The familiar feeling of the guitar neck in his hand soothed him a little. When it was back in tune, he strummed a couple of chords. Without an amp, it was barely audible in the open air. The urge to put it down and flee the site was intense. What exactly was he doing sitting in the middle of a snowy wood with an electric guitar, waiting for a sociopath to come and kill him?
Twigs snapped in the underbrush.
Billy looked up and saw Trevor Rail in a black trench coat and muck-covered boots marching out of the naked trees, gun in hand, eyes ablaze. An unexpected wave of calm washed over Billy. The waiting was over. He took a cigarette from the velvet pick compartment of the guitar case, lit it and took a drag. His calm deepened.
“Are these the master tapes, or is this just some dickless stunt?” Rail asked.
Billy blew smoke in his direction by way of reply.
“Are these the masters? Answer me!” Rail yelled.
Billy just looked at him.
Rail did a little pirouette with his hands held aloft, the stainless steel gun barrel shining on high, and his trench coat fanning out at the bottom. He laughed at the sky and said, “Of course. Of course they are.”
Billy thought, A drama queen to the bitter end. Then he said, “Don’t worry, Trevor. The weather can’t hurt them.”
“Why, pray tell, is that?”
“’Cause I already erased most of them. Only, I didn’t have time to finish. This one here at the end might still have ‘Language of Love’ on it. That’s the hit single, right?” Billy drew on the cigarette, then reached down and touched its glowing orange tip to the tape. It ignited immediately, shriveling in a line of flame that ran through the trees like a mythical salamander, disappearing in an instant as the fuel was consumed.
Rail aimed the gun at Billy’s heart. He said, “You’re insane, Billy. I’ve always known that. So why can’t you be crazy enough to kill yourself? You’re so fucking close. Why do I have to do it for you?”
Billy only shook his head and tossed the butt into the snow. Balancing the guitar on his knee, he pulled the platinum ring off his finger, held it up to his eye for a second to look at Rail’s puzzled face through it, then flicked it off of his thumb like a coin into a wishing well. It spun through the air in a little arc, catching the light, and vanished with a plunk into the pool, lost between the chunks of floating ice.
It took a few seconds for the incomprehension on Rail’s face to morph into rage. Even after all of the rebellion, he still did not expect Billy to be so bold as to think he could break their contract that easily.
Rail slipped out of his coat, letting it fall to the ground around him so that he appeared to be standing in his own black pool. Still holding the gun, he tugged up the sleeve of his red silk shirt to bare his left arm. The gesture was aggressive, determined, radiant with grim resolve. He walked to the pool slowly, each step a threat, each step a testament to the seriousness of the violation.
He knelt beside the water and looked at Billy. He said, “I thought I could work with you. I thought I could make you great, but you don’t have it in you. I enjoyed scaring the hell out of your father the night he died at his shop. I thought just maybe you’d get a good song out of it. But no. Because you don’t give a fuck about anyone after all. Well, you’re married to the music, Billy, and you’re going to die with that ring on your hand. You’re going to wear it in your coffin and it will hang on your finger-bone when the flesh has rotted off.”
Rail reached into the water. Something shifted in his face when his hand kept going deeper, past the point where he had expected to find the bottom of a shallow puddle lined with dead leaves. He reached in deeper, submerging his shirt to the shoulder. Billy marveled at the man’s determination when the freezing cold water reached his armpit but Rail seemed not to register such a trifling discomfort. His jaw was set, his eyes locked on Billy. His other hand pressed the gun against the ground for leverage.
Suddenly Rail’s body jerked, seized from below the surface of the pool with enough force to slap his chest and face into the water. When his head struck the surface, he squeezed the gun, firing a shot at Billy. He bobbed up from the water, wet strands of hair plastered across his brow like a web work of black roots through which his eyes beamed pure terror.
