“George. That’s his name.” Nomad felt both clammy and feverish. Wasn’t the air-conditioning working in this part of the jail?
“George, then. I’m telling you that George is very, very lucky. It helped him that UMC has one of the best trauma teams in the country, and they got him within what they call ‘the golden hour’. But in time he’ll be wheeled out of here, and—”
“Whoa! ‘Wheeled out’? You mean he’s going to be crippled?”
“No, he’ll walk again, but that bullet to his upper chest did tremendous damage. It’ll be a slow process for him to come back.”
“Oh, shit,” Nomad breathed, and came close to slamming his fist on the table. But he didn’t, because there’d been enough of that just lately.
“He will come back,” Allen said. “But at the very best, he’ll be in the ICU for several weeks, and they’ll be watching him for infection or other complications.”
“You sound like you’ve been there.”
“Not me personally, but I know some who have.” He checked his wristwatch again. “In a minute or two there’s going to be a knock at the door. It’ll be someone bringing your clothes and shoes wrapped up in brown paper and the contents of your pockets in a plastic bag. There’ll be some forms for you to fill out and sign. I’ll step into the hallway and give you some privacy. Just leave the jumpsuit and the jailhouse clogs on the table. Then we’re going to walk down the hallway to another door, we’re going to go through that, past a guard at a security station—who you will not speak to or look at—and out into the parking lot to my car. You understand that I’ve pulled a lot of strings and called in a lot of debts to get you out of here?”
“Yeah, I do. But why?”
Allen stood up from his chair, gripping the folder between his hands. “You come with me, and I’ll tell you. Not only that, but I’ll tell you Jeremy Pett’s story.” He walked to the door and then stopped. Nomad thought he moved with the crisp economy of a man who could without a doubt take care of himself in a fight. Again…military? Maybe more than the FBI?
“I’m not sure I want to go,” Nomad said. “Seems like it’s safer in here than out there with a sniper trying to kill me.”
“One big problem with your attitude, son.”
Son? Nomad had almost winced at that particular cheese sandwich.
“Your three bandmates aren’t in here with you,” Allen continued. “So to save them… you’re going to help me catch Jeremy Pett.”
Came the knock at the door. Allen opened it and went out, Kingston entered and dumped the package of clothes and shoes and the plastic bag of pocket stuff onto the table in front of Nomad. Kingston put down a ballpoint pen and a clipboard with some forms in it. Then he also left the room, without speaking a word.
Nomad sat looking at his belongings.
For better or for worse, the emperor had his clothes back.
He tore open the package. Then he got himself out of the jailhouse suit.
FIFTEEN.
Nomad realized he might be out of jail, but he was still definitely in custody. This message was sent to him by the sound of the doorlocks engaging on Truitt Allen’s black Acura TL sedan as soon as the engine started. The interior of the car was to Nomad disturbingly spotless, not an errant Kleenex nor crushed paper cup nor old hamburger wrapper in sight. Even the dashboard had been polished, and everything metal gleamed with psychotic perfection.
“Where’re we going?” Nomad asked as they pulled out of the lot.
“The medical center.” Allen had his sunglasses on against the glare. In profile he looked like a hawk with a lopsided beak. “Everybody’s waiting for you.”
“For me? Who’s waiting?”
“Sit back and relax,” Allen said, a command both benign and emphatic.
Nomad obeyed, figuring he couldn’t do much of anything else. As they approached the medical center, he saw a crowd of maybe forty or so people across Ring Road from UMC. They were gathered around two camera trucks, one from KVOA and the other from KMSB. Some of the people were dressed in long white robes and held handlettered signs. Nomad caught sight of what a few of the signs said as Allen drove past them, things like ‘God Hates The Devil’s Music’ and ‘Secular Music Praises Satan’.
“Are they protesting us?” Nomad asked.
“Protesting your music in general, I guess,” Allen replied, steering for the parking deck. “Any chance to be on camera, and people get themselves worked up.”
Nomad nodded. He had a secret. It would have amazed the other members of The Five, at least as much as it had astounded them that Mike Davis was a fan of Moby Dick, to learn that from age twelve, just after the death of his father, to about age fourteen John Charles had been an interested listener to WQRS-FM classical radio in Detroit. He’d discovered it after listening to the Cramps’ Stay Sick late one night on his record player and his mother had come into his room and asked him—begged him, really—to cut out the loud noise. So he’d gone radio surfing, hitting the FM rock stations, until suddenly he’d found a man talking about a piece of music called the Resurrection Symphony, which he’d learned later was Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number Two. The man—a music professor—was talking about the vocal parts of the Fifth Movement, translating them from German to English, and what stopped Nomad’s travels across the dial was the man’s calm, measured voice saying, O believe, You were not born for nothing.
Sometimes in the dark and the quiet, especially after his father was gone, he’d wondered what he’d been born for. Where was he going? What was he supposed to do with his life? They were heavy questions for someone his age, and there were no answers, and in the dark and quiet he could hear his mother reading Bible verses to herself in her own room, and sometimes crying a little bit as if what the Bible had to give her was not nearly enough of what she needed, and that was why he grew to despise the dark and the quiet.
But that weird music with the strings and the piano and the horns and the harps on WQRS pulled him in. Some of it could put you to sleep for a hundred years. But some of it sounded like war. Some of it sounded like the questions he asked himself about his life, if he were to put them to music. Here and there would jump up a piece that made him think of his dad swaggering across a stage, and then there would be music that sounded like a procession of ghosts carrying their lamps through a cemetery at midnight.
Kind of like the Cramps, only not as loud.
From the public library he’d checked out a book called The Lives of the Composers. He’d kept it way overdue until he’d finished it. Now, some of those fuckers had waded through swamps of deep shit. Writing by candlelight and thrown out into the street when they couldn’t pay their rent, and people hating them and acting like they had no place on earth because they heard things in their heads the mundanes didn’t.
Those protesters back there. Nothing new about them, Nomad thought. People hated that Resurrection symphony, the first time they’d heard it in Berlin. That Russian guy Stravinsky, the first time his Rite of Spring was played, in 1913, there was a huge riot. And there was that story about Mozart, the Michael Jackson and the Prince of his era, writing an opera for an emperor and the emperor saying, when it was over, “Too many notes, my dear Mozart!”
To which Mozart had replied, “Just as many as are necessary, Your Majesty.”
Even Mozart had had to deal with the suits, Nomad thought. The dudes who timed the songs and checked the notes in search of a single. The Dustin Daye-killers.