Berke and Terry remained seated; one was thinking about the contents of three boxes in San Diego, the other about a rock legend with a strange keyboard in a house outside Albuquerque.
“Continuing your tour is my idea.” Truitt Allen was speaking to the floor. “I ran all this past Mr. Chester this morning.” He looked up into Nomad’s eyes. “Why do you think I got you out of jail? I told you already, I need your help to catch Jeremy Pett.”
“Oh, I get it! We’re supposed to be fucking bait, right?”
“Cheese for a mousetrap,” Allen said.
“I’m allergic to cheese,” said Nomad. “Especially the kind that can get me—us—killed.”
Allen shrugged. “Okay, so you go back to Austin. Go back to your routines. If Pett’s still hunting you, how does that make you any safer? He can pick you off one by one, when you’re alone. Until he’s found, believe me…you’re safer together, on the road. Especially if you do what I say.”
Nomad scowled. “Yeah, right! What are you gonna do, be our new road manager?”
The man scratched his perfectly-shaved chin. “Well,” he said, “that would solve one of your problems.”
This was too much for Berke. “You’re a whackjob, man! We don’t need an FBI agent as a road manager!” It had taken all her willpower not to drop the f-bomb on him.
“Yes,” Allen answered, “you do. Because you need the security I can put together for you. You need a team of my men trailing you on the highway, watching your backs. You need a team travelling in front of you, to check out where you’re going. And this Stone Church thing…you need to play there on Thursday afternoon, and there need to be promos flooding local TV and radio and items on the newscasts building it up, so Jeremy Pett will see them and bring his rifle to Gila Bend, where I’ll have tac teams up in the hills waiting for him. That’s why you need to play in daylight. And that’s why I jumped through hoops to get you released into my custody…Mr. Charles,” he finished.
“Un…fucking…real,” said Berke, but she sounded resigned to whatever lay ahead.
Ariel tried her protest again. It, too, had weakened. “That’s not our kind of crowd. We shouldn’t play there. Not Stone Church.”
“Your being their road manager aside,” said Roger Chester to Allen. “The elephant in this room is that Garth Brickenfield wants them at night. Once he makes up his mind, it’s done.”
Allen nodded thoughtfully. “How about if I give him a call and ask him? And while I’m at it, I also ask for eight hundred dollars instead of six? Just to show I can do my new job.”
Ash gave a mocking laugh. “Nobody calls Garth Brickenfield! You call his office and talk to his people!”
“Really?” Allen looked at the young man standing next to the door. “Ken?”
“Yes sir?”
“Get the home phone number of Garth Brickenfield. Then get him on the phone for me, please,” Allen told the young man, who started talking to someone on his Bluetooth.
“That’s ridiculous!” Ash said. “You’re not going to find a number for him. It’s unlisted and his people make sure that no one gets through without—”
“They’re bringing it up now, sir,” Ken announced. “Garth Orwell Brickenfield, on North Summer Moon Place. Call’s going through.”
“He owns several houses,” Roger Chester said; his face had gotten flushed again. “I doubt if—”
“Hello ma’am, I’m Agent Kenneth McGuire with the Federal Bureau of Investigation here in Tucson. I’m trying to reach Mr. Garth Orwell Brickenfield. Is he in?” There was just a short pause. “Would you tell him that Special Agent Truitt Allen would like to speak with him, please? It’s very important.” Ken gave a nod to his boss. “Yes ma’am, I’ll hold.” He said to Allen, “She’s calling him out at the hangar; he’s been working on his planes today. She says it should just be a few minutes.”
The door opened.
A young auburn-haired woman wearing blue scrubs looked in. “Excuse me,” she said. “Mr. Emerson is awake. He’s asking to speak to his friends.”
They knew who they were.
On the way to the ICU, they were briefed that they were not to touch anything in George’s room and that they could stay only a few minutes. They came to a middle-aged man and woman standing in the hallway just outside the unit’s cream-colored doors. Nomad stopped to speak to them in his most decent and caring tone of voice. They thanked him for what he said about their son. Nomad would’ve recognized George’s father anywhere: not by his short stature, but by the shiny pennies in his loafers.
Nomad, Ariel, Terry and Berke followed the young woman through the doors. It was cooler and quieter in this area of the hospital. There was the low hiss of respirators in action and the electronic beep of crucial machines, but otherwise everything was hushed. Doctors and nurses in scrubs moved about, either talking calmly to each other or checking their clipboards. Along the corridor between rooms separated by closed curtains there was a blue-cast underwater light.
“This way,” said their escort. She took them to one of the rooms on the left and drew aside the curtain.
They moved into the room, Nomad first and Ariel right behind him. Terry was last in, and his thought when he saw George lying in the bed at the center of all the monitor screens and gray wires and IV drips and black rubber cables was that George was now more machine than man.
Nomad had the feeling that he was not looking at George, but at a wax replica of the Little Genius. Surely this moon-colored face wasn’t the real thing. George was wearing an oxygen mask, he was packed into the bed with the sheet up to his neck and there was something over his chest, bandages or medical dressings or whatever, that made it bulge like a muscle man’s. Tubes snaked out of the bed to and from various receptacles. Clear fluid was dripping in and yellow fluid was dripping out. A vertical bank of monitors about six feet tall stood next to the bed. Things chirped and beeped and suddenly George’s legs rustled the sheet—a heavy, painful sound—and he looked at them with his bleary, swollen red eyes and said in a voice like the scrape of a dead leaf blown by the wind along a sidewalk, “Hi, team.”
Ariel turned away from the bed. Berke put a hand on her shoulder and left it there like a steel clamp until Ariel could get control of herself again.
“You’re all wired up,” Terry said, and he gave a weak little laugh.
“Oh yeah,” George answered, more of a breath with words than a regular voice. The sound was made hollow by the mask. “Getting tuned,” he said. “Weird thing. I can see better now.”
Nomad walked to the side of the bed, wary of all the life-sustaining machinery. He didn’t know what to say, so he said what welled up when he looked into the pale, waxen face. “They’re going to get the bastard, George.”
“Same guy,” George said; it was not a question, because he knew.
“Yeah. We’re going to finish the tour.” Just that fast, smelling the lingering burned scent of a critical wound that he recalled had hazed the air around his father’s body there in the Louisville parking lot, Nomad had made his decision. “We’re going to help get him.”
“Finish…?” George blinked, maybe thinking he was more out of his mind than he’d realized. “The tour?”
“Thanks for asking us,” Berke said, but when both Nomad and George looked at her, she frowned as if she’d stepped on the crack that broke her mother’s back. “Shit.” The lines on her forehead only deepened. “Okay, screw it. I’m in.”
Terry said, with a shifting of his shoulders that was not quite a shrug, “I guess I’m in too.”
Ariel didn’t speak.
“Crazy.” It was a distant voice from a faded man. “All of you.”