It was the damnedest thing. He was falling backward as if on a reverse rollercoaster, a fast trip, a breathtaking trip, and there was nothing he could do but fall. And in this falling, this ultimate repositioning, he possessed a life in rewind. He passed through a whirlwind of bands and gigs and smoky clubs; he went back past a table full of whiskey bottles, back past a jail cell that smelled of swampy August; he passed his daughter Sara, and he thought to try to touch her cheek, or her hair, or her shoulder, but too late, too late, she was gone; he went back past bad-ass cars and sorry-ass cars and pick-me-up trucks, and bass axes of many colors; he passed a white dog and a black dog and the face of Grover McFarland watching him with stern disapproval under a yellow lamp; he fell backward past many faces, many shadows, through a place of darkness and despair, and then in what seemed the last light of summer, the sad light, the light of saying goodbye to all that was, a hand with freckles across the back of it reached out of nowhere and grasped his hand, and a familiar voice said, very clearly:
Gotcha
.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
There was a second or two of silence, while Berke stared at the fine mist of blood that reddened the air where Mike had been standing. She saw that he’d dropped the doughnuts, but he had clamped hard to the beef jerky. His left eye had turned a vicious shade of crimson, and blood had begun to trickle from the hole in his head.
Even as Berke made a noise—a scream, choked sob or anguished moan, whatever it was she couldn’t hear it—the young trooper was running toward her, and when he saw the wound in the fallen man’s head and the bullet hole in the window he drew his own Sig Saur .357 semi-automatic service pistol. His eyes were wild; he was well-trained, yes, but two bullets from the blue had a way of turning anyone’s Sunday afternoon a little chaotic. He shouted, “Everybody on the ground!” as he made a rotating scan with the pistol held in a double-handed firing grip. Nomad took a step forward, and the trooper levelled the pistol at him and yelled, “I said on the ground
now
!” because he didn’t know who had a gun or not, where the shots had come from, or really what the shit was happening. So Nomad dropped, Ariel dropped, Berke fell to her knees beside Mike’s body and, numbly, grasped his arm to shake him conscious, and alerted by the noise George came out of the bathroom pulling his pants up. “Get down!
Down
!” the trooper commanded behind his weapon. George went down, holding his arms out in a posture of surrender.
“You! Out of the van!” the trooper shouted at Terry, who immediately slithered from it and lay spread-eagled on the pavement. When the woman who ran the station emerged, with the boy behind her, the trooper told her in Spanish to get back inside, and she was trying to tell him that a piece of flying glass had hit Carlos and he was bleeding from the chin. Then she saw the body on the concrete and she backed up and the boy with the gashed chin gawked and started taking pictures with a cellphone camera.
“Get down! Get down! Get down!” the trooper hollered, his voice ragged, as he advanced on Berke with his pistol aimed and ready.
She was shivering. There were tears in her eyes, and she couldn’t seem to draw a whole breath. But it occurred to her, in a blank cold place beyond the horror, that she ought to tell him disco was dead.
And so too, she realized, was her buddy, her rhythm twin, her rough elbow to cling to.
She lay down beside him, on the hot pavement, and suddenly she was aware of a breakage within herself, a rupture, a failure of a weak seam that had never before known such pressure. She began to weep quietly at first, and then began to openly and brokenly sob as she had not cried since she was a girl too young to keep a cold lid on her cup of pain.
Her friend was dead, and dead too was The Five.
Dead, dead, deader than dead.
EIGHT.
George stared at the black telephone. Your basic landline, no nonsense here.
“Nine to get out?” he asked, and the chunky detective, the guy who was always wearing the cowboy hat, nodded. The second detective, a foxy Hispanic woman in her mid-thirties with manicured red fingernails and eyes like pools of bittersweet chocolate, was watching him from her chair across the table.
George punched the nine, got the outside line and then dialed the rest of the number. He made a note of the time from the clock on the white plaster wall. They didn’t want him to use his cellphone. They were going to sit in here and listen, and George figured the call was going to be recorded. The detectives were smalltown, but there was nothing soft or lax about them; they were interested in all the details, even what George was about to say. They made him as nervous as hell, and he hadn’t even
done
anything.
