All he needs to start his resume is a target.
Or targets.
Five of them, maybe.
If he hit them all, he could write his own ticket. In Mexico, maybe. God knows they could use his talent down there, against the drug lords. Because if he was a hit man, he would only want to work for the right side. And this band…this bunch of punks going on television talking about how United States of America soldiers are killing children in Iraq, about how they should be ashamed and suffer for what they do in the line of duty, just following orders, and sacrificing their futures and the futures of their wives and sons…they are throwing shit on the memory of Chris Montalvo, and every good man who puts his life on the line over there.
That band is definitely on the wrong side.
He thinks he needs to sleep now, to let himself rest. He thinks he might go to the pharmacy in the morning, get some disinfectant, gauze and bandages to tend to his wound. He might go eat a good breakfast at the Cracker Barrel on General Bruce Drive. He might head over to the library, go to the Internet room and look up The Five’s website. Check them out, check out their tour dates. Come up with a plan. He thinks he might take his guns and the rest of his money and his credit card to Dallas, to where that band is playing tomorrow night. Scope them out, so to speak.
A hit man could make a lot of money these days. But first he would have to show any potential employers how good he was at the job. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough experience already.
That band…with their lies…they shouldn’t be allowed to spread their poison. Sure, it’s a free country, God bless it, and everybody could have their own opinion, but this…this goes beyond free speech into hate.
We’re working on it, that bastard had said.
It is enemy action, clear and simple. It is a cancer that destroys from within.
Lying still and quiet, Jeremy suddenly knows he has found a reason to live.
He closes his eyes, listening to the thrum of blood through his veins.
And when the quiet, sarcastic challenge in his head whispers Are you my pet? Jeremy does not hesitate in his answer.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I am.”
SIX.
Nomad saw that they had left a porch light on for him. He wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. He got out of the cab on the dark suburban street and paid the driver. The cab pulled away from the curb. It was on the weeping side of three o’clock. In fact, that was the name of a song Ariel and Terry had written for the CD The Five had recorded last year.
On the weeping side of three o’clock,
I walk alone down the city block,
I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t care,
’Cause I know when I go home you won’t be there.
Had kind of a Loretta Lynn feel to it, made a little jumpy and strange by a pulsing B-52s-type Farfisa sound. Or it might have been something Joe “King” Carrasco and the Crowns could have recorded back in the mid-’80s.
Anyway, it was that time on Sunday morning.
The thing about Sunday mornings, Nomad thought as he walked toward the porch steps of a small house in this southwest Dallas neighborhood, is that they followed Saturday nights. It was quiet except for a dog barking maybe a couple of blocks away. The breeze was soft and the moon, just past full, shone down through the trees. The Scumbucket and trailer were parked in front of the house, across from a playground where this afternoon he’d watched Ariel on the swingset. He’d been standing at a window, just watching. He knew she’d tried to get Neal Tapley off the pipe. He knew also that she had cared for Neal in a dangerous way, had let herself be too drawn into his trials and tribulations. She had cared too much for him, is all. People broke your heart, if you let them. If you got too close, and cared too much, you were just asking for it. He had seen too many bands destroyed in the aftermath of what passed as attraction, or need, or love, or whatever you wanted to call it. So as long as he was the emperor, there would be none of that in this band. No matter if you were sleeping in the same room, or in the same bed, and you were together more often than you were not, and you liked the way somebody smelled and you liked their smile and their voice and something about them spoke to the things you were not but wanted to be.
There would be none of that in this band.
He went up the steps, opened the screened door and was careful not to let it slam behind him. He hoped the front door was not locked; if it was, he’d be sleeping on the floor out here instead of on the floor in there. He’d find out in another few seconds which it was to be.
Five hours ago, he’d been in a totally different scene.
The boom and echo of his electrified voice over the heads of the Curtain Club audience: Hi, guys. Thanks for coming out tonight, and we hope you enjoy the show.
A quick flurry of drums from Berke, then into the kick-drum tempo at one hundred and twelve beats per minute, a hiss of hi-hat and the first chord, a monstrous D, crashed from Nomad’s tobacco-colored Stratocaster. Ariel met him on the F chord and slid with him to the G on her glossy white Schecter Tempest. Mike took the bottom with his fire-red vintage 1978 Fender. Terry hung back, waiting. Many in the audience knew what song they were hearing, they knew it from the beginning chords because it had been on The Five’s first, self-titled CD, and so they put up a shout as Nomad got up next to the microphone and sang it in his roughest, darkest snarl with a crimson spotlight in his face:
“Drivin’ south down Main Street, I was takin’ it real slow,
But in my pimped-up candy-colored ride, how slow could I go?
Saw the lights flashin’, heard the siren start to blow,
Didn’t know it then, Lady Law was gonna lay me low.
Bad cop,
She was a bad cop,
She said I was top of my class at bustin’ bad boy ass,
She was a bad cop!”
Everytime Nomad sang the words “Bad cop!” their fans in the crowd shouted it back and swigged their beers, a ritual of sorts for this particular song that had started during their first tour. How those things began was anybody’s guess, but Nomad glanced at Ariel and nodded with satisfaction because the wave of energy was lifting him up. Multicolored lights played over him, the different heats of blue, yellow and bright orange. The surface of the microphone on its stand before him glinted and flared as if made of exploding stars. He looked out upon his world.
“Now lemme tell you, officer, I think you’re mighty fine.
She said whoa there, boy, I’m smellin’ seven different kinds of wine.
And if you think a silver tongue’s gonna save your sad behind,
Step out here right now, and you walk this crooked line.
Bad cop,
She was a bad cop…”
They were the second band on stage tonight, coming up after the Critters. Following their forty-five-minute set would be local favorites Gina Fayne and the Mudstaynes, and headlining at midnight were the Naugahydes, from Los Angeles, had a record deal with Interscope, had a song in the new Adam Sandler flick, and who sprawled around in the Green Room as if they owned it. Nomad used to be able to wear tight leather pants too, when he was twenty. Let them have their moment.
“You sure do look good, you sure do fill out your blues,
Now baby, I’m swearin’ it, I haven’t had that much booze.