Her sister had been the closest to her in age, but six years can become a vast distance. Her brother, the Boston lawyer, rarely visited because their mother hated his wife, a situation that caused rancorous arguments between her parents since the girl was the daughter of one of Edward Collier’s partners. Ariel—christened ‘Susan’, but who’d taken that name from a British nanny who used to play guitar for her when she was a little girl—watched her parents descend into a pattern of chaos, a script of drinking and fighting that made her believe things had gone wrong between them years before she was born. It seemed to center around Ariel’s brother, Andrew. But nothing was ever solved in the uneasy calm after the turbulence, and Ariel came to realize at an early age that her mother and father both needed the other to flail them with recriminations, to atone for some secret guilt or acts of disloyalty.
Except for the presence of a number of nannies, she was alone for as long as she could recall. Alone in the deepest sense, alone as if she had been left in a basket at the front gate of this house within salt-scent of Manchester harbor and taken in by strangers who thought they could put their thumbprints upon a spirit. She had nothing against possessions, against the shiny and the beautiful and the faddish, but she did have something against becoming a slave to them.
Wasn’t there more to life than an existence, fevered by this year’s model and passion for a cellphone?
Wasn’t there?
She thought there was. Why she sought peace when her family revelled in chaos, why she valued books that told quiet, meaningful stories and were not written to encourage the application of Genghis Khan’s methods to modern business, why she heard music in the night breeze and saw poems on paper before they were written, she didn’t know. But she did, and what she’d told Felix Gogo was true; she couldn’t remember not hearing some kind of music and wanting to write down what she heard. Or, rather,
capture
what she heard, which was very often a difficult task because some tunes—like wild animals, or like John Charles for instance—resisted being put into neat small boxes for the pleasure of the public.
Ariel believed that a song was a living thing. It could burst into the world prematurely, ragged and half-formed, yes, but she thought the best of them—the most fully-realized, the most able to go the distance—grew slowly from a seed, gradually developing its heart and mind, over time becoming male or female in its attitude, its swagger or its contemplation. It grew skin lusty or lustrous, it preferred night or day for its rambles, it dressed itself in the leather or suede or gossamer of a million colors. And the ones she remembered being touched by when she was alone and lonely among strangers had some message to give to her. To
her
, even though it might have been written for a different generation, like ‘Wait For An Answer’ by Heart or ‘The Lady’ by Sandy Denny. They offered her some secret solace, some friendship like a hand on the shoulder, a whisper of
I have been where you are, and now where are you going?
Or they gave her a rap to the side of the head, to say
Wake up, girl, and get your ass in gear
,
because the thing that kills is a thing called fear
.
Which was also a line from one of her early tunes.
She had been gone from that house and the people who lived there long before she left. It had taken a handsome young man she’d met when she was playing her twelve-string Gibson in the Starbucks on Church Street in Cambridge to actually cut the last ties that held her to her old life. He was starting up a band, had a couple of players together who’d paid their dues in other bands, they were calling this band Blue Fly, and did she maybe want to audition. And he wasn’t promising anything, he’d said, but they had some interest from guys who actually managed hot bands like Big Top and Adam Raised A Cain, so there was that.
Awesome,
she remembered saying.
She thought it had been a relief to her mother and father, the day she’d told them she was quitting her job at Barnes & Noble in Brookline, that she was leaving the apartment she shared with two other young women, and that she was driving to Nashville with three ex-members of Blue Fly to start another band. She hoped she might get some session work there, too. She thought it had been a relief for her parents because they never once asked her to reconsider, or said that she was travelling too far from home, or that she wasn’t wise yet to the ways of the world.
Maybe her father was glad that at last she’d discovered her ambition, even if it was unfathomable to him as to how she would make any money; maybe her mother wanted to mourn in solitude the loss of years that no plastic surgeon could replace. Maybe they both too were alone, each in themselves; maybe it was a state of being for the Colliers of Manchester.
Whatever it was, Ariel could not help them, and so she put aside the thing called fear and went out to help herself.