He was wrenched forward again, harder this time and fell face-first into the pool, submerged up to the waist, his legs kicking and scrambling at the muddy ground, trying to dig in, to find purchase, to anchor his body. He dropped the gun and scratched at the ground, took hold of a thick root. Pulling on it, he wrested his upper body from the water. As he did so, the root ripped out of the frozen ground but did not snap. He muscled into it. Slowly his face withdrew from the dark liquid followed by a grotesque mirror image: the face of the horned god, locked with him in a bloody kiss.
Pan emerged from below, third eye blazing electric blue, ripe lips drawn back revealing yellow fangs that were pierced through Rail’s bottom lip, peeling it away from the man's gums. Pan's tongue writhed in the space between them, catching the stream of blood that flowed from Rail's mouth.
Rail screamed through torn lips—a high, distorted shriek braided of equal parts pain and panic. He let go of the root, and pounded his hands against the ground. He found the gun, squeezed the grip, shoved the barrel against the creature’s head—only inches from his own—and pulled the trigger. His arm recoiled with kickback. A spray of gray matter, bone fragments and blood-clotted fur erupted from the other side of the creature’s head. The force of the shot tore the fangs from Rail’s lip, shredding it to ribbons. Thick blood poured from his ragged mouth, gushing over his chin.
Pan, however, did not bleed from the bullet hole. He merely reached into the cavity with an earth-encrusted claw and plucked a piece of brain tissue from the smoldering wound as if he were clearing wax from his ear. He flicked it away, let out a seismic peal of laughter, then licked the blood from Rail’s chin with his thick, purple-veined tongue, reaching behind the man’s head as he did so and raking his claws through the dense black hair like a ravenous lover.
Rail’s scream hit a new pitch, fraying his vocal cords with the last reserves of air from the bottom of his lungs. Pan shifted his weight, pulling his prey back down into the water. But before Rail’s face touched the surface again, he put the gun to his own head and fired it. Blood spattered the gnarled trunk of the ancient rowan tree.
As Trevor Rail’s limp body collapsed with a splash into the shallow pool, Pan morphed into a twisting cloud of black smoke, which hovered in the air for a moment, and then scattered on the wind.
Billy Moon stirred from his awestruck paralysis. He looked down at the Les Paul in his lap and the .357 slug that had broken his D string and bored into the dense mahogany between the two pickups.
He laid the guitar in its case and buckled the latches. He stared at the blood spray on the tree at the edge of the pool. Following the gray trunk up toward the sky, he caught a glimpse of sunlight flaring out from a hollow where the bark bulged as if a bees’ nest had altered the growth in that place. He went to it, stepping around the body of Trevor Rail, and saw that the hole in the tree contained a blown-glass sphere on a nest of dead leaves and feathers. He reached in and took it in his hand, felt the weight of the thick, bubbled glass—the witchball, in which the ashes of Olivia Heron swirled and settled like flakes in a snow globe.
Billy had never cared for sports as a child, but that hadn’t stopped his father from making a dogged effort to teach him how to throw a ball. Spying a stand of tall, thick oaks not far off, he said, “This one’s for you, Dad.” He wound up and let the ball fly with all the speed and power he could muster. It shattered against the rough bark with a loud crack, dust coating the tree at the point of impact and billowing out in a little cloud. The ashes drifted toward the ground, then were lifted on an updraft of gentle wind. The forest sighed.
Twenty-four
The police questioned Billy for just under nine hours. Long enough to give him a wealth of opportunities to cont
radict his original story. Long enough even to riff on the good cop/bad cop routines he’d seen so many times on TV. But ultimately, detectives Stark and Cronk needed only the first fifteen minutes to determine two things: one, Billy Moon was not right in the head and two, he was lying or omitting something in his account of how Trevor Rail had accidentally blown his own head off trying to kill a bear that had wandered over and attacked him while he was waving his favorite gun around to illustrate some creative differences he was having with his artist in the middle of the woods at ten in the morning.
