The Five (35 page)

The song.

She thought about Mike, writing the first word:
Welcome
.

Again, drawn from that girl at the well.

And George’s part:
I wish you safe travel…courage when you need it
.

The song.

Her solo was upon her.

She was a half-step late, but she swung her Tempest up and stepped toward the edge of the stage, and she was shredding metal and flailing it out in thick dripping incandescent blue-white coils above the heads of the Stone Church crowd when some of the people on the left side started sliding over the chainlink fence.

She faltered in her playing, mangled a hot handful of notes and stepped back, but then she picked it up again because she was a professional. Nomad, Terry and Berke had also seen the tattooed bodies coming over the fence. Garth Brickenfield’s security men were trying to push them back but now on the right hand side they started coming across, and over there the security men were shoving back and shouting but Ariel could only hear the voice of her guitar through her stage monitor. There was a human crush against the fence, a straining of flesh against chainlink, and suddenly the fence collapsed. It just went down and disappeared under the boiling wall. The bodies rushed forward, swarming around the security guards who were caught up in small battles of their own. The camera crews struggled to get out of the way, but there was no way to get out of the way; they were caught in a floodtide and shoved hard against the stage, and when there was no more empty space before the stage the real party, the hard-core crash of tattooed, sunburned and red-eyed music fiends, could begin.

< >

Prime, this is Shelter.”

“Go ahead, Clark.”

“We’ve got a vehicle coming up the road behind us. Black Range Rover. We’ll get a visual on the tag in just a few seconds. Yeah…okay, it’s an Arizona tag. Driver’s stopping at the gate. Doors opening. Looks like…three males and a female. Two males, two females. Not quite sure there.”

Join the club, True thought. He’d been walking around the lot, checking things out with his Walkie-Talkie ready, strolling in between the trucks, vans and trailers, and so far he’d seen plenty of unidentifiables. True stopped alongside a small U-Haul truck and faced in a southeasterly direction, where the Shelter team was located. The gate Clark mentioned was the one festooned with chains and barbed wire. “What’re they doing?”

“Um…well…it looks like they’re wanting to climb the gate. One’s trying it. No go, he’s backing off.”

“Kids who ought to know better,” said True, though he could remember climbing over plenty of barbed wire and locked gates when he was one of those who ought to know better. He started walking again, his black wingtips stirring up puffs of red dust. “They moving on?”

“Still in place, sir. Looks like…checking with the glasses…looks like they’re smoking some pot now.”

“Prime, this is Signet,” another voice came in. “Fly on the wall. Do you copy?”

True felt his face tighten. All joviality at pot-smoking unidentifiables vanished in the fraction of an instant. “Copy that,” True said. “Got a distance?” He was already turning toward the northwest. The music was thundering from that direction. The fly was coming up from the opposite side of the mountain, and would seek a clear shot at the stage.

“Three hundred and twenty-seven yards.”

That distance, calculated by a range-finder, would put the fly more than five hundred yards off the stage. Still climbing up, unable to get a shot yet until he reached Signet team’s height. True said, “Give me some details.”

“Definitely carrying a rifle,” said the Signet leader.

True wasted only the time to swallow. “Go get him. You know what I want. Logic, you’re on standby. Copy?”

“Copy that,” said the Logic leader.

True kept walking. After a few minutes he realized he was going in circles. He checked his wristwatch. He checked the sun. He walked past a nearly-naked guy with long brown hair and a topless, scrawny girl sprawled together in the water of a small blue inflatable baby pool. He brought the Walkie-Talkie to his mouth.

“Signet, you copy?”

No answer. They might be a little busy right now.

“Signet, this is Prime. Copy, please.”

He heard a sound from the amphitheater. The sound of wailing guitars, the driving drums, the fiery keyboard and the raw voice of John Charles, yes, but something else too. It was a sound like the wings of a thousand birds. When True looked up he saw only a sky of white fire.

John Charles abruptly stopped singing. There was an explosive
boom
and feedback shrieked. Something made a horrendous crash and twang.

True heard the next two noises and knew exactly what they were.

Crack. Crack.

Gunshots.

He ran for the stage.

< >

Ariel had seen the goose-steppers. There were six of them, bald-headed and pale, wearing white T-shirts, black jeans and shiny black boots. They were going back and forth through the crowd at full-speed, doing their Nazi salutes as they jammed into other people and fought through the crowd like battering-rams. No one was listening anymore; no one in her range of sight was actually paying them any attention, but they were hearing the music like escaping prisoners hear the sirens at their backs, and all they wanted to do was smash through every obstacle in front of them.