The number rang in Austin. On the third ring, Ash’s machine answered and left the usual message:
I can’t pick up right now, but after the tone leave a yadda yadda yadda
. George had realized before that Ash had a little bit of a lisp, but it was very pronounced on the machine.
“Ash, it’s George,” he said when the tone sounded. “If you’re there, pick up.” He waited a couple of seconds. “I mean it, man. Really. Pick up like right now.”
There was a click and Ash was there. A problem? Ash wanted to know.
“Listen,” George said. And something about his voice made Ash repeat the question, only now in his firmest big boy agent inflection. “Mike Davis…” How to say this? Just the truth and nothing but. “Mike Davis has been shot,” George went on. “He’s been killed. He’s dead.” Like it had to be repeated. There was utter silence from Austin. “It happened about a hour and a half ago, a few miles east of Sweetwater. We’re at the police station right now. In Sweetwater. Wait, wait, wait,” George said, when Ash started asking questions so fast the clipped Indian accent was getting in the way. “Let me tell you. We were at a gas station. Mike and Berke were talking out front and all of a sudden…a bullet got him in the head.” God, that sounded weird! Like something from any number of action flicks, but when it was real it was stomach-churning. George had already taken his turn at puking in the bathroom. “They say he was probably dead…like…right then.” Ash started throwing more questions at him, rapid-fire, and the truth was that George had always had difficulty understanding him and now everything sounded like a freaking mashup of English and Hindi.
“About an hour and a half ago,” George said again, because he caught that question. “Yeah, yeah…everybody else is okay. I mean…we’re mindfucked, but we’re okay.” He paused, trying to grasp what Ash was asking. “No, they didn’t catch anybody. They think…” He looked across the table at the woman. “Can I tell him?”
She nodded.
“They think maybe it was an accident. They don’t know exactly yet where the bullets came from, but they’re thinking it was from some woods across the highway. Yeah, I said
bullets
. There were two shots. They think maybe somebody was in there shooting a rifle, just dicking around.” The detectives had told George that the little cluster of thorny scrub-brush and trees, maybe sixty yards wide on the other side of a cinderblock building where truck engines were repaired, drew shooters after what they called ‘varmints’. There were rats, gophers and snakes in that mess, and kids with rifles shot it up. The repair shop had been closed, so nobody had seen or heard anything, and likewise from a few ramshackle old houses over there. “No, right now they have no idea who it was,” George said.
The deal was, though George felt no need to say this, the detectives thought it might be an accident just from the distance involved. The repair shop was two hundred yards on the other side of I-20 and the varmint woods was another hundred and fifty yards, at least. So it looked like an errant, careless couple of shots—high-velocity, for sure, but that wasn’t so unusual, they said—that had carried right across the highway.
“They’ll know more later,” George said. “They’ve got cops swarming all over the place.” When the Scumbucket had pulled away from the pumps, following the car the two detectives were in, the gas station had been secured with the yellow crime scene tape and it looked like a parking lot for police cars and paramedic vehicles. A slim yellow metal tube had been pushed through the hole in the window to show the angle of entry. What looked like a surveyor’s tripod with a monocular attached had been set up in line with the yellow tube, aimed at the varmint woods across I-20. Over there were more police cars. The cops were prying the first bullet out of the station’s rear wall. George assumed they would also remove the second bullet from Mike’s brain, but when the Scumbucket had pulled out The Five—ex-Five—had left their bass player under a sheet on the pavement. George had been glad to be leaving, because he’d seen a body bag being taken out of the back of a white truck and the way Berke was so torn up…it was for the best they were getting out.
“The thing is,” George went on, “they want to notify the next-of-kin. No, they want to do it from here. Right. So…I don’t have that information. I know his parents still live in Bogalusa, but…yeah, right. Would you do that?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to the detectives, “He’s looking it up on his laptop.”
