by Ken Douglas
“ You’re gonna miss your turn, Dad,” J.P. said from the back.
“ Good eye, J.P.,” Tom said. He made a right turn into the college parking lot. The Pasadena Meet, as the Pasadena Record Swap Meet was called, was held on the third Sunday of every month at Pasadena City College, and for reasons that Tom didn’t understand, was the best source in Southern California to buy bootlegs. What had probably started as a legitimate, once-a-month record collector’s flea market, had rapidly turned into a bootleg free-for-all. Month after month, the same fifteen or sixteen bootleg retailers were interspersed among the ordinary record sellers, making between two and five thousand dollars each for a day’s work.
Tom was usually apprehensive when he was in a place where bootlegs were sold openly, but not today. He was excited about the tapes, but he was worried about his son and that ghost dog thing that he was caught up in. Tom hoped it was just a phase. It was normal for kids to be afraid of things in the dark, but not his kid. J.P. had a head on his shoulders. He knew the value of a good Zep tape. How many other kids did?
“ There’s a spot, Dad.” Again Tom had been brought out of his daydreams by his son.
“ We don’t have to go to Disneyland today if you wanna go back to the motel and listen to the tapes. I wouldn’t mind.”
“ But I would,” Sylvia said. “We planned on going to Disneyland today and we’re going. There is no way we’re going to sit in a hot motel and listen to Led Zeppelin all day.” With that said, she crossed her arms firmly over her chest, her body language closing off any further discussion.
“ Disneyland it is,” Tom said.
“ Yeah, Disneyland,” echoed J.P., “but I wanna write a note to Mom first and send Dancer home.” He’d brought Dark Dancer with him on the plane. He wanted his favorite bird to be a genuine five hundred miler and the only way to make him one was to release him five hundred miles away from home and have him return. He hoped Dancer wouldn’t let him down.
“ Is your bird going to be okay in that little cage?” Sylvia asked.
“ Oh sure, he’s used to it. Once Mom and I drove to San Francisco and let him go the next day. He was in the cage all night. He doesn’t mind.”
Tom put the Chevy in park, put on the emergency brake. “Time to find Mr. Sam Storm.”
“ Can I get a Coke and look around?” J.P. said.
“ Meet us back here in forty-five minutes,” Tom said.
“ Should he go off by himself?” Sylvia said.
“ He’ll be fine. He loves it.”
“ Want me to take some money, Dad? In case I find something?”
Tom reached into his pocket and withdrew three twenties. There was always a chance the boy might stumble onto something worth having. “Here.” He held out the money. “Bargain wisely.”
J.P. grabbed the money and took off across the parking lot, dashing through a long corridor that lead to the other side of the campus, where the sellers were set up.
“ I love that boy,” Tom said to his wife.
“ I know you do, but it wouldn’t hurt if you taught him there is more to life than Led Zeppelin.”
“ He knows that.”
“ Why should he? You don’t.”
“ Let’s not fight about that now. We’ll go to the cafeteria, meet Mr. Storm, collect J.P., and then go to Disneyland. Okay?”
“ Okay.”
J.P. dodged around a big man headed toward the cafeteria, where his dad was supposed to meet the guy with the Zep tapes. That must be Sam Storm, he figured. He looked familiar. J.P. stopped and started to yell at the big man walking away from him, but an inner voice told him not to. If his dad had wanted him to meet Mr. Storm, he would have told him to wait, and besides, he didn’t want to talk to the man, because he might betray how much his dad wanted the tapes. Then Mr. Storm would ask for more money.
His dad had taught him to never betray how much you wanted something. “The number one rule a collector must always remember is to stay cool, play like you don’t care. Otherwise you pay through the nose,” his dad had said, so there was no way he was going to call out to Mr. Storm. He didn’t want to be the one to ruin the chance at Zep board tapes.
His mind made up, he started to turn his eyes away from the big man’s back, when the man stopped, turned quickly and locked his eyes onto J.P.’s. Then he dropped them to J.P.’s Robert Plant tee shirt.