When word got around the coffee maker that the dirtbag in Interrogation 2 was Billy Moon, yes the Billy Moon, someone must have made a phone call because by noon Echo Lake, normally a sleepy town between Christmas and New Year’s Day, was a traffic jam of news vans, camera men and talking heads. And it wasn’t just the local Catskill stations. Due to the town’s proximity to New York City and the fact that it was a slow week for news, all of the networks, plus CNN and Fox, had a presence on the scene.
By the time Los Angeles rolled out of bed, the speculation frenzy was in full swing. Danielle Del Vecchio spilled her coffee on the floor when she flipped on the little TV in her kitchen and heard that Billy Moon had kidnapped a teen-aged girl (who was going to do an exclusive with Larry King the following night), tried to burn down a legendary recording studio, and was now being held for questioning in the shooting death of his producer.
The phone rang. It was Don Lamar, president of Gravitas Records.
“Danielle. Holy… Shit. Danielle. What the… Fucking fuck, Danielle? What the hell is happening in New York? And why are you here? If he needed a baby sitter, you should have been there.”
“So I could get popped in the woods for Christmas, too?”
“Maybe you could have prevented this, made sure he was properly medicated or something.”
“You give an artist room to create. Let’s see, who told me that? Oh, right, you. Don’t try to make this my fault. We don’t even know what happened.”
“Happened? He went batshit crazy is what happened.”
“Well, you know, if I was locked up in a cabin in the snow with Trevor Rail, I might have a breakdown, too. I’m going out there on the first flight as soon as I can get a couple of lawyers up from New York to keep him from making this worse.”
“This could be worse?”
“Yes, Donnie, it could be worse. He could incriminate himself, if he hasn’t already. Do you even give a shit about Billy, or is he just your cash cow?”
“Of course, I care for Billy. Hey, are you sending those Jews who ran it up my ass on his tour negotiations? That’d be good. Billy’d be a free man and the State of New York would be bankrupt by this time tomorrow.”
“Hey, watch your mouth; you’re talking to a Jew. I’m getting him the best criminal lawyers you can afford.”
“Oh, is that right? Then you better shut your Rolodex and open the Yellow Pages because I’m hearing on TV that ‘sources close to Rachel Shadbourne are claiming that Billy erased the master tapes.’ Who the fuck is Rachel Shadbourne?”
“I don’t know. Don’t believe everything you hear on TV.”
“If it’s true, Danielle, I’ll hire those two circumcised pricks of yours to pump Billy from both ends, I swear to God.”
She thumbed the talk button, cutting him off in mid rant, then immediately pressed it again and started calling friends and associates back East while getting dressed. Forty minutes later she had arranged legal counsel to sit with Billy at the police station until he was charged or released. If he was released, they knew which hotel to sit with him at until she arrived.
* * *
Billy stuck to his story about the bear. He repeated it like the chorus of a hit song to anyone who wanted to hear it. And he sang the same tune to anyone who wanted to know what else he had in his repertoire: to the police, to his lawyers, and, after midnight, while partaking of the mini-bar in her room, to Danielle. He was shaken by what he had seen and was harboring some deep doubts about the very lax laws reality had been abiding by in his general vicinity lately, but he still knew for sure that talking to detectives about devils, ghosts and pagan gods might get him an insanity plea but it wouldn’t preserve his freedom. He would avoid prison only to end up in a mental hospital.
His lawyers spent the day reminding the police that they didn’t have any evidence against him. Little by little forensic results came in that concurred. The gun was registered to Rail and bore only his prints. There were no traces of weapon discharge on Billy’s hands, and the angle suggested self-infliction. It didn’t help Billy’s case that they'd found no bear tracks in the area, no bear scat, and no sightings by the rangers now combing the woods, but it was evident that some kind of animal had chewed up the man’s face.
It might have been a scavenger that showed up post-mortem while Moon was calling the police from the studio. In any case, the lawyers were already suggesting that their client could have invented the bear as a diplomatic solution to the problem of his longtime friend and professional partner killing himself. Perhaps he was in denial and really believed he had seen a bear. He was, after all, sleep deprived from the grueling sessions.
