Voice

by Joseph Garraty

  “It’s a free country.”

  “What about that kid, the one who was wasted out of his mind that night, staggering all over the place?”

  Case took her time answering. She plugged in her amp and switched it on to warm up, then got out her guitar. The truth was, she remembered that guy a little too well. That eerie gaze, the crafty grin, and most of all the way he’d tried to bite that woman, had stuck with her. That last image in particular had been popping up from her subconscious for the last couple of days like an evil jack-in-the-box. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Well, the old guy was looking for him before things got weird. He spent half the night searching the crowd, and you should have seen him smile when he saw that poor kid. He was going over to meet him when you came over.”

  “You think he’s a dealer?” That seemed possible. Hadn’t she wondered if the kid was wasted on something at the time?

  “Yeah. Or something.” Quentin made a fist, then relaxed his hand. “All I know is, Johnny’s my friend. Yeah, he’s a dick sometimes—more lately—but I’ve been playing with him for over a year. One of my uncles got hooked on meth, and I don’t want Johnny to get caught up in anything like that.”

  “How’d you get your uncle clean?”

  Quentin stared at her, his eyes glassy. “He’s fucking dead.”

  Case plugged in her guitar. “I’ll keep an eye out. This is a good band, and the last thing I want is for Johnny to do a Sid Vicious on us.”

  “You’re all heart,” Quentin mumbled, just as the door swung open and Danny and Johnny walked in.

  ***

  Gina was on the couch when Danny got home, absorbed as usual in a legal brief. She didn’t look up when he came in. Danny wasn’t surprised. Ever since the show, she had barely spoken to him. She hadn’t seemed angry, exactly, only distant. Very distant. Danny felt guilty just being in the same room with her.

  For what? I didn’t do anything. Except he sort of had. Wasn’t there a Bible verse about that? He who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery, or something equally uplifting and forgiving of human frailty.

  “Good night,” he said, walking toward the hall. It was late, he was tired, and waiting around for Gina to pay attention to him—happy, sad, angry, or otherwise—was stupid, and it would only make him feel worse.

  “Danny, can you come sit with me for a minute?”

  He stopped. He hadn’t expected a reply at all, and now she was looking up at him, eyes inscrutable behind her glasses, beckoning him over. Perhaps more amazing than that, the folder and stack of paper she’d been holding was lying on the floor, almost out of arm’s reach.

  Danny was seized with same feeling he got whenever the phone rang in the middle of the night. Something is bad here. This is not normal. Whatever comes next, I don’t want to hear it.

  He walked over with small, hesitant steps and sat down on the opposite end of the couch. A memory sparked in his mind of the interminable afternoon they’d spent shopping for this damn thing, combing every furniture store in Dallas. Gina wasn’t particular about much, but she had taken to furniture shopping like a holy calling. He remembered when she had, at long last, finally decreed that this couch—yea, verily, this very couch!—was the one that would grace their home. He had wrapped his arms around her and collapsed onto it with her right in the middle of the store while the sales guy had stood there with a dry smile and impatience reflecting from his darting eyes.

  “How was practice?” Gina asked.

  “It was okay,” he answered warily.

  Gina sucked in her lips and looked at her hands. Silence settled in between them like it had packed a lunch and was planning to stay awhile. The ice maker in the kitchen spat out another cube with a clunking noise. Am I supposed to say something? Danny wondered. If so, he had no idea what. This was the apotheosis of minefield conversations, and he didn’t dare put a foot in it.

  “This is hard for me,” Gina said, and Danny’s heart rate doubled instantly. “Did you have a good time?” she asked, sincerely, and the words and tone were so out of place that Danny actually heard her say I want a divorce before his mind rewound and played her statement back.

  “Wha—?”

  She moved to the middle of the couch to be closer to him. “I know your music is important to you. I don’t understand it, and I know I haven’t been all that supportive. But if it’s that important to you, I want to try to understand better.”

  “Gina, I . . . Where is this coming from?”

  “You leave two or three nights a week and go hang out in a little room with an attractive woman—”

  “And two other guys.”

  “And two other guys,” she conceded. “But please don’t tell me you’re not attracted to her.”

  Danny picked at the seam on his jeans.

  She touched his face, tilting his head up until his eyes met hers. “I trust you, Daniel. I don’t think you’re going to do anything to hurt me.”

  He didn’t trust himself to speak. Already, his eyes were filling with wetness, and his throat felt as if an iron bar were lodged in it.

  Gina brushed his cheek with the backs of her fingers and smiled sadly. “But I don’t feel that good about this. I don’t want to turn into the nag who won’t let you leave the house without being suspicious, and I don’t want to put you in a spot where you have to choose your brother and your music or me.” Her voice trembled, and now Danny saw moisture in her eyes as well. “So, please. Help me feel better about this. Tell me what it is about playing music that you love so much. Tell me why you keep going back, why you spend so much time on this. Tell me anything that makes me feel like you’re there for music, and not for her.”

