Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (28 page)

He set down his own guitar case and left the
lid open, not bothering to tune beforehand but warming up his
fingers with a quick jig while he distracted the others and waited
for Dan to set up. Dan, of course, carefully tuned beforehand while
Brose was winding tuners back so strings contracted with the cold
didn't snap like icicles before he could get any music out. When
Dan finally joined in, a satisfied look on his face as he bonged
and chimed another jig on the dulcimer, Brose belatedly remembered
the fairy dust and sprinkled himself and Dan, then looking at the
scruffy lot around them, flung a pinch or two in their direction
while pretending to limber up his picking hand. The bag lady
blinked once, and the baby at the blond girl's breast laughed.
Nobody else seemed to notice.

At least, nobody seemed to notice until the
next clot of pedestrians walked by, and then six of them stopped to
listen while Dan sang a funny song about the "Darby Ram" and Brose
sang the "Brown Girl Blues," followed by "In the Pines." The
pedestrians had seemed as harried and hell-bent for commerce as
usual when they strode up, but as they walked away, Brose noticed
that their faces had smoothed out a little. They walked with a
little more of a beat to their feet, a little swing to their
hips.

There was also an amazing thirty bucks in
the guitar case. Fortunately Brose noticed it before the street
people, who were holding out hands and hats to the next group of
pedestrians.

Dan, however, scooped up the money and said,
"This is great. You guys are terrific. Let's go for pizza."

"They won't let us in," the blond girl
whined.

"Fine," Dan said. "Then we'll have it
delivered."

Brose kept playing while Dan found a pay
phone and ordered pizza. The crust was so tough Brose thought maybe
they'd just slathered the thin tomato sauce and greasy cheese on
top of the cardboard disk, but nobody else complained. Of course
Dan didn't notice. But then, Dan's favorite breakfast was day-old
cold oatmeal.

They made a lot more money that day, all of
them, and Brose decided that for supper maybe he'd go pick up
hamburgers and shakes someplace. By now Dan was showing the blond's
two-year-old how to bang on the dulcimer in between troops of
onlookers. Brose hoped he didn't invite them all back to the house
of Bob and Shirley Kelly, the old folkies who were good enough to
house Dan and Terry. On his way back with the burgers and fries
sending nice hot greasy smells to his nostrils, Brose stopped at a
phone booth to try to find state health and social services
numbers, but none were listed. There was not even a Salvation Army
shelter listed anymore.

He knew something was wrong the minute he
pulled up to the corner of the street they'd been playing on. He
didn't have to be psychic to figure it out. The whirling red and
blue lights on top of the cop cars were a dead giveaway.

They were loading everybody into the van,
and Dan, who was not exactly resisting, was talking as fast as
Brose's teeth were chattering. As Brose got closer, he understood
that Dan was insisting that they all be arrested.

"Just move along, buddy, and there won't be
any problem," one cop said tiredly.

"There's no problem now, officer. We were
just standing here talking and singing a little."

"Creating a public nuisance," another cop
said.

"No way," said one of the teenagers. "Look
at this loot. They wouldn't be givin' us money if we were a
nuisance, would they?"

"Shut the fuck
up
," said the other teenager.

"Panhandling, huh? That's illegal."

"So like I said, arrest us," Dan said. "We
have our rights."

This time Brose did not rush to the rescue.
He did wait for the paddy wagon, however, and followed it two
blocks to the police station, where he handed over the burgers and
shakes to the perpetrators waiting to be booked.

* * *

To save jail space, small misdemeanors were
tried on the spot, and after several hours Dan and the members of
the group who hadn't managed to slink away when the cops arrived
were sitting on the hard metal chairs in the little room while the
judge listened to what the cops had to say.

"Panhandling, yeah, that's an offense okay,"
the judge, a petite black woman with a puffy straightened hairdo,
said. She had started the night tired and didn't expect to get any
more awake. Night after night street people, prostitutes, domestic
disputes, and random violence paraded past her. She hardly saw the
daylight any more, and the nights she saw weren't pretty. At least
she had a job. Her husband had left her for one of his college
students two years before, and her children were now themselves
college students. She had a hard time sleeping during the day with
the new mall going in across the street from her house. "Vagrancy,"
she said, trying not to mutter.