“ You like Led Zeppelin, son?” the man’s gravel voice boomed.
Without a thought, J.P. turned and ran. No way was he gonna talk to Mr. Storm and give anything away, no way. He ran down the corridor between the student union and the bookstore, emerging onto the grassy area where the record dealers were set up, not knowing that if he had stopped to talk to the big man, he would have already been twenty seconds dead.
Watching J.P. run down the corridor, framed by its circular columns, reminded Tom of Luke Skywalker maneuvering his starfighter between the walls of the Death Star. Like Luke, his boy was good and kind and honest. Thinking of Luke Skywalker brought Darth Vador to mind and then he saw the big man step into the corridor in front of J.P. He saw J.P. expertly dodge the man as only a boy could. He saw him stop, turn, then run away. Good boy, he thought, watching his son continue his run down the corridor. He didn’t want to say anything to blow the deal or increase the price.
A feeling of unease grabbed Tom as the big man came closer. There was something about the way he carried himself. The way he moved his bulk with seemingly little effort. The strong strides. A confident man. Not the kind of man who spent his time with headphones clamped to his head listening to unreleased concerts. His tan gave him away. Tom had never met a Zep collector with a tan. Something wasn’t right.
“ Tom Donovan?” the man asked, approaching with his right hand extended.
“ Sam Storm, I presume.” Tom took the big man’s hand. His grip was firm, but overpowering.
“ That your boy I saw in the Robert Plant tee shirt just now?”
“ No, my son’s in Toronto. Sylvia didn’t want to take him out of school,” Tom lied, with a nod indicating his wife. Throughout his bootleg career he had been used to deception. He often used different names as a matter of routine when dealing with his customers. A different name and a different background for each one, so the lie about J.P. rolled off his forked tongue with the ring of truth.
“ I saw the shirt.”
“ The shirt?”
“ The boy I saw, he had a Robert Plant tee shirt on.”
“ Black with a head shot of Plant?”
“ Yeah, like that.”
“ Probably one of mine. I make and sell Zep tee shirts. That’s mainly how I make my money. There are at least four dealers here that sell them.” Tom had used the tee shirt cover story so many times to explain his income, that he said it naturally.
“ That explains it.” The big man laughed. “But I thought you also sold bootlegs.”
“ No, sir.” Tom was put on his guard. Very few people knew about his connection to the boots. The fact that this man brought it up, told him that he might be more than just a collector with a few tapes to sell.
“ One of the dealers last month said he traded you a few records.”
“ Oh, that,” Tom said with some of the tension visibly leaving his body. “I’m a collector and I’m working on a book about the history of the band, so it’s my business to know everything there is to know about Led Zeppelin. Bootlegs are a fact of life and an important part of the history of the band, and although some of them may sound terrible, you have to admit, they show what it was like to see Zep in their heyday.”
“ I suppose.” The big man sounded less like a collector every second.
“ Did you bring the tapes?” Tom asked.
“ Right here.” The big man tapped a coat pocket. “Gotta keep them out of sight. They’re pretty valuable.”
“ Hold on, we agreed on the price.”
“ I know and I’m not going to back out of the deal. It’s just that t
here’s someone else who is also interested.”
“ I assumed this was going to be an exclusive deal.”
“ I never said that.”
“ But it was a valid assumption. If you sell the tapes to somebody else, how do I know he won’t trade them around.”
“ I guess you don’t.”
“ That would make them worthless.”
“ He’s paying a whole lot more money than you are, so I don’t think he’s going to trade them. He’ll want them for himself, like you do.”
“ That’s good to know,” Tom said, relieved. Then he asked, “Who is this person?”
“ You wouldn’t know him.”
“ Try me.”
“ A guy named Rick Gordon.”
“ Jesus Christ,” Tom said through grinding teeth.
“ Got a problem with that?”
“ I’ll say. You sell them to him and I don’t want them.”
“ Why not?”