  For once, a thousand replies leaped to Danny’s mind, but as the first tear slipped free from behind Gina’s glasses, he silenced them all and reached for her.

  “I love you,” he said, holding her tight against him. She cried silently, with no sobbing, no sound at all, and the wetness where her skin touched his neck started him crying, too. He held her tighter. After a few minutes, when his own tears slowed, he pulled away just far enough to kiss her.

  ***

  Afterward, in bed, he talked. It seemed to him he had nothing earthshaking to say, or even particularly interesting, but as he warmed to the conversation, it struck him as odd that they’d never talked about this before. Had he just assumed for all this time that she didn’t care? He thought that was part of it, maybe, but as he spoke he realized that mostly he’d been afraid. Afraid she wouldn’t understand at all, afraid she’d question his motives or think him childish.

  “This isn’t about some kind of rock-star fantasy for me,” he said, hoping she’d believe him. “I think that’s part of Johnny’s thing, but I’ve been a grown-up for too long. For me it’s that moment when everything clicks—when you’re making something amazing with a group of people that you couldn’t have made by yourself.” He pushed back the covers and propped himself up on one elbow. “Even if we never played another show, I’d still want to make noise in that ridiculous little practice room with a bunch of talented musicians. Music means that much to me.”

  Gina listened quietly and watched him with wide, curious eyes. Had he thought this would be boring for her? Why? He realized that he wasn’t bored when she was talking about her cases or the latest aggravating court decision, even though that wasn’t his world any more than music was hers.

  Danny talked for a long time.

  Chapter 15

  The stage again, the first song of the night, two bars in and Case already had that performance high going full blast. God, nothing was better than this. Erin had outdone herself, and word-of-mouth was starting to pick up, and the result was that there were a lot of people in this little club. Some of them were people Case was starting to recognize from past shows, pushing to the front, getting close to the stage—always crowding more thickly stage right. Not all of them were there to hear Ragman, t
hough Case thought most of them were.

  Johnny came in, and he sounded good. Case was again amazed at how far he’d come in such a short time, and she grinned. Danny was thrashing away with a similar smile on his face, right in the pocket, nailing it. Only Quentin seemed immune to the energy onstage—he was playing his parts okay, but he scanned the crowd, searching for something the way he always did lately. Looking for that old dude, probably; maybe he was spoiling for another fight.

  They played through the set to ever-greater cheers from the audience, but as the set neared its close, a formless dread built up around Case, like a static charge. There was something about this part of the set she didn’t like, though she couldn’t really remember why. Sure, they always did one of the slower numbers about now, and those weren’t her favorites because they brought down the energy so much, but that wasn’t enough to explain the prickles of gooseflesh that had broken out on the back of her neck, her arms, her thighs, or the slow beads of cold sweat that trickled into her eyes.

  She caught a glimpse of Quentin, and he’d gone pale. She followed his eyes—and there was that old fucker in the audience, circulating, whispering in ears, pausing to look in one person’s eyes for an unseemly long time.

  They moved on to the next song, the slow number Johnny liked so much. Half a dozen people—regulars, Case thought—leaned in at the front of the stage, gazing raptly up at Johnny. One reached out toward him, hand scrabbling on the stage inches from Johnny’s foot.

  The sound guy dimmed the lights and brought a spotlight up on Johnny as the intro figure closed. Johnny moved up to the mic.

  “The sun slides from his sky . . .”

  One of the stage lights flared briefly and burned out, and Case jumped. It was really dark now, except where Johnny burned white in the spotlight. Even the bar lights had dimmed, and Case could see nothing of the crowd other than a few glimmering eyes and reflections off glasses. The hand that clawed and scrabbled for Johnny onstage looked almost disembodied, as if it had been severed by the darkness.

  Where’s that old guy? Case thought, suddenly unnerved by the fact that she couldn’t see him anymore. Where did he go?

  She missed the fingering for the next chord, eliciting a wooden thud from her guitar, and scowled. Just fucking play the song, okay?

  The song went on and on, and even though it wasn’t a loud song, Case couldn’t hear anything from the crowd. Not the usual murmuring of a large group of people, not a single shout. It felt like the world had disappeared outside the stage. She edged farther away from Johnny’s spotlight, trying to get her eyes to adjust so she could see something out there.

  There was a movement in the crowd, a ripple as somebody pushed through the bodies. Even that didn’t get a response that Case could hear. The vague shape—she thought it was a man, though she couldn’t be sure—pushed forward, approaching the stage.

  The song reached the final verse, and Johnny’s voice rose in an eerie, wavering crescendo that made Case’s skin creep.

  “Hey, fuck this!” the guy in the crowd shouted, his voice cracking with hysteria. There was a swift motion, a blur through the darkness, and then a beer bottle appeared in the spotlight, spinning end-over-end toward Johnny’s head.