She was playing rhythm guitar to ‘Desperate Ain’t Pretty’ and trying to keep up with Berke’s frenetic beat. Terry sounded like he was playing the Hammond with his fists, and even John had started to miss notes. He had his mouth right up on the microphone, he was bellowing it out like a hundred-year old field hand scarred by a Georgia bullwhip.

“
Some fine woman you made yourself out to be,

If you had your evil way they could hang me from a tree.

You take my money and then you spit in my face,

Somebody ought to take you from this human race.

Won’t be me, not today, not me,

‘Cause I want you to live to see me go free,

Want you to live to see your pretty face fall,

Want you to cry before that mirror in the hall.

‘Cause desperate ain’t pretty, baby, you’re gonna know that’s true,

Desperate ain’t pretty, baby, ugly’s gonna show on you.
”

Nomad stepped back from the microphone while Terry went into his organ solo. The hard, heavy vibrato was full of glittering golden pain. Nomad looked out at the audience, at the figures who slammed into each other and, snarling, twisted away again. He saw at the very edge of the stage a few people who had ceased their warfare for the moment and were staring at him with glazed eyes. When they saw him looking, they reached out to him their tattooed hands and arms, and the inked figures and shapes moved on their necks and shoulders and shifted on their naked chests as if a multitude of souls were confined in each body and trying to climb out by using him as their ladder. He saw a big burly dude with close-cropped black hair staggering around, clipping people left and right with dangerous elbows. His red T-shirt read
Nug Nug Nug
. Another formidable guy with a goatee and Celtic tattoos blackening his throat ran head-on into one of the Nazi freaks and knocked the goose-stepper on his ass. Nomad thought of something his mother used to say:
It’s all fun until somebody starts to cry
. In this case,
starts swinging fists
.

As Terry ended his solo and Ariel picked up her rhythm part again, Nomad stepped up to his mike. He caught sight of a slim kid with neatly-trimmed blonde hair pushing through the crowd to the front of the stage, moving slowly but avoiding elbows, knees and skulls with the grace of a dancer. The guy was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting gray T-shirt with a color travel picture screened on the front and the green legend
Vietnam Golf Vacations.com
. He had his eyes fixed on Nomad, who got his mouth right on the mike once more.

“
This part you’ve been playin’, you know it has to end,

Nothing worse in the world than the murder of a friend.

Could’ve been so much to you, been the steady one,

But what I have to say to you won’t be spoken from a—
”

Gun.

The sun sparked off metal.

The wind rustled through the black canopy overhead. Nomad stopped singing.

He saw it in the blonde kid’s hand. It was a small pistol. It had come up from underneath the T-shirt. The barrel’s eye looked at him.

Then the kid blinked, his eyelids maybe freighted with drugs, and he turned the pistol toward Ariel.

Nomad had no time to think; he just jumped.

He knocked the mike stand over and carried with him the guitar on its strap around his shoulder. There was a hollow reverberating
boom
as the mike slammed down, followed by a squeal of feedback. An effects box or something crashed to the stage and made a noise through the speakers like a Strat in its death agony.

His guitar hit the kid first, and then Nomad. From the pistol in the outstretched hand came two shots, but the shooter was already going down to the dirt. Nomad was on top of him and fighting for control of the dude’s arm, which snaked this way and that and then suddenly the kid’s head came up and slammed against Nomad’s right eye. Sizzling lights and pain zigzagged through his head; he thought his skull had been fractured, but he had to get that fucking gun. He just started beating the kid, started whamming at him with both fists, every damned thing he had.

Somebody grabbed him under the arms and pulled him up and somebody fell on the shooter like a blanket. The blanket was wearing a red T-shirt, and as he pinned the kid’s gunhand to the ground with one knee, he looked up at Nomad and the guy holding him and said tersely, “Get him on the stage! Now!” His T-shirt read
Nug Nug Nug
. Another figure knelt down and started twisting the kid’s white fingers off the pistol’s grip. He had a spiderweb tattooed—painted?—on one side of his face and hexagonal steel gauges—definitely real—in his ears.

“Back! Everybody get back!” shouted the dude who was helping Nomad climb up over the edge of the stage. Ariel was there, her face drained of blood; she reached down and grasped his hand, and Terry leaned forward to grab hold of his shirt.

Nomad scrambled up onto the stage and then fell to his knees. The socket of his right eye was throbbing. Maybe it was already swelling shut. God, that was going to get black! Fucking took a shot! He felt like he was going to puke, the smell of gunpowder was still in his nose. He saw that the guy who’d helped him had a headful of spiky brown hair, a brown beard and on his bare chest a—fake?—tattoo of a horned red devil sitting astride a Harley. The bearded devilish Harley fan was holding out an open wallet and showing a badge to the crowd.

