“Just in the neighborhood,” I said, and mentally added, Jeopardizing my family’s lives. .. again.
Sasha cackled and punched me in the arm. “‘In the neighborhood,’ he said… Will you listen to this fart-knocker?” A giant grin had spread over his face, making him look about twelve years old. “Hey, you better go talk to Linus. I think he really wants to, you know, work some shit out.”
“We talked.”
“Cool. I love Europe, man. I’m moving here.” He turned to Gobi, ecstatic enough now that his words were running together without the added inconvenience of punctuation. “And you’re here too, the original European chick, that’s so utterly cool since you’re kind of the reason all of it happened in the first place and you guys are too cute together, like Sid and Nancy except without the drugs-hey, Caleb, Norrie, did you see who’s here?”
“I suh-saw,” Norrie muttered, and Caleb, who had just now gotten his Strat tuned the way he wanted it, gave us a distracted wave, as if all of this were happening in his garage on a slow Tuesday after school.
“So”-Sasha clapped his hands again-“are you ready to rawk?”
“Not exactly.”
Norrie took a step forward. “Wuh-What’s guh-going on, Perry?”
“I need to talk to you guys in private,” I said, and when I took off my coat, the Glock fell out of my pocket and we stood there staring at it like it was a dead bird on the floor.
“No,” Norrie said. “Nuh-No. No way. No.”
“Norrie.”
“No. No!”
“Dude.” I’d already picked up the gun and stuffed it back in my parka, but I kept seeing Norrie’s eyes flick back to the lump that it made in my pocket. “I need your help.”
We were leaning against the side of the stage while Sasha and Caleb tried to figure out the set list. Gobi was sitting on the floor beside me with her head in her hands. She hadn’t moved or spoken since we’d gone off to this dark corner of the club.
“Just let us-”
“I duh-don’t even care about the shuh-show,” Norrie said. “I juh-hust don’t want to guh-get killed.”
“Trust me, man, okay?”
He looked at me wearily. We’d been friends since grade school, and we’d been through a lot together, and this wasn’t how I wanted to catch up with him again. We should’ve been at home in his basement listening to Wolfmother, playing Red Dead Redemption, and talking about Princeton and girls and whatever else popped into our heads. Even back in high school, I’d known it couldn’t last forever, but I hadn’t ever dreamed that it would end so crashingly soon.
“And wuh-why c-can’t you just guh-go to the cops about this again?” Norrie asked, then answered his own question. “Oh yeah, thuh-that’s right, buh-because yuh-you’re traveling with a h-hired assassin!”
“Look,” I said. “I’ll have the cops here tonight. I just want as much cover as possible if something goes wrong.”
“You w-want to have an armed st-standoff in the middle of our show,” he said, sounding abruptly very sick of being my best friend. “Again.”
“What about that song?”
He stared at me, his face screwed up with confusion. “Whuh-What?”
“You said that you wrote a new song.”
“Are you suh-serious?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Nuh-now?”
I looked around the empty club, thinking of everything that was happening out beyond those walls, thinking of me and Gobi and my family, the odds against us stacked higher than they’d ever been. “Might be our last chance.”
“No. No way.” Shaking his head. “I cuh-can’t-”
“Yeah, you can.”
Norrie took in a breath, shook his head, and with a long-suffering, oh-Lord-I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this sigh of exasperation, turned and went back to the stage, where Caleb and Sasha had been studiously pretending they weren’t eavesdropping on our conversation. He murmured something to them as he got behind his drum kit, picked up his sticks, and fired off a three-click beat as Caleb ripped into the first notes.
The song-what he had of it-was ragged, unpolished, sloppy, all over the place… and unquestionably the best thing that Norrie had ever written. Midway through the second makeshift verse, unable to hold back any longer, I climbed up and grabbed the replacement bass that was sitting there, plugged it in, and started improvising a bass line on the spot, making my way up to the microphone to do backup vocals with Sasha.
When we finished, Gobi and Linus were standing there staring at the foot of the stage with matching expressions of amazement. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and looked past Caleb, toward where Norrie had just finished pounding out the last beat of the song. He was gazing up me.
“Well?” he managed. “What do you think?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I call it ‘Bullet Magnet.’”
I nodded. “Good title.”
“I thought so.”
“Me too.”
The applause from the back of the room startled us all.
42. “Baby Goes to 11” — Superdrag
“Stormaire?” Paula’s voice rang out loud and clear through the excellent acoustics of the empty concert hall. She pulled out a lighter and held it up. “Rock on, baby.”
I put down the bass and saw her at the back of the club. She was wearing a black wool coat and knee-high leather boots, standing by the bar, with Monash to her right in a gray business suit. Between them, the cadaverous Parisian bouncer that had let us in a few minutes earlier stood with his skinny tattooed arms crossed, cupping his elbows and trying really hard to look defiant and French, which could not have been easy given the pistol that Monash was pointing at his head.
“Listen,” Paula said. “I know you were planning something special for tonight, but Dad and I are kind of pressed for time here. Mind stepping out back with us for a moment? I really think you’ll want to see this.” She started to turn around, then glanced back almost as an afterthought: “Oh, and bring the freak.”
Gobi looked at me, and we followed Paula out of the club.
A white FedEx truck was parked in an alleyway next to a row of scooters. Rain had soaked the piles of trash back here, and the whole place smelled like raw sewage. Without a word, Paula walked around to the back of the truck and opened the doors, standing out of the way so that I could see inside.
And then, in real time, I saw them.
Three hunched figures sitting there on the floor against the inside wall of the truck, squinting up into the light. And all of a sudden I felt everything else lurch up inside of me and melt away to nothing.
“Mom,” I said. “Dad. Annie.”
My mother was the first one to react. She moved forward and threw her arms around me. “Perry, thank God.” Just hearing that tone in her voice, I realized that she was even more worried about me than she was for herself or Annie. Dad was on his knees, holding on to Annie, kind of helping her move forward out of the van.
“Are you guys okay?”
Dad nodded. “We’re fine.” His voice was quiet, different, broken somehow, without a trace of the confidence that I naturally associated with him. His stubble had grown into the beginnings of a beard, making him look completely different, younger and much older at the same time. “We’re tired.”
“Annie?” I gave her a big hug. “You all right, munchkin?”
She nodded and hugged me back so tightly that I could feel her heart racing. “I hate you, big brother.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I deserve it.”
“You owe me so big for this.”
“You’re right,” I said. “When this is over…”
“Just as long as it is over.” There were tears in her eyes. “That would be enough.”
“I want to thank you for holding up your end of the deal, Stormaire,” Paula cut in behind me, and when I turned, I saw that she had replaced the Glock that she’d lost to Gobi with something even uglier, some kind of customized Soviet-looking machine pistol pointed at Gobi’s face.