She faced him. “Okay,” she said with a sigh, “show me what you’ve got.”
“In my back pocket. The notebook.” Cradling his ginger ale and snacks, Mike turned around so she could get to it. “Listen, really… I appreciate it. But keep it to yourself, okay? For right now, I’m sayin’.”
“Right.” She was having trouble getting the green notebook out. With jeans that tight, his balls must be either the size of raisins or swollen up like apples. “Jesus! How do you get these damned things on?”
“Just pull.”
“Hard ass,” she commented, and then the notebook came free. The effort of it caused her to stagger away from him a few feet.
Something hit the window between them.
There was a sharp high crack, and suddenly a hole appeared next to the soap-chalk dollar sign of the price on a Budweiser sixpack. Berke saw it, and Mike saw it, and they watched as silver creepers spread across the glass from the edges of the hole. Then Mike turned his face toward Berke, to ask her what the hell just happened, and Berke saw a second hole appear as if by magic—fucking wicked magic, she thought in an instant of slow-motion shock—in Mike’s forehead about an inch above his left eyebrow. The left temple bulged outward, as if a fist had struck it from within, his mouth remained open in what he’d been meaning to ask Berke, and at his feet the bottle of ginger ale burst like a bomb against the concrete.
Mike was aware of a great pressure in his head, and suddenly he was falling away from Berke, falling away from the Texas heat, falling away from the Scumbucket at the pumps and his friends who waited there, falling backward in time.
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.