Berke knelt down beside Nomad and said something. It was all gibberish, he couldn’t make it out. “I think I’m going to puke,” he told her, or thought he did because he could hardly hear himself either. He began to try to fight free from his guitar, but it wouldn’t let him go.

Ariel was trembling. She backed away from the crowd. She could feel what was coming just about to break; she saw it in their faces, in their clenched fists, in their rage at having been born between the wasted earth and dirty surf. As the young man who’d tried to shoot her was being pulled to his feet, his gun now in the possession of Agent Nug, one of the Nazi Six stormed in and kicked the kid in the ribs with a black boot.

Maybe their anger was spilling over because he’d screwed up the show. Maybe they just wanted to beat somebody to death. Whichever it was, they started coming in at him and in another moment the FBI agents were fighting for the life of their prisoner.

Nomad sat on the stage. Ariel turned away, and thinking she too was going to be sick she headed through the corridor lined with black curtains. She ran into Truitt Allen, who looked questioningly at her and then ran past her to the stage. His .38 Special was in one hand, his Walkie-Talkie in the other.

Berke sat down behind her drumkit, where she felt the most comfortable in the world. She stared into the distance, at nothing. Terry stood watching fights break out across the amphitheater. He saw a young man in a blue shirt being knocked back and forth between two tattooed and grinning bruisers; the young man fell to his knees, blood streaming from his nose. Another dude, thin and bearded, was being stomped on by a guy in a Wildcats T-shirt.

Terry went to Ariel’s mike. Through it he shouted, “Stop it! Please, stop it!” but no one listened, and no one stopped.

True came to the edge of the stage, and looking out upon the madness he raised his gun into the air and began to fire bullet after bullet toward the silent red mountain.

TWENTY.

When Jeremy Pett finishes the job of shaving his hair off with the new electric clippers he’s just bought, he emerges from the men’s room at the Triple-T Truck Stop just off I-10 about nine miles southeast of Tucson.

He has taken a shower and used the facilities, and now—clean and refreshed and shaven to the pink—he goes out to the grocery section to buy some food. He needs items that don’t have to be cooked or even heated up, because there’s no electricity in his hidey-hole. The truck stop is only a few miles from where he’s been living since seeing his face, the description of his pickup and his tag number on television. He saw it yesterday when he was lying on the bed in Room 15 at the Rest-A-While Motel on South Nogales Highway, and after he saw it he stood up, quickly got his gear together, paid the old Hispanic man who’d asked him when he’d checked in on Saturday if he wanted a nice young college girl for company that night, and then he had hit the road. But not too fast, because he wanted to stay invisible.

He roams the aisles, picking up a few cans of pork ’n’ beans, a can of chili, three bottles of water, a pack of doughnuts and a bag of potato chips. He needs the sugar and salt, because it’s very hot where he’s living. He sees a rack of ball caps, and chooses a tan-colored one that has the red Triple-T logo. A candy bar or two would be good. He has parked around back, in among the protection of the semis at rest. His eye is always on the front entrance. In the waistband of his jeans beneath his light blue cotton shirt is his automatic pistol, loaded with a clip of eight.

At the Rest-A-While, which came equipped with many nice young college girls who knocked on his door after dark and smiled at him with meth-rotted teeth, he kept up on the news. The cable reception was fuzzy, hard to look at, but it had shown him what he’d needed to see.

One dead in Sweetwater, one in the ICU in Tucson. Sniper Stalks Rock Band. Tucson police and the FBI need community help in finding this man, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and may still be in the area. GB Promotions Presents Stone Church Nine at Gila Bend Thursday July 31st through Sunday August 3rd. The Five Appearing Thursday July 31st at 3:00, one show only. Tickets on sale at the site or available online through Ticketmaster. GB Promotions assures the fans that security will be tight and every precaution taken.

Don’t go there
, Gunny had told him in Room 15, as Jeremy had been packing his stuff. Gunny had been standing in the bathroom door, his boots in the puddles of the toilet overflow from last night, the soggy towels lying like dead white dogs.
I want you to rest today and tomorrow
, Gunny had said.

“I’ve got to get out. They’re on me.” Jeremy was thinking one word and one destination: Mexico…Mexico…Mexico.

Gunny had told him they were not on him until they had him. Now, it was true they knew his name and face and the make and color of his pickup truck and his tag number, but…they’re not here, are they?

“Matter of time,” Jeremy had said.

Then you know what you need to do
, Gunny had answered as he moved across the room.
Dig yourself in
.

“Mexico, Mexico, Mexico,” Jeremy had said. He’d zipped up his rifle case.