They waited.
“You guys were on the way to El Paso,” the woman said, without expression. It had been explained to her, the whole story, and she’d already checked their website, but around the station she was called ‘the Digger’, with those long red spade-shaped nails. The title was on her coffee cup. She could not stop until she got to the bottom. They were a team: Lucky Luke and the Digger, known to the general public as detectives Luke Halprey and Ramona Rios.
“Yeah,” George answered.
“Going straight through, then,” Lucky Luke said, chewing on a toothpick.
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Emerson, I have to ask you…do any of you owe money to anyone here? And by ‘anyone’, I mean a person who might feel they’re not going to be repaid and may be…um…a little vindictive about it?” asked the Digger.
“No. Well…I don’t. Owe anybody money,” he clarified. “What’re you saying? That this was a ‘
hit
’? Over money? I thought you said it was an accident.”
It was Luke’s turn to clarify. “
Might
be an accident, that’s what was said.”
“How about drugs?” The Digger’s arched black eyebrows went up. “Anybody gotten on the wrong side of a dealer?”
“No! Hell, no! We’ve never
played
this area before. How would a shooter even know we were
here
?”
“That would my next question,” said the lucky one. “Did you stop at that station because maybe you had a meeting planned with somebody?”
“Think about that before you answer, Mr. Emerson,” the Digger cautioned.
“No
. I mean…we didn’t have any meeting planned. Wait a minute…go ahead,” George told Ash, who gave him the number in Bogalusa. He relayed the number to the detectives, and Luke wrote it down on a notepad that advertised Big Boys Barbecue. Then came the moment that George had known was coming and that had to be done. “I guess that’s it,” he said, and when Ash didn’t respond George spoke with what felt like a stone sitting in his gut, “We’ll work out how to get Mike back, and then we’ll come on in.”
“We’d like you to stay here tonight,” the Digger told him. “Let us call around, just to check some things.”
“Stay
here
?” George asked, stricken by the thought of sleeping in a police station.
“A motel,” Luke supplied. “Get a good night’s rest.”
“Oh. Okay.” George turned his attention back to the matter at hand. “They want us to stay here tonight. And listen…you might as well start making the calls.” Ash said he would, and that he was so sorry for this senseless tragedy and there would never be another bass player like Mike Davis, and for George to tell everyone else how sorry he felt. “One more thing,” George said. “A woman from the local paper was here and asked us some questions. She said she wouldn’t file the story until the cops gave her the go-ahead. I just wanted you to know.”
Ash thanked him for that, then said he would immediately call Roger Chester.
“Are we done here?” George asked, and Luke told him the band members could follow them over to the Lariat Motel on East Broadway, get them checked in, and that there was a Subway nearby where they could eat dinner. Not said, but what George certainly felt, was that the detectives wanted to keep a rope around them and that the questions were far from finished.
He had his own questions. Who on this God’s earth would have wanted to kill Mike Davis? And in
Sweetwater
? No, it had to have been an accident. A kid in the varmint woods. Had to be.
< >
In another room, a TV was tuned to the Weather Channel. The four people who sat on the orange plastic chairs in this room pretended to be watching it. Nomad had always thought that the Weather Channel was a kind of Zen; it emptied your head with its colorful images and soothed your mind with the illusion of control. Right now they needed all the Zen they could get.
A policeman came through to ask something of Lucky Luke and the Digger. Berke, who sat apart from the others and was wearing Nomad’s sunglasses on her pallid face, sat up straight and called out in a strident voice, “Did you find it yet?”
The policeman, unnerved, looked to the detectives for help. The Digger said calmly, “We’ll let you know when we find it. I promise.”
Berke settled back in her chair. Her lips tightened. A weather map sparkling with sun symbols reflected in her glasses.
Nomad glanced quickly at Ariel, who sat a few chairs away with Terry on her other side. She was hollow-eyed and wan, and she occasionally made a catching sound in her throat as if awakening with a start from a very bad dream. Terry stared alternately at the television and at the floor, his eyes heavy-lidded behind his specs.
