But he knew that girl was missing. Hell, he knew that girl was dead. And he knew that more would die if he didn’t stop playing concerts. But he couldn’t stop. He didn’t think he could anyway. He tried, but other people seemed to get him on stage anyway. People like Chris. But he couldn’t blame Chris, because it wasn’t Chris’ fault. It was Shane’s own fault. For being too weak. And for loving it too much. He remembered when it was simple. When he played for sheer joy, the audience swearing at him when he stopped to take a break. He couldn’t stop then, but it felt right. It was pure. Now it was tainted.
The drugs didn’t help. But he couldn’t stop doing drugs. He couldn’t stand even the thought of facing the world sober. It would be so sharp, so jagged, so bright, so distinct. It was better this way. It was like a frosted window in front of his face. The world was hazy. It was distant. He wasn’t part of it anymore. He was separate. He lived in the drug world.
He was working on a song about it. He had it written somewhere. One of the verses... “It’s all good/ It’s inside my world/ Shelter from the acid rain/ I tuned in/ I dropped out/ This is all of me that remains.” He was going to call the song “Blanca.” So it would sound as if it was about a girl. But Shane didn’t have a girl. He had drugs. White drugs. Hence, Blanca. Shane scratched his rat behind her ears and set her on the floor. She scurried off. Maybe he should name the rats.
No. They already had names. They just couldn’t tell him what they were.
Shane shook his head hard. He didn’t like to think about the rats that way. He liked to think about them the way they were now. Not the way they used to be.
He needed to stop. He wasn’t going to think about this anymore. Shane began to pace the bus briskly. He focused on the way his legs moved, the way his muscles clenched and unclenched. He didn’t even look to see if the rats were getting out of the way of his feet. They scurried this way and that. He didn’t step on anybody. The bus was starting to feel very small, though. He didn’t know how much longer he would be able to stay here. When was the show tonight? How much time did he have? Enough for a walk?
* * *
“What are you going to do?” asked Rainey.
Lark shook her head. Rainey had been sitting inside the van when she’d approached it. Now both girls were sitting outside the van. Lark’s bags of clothes surrounded them. Lark had told Rainey what she’d said to Matt and in front of whom she’d said such things. In light of all that, Rainey’s question seemed pretty appropriate.
“Didn’t you say that Eric sort of offered—”
“Eric took off after Tina went missing,” said Lark. “So I can’t stay with him.”
“Oh,” said Rainey.
They were quiet for a few moments. The situation seemed pretty hopeless.
“Do you want me to talk to Matt?” asked Rainey. “Maybe I could get him to let you stay on the van.”
“I don’t want to sleep anywhere near that bastard,” said Lark.
“That’s understandable. But otherwise, where are you going to go?” asked Rainey.
“I don’t know,” said Lark. She didn’t. It was possible that someone else following the tour would let her catch a ride, but it would certainly not be a permanent arrangement. The best she could hope for was to catch rides here and there until somebody dropped out of the tour. People did it all the time. Some people actually had jobs and only followed The Wrenching on their vacation time. Also, it would be summer in a few months, and the summer groups would show up. It was possible she could ride with one of the summer groups. The summer groups were usually students, however, and most of the other members of the Entourage looked down on them. If she joined a group of summer people, she’d cut herself off socially from the rest of the Entourage. And anyway, summer was months away, so it wasn’t a solution that made much difference now.
Suddenly, Lark felt angry. Matt was such a jerk, and no one else was standing up to him. Why didn’t Rainey drop off the van too? Rainey was supposed to be her best friend. Rainey knew what an ass Matt was. How could Rainey stand to be in the van with him either?
Lark stood up. “I need to take a walk,” she said.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No. I need to be alone,” said Lark. “Just watch my dresses. Make sure Matt doesn’t fuck with them, okay?”
Rainey nodded. Lark might have imagined it, but she almost looked guilty. Maybe she felt bad for not leaving the van too. This made Lark feel guilty. Of course Rainey couldn’t put herself in that kind of position. She and Damien, being a couple, would have a really hard time catching a ride with anyone. Lark shouldn’t have even thought her angry thoughts.
