by Dave Housley
“Come on,” the girl said. She was headed for the stadium. Cain took one last look at the nitrous dealer. The rise was still up in his system and he could hear the man jibber-jabbering away, making small talk, calling everybody “brah” or “captain,” the disdain plain on his face. People like this didn’t deserve to be here. If Cain needed to satisfy a craving tonight, he would know where to go.
He took a dose out of his pocket and dropped it on his tongue. Now, he thought, we will see what happens next.
Chapter 26
July 6, 1995. Maryland Heights, MO. Riverport Amphitheatre.
The guy they called Cassidy was standing in the middle of the bus, talking nonstop, gesturing and shouting and whispering and shifting seamlessly from one story to the next to the next to the next. He was trying as hard as he could, Pete knew, to approximate the real thing. To be Neal Cassady, inspiration and second lead in Kerouac’s On the Road, driver of the bus Furthur for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The original hipster. The original hippie. One of the reasons, maybe, some fifty thousand people found themselves in a parking lot in Pittsburgh in varying stages of drug-fueled euphoria, paranoia, or decline.
His training session had been brief, but they had shown Pete the movies, had made him read the books. “A person like you’re going to be,” Nutter had said, “would have read these books, would know these things. If you’re going to be accessing the levels we’re expecting, they are going to expect you to know your business and know it effortlessly.”
Pete listened to Cassidy ranting and raving—something about his “old lady” in Santa Fe and a delivery of peyote via FedEx—and he wondered about the first part of what Nutter had said: “the person you’re going to be.”
Did they know? Could they have known he would slip so easily into the fabric of this thing he’d never even considered before? Was he so transparent that they could tell: this one will be getting high with dealers within two days of arriving on tour?
And if they could tell—if there was something in his DNA, his background, the permanent files on his parents that he knew existed but had never even seen—is that something they actually would have wanted?
He shook his head, tried to focus on Cassidy and the story he was telling. Now something about court, about a judge’s ruling and a punchline about conjugal visits. Everybody laughed, smoke shooting up toward the roof like an engine steaming up a hill. He looked to Sunny and she rolled her eyes, held the peace sign out to him, and put her head on his arm.
Okay, he thought. Okay, that was not funny. I thought it wasn’t funny and it was not. Okay. He focused on the steering wheel, black and worn on the sides. He stared at the insignia in the center: GMC. He breathed in and out, in and out. Cassidy had started up again and was feigning driving, turning an imaginary wheel to and fro, careening in his imaginary car over who knew where. I am high, Pete thought. Really high. This is okay. This is okay, okay, okay. We prepared for this. He flashed on his training sessions, he and Nutter in the hotel room with a bag of evidence. The man’s soothing tones. Focus on an object. Breath in and out. In and out. Tell yourself you are fine. You have been through this. You have been trained.
He looked to Sunny and she was staring out the side of the bus. The show had started hours ago, and he could hear the tinny music echoing across the parking lot. A song they’d played last night, something about a guy and his uncle. In the end, the guy kills the uncle. He remembered because it had seemed so shocking at the time, and only to him. To kill a blood relative, and for what? But it was only a song.
“The person you’re going to be.” It was an interesting choice of words. He thought he had made his peace long ago with his situation, with being the only person in his family, nobody to look for or lean on, no template waiting to lead him forward into adulthood. But these past few days had been disorienting. Is this the person he was going to be? Sunny had said “be who you are.” What was the difference between the two?
A joint was making its way toward him and he thought no, no, no. No, I do not want that. Sunny took a hit, held it in and coughed blue smoke up toward the ceiling. Pete followed its progress and watched as it pooled and then disappeared, seeping into the gray fabric like dew melting into a lake.
Cassidy waved at somebody walking by in the parking lot, then waved again, and then smiled. He stopped in mid-story and Pete told himself not to sigh audibly. He sighed anyway. Cassidy was halfway out the door, though, moving out to the parking lot where he immediately started up with an entirely different story. The guy was in character. You had to give him that.
Sunny handed Pete the joint and leaned over, put her head on his shoulder. She smelled like apples and pot and cigarettes and sweat. She smelled like Sunny. Again, he made a note to remember this and wondered how he could ever tell her the truth. He couldn’t. “Gotta go back but I don’t know if I can right now,” she said. She yawned and closed her eyes.
Pete took a hit from the joint and adjusted himself so his back was firmly against the wall of the bus. Sunny breathed in and out, in and out, and he thought she might actually be asleep. He wondered if the joint had been laced with anything. That was certainly a possibility, one they’d covered in detail in his limited amount of training. He thought about trying to make himself throw up, but he knew it was too late.
Training. Now that he was out here, he realized how lousy his own training had been. If this is how the government trains agents, he thought, there’s no wonder the world is in chaos.
They had said something about his schooling. Academic background. It hadn’t made sense, necessarily. Had always kind of stuck in his craw. “Religious studies majors can have a certain…open-minded nature, in terms of the folklore,” Nutter had said.
The folklore was what they called it. What they meant, of course, was something different.
