"When cornered, The Rat fights." His voice echoed in the hollow barge. Then he turned to his shelf of cracking tools. He selected his best UNIX cracking kit. He booted up his Toshiba notebook. When it was up, he slipped the program into the machine. He would start with John Lockwood and the Government computer at U. S. Customs. He hunched over his keyboard, his body damp with sweat. His fingers danced on the plastic stage before him…
The Loomis Theater was on Fourth Street and Miami Avenue, a half block from the downtown bus terminal. It was in a bad neighborhood. Taggers had scrawled bizarre artwork everywhere. The old theater had been shut down for almost two years, giving up its audience to the busy mall Cineplex Theaters. The Loomis had three hundred seats and a steeple tower that rose two stories above the marquee. Pasted onto the billboard was a sign scrawled in Magic Marker on butcher paper:
BABY KILLER FEATURING SATAN T. BONE TONIGHT 8:30 P. M.
The doors opened at eight and approximately a hundred lost souls wandered into the theater, high-fiving each other and laughing too loud. Outrageous colored hair was hiked and spiked. The audience wore leather, see-through tops, tattoos, punk rock jewelry, pimples. The concert started, as promised, at eight-thirty.
The sound was discordant and horrible. Lockwood and Karen pulled up and parked across the street, then moved toward the Loomis. Even outside they could hear Satan's horrible, raspy voice. There seemed to be almost no melody to the music. Percussion, bass guitars, and a hammering keyboard competed viciously with each other. Satan screamed out the lyrics like an umpire calling out a slide at home plate.
Cut off their tits while they sit on your dicks. It's a burnout, brother, burnout.
Make 'em be brava while they suck-a your flava. It's a burnout… baby, burnout.
Righteous and rich, bloody the bitch.
It's a redneck burnout, yeah.
There was nobody to take the tickets at the door, so they just went inside and stood near the back. The theater was musty and underlit.
Faded red-velvet curtains lined both walls. To both Lockwood and Karen, the spectacle was close to indescribable. Satan T. Bone strutted on the stage like a wild animal. His long, stringy black hair and the tattoos under his eyes made him ghoulish. He was, as Zeno had said, only about a hundred pounds, and was stripped to the waist, wearing leather pants. His nipple jewelry swung against his hairless, skinny, sweat-soaked chest. He harangued the audience, screaming and growling into the mike. Behind him, on the small stage, the other members of Baby Killer were beating on their instruments as if they hated them. Lockwood thought they didn't even seem to be playing the same song.
After each ghastly number, the audience would go wild, trying to rip out the seats and throw them, swinging each other around, leaping on the backs of the chairs.
Satan raised his arms like a drug-crazed Anti-Christ and drank in their adulation, screaming insults at them through the mike. "Eat shit, pus heads!" he screamed. "Swallow my cum!" Then he'd launch into another braying, discordant song, which seemed even more horrible than the last. All the lyrics were about death and dismemberment. Huge pictures of Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer hung from ropes in the center of the stage.
"They don't mean it, they're just kids having fun," Lockwood said sarcastically between numbers. They were looking for Tashay Roberts and hoped they could recognize the pretty blonde from her photograph in Zeno's office. At one point, two teenaged boys with spiked hair, tattoos, and pierces everywhere moved up to Lockwood and Karen.
"Twist a braid, dude," the larger one said.
"Whatever the hell that means." Lockwood smiled.
"It means get outta here, you don't belong. Get sideways, fuck-face." "What're you guys supposed to be, comedy relief?" Lockwood kept smiling.
"Event Security," the bigger one said. "Go before you get wrecked." When Lockwood didn't move, he took a swing without warning. It was maybe the worst right cross Lockwood had ever seen. It was wide and so slow, he ducked under it by just bending his knees. Then he hit the boy with a vicious uppercut. He didn't need a follow-up punch; the boy woofed out stale air and sat down right where he was standing. The other bouncer looked at Lockwood.
"I suppose you want some of this too?" Lockwood said.
Satan had begun the next song; the noise level rose. The smaller boy held both palms up, moved backward, and disappeared out the front of the theater.
"I think we should wait at the stage door. I've seen enough of this to last me forever," Karen said.
"You'd think guys who looked this grungy could fight a little better," he said, as they moved through the lobby to the door.
"Eat me, fuckers…" Satan T. Bone screamed at his cheering audience, but by then Lockwood and Karen were back in the street.
Parked in the alley near the backstage door of the theater was a brown primer-patched VW van.
"Looks like ye old band bus to me," Lockwood said and circled it, checking the doors.
"Don't you need a warrant or something to look in there?"
"Yeah, probably… but I'm not a cop anymore, so this is just gonna be a straight felony B and E." He pulled out a pocketknife. Using the short blade, he pried up the rubberized strip on the door and pushed his finger through the opening, popping the lock and opening the van. "Didn't it bother you at all that John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Uncle Charlie's pictures are hanging up in there?" Lockwood said disgustedly.
"You mean instead of Abraham, Martin, and John?"
"Here we are working a possible serial killer, and three maniacs turn out to be the mascots for this band of jerk-offs."
Lockwood started looking around in the van. He pulled the registration slip out of the holder on the vr. "Bob Shiff. Same Court Road address." He returned it and started looking under the seats. He worked his way around until he got back to the front seat on the passenger side. It was a hot night and his shirt was beginning to stick to his back. He found what he was looking for in the glove compartment.
The three brightly colored balloons were knotted at the neck. He pulled them out and poked the knife blade through one of the balloons. He poured white powder into his hand. He smelled it, then tasted it. "Heroin. But it's flea powder, been cut way down." He put the balloons back inside the glove compartment, rummaged around in there some more, and this time pulled out a syringe. He laid it on the seat in plain view, closed the door, and relocked it, putting the strip back on.
"Y'know, John, if this is the way you did the job, no wonder IA was all over you."
"We're not gonna arrest anybody. We're just looking for information. You always do better if you get them playing defense."
He moved to the chain-link gate and closed it, blocking the alley from the front of the theater. He found an open padlock hanging on the fence, slipped it through the gate, and snapped it shut.
Two hours later the stage door opened. Bob Shiff and Tashay Roberts came out. Tashay was wearing a lace see-through top and denim shorts cut so that there was almost no back on them. She was holding on to Bob Shiff's skinny arm. Behind them were the other members of Baby Killer, all of them lugging their instruments. Some of their fans were now moving around to the back and hanging on the fence Lockwood had padlocked shut.
"Hey, man, open the gate," they shouted.
"Who locked the gate?" Shiff asked, looking at Tashay. Lockwood stepped out from behind the van.
"Who the fuck're you?" Shiff said.
"Space Patrol… You guys look like intergalactic travelers. Wanna roll up your sleeves, show me your arms?"
"You got a warrant?" Shiff said.
"Don't need one. Got probable cause for a search. You left your pump on the seat there." He pointed through the window at the hypodermic. "Gimme the key to the van or I'm gonna knock out more than your window," Lockwood said.