As she walked away, she hung her head. Tears threatened again, but she swallowed them. She couldn’t cry forever. She’d need to come up with some kind of solution eventually. And crying didn’t really help with solutions. It made her feel a little better. Momentarily better. But it didn’t fix anything. She just wished she knew of a way to fix things. She wound between cars and campers, losing herself in the maze of the parking lot. She concentrated on keeping her tears back, not letting them spill over her eyelids. She blinked hard. She swallowed over and over. She gritted her teeth against the tears. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t let herself.
They’d moved on from the venue where Tina had gone missing, so the strip of trees Tina had run into wasn’t there. There were, however, a few straggly trees on the edge of the parking lot. They had thin trunks and twigs for branches. Still, they looked comforting to Lark, and she started for them.
“Not the woods,” said a voice. “Don’t go in the woods.”
Lark jumped. She looked around her frantically, trying to locate the source of the voice. “Who said that?”
It was Death Man.
Lark faced him. He stared at her, black suit, black hair, black beard. “Go home,” he said.
“I don’t have a home,” Lark snapped. Usually, she was slightly afraid of Death Man, but today she just didn’t freaking care. There were more important things to be afraid of.
“Don’t go in the woods,” he said again.
“What fucking woods? There’s no goddamned woods. There’s a couple sorry excuses for trees, but there’s no woods.”
“He’s in the woods. He gets you if you go in the woods.”
“You’re mentally challenged, aren’t you?” said Lark. The guy wasn’t even listening to what she was saying. She turned and started towards the trees again.
“Don’t!” said Death Man. He lurched forward and grasped her shoulder.
Lark shook him off. “Don’t touch me,” she said.
Death Man backed off. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just—I want you to be safe.”
Lark looked at him again. Into his eyes. They were concerned, like before. She believed him. And again, she had the nagging feeling that she’d seen him before. He was so familiar somehow... “I’ll be safe,” she said.
“The other ones,” he said. “The other ones went into the woods. ‘Follow me into the woods/ You’re hungry for what I’ve got.’“
He was quoting “Get the Fuck out of Hamelin,” which was a Wrenching song. The one where the chorus went “Die, die, die little children.” The one that had the right-wing activist groups up in arms. He was trying to scare her. But what was he saying? “The other ones?” she asked.
“The ones that are gone,” he said. “They went into the woods.”
Like Tina? What was he saying? Someone was trying to make “Hamelin” true? Someone was in the woods? “There is no woods here,” she said again. She pointed at the trees. “See?”
Death Man turned his head to look at the trees. “Oh,” he said. He wrinkled his brow. It was as if he were seeing them for the first time. “No woods. Huh.” He squinted, as if he could change what he saw.
And when he did, Lark suddenly knew who he was.
* * *
“There’s a Marguerite Rinehart for you on the phone,” called Ryan from the living r
oom.
Whitney leapt up, sloshing a little of her beer on the carpet of her office, and ran for the living room. One hand clutched her Dos Equis. One reached for the phone, which Ryan handed to her. “Marguerite,” said Whitney into the receiver.
After several more calls to the woman’s phone number with no answer, Whitney decided to leave a message. She’d simply said she wanted to talk to Marguerite about her daughter Tina and to call back at the number she left. Whitney hadn’t been certain that Marguerite would call back, but she was glad she had.
“This is Whitney Eros,” she said into the phone. “I’m so glad you called back.”
“You a reporter?” said Marguerite.
“Yes, I am. Is that a problem?”
“Only problem I see is that no one knows my girl’s missing. ‘Course I didn’t know she was on that tour. Tina ran off with that boy ‘bout a year ago. I ain’t heard from her since.”
Whitney bit her lip. This would be easier if Tina’s mother was a tad bit more of an involved mother, but whoever said anything Whitney did was easy? She had hoped to write a story about parental heartbreak, paint a picture of a mother unfairly separated from her daughter, a terrible tragedy that no one was working to correct. It could still work, but Whitney was going to have to edit carefully.
“May I quote you, Mrs. Rinehart?”