“We’re going to a motel,” the Little Genius announced. “Stay there tonight.”
“You take them over,” the Digger said to her partner, in a quiet voice. She took the Big Boys Barbecue pad with the phone number on it. “I’ll do this one.”
Nomad didn’t think he could stand up. To an outsider, he might have appeared the most composed of the shattered group. He might have seemed the least in shock, the most able to bear this tragedy and to rebound the fastest from it. But the outsider would have been criminally incorrect.
In the past ninety minutes, he had relived his own personal nightmare a hundred times over.
< >
Johnny,
there’s no roadmap
.
But.
It had been different that night. That August 10th, 1991. A Saturday, outside the Shenanigans Club in Louisville. Nearing midnight, and in a parking lot bathed in blue and green neon Dean Charles and the Roadmen starting to pack up the van after opening for the Street Preachers. John was a boy, a son, a fan. Dad was the bomb, the Killer. Played a gold-colored Strat that could cut through an arrangement like a razor through a hamhock. And
sing
…that man could wail. He was a bottle full of lightning. Up there on stage, front-and-center in the godly glow, all that power coming off him, all that energy and life. He was one of a kind.
And then out in that parking lot, when they saw the two flat tires on the van, the old blue cat sitting crooked on her paws, and somebody said, “Oh, shit,” and somebody else growled, “Motherfucker!” because John was one of them, he had heard it all, he was a veteran of the road even at twelve years old.
Dean had looked at his son and shrugged and grinned in that way he had of saying nothing in this world was such a big deal that it tugged you out of shape, you could always find your way back to the center of the cool world the musician lived in, and he said as he always did in such situations, “Johnny, there’s no roadmap.” Then he’d paused just a second or two, maybe thinking it over for the first time, and he’d said to his son with that slip-sided smile, “
But…
”
“I’m gonna end it now,” said the man who had just stepped out from his crouch behind a parked car, and Dean had regarded him only with mild surprise, as if expecting a visitor who was late in coming.
< >
John had been standing next to his father when the pistol in the man’s hand spoke. It had shouted into his father’s left ear, and John remembered how his father had winced at the loud noise, because his father had always cautioned John to guard his hearing, he only had one set of ears.
The pistol had gone off twice more as Dean Charles was falling, a whiff of gunpowder and a smell of blood in John’s nostrils, the boy falling back in shock, falling as his father fell, one to be called dead four hours later in the hospital and the other left behind to relive the moment over and over again.
“I have to find it,” Berke said, but to whom she was speaking was unclear. She hadn’t moved from her chair.
“It’ll turn up.” George stood over her. “Come on, it’s time to go.”
Nomad counted slowly to three, and then he got to his feet. As he followed the others out of the police station into the solid heat of late afternoon, he thought how ridiculous this situation was. How utterly fucking ridiculous. Two days ago he’d been burdened with the fact that The Five would end their last tour in Austin on the 16th of August—the Month of Death, as far as he was concerned—and then it would be back to putting another band together, another name, another vibe, another set of personalities—and here he was, here
they
were, on the real last day come way too soon. And Mike dead.
Dead
. He had experience with sudden death, yeah, but at least he’d found out later that his father, one of the wiliest tomcatters to ever sneak in a housewife’s back door, was responsible for a Louisville beauty-shop operator divorcing an out-of-work husband who owned ten guns. It would have made a farce, a black comedy directed by the Coen brothers starring George Clooney, but with blue contacts, and to complete the tragedy the man who had shot Dean Charles had walked about five yards away and shot himself under the chin, leaving behind two more children who would always feel an empty hole at their birthday parties. So as terrible as that was, it had made sense. But
this…
if he believed in God, which he did not, he would have heard the sound of cruel cosmic laughter, funny to no one else. Now he had to stop seeing Mike fall down over and over again in his mind, and he had to stop hearing Berke’s strangled scream or he was going to lose it right here on the Sweetwater street.