Detectives Stark and Cronk released Billy Moon at a quarter past eight that night on the condition that he would remain in Ulster County for the next three days. Cronk told his partner he had a gut feeling they would be officially arresting Moon at the Holiday Inn before the first twenty-four hours was up, after the lab geeks had more time to chew on the data.
But the next day came and went, and so did the one after that, with no breakthroughs in the case. The geeks all seemed fascinated by the utter freakishness of their findings when they explained that trajectories and powder burns all painted a picture consistent with the victim shooting himself. There were those damned bite marks on his lower lip that didn’t match any known species of bear, but neither did they match the dental mold Moon let them take during his nine-hour interview. He was free to go. Cause of Death: accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. That much became fact, the rest remained mystery.
* * *
Billy flew home to San Francisco. He left his gear to be packed and shipped by Jake and the runners, with the sole exception of the red Les Paul, which he’d bought a seat for and carried on the plane. Until the day he flew home, it had rested in its case beside the control room couch where he had set it down before calling the police. Billy wasn’t quite sure he knew why he had taken an electric guitar with him into the woods that day. Because the Devil made him do it? That excuse was starting to feel a little worn out. Because the spirit of the wood, buried in his poet’s heart, disguised as a horned god by his tired mind, had deigned to save his life?
Maybe.
He had, in rare moments, felt that some songs had a life of their own—that they were hatched whole in the ether, merely waiting for someone with a guitar and pen to catch them and set them down. There had been far too few of these in his career, until perhaps recently. Guys like Dylan seemed to have a better butterfly net.
Still, he knew what it felt like to catch one and to be sure that he had no claim to the title of creator. It felt like being a vehicle for some greater voice. So maybe the god of song worked in strange ways. Maybe he rewarded the scribe with a commuted sentence every now and then, on a whim. Maybe God was a hoary old goat who liked wine and women and something you could dance to. Some sane people believed stranger things.
Billy restrung the Les Paul and hung it on the wall of his writing room, glad he hadn’t told the detectives about it. They would have wanted to dig the slug out. He wanted to keep it.
Jake hadn’t been around the last time Billy went to the church to pick up his guitar and pack his suitcase, but Eddie gave Billy Jake’s home number and they talked one more time before Billy flew home. As soon as he heard Jake’s voice, Billy regretted that it was only a phone call and not face to face. He was calling from the airport while he waited at the gate.
>
He’d wanted to go to Jake’s apartment but was afraid of drawing attention to the kid if there were still reporters lurking around. Jake’s last name was still unknown to the media because Rachel had never bothered to learn it, and the paparazzi didn’t need to know that Billy had an interest in the address. Nonetheless, after all they’d been through together, after drawing blood from the kid, this felt like a shitty way to say good-bye.
“How’s your arm healing?” Billy asked.
“It’s fine, just itches a little.”
Billy didn’t know what to say next, but he stayed focused on Jake’s interests, even though he had a favor to ask. “I asked Danielle to go to bat for you and squeeze a higher engineering fee out of Gravitas. So you should be getting a fat check.”
“Okay.”
“They would have tried to shortchange you since it’s your first time and they know you’re hungry for the credit, but Danielle’s good; she’ll get you what you deserve. Besides, they don’t want you talking to the media.”
“I wouldn’t do that anyway.”
“Yeah, I know that, but they don’t.”
“Well, thanks. And there can’t be a credit if there isn’t a record, right?”
Billy laughed, sending a short burst of distortion through the line. “True,” he said. “They’re still a little sore about that.”
“I imagine they would be. They have nothing to show for what they’re paying me, and that’s still nothing compared to what they paid Eddie.”
“Yeah, well… They’re looking into having Bob Ludwig master your rough mixes just so they can put something out while there’s a buzz.”
There was silence on the line for a beat. “Don’t scare me, Billy. They’re not good enough. That’s why we call ‘em rough.”
“It never crossed my mind I’d need to destroy those too. Now Danielle has them. It’s out of my hands.”
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