“Sure. Ain’t ‘Mrs.’ though. Rinehart is my maiden name. I took it back after my fourth husband run off.”
“Miss Rinehart?”
“Ms.”
“Okay.” Whitney headed back to her office and rummaged through the papers on her desk for a legal pad. “I’ll make a note of that.” Dammit! Where was the freaking legal pad? And her tape recorder? Could she record the conversation on the phone?
Her tape recorder peered at her from beneath a few sheets of paper on the right hand corner of her desk. She snatched it and turned it on, holding it as close to the phone as she could. “Ms. Rinehart, how did you discover your daughter was missing?”
Marguerite started talking. Whitney hoped the tape recorder was getting it, because she didn’t hear much except a few bits. However, she spotted a legal pad on the floor behind her desk. Now prepared, she was able to conduct the rest of the interview. Marguerite was easily led, and since Whitney wanted to slant this article a certain way, she had a certain kind of quotes in mind to attribute to Tina Morris’ mother. Marguerite gave her just what she wanted.
Whitney hung up about twenty minutes later in a euphoric mood. It was perfect! This article was going to rock! She was so excited. There was no way it wouldn’t sell now. Unable to help herself, she did a little victory dance in her office.
Ryan cleared his throat. Whitney stopped dancing. She looked up. Ryan was standing in the doorway to her office. “That was more about that Shane Adams story, wasn’t it?” he said.
Whitney rolled her eyes. “God, Ryan, get over it. What is the big freaking deal, anyway?”
Ryan laughed bitterly. “Come on, Whit. I tell you that the editor for USATunes is on the phone yesterday evening, and you told me to take a message—”
“I was busy!”
“—but you run like crazy for Marguerite Rinehart?!”
“I called Rick back today,” Whitney said. She was lying. She hadn’t called Rick at USATunes back. She’d been too busy with the Adams article.
“Did he offer you a story?”
“I got his secretary.”
“He was offering you a story last night. And you let it go. You haven’t worked on anything except this Wrenching thing for way too long. You have to see that you’re unhealthily obsessed.”
What was his problem? She was not obsessed. “I don’t see anything of the kind,” she said. Where was her beer?
Ryan kept going. “And that’s just the beginning of why it’s bad,” he continued. “With every day you spend on this, you’re getting closer and closer to—”
“Doom?” muttered Whitney. “Sure, Ryan.” She must have left her beer in the living room when she went to get the phone. She pushed past Ryan through the doorway to get back to the living room.
“Where are you going?” Ryan asked. “Don’t walk away from me.”
He followed her into the living room, where, as she’d suspected, her beer was sitting on an end table. She picked it up and took a long swig.
“I should have figured,” he said. “Of course you went to find your drink.”
“Just stop,” said Whitney. “I don’t want to hear anymore of this.”
“I think you have to hear this because you’re losing yourself, and because I’m losing you.”
“You’re crazy. I’m right here.”
“No one wants to buy that goddamned article. A sane person would have given up by now. It’s a sign, Whitney. The article is bad news. Please leave it alone.”
“It’s just that...it’s a damned good article, okay?”
“Let it go, Whitney.”
“No. I’ve worked too hard for this.”
“Whitney, can I just tell you about what I see in your future when you—”
“No,” said Whitney. “I don’t want to hear that shit right now, Ryan. Because, frankly it makes you sound crazy.” She should stop. Whenever she told Ryan what she really thought about his psychic ability, he got really upset.
“You think I’m crazy,” said Ryan. “You’re the one who’s pursuing a dead end article and giving up on solid leads. And I’m crazy.”
“No,” said Whitney. “You just sound crazy. It’s like after your dad died. I know his death was sudden—”
“It wasn’t sudden,” said Ryan, anger and hurt creeping into his voice.
Whitney felt bad. She’d had to go and bring up Ryan’s dad, hadn’t she? Fuck.
“I had to go into another dimension and negotiate my own father’s death,” Ryan told her.
“Ryan, please.” She didn’t want to hear this. Not again.
“Do you have any idea what that was like for me? To know that my father had caused the death of my brother because he’d been making deals with beings in another world?”