You’re not ready. Jeremy? Dig. Yourself. In.

And the way Gunny had said that, with all the iron-hand-in-the-velvet-glove persuasion that made a man admire another man, caused Jeremy to look toward the corner where Gunny was standing, just at the edge of the blazing light that slipped around the crooked curtains.

“Dig yourself in,” Jeremy had repeated, as if he’d come up with the idea. “How? Where?”

You’re supposed to be the Marine
, Gunny had reminded him, with a dark stare.

Translation: guy with a pussy last name ain’t gone be no pussy, not in
this
man’s Corps.

Jeremy stands at the Triple-T Truck Stop’s cash register, waiting as the lady bags his groceries. She is also talking on a cellphone, so she’s working one-handed. And slowwwww. Up on a shelf behind the counter is a small TV for her entertainment, and it is from a KGUN-9 News Minute that he sees a young female reporter holding a microphone. At the bottom of the scene is the legend
Violent Afternoon At Stone Church
. That sounds like one of the many paperback Westerns Jeremy had read at Camp Fallujah.

“It happened about an hour ago, Guy,” the reporter is saying to, presumably, the anchorman. Her mane of brown hair whips in the wind and she makes a move to control it but no luck. Behind her, people with tattoos are milling around, mugging at the camera over her shoulders, showing the devil horns and sticking their tongues out. “During a performance by The Five band, a man drew a handgun and fired two shots. There were some minor injuries in a scuffle, but no one was seriously hurt and the shooter was taken into custody. We have some pretty startling video to show you.”

There is just a brief clip of bodies flailing around, the camera getting knocked back and forth, a glint of what may be a gun in someone’s hand, and then a figure with shoulder-length black hair jumps off the stage into the crowd.

Jeremy knows who that is.

“Guy, we’ll have more of this video, more details on this story and interviews with the actual Five band members at six o’clock. For now, a GB Promotions spokesman says Stone Church will continue as planned through Sunday night.”

“Amazing video, just amazing,” says Guy.

“Cap?” asks the woman behind the counter.

Jeremy focuses on her and realizes what she’s asking. “I’ll wear it,” he answers, and then he breaks eye contact because that’s one way to stay invisible. But she’s back on her cellphone as soon as he has the bag in hand, and he walks out into the hot yellow sunlight of late afternoon and goes around to his truck. He drives away, slowly and unhurriedly, but he keeps watching all his mirrors for a flashing light.

Jeremy drives to the southeast, toward what he found yesterday afternoon when he left the Rest-A-While in search of a place to dig in. He found it when he followed a series of signs that said
Houses For Sale
and repeated underneath it was
Casas para la venta
. It is not quite four miles from the truck stop. It is on a main road past a residential area of middle-class homes with cactus gardens and red tile roofs, three different types to choose from. Many of the houses here are For Sale. Some appear to have been For Sale for a long time. It is past a stripmall with a drugstore and a Mexican takeout joint and a consignment shop and a nail parlor, but the grocery store and the video rental store are For Rent though their signs still hang in place over empty windows. It is the next turnoff on the right, within sight of the dying mall. It is built upon God’s own country, hard desert earth under a stark blue sky with cactus-stubbled foothills and gray mountains to the east. At the turnoff, there is a stand of mesquite trees and among them a rock wall with the words
LaPaz Estates
hammered into it with tarnished brass letters.

And beyond the turnoff and the trees and the wall are dusty streets with no names that lead to the empty driveways and bare garages of nine small houses built in the adobe style, three different types to choose from, all with red tile roofs. Beyond the nine houses, there are two more half-built and one hardly started. The streets wander a distance past wooden stakes that define the borders of their estates. Here and there are sacks of concrete and forgotten wheelbarrows and black garbage bags melting in the sun. Past the last estate where any work has been attempted, marked by piles of stones and brown cactus, the streets surrender to the desert, and that is the end of someone’s dead dream.

Dead it is. Jeremy steers toward his very own adobe-style piece of heaven, which stands back off the main road far enough to be careful. The For Sale signs are everywhere, though some have collapsed due to wind and fatigue. Open House, some of them proclaim. New Low Price, some of them plead. He has seen a coyote here this morning, trotting down the middle of his street.

No one is home in any of these houses. Jeremy figures it was a construction deal gone bad, or somebody ran out of money, or the bank stopped throwing away good cash until some of the existing LaPaz estates started selling. Whatever. Somebody’s loss, his place to dig in.