That had been the spring of 2003. Her stay in Nashville had been little more than a year, working with the bands The Shamen and Strobe, before she’d headed to Austin with a new band who called themselves The Blessed Hours, and the rest was herstory.
The morning moved on. In front of the Scumbucket, the long gray stretch of I-10 baked and shimmered. They passed across the desert where it lapped up against truckstops and small towns built around cemeteries. Always mountains stood hazy against the horizon, the sky was cloudless and more white than blue as if the very color of heaven was burning away.
Since Mike’s death, a stop at the gas pumps to fill the Scumbucket’s tank brought everything back in terrifying detail. Berke would no longer leave the van, somebody else had to go get her bottled water for her and whatever else she wanted. Whoever was pumping the gas couldn’t help but look uneasily over their shoulder and scan the far distance, but what they were looking for they didn’t know. Everybody breathed better when the transaction was done and they were back in the Scumbucket pulling away, because the Scumbucket—ugly as it was, worn down and beaten up by the thousands of miles it had carried them—was their protection. But from what, no one could say.
Except for a twenty-minute creepy-crawl when traffic on I-10 was backed up by one of those situations where a car or a truck has broken down and everybody and their dashboard Jesus has to gawk at the wrecker, they made the Tucson city limits in plenty of time. Nomad had always liked Tucson when he’d lived there; it was a beautiful city, artsy-craftsy, bright Mexican colors, the San Xavier del Bac mission, the dry mesquite smell of the Sonoran desert, lots of golf courses drinking that precious water and lots of old people, sure, because it was a retirement haven, but there were lots of goths and metalheads in Tucson too. The University of Arizona kept the funk going. There was a pretty hot music scene, a healthy variety of clubs showcasing different styles, some very good and cheap restaurants and some way cool bars like the Surly Wench Pub and Snuffy’s. So in a way he felt he was back at his second home, though he didn’t care to revisit the grimy “musician’s special” apartment he’d lived in out on South Herbert Avenue.
Nomad had found them a way to save some money this time into Tucson, and he reminded George of the address and how to get there. They were staying for the night with the cousin of one of his old bandmates from Uppercut, which had lived and died within the space of six months, but the cousin was cool, he’d let them rehearse in his garage. The house was in a development northwest of the city. They got there without a problem, said their hellos to the cousin and his wife, unpacked their bags and had time to eat the ham sandwiches and taco chips that were graciously provided for their lunch. Then they turned around again and headed downtown, to the brown brick Fortunato’s on North Fourth Avenue, for their three-o’clock load-in and sound check.
The gear was unloaded, the check went well, management said the ticket sales were off the heezy, and everybody was in their groove. Their boxes of merchandise went into the same room where merchandise boxes of the other bands on the gig, The Yogi Barons and The Bella Kersey Band, were stored. The Five wasn’t on until around nine, so they climbed back into the Scumbucket and returned to the cousin’s house to grab a few hours of sleep, drink a beer or two, meditate over a candle, watch cage fight matches on cable and do whatever they needed to do to get up for the gig, each to their own.
Following a high-energy show by the Yogi Barons, The Five took the stage a little after nine and the pumped-up crowd gave a full-throated response to ‘Something From Nothing’. Without interruption the band went into ‘The Let Down’, another hard rocker opened by Ariel on her white Tempest. The gig was going like clockwork, everybody was loose and easy, the crowd was hollering when you wanted them to let loose and quieter when you wanted them to listen. Berke did her drum solo, cutting back on the time and the frenetics, and she allowed Terry to enter with his keyboard part when he was supposed to. Nomad broke an A string during ‘Your Body Not Your Soul’ but it was okay, he was playing for the angels tonight. Forty minutes later they did ‘When The Storm Breaks’, which earned a big positive, then they left the stage, waited for the audience buildup and returned to finish with a thunderous, wall-shaking version of ‘Blackout of Gretely’.
