“That’s right.” Berke had a blinding headache. She’d been sick to her stomach for the past two hours. “Yeah.”
“So can I ask if you reported this to the police in Sweetwater or not?”
“I didn’t, no. I thought… I wasn’t sure it happened.”
“Pardon me? You weren’t sure you were shot at?”
“Jamie, this isn’t an interrogation,” said the public information officer, a dark-haired woman in her mid-forties named Ann Hamilton. She was sitting at the end of the conference room table, beside Terry. Her demeanor was quiet but obviously she could pull up some steel when it was needed. “Miss Bonnevay has explained that to Captain Garza. Next question, please.”
The reporter from KVOA raised his hand, but the Citizen reporter wouldn’t yield. “I’m just thinking out loud, maybe, that we have a sniper on the loose here because the police weren’t properly notified in Texas. Am I wrong about that?”
“Let me answer,” said Garza, whose deep-set ebony eyes fixed upon Jamie Layne and had the effect of nailing her to her chair. He had a jaw like a brick and a pock-marked face and his voice sounded like gravel being churned into cement. “First off, we’re only starting our investigation. Where it’ll take us, we can’t say. Secondly, you’re assuming that Mr. Emerson was shot by the same individual who killed Mr. Davis, which is far from being proven. And, Jamie, tossing around terms like ‘sniper’ is not going to endear you to the police department, I can tell you.”
“It’s a little premature,” the PIO lady added, as a softener.
“Sir?” said the KVOA reporter. “Are you saying this was a coincidence?” It sounded ridiculous, the way he said it.
“I’m saying we have a young man who is fighting for his life.” Garza would not rise to the bait. His expression was Buddha-calm, if Buddha had been born the son of a Juarez cop. The hospital public relations rep had only a few minutes ago left this room on the first floor of University Medical Center, after telling the assembled group of reporters, camera crews and various techs that George Emerson had been delivered by ambulance at eleven forty-eight in critical condition, a little more than two hours ago, and was currently in surgery with two gunshot wounds, one to the right shoulder and one to the upper chest. “Until we have more to go on, we can’t draw any conclusions about anything,” Garza said.
“But they were long range shots, is that correct?” asked the black female reporter from, ironically enough, KGUN.
“I can’t comment on that.”
“Mr. Castillo says he didn’t hear any shots. He was right there when Mr. Emerson was hit. If they weren’t fired at long range, then—”
“Under investigation. No comment.” Garza pointed to the Daily Star reporter whose hand was up. “Go ahead, Paul.”
“Thanks. How about some background on Mr. Emerson? What’s his age, and where’s he from?”
The others looked to Nomad to answer, but Nomad just stared at his own hands clenched together on the table before him. He wasn’t feeling much like an emperor at the moment. He was feeling small and impoverished and lost again on the unmapped road. He was feeling caught between tears and rage and if he was to move his head one inch to the left he might start to weep and one inch to the right he might stand up and throw this fucking table over.
So he sat very, very still.
Terry cleared his throat. “George is thirty-three. He’s from Chicago.”
“Can I get a rundown of all your ages and where you’re from?”
“Old,” Nomad said when it was his turn. He wished he’d kept his sunglasses on, but Garza had told him to take them off when speaking to the press. Just grit your teeth and get through it, Ms. Hamilton had said. He could still feel the stiffnesss of dried stage-sweat in his red T-shirt. “Detroit city,” he added, without looking up or moving his head.
“I think we ought to wind this up,” Ms. Hamilton told the reporters after everyone else had answered the question. “You can imagine what these people are going through.”
“Captain, are you planning on asking the FBI to help the investigation?” It was the woman from the Citizen again.
“That’s not been discussed yet.”
“Sir? Let me rephrase a question,” said the Fox guy. “Does anybody at that table have any idea about why a sniper might be—might be—stalking your band?” He ignored both the abrupt birth of Garza’s fearsome scowl and the outstretched palm of Ms. Hamilton’s hand. “Or are we talking about music critics taking up arms?”
Nomad had had enough of this. His face impassive, he stood up and walked out the door behind Ms. Hamilton. Before he reached the elevators at the end of the hall, he was aware that three other people were walking with him. The police captain caught up with them and eased into the elevator just as the doors were closing. They began rising to the second floor, where they’d been given a private waiting area and a cop was on-duty to keep any reporters from intruding.
“As much as I don’t want to hear that word or see it in print,” Garza said before they reached their floor, “I know the media. They’re going to be talking about a sniper all over this town by sunup, so get used to it. When it goes on the Internet and the networks, it’s everywhere.”
“This is crazy.” Berke had dark purple hollows under her eyes. “Why would somebody be trying to kill us?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
The doors opened. The cop was on a sofa in a small seating area, facing the bank of elevators. He put aside his Sports Illustrated magazine and sat up straight as a display of vigilance. On the table beside him was a stack of magazines and a dark blue coffee cup bearing a red ‘A’ outlined in white. Garza nodded at him and walked with Nomad, Terry, Ariel and Berke down the long hallway past a nurses’ station to another door. He opened it for them and followed them in.
It was nothing special, just a room with a few gray upholstered chairs, a sofa, a couple of low tables and lamps, and a TV. On the cream-colored walls were framed paintings of sunwashed adobe houses and orange-tinted desert scenes.
“Okay,” Garza said as the bandmembers got themselves settled. “Now I guess all you can do is wait. Unless you want to pray,” he added. “If not here, there’s a chapel at the far end of the hall and take a right.”
“Thank you,” Terry said. He pushed his specs back up the bridge of his nose. “Um…we can leave and walk around, can’t we? If we want to take the elevator down to the vending machines? Like…we’re not under arrest, are we?”
“You can go wherever you please. Just remember that if the reporters are hanging around, they can get to you downstairs. But probably most of them are going back to the crime scene.” Garza checked his watch. “Which is where I need to be.” He moved toward the door. “Anything else I can do for you?”
Nobody answered, but then Ariel spoke up: “I’d like to know,” she said. “Where the shots came from. They were from long range, weren’t they?”
“Miss, I just can’t say. It’s true Mr. Castillo didn’t hear them. He didn’t see anybody else in the lot but Mr. Emerson. So…the only thing we’re sure of is that it wasn’t a drive-by. Other than that…” He let the sentence die. “We have a lot of work to do,” he finished.
“Thank you for doing what you can,” Ariel told him. Her eyes were swollen and had the shine of shell-shock.