No one answered, so George plowed on. “Any media shine sells tickets. We can think of ourselves as great and sensitive musicians, or rebels without a cause, or raging flames of angry righteousness, or whatever…but all the business cares about is, do you sell tickets? Okay, what I’m saying is—and we don’t have to like it, but that’s life—we need to buckle up and act like professionals. If we can headline and get a good merchandise split from the Spinhouse, we go play there. Any disagreements with that?” There were no replies, but George had one more point to make. “You think Mike would disagree? After working his ass off so long, and now we’re invited to headline?” He directed the next question to Berke. “You think he’d say pack it in and go back to Austin?”
Berke was staring across the room, at the green notebook sitting atop the vanity. As far as she knew, Mike had never written a verse in his life, nor had he ever wanted to. Why suddenly now, just before he’d been shot dead by a…
…sniper?
“Mike would say go to El Paso and play the Spinhouse,” Berke answered, speaking more to herself than to the others. “He’d say…”
No one here gets out alive?
“…buckle up,” she went on, “but maybe not in those exact words.”
“It doesn’t seem right,” Ariel said, but her conviction was wavering.
“We play the gig, and we tear the roof off the place, and I say Mike’s family gets his cut just the same as if he were here.” George’s eyebrows lifted. “Everybody cool with that?”
They were, and Nomad spoke for them alclass="underline" “Sure.”
“Then it is right,” George told Ariel. “Anything else would be wrong.”
To that, Ariel had no reply.
Their complimentary breakfasts came, the biscuits, the jelly, the coffee and the orange juice. The woman who brought the tray looked quickly around the room to make sure it hadn’t been trashed by this bunch, whom the police had told her were musicians, and she went back to her office relieved. There was no further mention of Mike as they ate, but Berke put the green notebook in her own bag for safekeeping. She had decided not to say anymore about her experience on the road; it was just too weird to kick around, and George might want her to tell the cops, and now she wasn’t sure of her own mind and she just wanted to get out of here. So she stayed quiet, and she went to the bathroom to take a shower and wash the dust out of her hair.
Around ten-thirty, with the sun up high and heat pressing against the window, the two detectives knocked at their door and came in to talk. Lucky Luke and the Digger both looked tired; it had been a long night and a hot morning in those scraggly woods, and neither luck nor digging had revealed more than they’d known before sundown. “I’ll tell you,” said Detective Rios as she and her partner stood next to the air-conditioner to catch a breeze, “that we haven’t found fresh casings on the ground where we think the shooter was positioned. So either we’re wrong about the location, or the brass was cleaned up. And that’s kind of puzzling, because it’s not something a kid in need of a course on rifle safety would do.”
“Where does that put us?” George asked.
“In between theories, until we find the brass or somebody tells us something.” Luke had his toothpick in his mouth and his cowboy hat sat on his head cocked a little to one side. “We may find the casings today, or they may be rattling around in the floorboard of junior’s ATV. Hard to say.”
That statement brought a flush of anger up in Nomad’s cheeks. “Hard to say? Our friend’s dead, and that’s all you’ve got?”
“Easy, man, take it easy,” George cautioned.
“See, this is our situation,” Luke went on, his voice unhurried. “Was it an accident, or was it intentional? Was it a kid out dicking around or a random shooting, with intent to kill? If that’s so, we’ve got a real problem.”
Berke knew now was the time to speak up, if she was going to; but the moment passed and she kept her mouth shut because she wanted out of this town right now and they would get all tangled up with something she wasn’t even positive had happened. The open road had never before seemed so inviting. Or so safe, for that matter.
“There are other possibilities,” Detective Rios said, focusing on Nomad. “Somebody with a grudge against the gas station’s owner. Or the oil company. We’re bringing in for questioning some people you might call ‘sketchy’. Got their guns and their anger issues. So we’ll see if that leads us anywhere.”
“Get the wrong person upset over any little thing, and that’s why we’ve got jobs,” Luke added.
“Sorry we can’t offer you more,” the woman said. Her voice carried a tone of finality. “You’re going back to Austin?”
“No, on to El Paso,” George told her. When she looked blankly at him, he decided to say, “We’ve got a gig there on Friday night, it’s a pretty good deal.”
“I guess you have to be dedicated to your music,” she said, but no one replied.
What the detectives had really come to say, the Digger went on, was that the family had worked out transfer of the body back to Bogalusa from the mortuary, and that if anything further developed the Sweetwater police department would be in touch with Mr. Vallampati at the Austin number George had given them. She said Mr. Davis’s belongings could be shipped from Sweetwater to Bogalusa at the UPS office, or that could be done in El Paso or wherever was most convenient. George said they’d do it in El Paso. He was thinking that he wanted to get on the road as soon as possible and that the bag of Blue Mystic weed in Mike’s duffel ought not to be in there when the family got his stuff.
“We’re very sorry about this,” Detective Rios said, speaking for both of them. “I hope we’ll have some news for you soon.” With that, their visit had come to its conclusion. The two detectives left, closed the door behind them, and George scratched the back of his neck and said as he had said so many times before in so many different motel rooms, “Let’s saddle up, people.”
They paid their bill, Nomad took the Scumbucket’s wheel because it was his turn to drive, Ariel rode shotgun with George and Terry in the seats behind, and in the back Berke sat next to an empty place.
They pulled out of the Lariat Motel’s parking lot, and beneath the scorching sun they took the entrance to I-20 West on toward El Paso. They were silent for a while, and then Terry began to talk about a particularly memorable gig they’d done last June in Myrtle Beach, it was a club right on the beach, and it was early evening with the breeze blowing salty off the sea and the light was soft and blue and the place was crowded, everybody appreciative and cheering for the songs and only rowdy enough to be fun, and in the brief quiet between numbers Mike had come over to him, leaned close and said, Bro, drink it up ’cause this is as good as it gets.
Yes, the others said. They did remember the gig. They remembered it very well. And everyone agreed that now that Terry mentioned it, it seemed like it was only yesterday.
TEN.
When White Wedding’ blasts from the speakers, Jeremy Pett allows himself a passing smile because he knows that he is in the right place.
“Are you a captain?” he asks the black-haired girl with the two silver bars piercing her nipples as she leans her head down to him (she smells like bubblegum and coconut suntan lotion, he thinks) and she returns the smile that she believes is for her and tells him he can call her anything if he’ll buy another beer. He says yeah, sure, and she goes away into the purple light that is edged with crimson. He returns his attention not to the other black-haired girl who is coiled around the pole ten feet from him but to a table over on the right side where he saw Gunny sitting a minute ago but Gunny is not there anymore. Gunny is a prowler, and can’t stay still very long. But Jeremy knows by now that Gunny is never far away, and this knowledge gives him comfort.