He has to go there now, and think. Figure things out. He is so close to Mexico he can smell the freedom in the breeze. He can smell the new beginnings, like the odor of onions frying in a pan. He pulls into the driveway, the ninth of nine, and he lets the truck idle as he gets out and pulls up the garage door, which normally would be opened by someone’s electronic garage door opener but that person is not coming here today and Jeremy has previously disengaged the latch.

Then he drives in and pulls the garage door shut again, and when he takes his bag of groceries into the kitchen he almost feels like calling out
Honey, I’m home
.

There is no kitchen yet, really. There is a white counter and some cupboards, you can tell this is supposed to be a kitchen, but there are no appliances. The new linoleum floor is protected from workmen’s dusty boots and spatters of paint by a bright blue tarp. The same sheet of blue in every room, protecting the carpets. The money must have run out suddenly, because the painting was never finished and several empty paint cans lie around.

There is something about this color that bothers him. There is something about it that makes him want to run away, and in the room where he sleeps he has taken up the blue tarp and gotten it out of there, so he can curl up on the thin sand-colored carpet with a pillow of clothes under his head and find some rest.

He thinks maybe he remembers it as the color of a body bag. He remembers seeing it on the roofs of New Orleans houses on TV. Or…maybe…something else…something…

He wants and needs and badly desires a nice powdered doughnut.

You need a car
, says Gunny, whose face slides in across Jeremy’s shoulder.

It is hot in this house. The air is still, the sound of humanity absent.

A car
, Gunny repeats, as if to a mentally-deficient child.
Do you understand why?

Jeremy does. He’s been lucky so far, going back and forth to the truck stop. He hasn’t seen a police cruiser, and neither has one seen him. But the thing about digging in is, digging in can be a trap of your own making. He can’t get out on the highway to Mexico in his pickup truck. He can’t make it to freedom and lose himself in his future. So, yeah, he needs a car.

Gunny asks him, in that quiet and penetrating way that Gunny has, where Jeremy thinks he might find a car.

“A car dealership?” Jeremy asks, but he knows the correct answer.

Some place where cars are parked.

He takes his powdered doughnut and his bag of chips and a bottle of water into the room where he sleeps. Before he sits down in his corner he removes the .45 from his waistband and puts it on the floor at his side. Then he eats a little and drinks a little and thinks as he stares at the gun.

He is proficient with his rifle, but a pistol is a different animal. You have to be close. You can so easily miss with a pistol, unless you’re really close. He has always thought of a pistol as a defensive weapon, a rifle as offensive. That’s why he didn’t try to use his pistol on the drummer girl back in Sweetwater. Sure, he could’ve just driven up beside her and shot her, but what if she’d been quick enough to dodge a killing bullet? Then she’s got his face behind her eyes, and if she’s able to talk the police have his face too. And if somebody drives up before he can finish her off…wow, that’s messy. Well, they’ve got his face
now
—and how that happened he couldn’t figure out—but still, at the time he didn’t think he should risk a close encounter. Look what happened to that amateur at Stone Church. Two pistol shots, wasted.

Kind of an interesting thing, though, why somebody
else
would’ve wanted to take those fuckers out. Maybe he wasn’t the only one their lies had stirred up?

He can feel that Gunny has entered the room, and is standing right over there.

Jeremy eats and drinks and stares at the gun.

The rifle is a creature of dignity. To die by a long-range rifle shot is, really, a dignified death. It is the coming together of engineering, geometry, and God-given talent. But death by pistol is nasty and brutish, and way below his standards.

What he does is art.

But he knows what Gunny wants him to do.

“Do I have to kill an innocent person?” Jeremy asks, with powdered sugar on his chin.

Gunny tells him again that he needs a car.

Jeremy remembers a day when he had some downtime and he was connected through the Internet with Karen and Nick on her laptop. It was morning in Iraq and near midnight in Houston. He remembers that she had put on makeup for him, and how pretty her hair looked. He remembers that Nick had stared at him through the screen seven thousand six hundred and a few miles away and asked him one question:
Daddy, when
can you come home?

And Jeremy had answered,
I can come home when the good guys win.

“Don’t make me kill an innocent person,” says Jeremy, but there is no begging in it. A Marine does not beg. A Marine gets the job done, and then he can go home.

Gunny tells him that he doesn’t have to kill anyone today. What he has to do is get a car, and if that means taking a person out in the desert two or three miles from a road, giving them a bottle of water and directions in which to go and making them walk in the cool of the evening, then what is the problem with that?

“You make it sound so easy,” Jeremy remarks.

Gunny says that the sooner he gets this task done, the safer he will be and he will not be trapped in this place with those blue shoes on the floor.

Jeremy doesn’t move; he’s not sure he heard what he thought he heard.

Gunny asks to be forgiven. He says he meant to say
blue sheets
.