The Paradise Gig

by Laurence Shames

  29

  s o here’s what happens next.

  Me and Master and Pete and Callie are watching Sarge up on stage and, like everybody else, we’re a little what-the-fuck when he stands there like a statue and doesn’t bother singing. But aside from the surprise, I sort of sense, especially from Callie, some gladness, some pride, like he’s doing the right thing—whatever the right thing is by human standards, like where’s the line between business and bullshit, occasional fibbing and lifelong fraud, and questions like that which as a so-called lower animal I will never fully understand.

  But here’s something I do understand: Survival. And when we see Sarge disappear backstage and not show up again after a minute or two, we all seem to realize at once that survival is now what it’s about, so we slip out past a catering table and through a tent-flap to go looking for him. Understand, it’s very dark outside after being in the lit-up tent. There’s no moon. It’s cloudy, hazy. Except for kind of a ghostly gleam from the seashell walkways, we can barely see anything. And it’s loud out there, with the big speakers scattered all around and the DJ started up again, playing songs with lots of bass and saxophones and such.

  So we’re out there creeping and groping around the property. I’m pulling on the leash, nose to the ground, sniffing for some sign of Sarge. But with all the different shoes and sandals and perfumes that have been dragging through the place, I can’t say I’m finding anything to go on. Finally we edge around a big bank of bougainvillea and have a clear view down to the pool and hot tub. Well, almost clear. In the damp and heavy air, there’s a layer of mist above the water like fog on a lagoon. Makes everything look wavery. Still, we can tell there’s three people down there squeezed very close together. The tall guy, the short guy, and Sarge in the middle. There’s something that doesn’t look quite right about the way Sarge is standing. His feet are on the ground but it’s like his legs aren’t really holding up his weight.

  We creep closer, using shrubs and lounge chairs to hide behind. We can see by then that Sarge looks pretty limp. The tall guy is propping him up and the short guy is fiddling with his shirt. They keep sidling closer to the hot tub while fumbling around to undress him, and it’s getting pretty clear that we’re running out of time to pussyfoot around, so we sort of jog right over and stand just across the pool from them, maybe ten yards away. They don’t hear us coming above the music, and it’s for sure they’re not expecting company. When they finally see us, they sort of flinch and lose their grip on Sarge, then catch him again as his knees are buckling.

  “Hey, what’s with him?” says Pete, not too pushy, not accusing, just buying time I guess, while all the while we’re rounding the pool and getting closer still.

  “Him?” the short guy says. “Binged on vodka when he came offstage. Swigged a pint. Just trying to sober him up. Ya know, not see him embarrassed.”

  “He doesn’t drink,” says Callie.

  “Maybe not when you’re looking, Mom,” says the tall guy. “He’s polluted.”

  “He doesn’t drink,” she says again, and that seems like the right moment for me and Master to do our little trick, the new one that I learned that very afternoon. Master twitches my leash twice in a way that no one else would notice. This is my signal to throw a barking, snarling shitfit, which is what I do right there on the tiles around the hot tub. Master says, “Calm down, Nacho,” and grabs a treat from his pocket. But I keep up the racket. It’s pretty unpleasant, so people look away as he reaches down to hand me the goodie, and of course that’s when he grabs his .38 from the holster by his ankle. There’s no big hurry as he straightens up until suddenly he’s waggling the gun toward the tall guy and the short guy and it’s too late for them to do a damn thing about it. “The kid drinks ginger ale,” says Master. “Wha’dya drug him with?”

  “Don’t be stupid, old man,” the short guy says. “We didn’t drug nobody. Put the gun away.”

  Master doesn’t. He gestures for Pete and Callie to take over propping up Sarge, who sags pretty badly on the handoff but doesn’t quite go down. Then he says to the thugs, “Keep your hands high and get inna water.”

  “The water?” says the tall guy.

  “The water. The hot tub. Where yas was gonna put Sarge. Get in.”

  “Fuck you, old man,” the short guy says.

  “Now that’s a very unhelpful remark. Do youse not take me serious? Do I gotta shoot somebody’s kneecap off? You wanna see me do it?”