“ He’ll bootleg them faster than you can blink.”
“ I thought you didn’t have anything to do with the bootlegs?”
“ I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know who does.”
“ Well, I’ll put your mind at rest, Mr. Gordon is retired. He doesn’t make bootlegs anymore.”
“ Then why does he want the tapes?”
“ Maybe he likes Led Zeppelin.”
“ Not a chance. The only thing he ever liked about the music business was the money it made him.”
“ There is something wrong with money?” the big man asked.
“ There is if you make it on the backs of genuine collectors and fans who love the music for what it is.”
“ So what you’re saying is, it’s okay for you to make money on bootlegs, because you’re a genuine fan and collector, but not okay for Gordon, because he only cares for the money.”
“ Exactly, every bootleg I ever made-”
“ I thought you didn’t make bootlegs,” the big man interrupted.
“ I don’t. I might have. I mean I don’t anymore.”
“ Like Gordon doesn’t anymore?”
“ That’s not what I mean.”
“ What you mean is, you want my tapes to make bootlegs.”
“ What if I do?” Tom hated himself for being caught in his lie so easily.
“ Then I think you’d better plan on paying a little more money.”
“ I didn’t bring anymore with me.”
“ Are you going to bootleg them?”
“ I think you already wormed that out of me.”
“ In that case, I think we need a few moments of private conversation.”
“ Whatever you have to say to me, you can say in front of my wife.”
“ Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she can be trusted and I don’t mind if you tell her everything you and I talk about, but when discussing something of this nature, I prefer it to be on a one to one basis. That way if things should go sour in the future, it’s my word against yours, not yours and your wife’s. Do you understand?”
“ Not really.”
“ It’s okay, Tom. I left my purse in the car anyway,” Sylvia said. Then turning to the big man she asked, “Ten minutes be enough for you, Mr. Storm?”
“ More than enough.”
Turning on her heels, Sylvia walked down the corridor, slapping the circular supporting columns as she passed them. The slaps echoed like gunfire down the empty corridor, each sound less loud than the one before.
Tom stole a quick glance to the big man standing next to him and felt a pang of jealousy when he saw those steel eyes glued to his wife’s backside. Dirty old man, he thought, but then who wouldn’t steal a look at Sylvia if given half a chance.
“ If she’s half as sharp as she looks, you are a lucky man.”
“ She’s working on her Ph. D. in French Lit.”
“ Nice.”
“ She hates Led Zeppelin.”
“ Too bad,” the big man said. Then without warning, he shoved Tom in the chest, slamming him into one of the columns that supported the covered corridor. Then Storm grabbed him by the neck and rapped his head against the column, stunning him. In seconds he had Tom’s hands behind his back, arms around the column, hands handcuffed together.
Tom started to yell and the big man hit him in the stomach, winding him. Gasping for air, Tom’s eyes bugged out and he barely saw Storm remove a roll of gray duct tape from a coat pocket. The big man grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up until Tom was standing erect. Then he covered his mouth and started winding the tape, affixing his head to the column.
“ If you could only see yourself,” Storm said.
Tom moaned.
“ Yeah, tell me about it.”
Tom’s eyes widened.
“ Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t make you a bootlegger. You must have known that someday, someway, you’d have to pay for your crimes.” Saying it made it sound just, but Storm knew it wasn’t so. Since seeing Gordon in Tampico he had changed. Once a man who lived by the rules, he had turned into a man who lived by the gun. He’d become an old west sheriff bent on vengeance. Part of him reveled in the new Sam Storm, and part of him was repulsed, but he had gone too far to turn back now.
The new Sam Storm wanted the woman. He wanted her on the ground in front of her helpless husband. He wanted to feel the husband’s fear and anguish as he saw his wife raped, then tortured. He wanted to taste her blood, smell her fear, swallow her terror, but alas it couldn’t be, he was going to have to follow her out to the parking lot and do her there, after he finished with hubby. He had to kill the bootlegger and his wife and be gone, before they were discovered by a happy collector, looking for a safe place to do a line or smoke a joint.
