The driver hit his brake and the truck skidded to a halt. He had a mop of gray hair and a gray mustache, and the red letters in a white circle on his sweat-stained brown shirt said his name was Roy.
“Can you give me a ride?” Berke asked. Her voice was shaking. “To the motel?” Roy and his partner, a thin Hispanic man burned nearly black by the sun, just stared at her. “The Lariat motel,” Berke explained. “I need a ride.” She glanced through the cab toward the farmhouse, but it looked only empty and forlorn.
“You need a ride?” Roy obviously was the type to deliberate at his own speed. “What’re you doin’ out here?” He took stock of her outfit. “You runnin’ in this heat?”
“Can I get in?”
Roy made a sucking noise with his lips against his teeth. His slow deliberation obviously also included sound effects. “Yeah,” he decided, “get on in.”
She edged around the truck. The Hispanic dude opened the door and scooted over. As Berke climbed in, the flesh on the back of her neck tingled in expectation of the bullet, but nothing hit it except a few gnats interested in her salt. She slammed the door shut, glanced again at the farmhouse and saw nothing move, no glint of metal, nothing. “Who lives there?” she asked.
“Land’s for sale,” Roy said. “Suppose it’s vacant. You a buyer?”
By the time Berke shook her head, Roy had put a boot on the accelerator and with a tired groan the patched-up truck rolled on toward town.
“You ain’t from around here, are you?” Roy asked, and Berke told him no, she was not. “Where you from, then?” Austin, Berke said, and added that she was going back to Austin today. “Big city,” Roy remarked, after which he began to tell her about the time he went to his sister’s wedding in Fort Worth, which was another big city but he didn’t care for big cities, he had been here in this town for all his life and made a good living, had a wife and three sons, one worked on an oil rig in the Gulf and boy howdy did that little rooster make a wad of dough.
Berke had stopped listening about the time she’d said she was going back to Austin today. She knew someone had fired a shot at her. She knew it. Had felt the bullet go past, had smelled it. But… Jesus Christ…why? A bullet fired from an empty farmhouse? Yeah, well, it must not have been so fucking empty. What had she done, gotten some trigger-happy hermit mad at her? But this was too weird… Mike getting shot yesterday, and now this…
Roy and the silent Hispanic stick-man were looking at her. She’d missed something. “What?” she asked.
“Did you fall down?” Roy repeated. “You’re dusty, I figured you fell down.”
“Yeah, I fell down.”
They were getting close to the Lariat. Berke’s fingers were on the door handle.
“Better be careful,” Roy advised as he pulled the truck into the parking lot. Berke saw that the guest list had thinned; the silver Subaru and the dark blue pickup were gone. “Fella got shot dead out on I-20 yesterday afternoon,” Roy said. “In the paper this mornin’. This is crazy times.”
“Okay. Thanks for the ride.” She got out while the truck was still rolling. The Hispanic guy raised a hand in farewell as Roy drove away. Berke was close enough to the swimming pool to see that Ariel was still lying on the blue lounge chair in exactly the same position she’d occupied about forty minutes ago. Berke opened the gate. She walked with long strides around the pool to Ariel’s chair and touched her shoulder.
“Hey, wake up,” Berke said. “Ariel! Wake up!”
Ariel’s eyes opened. She turned her head toward Berke and immediately made a noise of pain. She pressed a hand to the side of her neck. “Ow,” she said, massaging the cramped muscle. Her shoulder was stiff too; these loungers definitely were not meant to take the place of a bed, but it had been so nice out here, with the sound of the water and the panorama of the stars overhead. It was hot and bright out here now, though. Who was standing over her? She squinted to see. “Berke? What is it?”
“Somebody shot at me.”
“Somebody…what?”
“Listen to me. Wake up. Somebody shot at me, when I went out running.”
Ariel sat up, still working the offending muscle in her neck. She realized one of her shoes had fallen off during the night. “Went out running?”
Berke abruptly turned away and headed toward the room. Ariel was cute, smart, talented with lyrics and melody, a real trooper when it came to the grind, but before she got her bowl of granola and cup of silver needle tea in the mornings she could be as thick as a brick. Berke opened the door and went into the room, where George was sitting on one of the chairs staring at his cellphone’s screen. Nomad and Terry were still laid out on their beds, asleep. Berke felt the heat of fresh tears at her eyes, because Mike wasn’t there, and she wasn’t sure she was ever going to get past this tragedy.
“I got—” shot at, she was going to say.
But before Berke could finish her sentence, George said, “Amazing. This is just…awesome.”
“Listen to me. Okay? I got—”
“We sold one hundred and sixty-three CDs last night,” George went on. “That’s just figures for Catch. One sixty three,” he repeated, for emphasis. He didn’t have to tell her the CDs were ten dollars a pop, payable through PayPal. He consulted some more awesome numbers. “The video’s up to five hundred and nineteen hits on YouTube, six hundred and thirty-eight on MySpace and…get this…seven hundred and twelve on the webpage.” Behind his glasses, his eyes were shining. “Jesus!” he said. “What happened?”
“Yeah, great, I’m glad, but—”
“Guys!” George started shaking the others awake. “Get up! Come on, you’ve got to hear this!” They responded with snorts and snarls, like animals being dragged from their dens of refuge. “I mean it!” George almost shouted. “We made some fucking numbers last night!”
Nomad was the first to reply, his voice husky with sleep. “What the shit…?”
George’s cell buzzed. He checked the caller. It was Ash. “Yeah!” George said, and listened as Nomad and Terry fought out of the bands of bedsheets that had wrapped around them during the night. Nomad staggered off to the bathroom. “I saw the numbers, yeah,” George said. “What’s the deal?” He was silent, letting Ash speak.
“Somebody took a shot at me,” Berke told Terry. She didn’t know if he’d heard her or not, because he was fumbling for his specs on the bedside table. The door opened again, letting in a blinding burst of sunlight from which Ariel emerged, still working her neck.
“Oh. Okay, right.” George had eased down into the chair again. Something had changed in his voice; some of the happiness had evaporated.
“What’s going on?” Ariel asked.
“Somebody took a—” Berke stopped herself. She could still hear the sound of that bullet zipping past, but now the whole event seemed dreamlike, surreal, mixed up with the crack of the slug hitting the gas station’s window yesterday. She thought that the heat had gotten to her out in front of that empty farmhouse, or that she must be going crazy. Why would anybody be shooting at her? Did that make any sense? But had it made any sense that a bullet had hit Mike in the head and now he was lying stretched out on a slab somewhere?
“Really,” George said. It was a reaction to something Ash had just told him. “No, we haven’t seen it. Wow. That’s all I can say, man…just…wow.”
Berke put a hand to her forehead to see if she’d overheated. If anything, she felt clammy. Maybe she had overheated. Maybe she was going to throw up in another minute, because her stomach was roiling. This is like that syndrome soldiers have, she thought. That delayed stress syndrome deal. She felt cold sweat crawling on her cheeks.