bunk and get some rest for tomorrow, gentlemen. I'll see you two in the morning.”

Creed glanced over his shoulder long enough to wink and smile at the band manager, then trained his eyes back on the highway.

After she walked aft, bouncing side-to-side in the swaying bus, Luster handed Creed a beer—his first of the night.

“You reckon you ought to be winking at our band manager that way?”

“I had something in my eye.”

“Right.”

 

36

CHAPTER

Franco had been told by his admiring colleagues in organized crime that he had eyes in the back of his head. There was no truth to that, in a literal sense, of course. But in many ways, Franco could sense what was going on behind him, without the benefit of another set of eyes trained aft. It was just common sense born of a desire for self-preservation. Franco considered his life just too good to leave behind. He was not going to be blindsided.

So, how did he do it? Well, first of all, you didn't sit with your back to the room. The famous old-west gunfighter Wild Bill Hickock knew that rule, had violated it once, and lost his life because of it. You sat with your back to the wall—better yet, a corner. And you didn't sit with your back to a window where somebody could whack you from outside.

That much was simple. That was putting yourself in a place where you didn't really need eyes in the back of your head. But when you got up from that table and walked out onto the street, you had better know how to see, smell, hear, and feel what was going on behind you.

Take tonight for example. Standing at the bar in a place called Maggae Mae's on Sixth Street, using the mirror behind the bar to watch his back, Franco had spotted the guy in the arm sling staring at him. Franco had been asking around for a couple days about Charles Biggerstaff Jr. of the stupid stage name. So far, no one knew, or even knew of, a musician by that name. Maybe Junior had changed his stupid stage name by now. Maybe word had gotten around that someone was asking. Maybe that was Junior in the arm sling.