They met some fans backstage, had pictures taken, and did a quick question-and-answer with entertainment reporter Brad Lowell from
The Daily Star
, whom they knew from past trips through town. He praised their new CD, said he thought they were on their way to a breakthrough, and he would be the first to say
I told you so
. He touched only briefly on Mike’s death, but they couldn’t add anything he didn’t already know.
They settled in backstage to watch some of Bella Kersey’s band. They’d played several gigs with her before, and Ariel in particular was a big fan. Bella was in her mid-thirties, had long prematurely gray hair and the face of a serene earth mother, but she could kick out the jams and lay down some howling firepower with her cherry-red 1975 Gretsch Streamliner. The band was a family thing and they lived in Tucson; her husband played bass and her brother played drums. It was awesome to watch Bella work the crowd, her sultry voice soaring over the flaming chords. She punched the air with a fist and kicked it with a bright red cowboy boot. Then after a riotous rocker she went to her pedal steel and, bathed in blue light, did a slow, achingly-beautiful version of Shane McGowan’s ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’.
While Bella was playing, the Little Genius quietly said to Nomad, “I’ll go bring the trailer around.” He went out the stage door and back through the alley where the gear would be loaded.
The Scumbucket was parked in a lot on the next street over. Despite the tragic loss, George was feeling good about things. Anybody who might have been watching would have said he was walking like a man with places to go. The band had been hot tonight, very tight, the merchandise was moving, a check on the website said the CDs were selling now in the hundreds of copies, and the YouTube and MySpace hits were through the roof. Yeah, maybe it did have something to do with the kind of media shine that no band wanted, but there it was. Now there was the Casbah in San Diego to get ready for, and after that on Saturday the 2nd came the Big Show, the make or break, at the Cobra Club in Hollywood. The Sunset Strip, baby! What he had not told them—not yet, but he would—was that two A&R guys, one from Sonic Boom and the other from Manticore, were going to be in the audience.
Supposed
to be. Let’s hope.
He was going to leave them in good shape, with a future ahead of them. He owed them that much.
He showed his parking pass to the attendant on duty and walked across the lot, under the bright yellow security lights. He fished his keys from his pocket, unlocked the driver’s door and opened it, and he was thinking of finding a supermarket and buying a bottle of wine for their hosts when a hammerblow crashed into his right shoulder.
He thought that somebody had actually come up from behind and struck him, but when he spun around, gasping, no one was there.
George put his left hand to his shoulder. His shirt was wet. There was a hot throbbing pain, rapidly escalating. His shoulder felt knocked out of joint. He looked around, stunned. His glasses hung by one ear. It was getting harder to breathe; the breath had been knocked out of him, too. His heart…Jesus, it was really pumping…
He looked toward the attendant’s hut. Saw the blurred shape of the man sitting on a stool, watching the screen of a small TV.
It came to George’s mind to call out
Sir, I need some help please
.
But the words never left him, because another hammerblow hit him in the chest and he fell back against the Scumbucket. He tried to draw a breath but all he found was a gurgle of liquid. Something in his chest burned like a white-hot coal. He had to get it out, had to get rid of it, and he put both hands against his chest but he couldn’t reach what he needed to find, his fingers were wet, he couldn’t get his fingers deep enough. He clawed at his chest and he opened his mouth to shout for help but nothing came out, he no longer had a voice.
George staggered. His knees were giving way. He reached out to grab hold of the Scumbucket to keep him on his feet but it was no good, he was falling toward the pavement, and as he twisted and went down he saw in the last of his light his own splayed handprint dark against the battleship gray.
It was just like the logo on their T-shirt, except this one was melting in the warm Tucson night.
TWELVE.
No, I don’t,” said Nomad.
He was weary and red-eyed. The video camera lights were not kind. Neither were the questions that came from behind them, and the one that had just been thrown at Nomad was
John, do you
have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?
“Dumb question, Dave,” the Hispanic police captain sitting at the table between Nomad and Ariel said. “Don’t you think we’ve been over this?”