  He cocks the hammer and waggles the gun around at knee level, maybe more like crotch level on the short guy. The two thugs look at each other, stall another second then step into the hot tub. There’s three stairs going down, so they get shorter as they descend, like they’re sinking into quicksand. They’re still wearing their shiny Sergeant Pepper uniforms with the epaulettes and braid. The cloth looks pretty heavy and turns a much darker color wherever it gets wet.

  “So,” Master goes on, “what were you were plannin’ to do with ‘im? Drown ‘im?”

  “We weren’t drowning anyone,” says the tall guy. “Like we said, we just wanted to sober him up.”

  By this time, Pete and Callie have dragged Sarge around a big speaker on a tripod and laid him on a lounge chair. He’s pretty much conked out. Callie’s sitting next to him and stroking his forehead. Pete finally seems to remember that he too has a gun, so he takes it out and tries to waggle it like Master does. But some guys, a gun looks natural in their hand. Pete, he might as well be holding a banana. Still, the pistol lends a certain authority, and he says, “Sober him up? Like you sobered up the kid who had the surfing accident? Or the one that got run over after too much partying? Right after their songs got released?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the short guy says.

  Master lifts his eyes away from the two guys in the tub. I find this a little surprising, the lapse in focus, I mean. But something has caught his attention, and he says to Pete, “Hey, wait a sec. Those lamps. Those neon things. They weren’t so close to the tub before, were they?”

  Pete looks and thinks and says, “No, they weren’t. Not nearly that close.”

  Master shakes his head. “Electric right by the hot tub. Bad idea. That shit is dangerous.”

  For a moment no one says anything. The music’s blasting a song about somebody’s birthday that isn’t going well. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to…

  Master goes on, “You sons a bitches were gonna electrocute ‘im?”

  The thugs say they weren’t. Nobody believes them.

  “That’s a nasty fuckin’ thing to do,” says Master. He ponders a moment. “Y’ever been electrocuted?” he asks the thugs. “What I hear, it doesn’t kill ya. People say it does, but it don’t. Not regular current. Just burns, singes hair off, eyelashes and such. That’s what I’ve heard, at least. So I’ll ask ya again. Was that the plan? Were ya gonna electrocute ‘im?”

  The thugs say no.

  Master says, “Ya know, I really don’t care for violence. Except as a very last resort.” He sidesteps to where he can pick up a lamp. He checks the slack in the cord. “S’okay. We’re tryin’ to clear a few things up here. Get to the bottom a things, ya might say. Here’s your chance to help.”

  He lifts the lamp above his head. He says, “What were ya gonna do wit’ Sarge?”

  The tall guy and the short guy just sit there, not answering, kind of bracing, like for a car crash. Master shrugs, winces, and throws the lamp in.

  There’s a sizzle like a pork chop in oil. The water in the hot tub flashes blue. The metal buttons on the thugs’ crazy outfits spark and crackle. Their hair stands up. Smoke rises from their heads. They howl but it can barely be heard above the music, which is now playing You would cry too if it happened to you…

  The lamp goes out. The current dies. Master steps over to another lamp and picks it up. “Okay, that was for Sarge. This one’s for those other kids. Why’d ya kill ‘em?”

&nb
sp; “We didn’t. We didn’t kill ‘em.”

  Master says, “You guys are makin’ me feel bad, havin’ to do this. Wanna reconsider?”

  “We didn’t do it. We swear.”

  Master shakes his head sadly, bites his lip, and tosses in the lamp. The thugs jerk like toys on strings. Their epaulettes catch fire. They duck underwater to drown the flames. When they come up again they have no eyebrows.

  “Enough!” the short guy says. “Please, enough. We’re being straight here. Those killings, we didn’t do ‘em. All we did, we set ‘em up.”

  “Set ‘em up?” says Pete.

  “Yeah,” the tall guy says, “that was our job. Set-up. We admit it. First kid, we got him out surfing. But we didn’t know what was gonna happen. Not the first time. I swear we didn’t. We thought it was one of Marco’s crazy games, some kind of control-freak prank. Then the murder happens…”

  He breaks off and suddenly he’s crying, his nose is running, he’s trying to wipe it with what’s left of the scorched sleeve of his Sergeant Pepper jacket.

