Beside the man’s right leg is the dropped wallet. It has a satisfying weight of cash, which Jeremy promptly removes. Somebody could make some money off all the credit cards in there, but Jeremy’s not that kind of player. He tosses the emptied wallet aside and then he kneels down and checks the man’s heartbeat. It’s strong enough; better a headache than a heart attack. The man begins to groan and stir, and Jeremy decides it’s time to make an exit.
First, though, he takes the other thief’s wallet and comes up with four bills. There are another two bills and change in the right pocket, along with a very nasty little length of black leather with a lead cylinder sewn up inside. He’ll count his money when he gets back to the motel.
He throws the bloodied gym sock with its weight of soap as far as he can into the night, and then he climbs out of the culvert, goes through the broken section of fence, walks to his truck as if strolling through an English garden, and drives away. He expects Gunny to be there, to say Good work or Nice job or something, but Gunny does not show. It’s okay, Jeremy thinks. Another thing they taught him in the Corps was the value of self-reliance.
On the drive back, through streets nearly empty, Jeremy has to pull over into a restaurant’s parking lot because a fit of shaking has come upon him and cold sweat has exploded from his flesh. He can’t get his breath, he thinks maybe he’s got a cracked rib and what is he going to do now? But he sits holding onto the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white, and when at last he takes a deep breath and sees he’s pulled up in front of a Popeye’s Fried Chicken joint he has to give out a broken laugh because God has such a twisted sense of humor. A mean streak, really.
He decides he’s all right. No cracked rib. Just the thrumming of violence through his nerves and the smell of blood up his nose.
In his motel room, under the light bar in the bathroom, Jeremy finds himself richer by three hundred twenty-eight dollars and seventeen cents. Not a bad night’s work.
He congratulates himself by buying a Dr Pepper and two bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips from the vending machines down by the office, and when at last he passes into a twilight sleep he feels well-fed.
ELEVEN.
At six o’clock on Saturday morning the Scumbucket pulled away from the La Quinta Inn on Remcon Circle in El Paso. George was at the wheel, Ariel sat in the front passenger seat, Nomad and Terry were behind them and Berke had her usual place. There was no joking around, no cutting comments flying back and forth; in fact, it was way too early to do anything but mutter. It had been a hard gig at the Spinhouse last night, a series of frustrations. Today they had about two hundred and eighty miles to travel before three o’clock. They were heading in a northwesterly direction up I-10 into New Mexico, and would follow it when it turned off almost due west for Tucson.
The call from Ash had come on Wednesday afternoon, about an hour after their interview on KTEP’s local radio talkshow. The Saturday night gig at Fortunato’s in Tucson was still open if they wanted it, he’d told George. And if they went that far, they might as well go on to San Diego and the rest of the venues, finish up the tour, but it was the band’s decision so if they needed some time to think about it they could let him know in the morning.
“How about the situation in Sweetwater?” George had asked as he lay on the bed in the room he shared with Nomad and Terry. This time, John Charles got the rollaway. “Did they find the shooter?”
There’d been no progress, Ash had told him. He said he had another call in to Detective Rios but was waiting to hear back.
George had thanked him, and when Ash had ended the call George said to his roomies, “We need to get Ariel and Berke in here and figure out what we’re going to do after the Spinhouse. We’re still on the schedule in Tucson and Ash is talking about us finishing the tour. What do you think?”
“Okay with me,” Nomad had said. “If everybody else says yes.” He’d lived in Tucson for two years in his early twenties, working at Budget Rent-A-Car at the airport and playing with a couple of bands that never got off the ground. It pleased him to go back to his old stomping grounds with some success under his wings.
“Me too,” Terry agreed, but what was foremost on his mind was getting to Eric Gherosimini’s house outside Albuquerque and seeing Lady Frankenstein.
“Let’s find out what they say.” George had reached back and knocked twice on the wall, and in a few seconds Ariel had opened the connecting door.
It had not been such a tough decision. They were professionals, and the show must go on.
That didn’t mean the show was going to go perfectly, or even well. As George drove the Scumbucket under the glare of a cloudless sky and between craggy brown mountain ranges, the band lay back in a silent reflection of the night before.
The Spinhouse had been packed, the merchandise and CDs had sold at a brisk pace, but the troubles had started when the lead singer of the Soul Cages—angry at being displaced as headliners for the night and not a little bit drunk—made a remark to Nomad backstage that a lot of Mike Davis’s fans were out there, they would’ve been smart to sell Beelzefudd CDs and T-shirts instead of The Five’s shit. Nomad had given him a glare that could melt glass, though he’d held his tongue and temper. He’d been in bands that had been knocked down from headliner status before, he knew what that felt like, but for two nickels and a cup of warm piss from a leper he would’ve punched the oh-so-groovy young fucker’s RayBans right off his face.
Then there was the show itself. Nomad had decided not to do the party song ‘Bad Cop’ and start it off with ‘Something From Nothing’, which rocked pretty hard but slowed down for a quieter chorus:
When things fall apart and the story comes to its end,
You have to make something out of nothing again.
Which was about the way they all felt.
Within a few minutes, Nomad had nearly put a foot through his malfunctioning monitor speaker before Ariel could calm him down. Her own monitor started going out during the third song, she couldn’t hear herself and she was drifting off-key and screwing up the rhythm too. George had huddled with the tech guy, a well-meaning aged hippie who had tripped over the fantastic light way too many times and as a result moved in slow-motion suitable for an alternate plane of existence, trying to make sense out of the tangle of cables and connections in the beatup mixing console. Everything had looked and sounded good in the light of day at sound check, but in the dark with six mirrorballs spinning at the ceiling, the noise of contained thunder from Berke’s drums, the hollering of beer-stewed fans and the speaker system throwing out shrieks and growls as it neared imminent overload and fuse blowout, the console revealed itself to be as addled and time-warped as its kaftan-clad master.
While George rode the sick console, Terry was trying to cover Mike’s line on the songs they’d agreed really needed the bass bottom, and he’d missed a couple of cues for his own keyboard parts. That was shocking in itself, because Terry never screwed up his parts; the realization came pretty quickly that he was trying too hard, and Nomad told him to concentrate on his usual job and forget the bass, which pissed Berke off because she thought it was disrespectful to Mike’s memory, like his part could just be thrown away and nobody would care.