As his helpless victim watched, Storm removed an ice pick from his coat pocket. Then he took a CD out of his shirt pocket. Tom started to squirm, fighting against the handcuffs as Storm inserted the point of the ice pick through the hole in the center of the CD.
“ Live on Blueberry Hill,” Storm said, indicating the CD.
It wasn’t fair, Tom thought, he was going to be killed and his favorite Zeppelin concert, the first Zeppelin bootleg, was going to be part of the murder weapon. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair.
He felt a slight discomfort as the man inserted the ice pick into his left nostril, holding it with thumb and index finger below the shaft. Then he felt a brief stab of pain, when the man used the palm of his right hand to slam it into his brain. Then the lights went out for Tom Donovan.
Chapter Twelve
“ It’s not going to be the same up here by myself.” Rick Gordon hefted Judy Donovan’s suitcase into the trunk of her old Dodge. He meant what he’d said, the thought of being alone on the hill suddenly chilled him.
She stuck out her lower lip and blew the hair up from her eyes, but it fell right back, so she pushed it back with her hand. “I know,” she said, “except for spending last Christmas with Christina and the twins, I haven’t been out of this town for the last eighteen months.”
“ How’s your arm?” He stood by the trunk, but he didn’t close it. It was almost like she couldn’t leave as long as he held it open. There was something about her he was going to miss. She was different. Or maybe she wasn’t, maybe she was the same, maybe he’d just never noticed before, but he was noticing now, and her leaving, even though it was for only a short time, tugged at him.
“ Fine,” she said. “Hey, you wanna autograph my cast?”
“ Sure.”
She took a pen out of her purse, “Write away.” She offered the pen to him. She was trembling, just a little. He saw it in the slight shaking of the pen in her hand. He took the pen, feeling a slight tremor himself as he touched the writing instrument, then it was gone.
He reached out with his left hand, to steady the cast, and the tremor was back, the instant he touched her. Sort of a pleasant jolt of awareness, like he’d just woken from a good dream and he knew it was go
ing to be a great day. Then the pen started to move in his hand, almost as if it had a life of its own.
“ Friends forever. Longer than life,” he said as he wrote, surprising himself.
“ It’s nice,” she said, “but you didn’t sign it.”
“ You know who it’s from.”
“ But I’m not quite sure what it means.”
“ Neither am I,” he said and they both laughed, but he sensed she was tingling inside, as was he.
Then she said, “You’re sure you don’t mind watching the birds? They can be a lot of trouble.” And the spell was broken. The tingling stopped, but he still felt the aftermath, a pleasant feeling as he handed her back the pen.
“ Not for me. I’ll enjoy every minute of it.” Then he picked up the second suitcase. “What do you have in here, lead?”
“ Spent the day at Miles of Books. I intend to do a lot of reading while I’m laying on that beach.”
“ Does Miles have anything left?”
“ Nope, bought him out,” she kidded. “Good thing too, because he’s getting married, so he can probably use the money.”
“ Really, I thought he was a confirmed bachelor. Who’s the unlucky woman?” He wasn’t being flip. He thought Miles was sort of a dandy, the kind of man that would be more at home in upper crust London than small town Tampico. A stuck up snob, who acted like he was a cut above everybody else. He read a lot, knew a lot, and didn’t mind letting you know it. Rick didn’t like him very much, but it never stopped him from going into his store. It was the only bookstore in town and he liked to read.
“ Sarah Sadler, she teaches at RFK elementary.”
“ That proves it, there’s somebody for everybody,” he said, hand on the trunk, resisting, not wanting to close it. He bit his lip and curled his toes in his shoes, trying to take his mind off these new feelings shooting up and down his spine. The tingling was back and he didn’t know how to deal with it.
“ If that’s true, then there must be somebody for me.” She moved around to the driver’s side of the car, opened the door, but didn’t get in. She just stood there, hand on the door, like he had his hand on the trunk.