"Your honor, I'm not a vagrant," Dan said.
"I'm a musician." And he hoisted his somewhat battered-looking
dulcimer with cuffed hands. "We were playing music."

"Is that so?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "I'll prove it if you
like."

"Her honor does not have time for that kinda
crap," the cop growled, but her honor was looking hard at the
gray-haired man, who was slightly better put together than the
group accompanying him. The instrument looked like something that
might have cost some money at one time. He could have stolen it.
There was something about him that didn't make her think so.
Despite his clothes and general dishevelment, he seemed . . .
fresher, somehow, than the people she usually saw. Of course, she'd
been on the bench way too long to be taken in by appearances, but
she couldn't help hoping, in spite of every scrap of experience
telling her she was being silly, that this one case might be a
little less tedious and boring and depressing than usual. Oh, well.
One sure way to find out.

"Very well. Submit your evidence," she
said.

"Could you ask the officer to give me that
thing that looks like a table leg back; ma'am?" Dan asked. "I guess
he thought I'd use it as a club or something. But it's to support
the back of the instrument when I lean the front half against my
thighs, like this," he said, showing her. She nodded, and one of
the policemen, bouncing the wooden leg in his hand, gave it to Dan,
and who duly screwed it into the back end of the instrument.

Dan took two thin carved wooden hammers from
his pocket. Once the police decided they weren't loaded, they'd let
him keep them. He began to play a dance tune from Brittany. It took
only a bar or so for the judge to understand that he was absolutely
telling the truth, but she let him finish anyway for the sheer
pleasure of it. The tune was short, and when he finished he paused,
hammers still poised in his hands, and grinned up at her
expectantly, like a kid who expected to be congratulated on
spelling his name correctly.

She said nothing but deliberately maintained
a cool and aloof expression, raised her brows, put on a pair of
half glasses, and thumbed through a book of statutes. She seemed to
recall an applicable one from a test case she'd read about that
happened ten years before. Ah, there it was. Definition of vagrancy
and statute pertaining thereto. She slammed the book shut and said
to the cop, "He's okay. A musician playing on the street is not a
panhandler or a vagrant but a street performer practicing his
trade. I don't know about the rest of these people." Funny. There
was nothing really out of the ordinary about them as far as street
people went—they all looked hungry and blitzed out and ill clothed
and dirty, but they were as appealing somehow as children with
their noses pressed against the window of a bakery. Or the Little
Match Girl. Or something. In spite of the stench she could smell
from twenty feet away.

* * *

"Hmph," Barbara said. "So much for the great
liberal. He got free on charm and let the rest of them get thrown
in the slammer, huh?"

"No wonder Brose was so skeptical about
him," Shayla said. "But I guess he probably figured a night in jail
was better for them than a night on the streets."

"Will you ladies just pipe down and let me
finish?" Ute said. "If you'd known Dan, you'd know he did no such
thing."

"Seems to me if street music was still
allowed, the devils slipped up someplace," Mary Armstrong said.

"Well, a lot of what they did was on the
sly, not out-and-out law changing. Besides, they said all along
they didn’t want musicians in jail. And I guess they didn't figure
it would ever come up, especially in Kansas City. Ol’ Dan kinda
fooled 'em."

* * *

Because while that verdict might have been
fine with other people, Dan wasn't the kind of man to let down
friends, no matter how newly minted. As Dan would have explained
it, he was a Cancer, which made him caring and protective, had his
moon in Libra, which made him fierce about fairness, and had his
rising sign in Aquarius, which made him into weird causes. He was
also Norwegian by ancestry, which made him stubborn. "Excuse me,
ma'am. These people are my students," he said. "We were in the
process of forming a band—"

"Street Pizza," suggested the Hispanic
kid.