He felt a tingling in his hands again. He looked at his right hand and then his left. They were jittering, almost buzzing. He stood, wobbled, stumbled out of the bus. “Wait,” Sunny yelled. But he needed to protect her, get as far away from her as he could. The man, whoever he was, had known that they were together and it was clear that his earlier demonstration had been just that. Pete’s legs were moving. It was crazy. He was no good at this job. He was super high. He was a federal agent. He was moving toward something, somebody. What and who, he had no idea, but he was moving.
Chapter 27
July 6, 1995. Maryland Heights, MO. Riverport Amphitheatre.
Cain followed the girl through the crowd and back up into the stadium. “New Speedway Boogie” was playing in the background, Garcia noodling through a set of runs somewhere between blues and funk. All around them, people made their way to and from the infield—hardcore Deadheads headed toward the stage, new fans and suburban kids headed toward the beer stands or the bathrooms.
She knew that he was tripping now, or that he’d taken a dose, at least. It didn’t seem like anything was happening yet, but she had begun to regard him carefully, checking her watch every five or so minutes and then looking at his hands and his eyes to gauge…something.
They walked up the stadium stairs and into the first level, through a throng of Spinners ecstatically whirling as Micky and Billy started to pound out a slow march from “Space” into something that he couldn’t quite recognize yet. His brain said Europe, early seventies. Vintage years. Europe had been easy. After the change, it was the first place he had felt even remotely at home, and the loosened restrictions on his kind had allowed him to finally make some peace with who he was now. The Europeans had lived for centuries with his kind, and there was a system in place, a market that existed apart from the law and the straight world. It was no harder to find blood in Europe than it had been to find weed or acid in San Francisco in the sixties.
Perhaps Europe was the place to go, after this was all over. It would be harder now—many things had gotten much harder. The band hadn’t been to Europe since the eighties, and Cain had settled into the habit o
f simply following, had relaxed his will to the easy non-decision of going where the band went, staying where they stayed, and then heading off to the next city.
For the first time, he wondered if there was a next tour. This tour had gotten ugly—gate crashers and nitrous dealers. The crowd had changed. At first, he didn’t want to believe it, had thought the complaints were just old heads unwilling to let go of the fact that the fan base was doing what it always did—churning out the old and welcoming in the new. But now, as his own transformation had taken place over the past few months, he could see it more clearly. Things were changing. There may not be another tour. Depending on what he had placed on his tongue roughly an hour ago, there may not be another show for him at all. That was the choice he had made, and he was almost surprised to realize that he was okay with it.
The girl nodded at him in a way that he was positive meant stay put, and walked into the women’s room. Packs of kids roamed the yellow hallway. He smelled sweat and piss and popcorn and weed. Cigarettes and beer and something sharp and chemical.
He turned toward the source of the smell and saw him, leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette and drinking a soda from a straw. The Dealer.
Chapter 28
July 6, 1995. Maryland Heights, MO. Riverport Amphitheatre.
Jenkins stood in the beer line, at least twenty or thirty hippies deep, and watched the crowd. Crabtree had convinced him, maybe rightfully so, that the only way they could distinguish themselves from undercover cops was to go ahead and loosen up. Tibor had disapproved, he could tell, but these were different times and this was a different job than the one he had done with the old man. Most of the people in line were kids—trust-fund sophomores playing at being hippies. They were smoking, drinking, getting high right there in the bowels of the stadium. At the exit, a group of girls twirled in tight circles, like little tornadoes edging for the open space of the infield. Everything smelled like weed. He could have arrested maybe three-quarters of the crowd for one thing or another. But, he reminded himself, he was after bigger fish.
He watched a group of kids passing a joint around, standing no further than a few feet away from Crabtree. One of them tapped him on the shoulder and offered a hit. Crabtree accepted and took three hits in quick succession, turned to Jenkins and released a thick plume of smoke. He was fitting in a little too well, perhaps.
Jenkins flexed his knee. He wasn’t used to standing around like this, not anymore. The flight had been quick, three hours to fill Tibor in on everything they knew, feed him all the data that was available. The old man had taken everything in, filing each detail, each murdered junkie, location, and date, into the computer of his ancient brain, and Jenkins had watched and marveled at the stores of information that must reside there. Centuries of weapons, injuries, motives, times of death, pieces of evidence. He pictured the old man’s mind as a massive filing system stuffed full of notes, the paper growing ever thinner, more white, lined, manufactured, and sterile as the years went on and on.
For his part, the old man simply nodded, scribbled on his little note cards, constantly arranging them into piles, rearranging, adding cards and moving from one pile to the other. He had asked few questions, his uncharacteristic reticence, Jenkins knew, a nod to the presence of Crabtree. There was little in the folklore that the old man would support, but the idea that there was some sixth sense, that like dogs, they could tell if somebody was open minded, sympathetic or not, was something he had told Jenkins about early in the partnership.
More than once, when they had arrived at a crime scene, Tibor had opted to simply wander through the crowd, to turn off his senses and let what he called his “radar” take over.