  “Look,” the short guy says, “all we ever wanted was to be singers, music guys. That’s why we went to work for Marco. He said if we were good employees, he’d record us sometime, give us a start. We believed it. We figured he was nuts, but not a maniac. Then the killing happens, and suddenly we’re in it up to our eyeballs. Accomplices. Stuck. Marco had us. So the other kid, we set him up, too. We got him to the spot. But we didn’t do the killing. I swear to God.”

  “So who did?” asks Master.

  “Who?” says the tall guy, still sniffling. “Who do you think? Marco did. Personally. With pleasure. He hated those kids.”

  “That’s something we just didn’t get at first,” the short guy picks up. “How much he hated them. ‘Cause they had talent. They could sing, they could play. All he could do was turn his knobs and switches. Sure, he was greedy for the money. But the reason he killed ‘em, mainly it was flat-out hate. Hate and envy.”

  Callie says, “And he was going to kill Sarge, too.”

  “Yeah,” the tall guy says. “As soon as we told him everything was ready. We drugged him, yeah. Were gonna soften him up with shocks, just like you done to us. Then we were gonna leave the rest to Marco. I’m sorry. I’m ashamed. But it’s the whole truth, I swear to God.”

  Master looks at Pete. Pete looks at Callie. I don’t know exactly how humans decide what’s a lie and what’s for real, but somehow or other everyone seems to agree that this story is legit. So Master’s voice softens up a little and he says to the toasted guys in the tub, “S’okay, let’s say you bastards aren’t killers. Not quite, at least. Which leaves just one more question. Where’s Marco keep the notebook?”

  “Notebook?” says the tall guy. “What notebook?”

  Master wags the gun and says, “Come on, fellas. Youse were doin’ so good. Don’t start in wit’ the bullshit again. Where’s he keep it?”

  “Keep what?” the short guy says. “Look, we don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  Well, while all this back and forth is going on, Sarge has been waking up little by little, but no one’s really noticed except Callie, so it comes as a surprise when the young man says, “The Beatles notebook. The one with the great songs. The songs he uses for bait.”

  As he’s saying this, he tries to raise himself up on an elbow. He’s still woozy, so it takes a lot of effort, and part of the effort is that he sort of kicks his foot out, and when he kicks his foot out it hits one of the legs of the tripod that’s holding up the giant speaker, and the tripod starts to buckle, and the speaker starts to lean, and it’s leaning toward the pool, and it starts to fall. It seems like it’s falling very slowly, the way a large building might tip over, but probably that’s just an optical illusion, because if it was really falling slowly, then someone would have had the time to catch it or at least deflect it. But no one does. So it keeps tipping, picking up momentum, unstoppable as a truck sliding off a bridge, and it hits the water with a huge slap that then becomes more of a sucking sound. There’s a final buzzing bass note and a tsunami around the edges of the pool.

  And then the whole sound system gets shorted out and takes the lights out with it.

  So in a single instant, right in the middle of a song, the music stops and the party tent goes dark and the night gets eerily silent and way blacker even than it was before. For a second or two, all we hear is crickets and mosquitoes. Then there’s all sorts of noises from the tent, a mix of shouts and cursing, and then it sounds like a stampede, like people are panicking, storming out, imagining, I guess, that the tent is collapsing or it’s a terrorist attack, or God only knows how many different things human beings are afraid of.

  Anyway, people scatter, running around at random, half-blind in the dark. But one guy, just a silhouette, you understand, a black cut-out wriggling on a black background, seems to know exactly where he’s going and is making a bee-line for the hot tub. There’s only one person that rushing figure could be, Marco, coming to see if his thugs have done their job and if it’s time to make the kill.

  All at once I’m straining at my leash, ears thrown back, haunches quivering, poised for action. After everything I’ve just heard about this scumbag, I’d like to hurl myself at him, bite his leg and try my damnedest to chomp an artery. But Master holds me back. We bide our time. Everyone is keeping very quiet. The dazed guys in the hot tub stay still as rocks in an aquarium. Pete’s arm droops a little from the weight of his gun. Sarge has sat up in the chair. Callie still keeps her hand on him, like she’s afraid he’ll vanish into thin air if she doesn’t. Me, I’m trying not to pant. The haze has thickened. It carries a smell of chlorine and burned skin. Marco moves closer, sometimes crunching over a seashell walkway, other times rustling against shrubs.