Whitney chugged the rest of her beer. What was she supposed to say to that, anyway? “Look, baby,” she said, trying to fix whatever she’d just fucked up, “you needed to deal with the sudden passing of both your dad and your brother. You needed to believe there was some reason for it.”
“No, that’s not it. I have abilities. I’ve never hidden them from you. You used to believe in them.”
“I didn’t believe in them!” Whitney said. “I just didn’t care that you believed in them. I still don’t. I don’t want to hear about that shit all the time. I don’t want to listen to my boyfriend sound like a mental patient!”
A disbelieving laugh escaped Ryan’s lips. “Mental patient,” he repeated. “Wow.” He shook his head. “Okay, fine. Fine.” He took a deep breath. “But, please God, Whitney. Look at yourself. You think I’m a nutcase, but you’re drinking all the time. You aren’t writing anything except that damned article. And, um, sometimes you’re really...cruel.”
“I...” Whitney considered her empty beer bottle. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
Ryan turned to walk away. He stopped. “This isn’t working anymore, is it?” He trudged out of the living room.
What? No. It was working. It would work again. It was this article. Ryan was blowing it out of proportion. She was fine. She did kind of wonder why she’d lied to Ryan about calling the editor of USATunes. Why did she feel the need to defend herself? She wasn’t doing anything weird, was she? But if that were true, why was she lying to make herself look better?
Whitney heaved a huge sigh, alone in the living room with her empty bottle. Then she went after her boyfriend.
Chapter Five
She’d recognized him! He couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t that his disguise was so ingenious that he thought no one would ever see through it. But he did think that no one was likely to believe that he would be the guy he
understood they called Death Man. He thought that their characters were so incongruous that no one would ever put the two of them together. Of course, he guessed that lately they’d both been saying the same thing. Stop the concerts. Go home.
Shane Adams had gotten the idea from a special he’d seen several years ago on VH-1. The special had starred John Mayer. Shane wasn’t a John Mayer fan by any stretch of the imagination, so he wasn’t even sure why he had watched the darned thing. Maybe it was because when he flipped through, he saw John Mayer being extremely un-John Mayer-like. John Mayer was a soft rock artist who played acoustic guitar. Thirteen-year-old girls thought he was sweet. His songs were sentimental drivel about love. They were catchy. In short, John Mayer’s music was nothing like The Wrenching’s. So, Shane had imagined the guy to be sort of like his songs. A sentimental, sweet putz. Oddly enough, the guy had a sense of humor. He was really silly. And he pulled a lot of stunts, one of which was to dress up in a bear suit and go out into the parking lot before his concerts. There, he would rag on himself. He would say things to his own fans like, “John Myers sucks!”
His fans would get huffy. “It’s not Myers, it’s Mayer,” they would tell him. They would throw beer cans at the bear.
John Mayer thought it was a riot. Shane could tell the guy was having fun doing it. He could tell that this was a guy who didn’t give a flying fuck what people thought. He was just enjoying his life. Shane had tried to meet John once at the MTV Movie Awards, but it hadn’t worked out. John Mayer’s publicist had sent Shane flowers in apology. Shane told his publicist, who said that in instances like this, the appropriate thing to do was to send flowers back, so Shane’s publicist sent return flowers. As far as Shane knew, the flower-sending madness had stopped there. He hoped. Otherwise, they could have gone on forever, sending flowers back and forth.
But shortly after seeing the special, he’d gotten the idea for Death Man. He’d spent some time perfecting Death Man, who he called Ivan, not Death Man. He thought Ivan was a good name for the dude, who was a bible thumping, screaming right-wing activist, whose message to the Entourage was to go home. Shane didn’t know if Ivan had convinced anyone yet, but having the alter ego had helped him feel as if he was at least getting it out. As if he was actually doing something. Ivan wore a black suit. All black, even the shirt and tie. He had long black hair—halfway down his back, courtesy of a wig Shane had purchased. He also used a long, fake beard and mustache to cover his face. On his head, he wore a top hat. Shane felt that when Ivan strode down the street, he looked like Death coming to call. Or like a harbinger of the Apocalypse. He liked it.
Ratcatcher Page 5