“All for the public, sir,” Dave the reporter from Fox-KMSB answered. He flashed a thin and humorless smile. “Doing my job.”
“Miss…Bonneway, is it?”
Berke blinked heavily and directed her attention to the young woman who’d spoken. “Bonne
vay
. With a ‘v’.”
“Okay, got it. Am I hearing you’ve reported to Captain Garza that you were shot at by this sniper when you were in Sweetwater? After your bass player was killed?” The woman, blonde and sharp-featured and maybe twenty-two at the oldest, wore a nametag on the jacket of her beige suit that identified her as being a reporter from the
Tucson Citizen
.
“That’s right.” Berke had a blinding headache. She’d been sick to her stomach for the past two hours. “Yeah.”
“So can I ask if you reported this to the police in Sweetwater or not?”
“I didn’t, no. I thought…I wasn’t sure it happened.”
“Pardon me? You weren’t sure you were
shot
at?”
“Jamie, this isn’t an interrogation,” said the public information officer, a dark-haired woman in her mid-forties named Ann Hamilton. She was sitting at the end of the conference room table, beside Terry. Her demeanor was quiet but obviously she could pull up some steel when it was needed. “Miss Bonnevay has explained that to Captain Garza. Next question, please.”
The reporter from KVOA raised his hand, but the
Citizen
reporter wouldn’t yield. “I’m just thinking out loud, maybe, that we have a sniper on the loose here because the police weren’t properly notified in Texas. Am I wrong about that?”
“Let me answer,” said Garza, whose deep-set ebony eyes fixed upon Jamie Layne and had the effect of nailing her to her chair. He had a jaw like a brick and a pock-marked face and his voice sounded like gravel being churned into cement. “First off, we’re only starting our investigation. Where it’ll take us, we can’t say. Secondly, you’re assuming that Mr. Emerson was shot by the same individual who killed Mr. Davis, which is far from being proven. And, Jamie, tossing around terms like ‘sniper’ is not going to endear you to the police department, I can tell you.”
“It’s a little premature,” the PIO lady added, as a softener.
“Sir?” said the KVOA reporter. “Are you saying this was a
coincidence
?” It sounded ridiculous, the way he said it.
“I’m saying we have a young man who is fighting for his life.” Garza would not rise to the bait. His expression was Buddha-calm, if Buddha had been born the son of a Juarez cop. The hospital public relations rep had only a few minutes ago left this room on the first floor of University Medical Center, after telling the assembled group of reporters, camera crews and various techs that George Emerson had been delivered by ambulance at eleven forty-eight in critical condition, a little more than two hours ago, and was currently in surgery with two gunshot wounds, one to the right shoulder and one to the upper chest. “Until we have more to go on, we can’t draw any conclusions about
anything
,” Garza said.
“But they were long range shots, is that correct?” asked the black female reporter from, ironically enough, KGUN.
“I can’t comment on that.”
“Mr. Castillo says he didn’t hear any shots. He was right there when Mr. Emerson was hit. If they weren’t fired at long range, then—”
“Under investigation. No comment.” Garza pointed to the
Daily Star
reporter whose hand was up. “Go ahead, Paul.”
“Thanks. How about some background on Mr. Emerson? What’s his age, and where’s he from?”
The others looked to Nomad to answer, but Nomad just stared at his own hands clenched together on the table before him. He wasn’t feeling much like an emperor at the moment. He was feeling small and impoverished and lost again on the unmapped road. He was feeling caught between tears and rage and if he was to move his head one inch to the left he might start to weep and one inch to the right he might stand up and throw this fucking table over.
So he sat very, very still.
Terry cleared his throat. “George is thirty-three. He’s from Chicago.”
“Can I get a rundown of all your ages and where you’re from?”
“Old,” Nomad said when it was his turn. He wished he’d kept his sunglasses on, but Garza had told him to take them off when speaking to the press.
Just grit your teeth and get
through it
, Ms. Hamilton had said. He could still feel the stiffnesss of dried stage-sweat in his red T-shirt. “Detroit city,” he added, without looking up or moving his head.