  Finally, when the murderer is just a few steps away, Sarge says very calmly, “Hello, Marco. Thanks for a lovely party.”

  Marco stops on a dime. He cranes his neck. You can almost sense his eyeballs straining, trying to make out what the hell is going on, how things went so wrong. In a second or so, he notices his torched and simmered thugs. He sees Sarge alive and well. I guess he sees the rest of us, too, but he doesn’t stick around to gather more details. He leans one step backward, pivots on his fancy shoes, and takes off running.

  We take off after him, but not before Pete fires his gun. Frankly, I don’t think he means to, I think it’s just a twitch. There’s a flash from the muzzle that shows him looking very surprised. God knows where the bullet ends up. Anyway, after the recoil, we take off after Marco. But the fleeing man has a big advantage. He knows every square inch of the property and we do not. So he’s zigging and zagging through the humid dark, around hedges and gazebos, between cottages, in among the clumps of palms and vines. Tough evasion tactics, plus Master just can’t move that fast, so Marco’s pulling away with every footstep and there’s no way we can track him with our eyes.

  But this is where my nose comes into play. You don’t need light to smell. All you need is air and will and focus. And I’ve picked up Marco’s scent by now. It’s a bitter smell, a blend of sweat and fear and dry cleaning stuff and stale cologne, and I can read it like a book. Nose down, I follow it across pathways and patios, through swaths of grass and flower beds. Master trundles along behind me, Pete at his side, Callie propping up the gradually recovering Sarge.

  I’m confident, I’m tireless, I’m proud to be leading. But then at some point, on a patch of bare ground, doubt creeps in. What if I’m wrong? What if I fail? What if I mess up and let him get away? Worry halves my concentration and the scent grows indistinct and muddled. We’ve almost reached the edge of the estate by now, the shoreline of the Gulf, and there’s a new array of complicating flavors in the air. Salt, seaweed, sulfur. I hesitate, confused. I backtrack a couple steps. I’m close to panic, close to shame. I sniff left, sniff right, sniff high, sniff low.

  And then I have it again! Huge relief. Once again I’m sure. And is
there any better feeling? Now I know for certain where the scent is leading. It’s leading to a small, square building, maybe twenty yards away, where the faintest of flickering light is coming through a grated window.

  I let out a quick whimper. I point the way with nose and tail. I strain against the leash like I’m dragging a sled but Master holds me back. Then he gestures to our companions to stay quiet and we slowly and carefully approach, staying on the grass, avoiding the crunch of gravel, crouching as low as Master can manage, seeking out the skinny shadows of wind-leaning palms. Master’s gun is poised, as easy in his hand as if the barrel was just another finger. Pete holds his like it just came off the stove. We sidle around to where we can see a slice of light beyond the grated window. We creep closer, barely breathing, braced for…well, for what? The rude poke of a rifle suddenly sticking through the grate? A hail of bullets? Who can even say what he expects in a moment such as that, when the blood is so riled up that you hardly even notice that you’re terrified?

  But here’s what we definitely don’t expect, and it’s what we actually see.

  Marco’s in there on his knees, his forehead resting on his mother’s marble casket, and he’s weeping. His arms are spread around the stone like he’s trying to embrace her one last time. The vase of yellow roses is close to his right hand. The oil lamp casts a soft gold light that puts a gleam on one side of his face and throws the other into purple shadow. After a moment we hear him sobbing. It’s a childish sob, the kind that leaves a person out of breath. I hear that and the rage starts leaking out of me. I can’t stay as furious with Marco as I was before. I can barely even hate him for the awful things he’s done, it’s more like I’m just sad and totally bewildered that a person could turn out like that. How could it happen? Why?

  We stand there for some seconds, watching him weep, hearing him sniffle. What’s weird is that, after the frenzied chase and hot pursuit, it’s almost like we don’t want to interrupt him now that he’s praying or mourning or whatever it is he’s doing. It’s Callie who finally speaks up. “Marco,” she says gently, “come out of there.”