That’s what he was doing now, trolling around the stadium, waiting for something to register. Where he actually was, Jenkins had no idea. “Wandering?” Crabtree had said, watching the old man wade into the crowd and fade away, like a fish let off a hook. “You had to sign five waivers to get him out of that place, take him across state lines, and you’re just going to let the guy fucking walk around and…check shit out?”
“It’s not like that,” Jenkins had said, but when pressed to explain exactly what it was like, he realized he was actually unable to provide any further detail.
The line was taking forever, each of these kids rolling out with four or five or six gigantic beers, heading toward the lawn with big stoned smiles on their faces. Jenkins scanned the crowd, his mind registering data, data, data but none of it any good. A kid smoking a joint here. A hippie spinning in an acid daze there. None of it was going to help them find the guy. None of it was going to save anybody’s life tonight.
What were they even looking for? Somebody out of the scene. Of it but not in it. Somebody who was sober, if the folklore was to be believed. That was a start, he realized, but the place to collect that data was not in the beer line. Fucking Crabtree.
He played with the walkie-talkie in his pocket. It was still. No buzzing, no messages. The plan was flawed, had been all along. There was, he had to admit, not really much of a plan at all, other than three grown men walking around in tie-dyes, one of them waiting for “radar” to kick in, the other two fighting the urge to arrest nearly every single person they came into contact with. Best case scenario, they stumble upon something. Worst case, Tibor had himself locked up in that facility for a reason and they have two, maybe more bodies to deal with by the end of the night.
And now they’d taken themselves to the one place in the entire goddamn stadium their suspect was certain to avoid. Unless, of course, he was stupid enough to be doing the same thing as they were—trying too hard to fit in, fitting in all too well, accomplishing nothing.
He wasn’t stupid, Jenkins knew. Not this one. But he was sick. Of this, Jenkins was sure. It was the only way to explain the aberrant behavior. Sickness, or a death wish, and if he really had a death wish, there sure as hell were easier ways to carry that out.
No, he was sick, and like a dog that can’t stop eating weeds, their guy needed blood, real blood, not Plasmatrol or pig’s blood or whatever they were selling on the black market wherever the tour happened to land him. He needed real blood, and he needed it immediately.
He looked over at Crabtree, who was spinning with the girls in the exits, his eyes closed, barefoot, a smile on his face like Jenkins had never seen before—pure joy, like a baby, like the only thing happening in the world right now was the drumbeat pushing out from the stadium and Crabtree’s own stupid sandaled feet spinning, spinning, spinning.
Holy shit, Jenkins thought, maybe their perpetrator actually liked the Grateful Dead. Maybe he was a Deadhead before he had gone through the change. They had spent so much time tracking the shows, trying to find a geographic nexus where the guy might be living. They had studied maps and highways and traffic patterns, as if they were tracing the path of flotsam through a series of rivers. But that wasn’t it at all. He wasn’t floating. He lived here. This, the kids in line and the music and the parking lot and the cars and vans and buses, the whole damn thing: this was his home.
Chapter 29
July 6, 1995. Maryland Heights, MO. Riverport Amphitheatre.
Cain wiggled his fingers. They were working just fine. So far. He wanted to send some kind of signal to the Dealer, but he wasn’t sure what he would say. Back off? Hi there? More? What? Instead, he just stood there, watching the guy sip his drink, watching him nod and then slowly walk away. Watching him stop and gesture, once, crooking a finger in the direction of the parking lot, grimacing impatiently, like a father waiting for a dimwitted child to figure out how to tie his shoes.
He followed. Why was he following? His first impulse was to go get the girl, but then he realized that she was at his side, one hand behind his back, silently guiding him, moving him along, keeping him on track like a guardrail.
The Dealer walked through the tunnel of the stadium, past one exit and then the next and then the next, past masses of people waiting for the bathroom or the beer st
and or the popcorn. Whirling groups of Spinners twisted in the light of each exit, the sounds of the band playing “Box of Rain” pushing out through the openings. Cain caught a glimpse of the stage and then the back of the stage and then the infield. They were walking in a circle. Cain told himself to run, to feed, to grab the girl and hold her hostage. He should be in the van right now, heading south, or north, or anywhere but here. He never should have taken that first dose. Without it, he would be standing on the infield right now, not just among the crowd but in it, a part of it, as much as his condition would allow. He would be swaying back and forth, his own particular version of the Dead dance that was now being practiced to varying degrees of success in every foot of the stadium. Now, what was he doing? He was following a dealer in a circle around the stadium. He had left two bodies behind in in the past two days. He had killed more, fed more on live humans in the past few weeks than he had in the entire previous time since the change.
He couldn’t help feeling like the dose had transformed him back somehow. His soul. As a vampire, he had lived a virtuous life, as much as the condition would allow. And now, after the dose, he had reverted back to the soulless, selfish way he’d lived as a man. He realized all that he had lost in the past few months—his entire way of being in the world had been careful, cultivated, thoughtful. And now he was…what? An animal. An animal who killed in cold blood and not only gave in to his most base desires, but enjoyed the release of those moments, longed for it when the grip was not upon him and he again labored under the restrictions of responsibility.