“About an hour and a half ago,” George said again, because he caught that question. “Yeah, yeah…everybody else is okay. I mean…we’re mindfucked, but we’re okay.” He paused, trying to grasp what Ash was asking. “No, they didn’t catch anybody. They think…” He looked across the table at the woman. “Can I tell him?”
She nodded.
“They think maybe it was an accident. They don’t know exactly yet where the bullets came from, but they’re thinking it was from some woods across the highway. Yeah, I said bullets. There were two shots. They think maybe somebody was in there shooting a rifle, just dicking around.” The detectives had told George that the little cluster of thorny scrub-brush and trees, maybe sixty yards wide on the other side of a cinderblock building where truck engines were repaired, drew shooters after what they called ‘varmints’. There were rats, gophers and snakes in that mess, and kids with rifles shot it up. The repair shop had been closed, so nobody had seen or heard anything, and likewise from a few ramshackle old houses over there. “No, right now they have no idea who it was,” George said.
The deal was, though George felt no need to say this, the detectives thought it might be an accident just from the distance involved. The repair shop was two hundred yards on the other side of I-20 and the varmint woods was another hundred and fifty yards, at least. So it looked like an errant, careless couple of shots—high-velocity, for sure, but that wasn’t so unusual, they said—that had carried right across the highway.
“They’ll know more later,” George said. “They’ve got cops swarming all over the place.” When the Scumbucket had pulled away from the pumps, following the car the two detectives were in, the gas station had been secured with the yellow crime scene tape and it looked like a parking lot for police cars and paramedic vehicles. A slim yellow metal tube had been pushed through the hole in the window to show the angle of entry. What looked like a surveyor’s tripod with a monocular attached had been set up in line with the yellow tube, aimed at the varmint woods across I-20. Over there were more police cars. The cops were prying the first bullet out of the station’s rear wall. George assumed they would also remove the second bullet from Mike’s brain, but when the Scumbucket had pulled out The Five—ex-Five—had left their bass player under a sheet on the pavement. George had been glad to be leaving, because he’d seen a body bag being taken out of the back of a white truck and the way Berke was so torn up…it was for the best they were getting out.
“The thing is,” George went on, “they want to notify the next-of-kin. No, they want to do it from here. Right. So… I don’t have that information. I know his parents still live in Bogalusa, but…yeah, right. Would you do that?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to the detectives, “He’s looking it up on his laptop.”
They waited.
“You guys were on the way to El Paso,” the woman said, without expression. It had been explained to her, the whole story, and she’d already checked their website, but around the station she was called ‘the Digger’, with those long red spade-shaped nails. The title was on her coffee cup. She could not stop until she got to the bottom. They were a team: Lucky Luke and the Digger, known to the general public as detectives Luke Halprey and Ramona Rios.
“Yeah,” George answered.
“Going straight through, then,” Lucky Luke said, chewing on a toothpick.
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Emerson, I have to ask you…do any of you owe money to anyone here? And by ‘anyone’, I mean a person who might feel they’re not going to be repaid and may be…um…a little vindictive about it?” asked the Digger.
“No. Well… I don’t. Owe anybody money,” he clarified. “What’re you saying? That this was a ‘hit’? Over money? I thought you said it was an accident.”
It was Luke’s turn to clarify. “Might be an accident, that’s what was said.”
“How about drugs?” The Digger’s arched black eyebrows went up. “Anybody gotten on the wrong side of a dealer?”
“No! Hell, no! We’ve never played this area before. How would a shooter even know we were here?”
“That would my next question,” said the lucky one. “Did you stop at that station because maybe you had a meeting planned with somebody?”
“Think about that before you answer, Mr. Emerson,” the Digger cautioned.
“No. I mean…we didn’t have any meeting planned. Wait a minute…go ahead,” George told Ash, who gave him the number in Bogalusa. He relayed the number to the detectives, and Luke wrote it down on a notepad that advertised Big Boys Barbecue. Then came the moment that George had known was coming and that had to be done. “I guess that’s it,” he said, and when Ash didn’t respond George spoke with what felt like a stone sitting in his gut, “We’ll work out how to get Mike back, and then we’ll come on in.”
“We’d like you to stay here tonight,” the Digger told him. “Let us call around, just to check some things.”
“Stay here?” George asked, stricken by the thought of sleeping in a police station.
“A motel,” Luke supplied. “Get a good night’s rest.”
“Oh. Okay.” George turned his attention back to the matter at hand. “They want us to stay here tonight. And listen…you might as well start making the calls.” Ash said he would, and that he was so sorry for this senseless tragedy and there would never be another bass player like Mike Davis, and for George to tell everyone else how sorry he felt. “One more thing,” George said. “A woman from the local paper was here and asked us some questions. She said she wouldn’t file the story until the cops gave her the go-ahead. I just wanted you to know.”
Ash thanked him for that, then said he would immediately call Roger Chester.
“Are we done here?” George asked, and Luke told him the band members could follow them over to the Lariat Motel on East Broadway, get them checked in, and that there was a Subway nearby where they could eat dinner. Not said, but what George certainly felt, was that the detectives wanted to keep a rope around them and that the questions were far from finished.
He had his own questions. Who on this God’s earth would have wanted to kill Mike Davis? And in Sweetwater? No, it had to have been an accident. A kid in the varmint woods. Had to be.
< >
In another room, a TV was tuned to the Weather Channel. The four people who sat on the orange plastic chairs in this room pretended to be watching it. Nomad had always thought that the Weather Channel was a kind of Zen; it emptied your head with its colorful images and soothed your mind with the illusion of control. Right now they needed all the Zen they could get.
A policeman came through to ask something of Lucky Luke and the Digger. Berke, who sat apart from the others and was wearing Nomad’s sunglasses on her pallid face, sat up straight and called out in a strident voice, “Did you find it yet?”
The policeman, unnerved, looked to the detectives for help. The Digger said calmly, “We’ll let you know when we find it. I promise.”
Berke settled back in her chair. Her lips tightened. A weather map sparkling with sun symbols reflected in her glasses.
Nomad glanced quickly at Ariel, who sat a few chairs away with Terry on her other side. She was hollow-eyed and wan, and she occasionally made a catching sound in her throat as if awakening with a start from a very bad dream. Terry stared alternately at the television and at the floor, his eyes heavy-lidded behind his specs.