“I think we ought to wind this up,” Ms. Hamilton told the reporters after everyone else had answered the question. “You can imagine what these people are going through.”
“Captain, are you planning on asking the FBI to help the investigation?” It was the woman from the
Citizen
again.
“That’s not been discussed yet.”
“Sir? Let me rephrase a question,” said the Fox guy. “Does
anybody
at that table have
any
idea about why a sniper might be—
might
be—stalking your band?” He ignored both the abrupt birth of Garza’s fearsome scowl and the outstretched palm of Ms. Hamilton’s hand. “Or are we talking about music critics taking up arms?”
Nomad had had enough of this. His face impassive, he stood up and walked out the door behind Ms. Hamilton. Before he reached the elevators at the end of the hall, he was aware that three other people were walking with him. The police captain caught up with them and eased into the elevator just as the doors were closing. They began rising to the second floor, where they’d been given a private waiting area and a cop was on-duty to keep any reporters from intruding.
“As much as I don’t want to hear that word or see it in print,” Garza said before they reached their floor, “I know the media. They’re going to be talking about a sniper all over this town by sunup, so get used to it. When it goes on the Internet and the networks, it’s everywhere.”
“This is crazy.” Berke had dark purple hollows under her eyes. “Why would somebody be trying to kill
us
?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
The doors opened. The cop was on a sofa in a small seating area, facing the bank of elevators. He put aside his
Sports Illustrated
magazine and sat up straight as a display of vigilance. On the table beside him was a stack of magazines and a dark blue coffee cup bearing a red ‘A’ outlined in white. Garza nodded at him and walked with Nomad, Terry, Ariel and Berke down the long hallway past a nurses’ station to another door. He opened it for them and followed them in.
It was nothing special, just a room with a few gray upholstered chairs, a sofa, a couple of low tables and lamps, and a TV. On the cream-colored walls were framed paintings of sunwashed adobe houses and orange-tinted desert scenes.
“Okay,” Garza said as the bandmembers got themselves settled. “Now I guess all you can do is wait. Unless you want to pray,” he added. “If not here, there’s a chapel at the far end of the hall and take a right.”
“Thank you,” Terry said. He pushed his specs back up the bridge of his nose. “Um…we can leave and walk around, can’t we? If we want to take the elevator down to the vending machines? Like…we’re not under arrest, are we?”
“You can go wherever you please. Just remember that if the reporters are hanging around, they can get to you downstairs. But probably most of them are going back to the crime scene.” Garza checked his watch. “Which is where I need to be.” He moved toward the door. “Anything else I can do for you?”
Nobody answered, but then Ariel spoke up: “I’d like to know,” she said. “Where the shots came from. They
were
from long range, weren’t they?”
“Miss, I just can’t say. It’s true Mr. Castillo didn’t hear them. He didn’t see anybody else in the lot but Mr. Emerson. So…the only thing we’re sure of is that it wasn’t a drive-by. Other than that…” He let the sentence die. “We have a lot of work to do,” he finished.
“Thank you for doing what you can,” Ariel told him. Her eyes were swollen and had the shine of shell-shock.
“Yeah. Well, the trauma team here is the best in the country. That’s not just
my
opinion.” He glanced quickly at Nomad, who was sitting in a chair slumped over with his hands to his face. “Hang in,” he said, and then he left the room and shut the door behind him.
For a while no one said anything. At last Terry quietly breathed, “
Wow
,” which served to sum up their collective inability to grasp the fact that the Little Genius lay on an operating table with surgeons trying to keep him alive. Also, they were so tired they could hardly move. It was a bad dream, and at its center a worse one. How long George had been bleeding out on the ground before the attendant had seen him was still unknown, though the police thought it had only been ten or fifteen seconds. Still…ten or fifteen fucking
seconds
? While George had been down with two bullets in him, and one right in his chest near the heart? It was more than they could bear to think about.