"Yeah, Street Pizza," he said. "My friends
were just waiting to complete the finishing touches on their
instruments."

"Oh, come off it, buddy," one of the cops
said. "We've been movin' some of these folks from one corner to the
next for three years."

"We don't mind moving," Dan said. "But you
did interrupt us in the process of getting ready for our outdoor
concert."

"I've heard enough," the judge said.
"Dismissed. But the next time the officers find your students,
young man, they'd better all be playing instruments too."

"No a cappella?" he asked.

"Don't press your luck with me, son," she
said, and banged her gavel on the bench. "Next case."

Because Dan didn't like to lie, a little
while later Brose found himself sitting on yet another curbside
outside a flea market, kept company by his guitar case and Dan's
student body, waiting for Dan to return from shopping.

"Excuse me, am I to assume that dumpster
back there is taken?" someone asked. Brose turned to find an
unfamiliar derelict being glared at by the rest of the Street Pizza
ensemble. "Help yourself," he said indifferently. What was one
mouth to feed, more or less?

Dan returned with a handful of
bright-colored unopened cardboard and plastic-bubbled packages.
"These were really cheap. You wouldn't believe it. Perfectly good
kazoos and tambourines."

"What? No Mickey Mouse ukuleles?" Brose
asked.

Dan shook his head sadly. "Those all went
long ago. The guy said somebody found these in an old warehouse,
and he was able to get the whole lot of them for next to nothing.
They don't teach kids music anymore, Brose. The guy who sold me
this stuff used to be a band teacher. Isn't that the saddest thing
you ever heard of? Anyway, folks, if you want pizza on a regular
basis . . ."

The newcomer, who seemed a little grubby but
otherwise very well groomed for one of these people, shambled back
from the dumpster. "Pizza?" he asked. "I musht shay I al-waysh
think itsh a good idea to broaden yer cul'tral hor-ishons."

He accepted a kazoo from Dan, lifted it to
his lips, and blew through it, producing a farting sound.

"That's the way," Dan said encouragingly.
But the man handed it back to him.

"I'm not mush for blowing type
inshtrumentsh," he said. "But a mushical saw, now. I ushed to be
able to play a tune on my daddy'sh old saw."

He didn't mention that the saw was a chain
saw, and what he considered the musical part was the shrill
vocalizations it inspired.

CHAPTER 21

Tom George dreamed of drums that night, and
a sharp sting on the back of his hand woke him. He awoke all at
once, both feet on the floor, arms swinging, fighting. Even now, so
many years after Nam, if he woke up too suddenly, he came to ready
to kill.

The porcupine on the windowsill of his
sister's mobile home was not impressed. It sat there swearing at
him under its breath.

The sky outside was just turning the yellow
of an old bruise. He didn't have to get up for hours yet to open
that run-down store. His sister would be in her own bed now, and
she always got her own kids ready for school in the morning,
leaving him to sleep until time for work.

"You dumb critter, I'll use you for
jewelry!" he said to the animal. It grumbled back at him and hopped
down from the window. He went to the sill and watched it waddle off
into the shadows. A quill quivered on the back of his hand. That's
what had stung him. Angrily he pulled it out and started to throw
it out the window, then realized the window was closed.

He set the quill on the windowsill while he
dressed, then tucked it into his shirt pocket.

* * *

Anna Mae crawled out of the tepee and
stretched, the bracelet pinching her wrist a little as she twisted
her arms skyward. Whatever she was supposed to do, she didn't think
it involved sleeping all day, and she felt strangely awake and
alert.

Beyond the fence, tires bumped across the
gravel and swiss-cheese pits of the parking lot and stopped. Tom
George was back then. Good. She was afraid he wouldn't return till
later in the morning. She stuck her foot through the opening in the
fence and crawled back out.

And stepped right into a scene straight out
of the last days of the other Anna Mae.

Two guns pointed at her from the cover of a
green-and-brown patrol car. "Hold it right there, lady," said the
man behind the left door. "Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Liquor
Control."