The attendant—Castillo—had recognized the blue parking pass as being from Fortunato’s. Musicians parked their vans and trailers over there all the time, in a special area in the back. He’d called nine-one-one, reported a man down and unconscious and his chest covered with blood. About the time the ambulance and the first police cruiser had come screaming up, Nomad had walked out Fortunato’s stage door into the alley to see where George was, and when he heard the sirens he later told Ariel that he’d felt like a knife had ripped open his guts because he knew something very bad had happened to
their friend.
At the hospital, Nomad had called Ash on his cell and had gotten the
I can’t pick up right now, but
—
“Pick up, you dumb shit!” Nomad had shouted into the cell. “It’s John Charles! Pick up!”
“Hey, hold on with that language!” There had been some hot spice in Ash’s heavily-accented voice. Little did he know how close he was walking to a burning crater in Hell. “Who do you think you’re talking—”
“Shut up and listen!” the emperor had commanded, and Ash had shut.
Ash was coming to Tucson, would try to get a flight out by afternoon or at the latest by Monday morning. In the meantime, he would make the call to George’s mother and father in Chicago. Ash had sounded stunned, and when he asked Nomad, “What is going on?” Nomad knew he was asking why two members of The Five had been cut down by bullets and to that there was no good or easy answer.
Nomad lowered his hands from his face. Terry was standing in front of him.
“Maybe we ought to pray for George,” Terry said, and he looked at Ariel and Berke to gauge their reactions. “Don’t you think?”
“I think we should,” Ariel agreed.
Nomad closed his eyes and shook his head and masked his pain with his hands again. Berke said, “I’m not what you’d call religious.”
“Can’t you be? For just a minute?” Terry asked, but Berke turned her face away. Terry went over and sat beside Ariel, and they grasped hands and put their heads together, and when Terry began with “Dear God,” Berke got up and left the room.
When their prayer was finished, Nomad sat back in his chair and rubbed his temples. If he’d only gone to get the van with George, he thought. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened. If only, if only…
“John?”
“What is it?” Nomad watched as Terry pulled a chair up in front of him and sat down.
“Don’t you believe in God?”
“No,” came the reply. “I believe in myself.” He saw his lamplit face reflected in Terry’s Lennon-specs. “God is a myth made up to keep people from freaking out about death.” Terry was silent, as if waiting for something else. “Listen,” Nomad said irritably, because Ariel was watching him too, in that expectant way she had when they were writing a song together and she was waiting for him to supply a line. “I want to rest. How about leaving me alone.”
“I’m just asking.”
“Don’t ask.”
Terry started to slide his chair back, and then he seemed to think better of it. He drew a long breath, as if preparing himself.
“What do you
want
from me?” Nomad asked, again on the verge of either anger or tears. “You want me to get down on my knees and pray for George’s life? You want me to promise I’ll be a good boy or some shit like that, so George will come out of that operating room
alive
?” He felt his mouth start to twist into a snarl. “It doesn’t happen that way. Praying to a myth doesn’t get it. Either he lives or he doesn’t. Okay? And anyway…if God wasn’t a myth, why should He care about George? Why should He care about anybody in this room, or this city, or on this fucking
earth
? Huh?”
“I don’t know,” Terry said, but the way he said it told Nomad that maybe Terry had already asked himself these questions, many times over.
“Damn straight you don’t know.” Nomad looked to Ariel for support, but she was staring down at the floor. “Nobody knows, and for damn sure those fucking preachers don’t know. So what are we sitting here talking about?”
Terry’s face was impassive. Whatever he had been preparing himself for, he was ready. He said, “Can I tell you a story?”
“What kind of story?”
“A true story. Something that really happened to me, in a church about—”
“Oh, shit!” Nomad interrupted, scowling. “Come
off
it, man!”
“Terry?” Ariel’s voice was quiet but firm. “You can tell
me
.”
Terry nodded, but when he spoke again he was still staring at Nomad. “In a church about forty miles northwest of Oklahoma City,” he went on. “A small town called Kingfisher. Did I ever tell you about my dad?”