  Johnny’s mouth was open wide as he belted out the last chorus, and in her mind’s eye Case could already see the bottle hit, smashing through his teeth, exploding, and sending shards of glass into his tongue, his palate, his throat. She had no time to scream a warning, barely time to inhale—

  And the bottle was spinning past, missing Johnny’s head by a hairsbreadth before sailing over Danny and shattering against the back wall.

  Johnny didn’t even blink.

  The song ended and the lights came up, and the usual solemn ovation that followed that particular song broke over them. Four people in the front, including the one who’d been reaching for Johnny, turned, watching avidly as the bouncer grabbed the bottle thrower by the arm and dragged him out. One of them pointed at the man and smiled a crooked, awful smile that seemed horribly out of place on her pretty face.

  Johnny was staring at Case.

  “You all right?” she asked him.

  “Huh? Yeah, fine. Start the song already, will you?”

  She checked the set list, tuned up her E string, and began the last song of the evening.

  ***

  “Wow!” Erin shouted. “You were amazing!” She gave Johnny a giant hug as Case stood by and watched, conflicted. This was Johnny’s moment, and she ought to be happy for him . . . but the room still didn’t feel right.

  A hand touched her shoulder. “Looks like your boy really turned it up a notch since last time I saw him.”

  “Brad! You came!” Case found a smile now, and it even felt genuine. She’d done the session work for his band just the week before, and he had been so professional about it that she’d nearly given up on any personal interest. To be sure, though, his professionalism had helped. She hadn’t had any experience in a real studio before, and it had turned out to be surprisingly nerve-racking. The sense that every note was under intense scrutiny had been pervasive and distracting, and the environment, despite its funky decor, oddly sterile. She had supposed that came from playing with recorded tracks instead of the push-pull action and reaction of a live band, but whatever the cause, it had been tough at first. Once she’d gotten the hang of it, though, she had laid down some tracks that got an appreciative nod from the engineer and made the band happy besides. She’d thought there was a good chance that would be the last she’d see of Brad, but now here he was.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Lady, are you tryin’ to get me all liquored up? Ain’t gonna happen. Besides, you’re working tonight—it’s on me.”

  “Sold.”

  They made their way to the bar. Case did her best to be polite to the fans that wanted a word, and she even talked shop briefly with a couple of admiring guitarists (“How did you get your guitar to sound like bagpipes in that one song?” one of them asked. Baffled and laughing, she answered, “I don’t know, but if you figure it out, tell me so I can make sure I never do it again!”). She wasn’t entirely comfortable with the attention offstage yet, but it was becoming tolerable.

  It would be a great night if she could just shake that ugly feeling from the stage. Already, the specifics were hard to recall, and all she could remember was a feeling of dread, and then the bottle thrower.

  Case and Brad edged in next to the bar and ordered a couple of drinks.

  “Hey,” Brad said, shouting over the crowd, “where the hell did Johnny learn to sing like that?”

  “Just like getting to Carnegie Hall,” Case said uncomfortably. “Practice, man, practice.”

  “I gotta talk to his voice teacher. That slow tune was amazing. Up until that jackass threw something at him, I think everybody in the crowd was holding their breath. It was intense.”

  Case took a drink.

  “Seriously,” Brad continued. “He puts this weird excitement into this song about the end of the world, but it’s kind of sad, too, and it’s creepy as—”

  “You want to get something to eat?” Case asked. The room was too loud already, and from the pointy guitars of the band that was setting up now, it looked like there was going to be some awful metal blasting real soon.

  “Yeah, all right,” Brad said. “Let’s get outta here.”

  Chapter 16

  Alan kicked angrily at a newspaper on the sidewalk. “That was some bullshit!” he said to no one in particular. A couple of clubgoers gave him the hairy eyeball and crossed the street. “Fuckers!” he shouted, whether at them or at the muscled-up security meatheads who’d thrown him out of the club he wasn’t sure.

  What the hell had happened in there? He’d heard of Ragman around town—it was impossible to miss the flyers, if you spent any time down here—but never seen them before. He and his buddies had come down to catch the Judas One Thirteen show and walked in
on the last half of the Ragman set. It was kinda cool, up until the end—not as heavy as his usual thing, but they rocked all right, and the chick playing guitar was hot.

  Then—then what? He pressed his palms to his temples as if he could squeeze the memory out of his head. Things got bad. Everybody was all “oooh, aahh,” but that was some sick shit even by his standards, and he was a guy who liked his album covers with exploding heads and eyeballs and shit. The singer’s voice had done—something. It had gone weird, and dark somehow, or something. It was bad, that was all Alan could remember, like the guy was fucking with his head on purpose. That he couldn’t remember exactly what had happened was all the proof he needed.

  By his reckoning, it had taken him way too long to decide to put a stop to it.

  “Too bad I fuckin’ missed,” he said. The only thing that sucked was that his friends had pretty much just waved goodbye to him as he was dragged out. “See you later, Alan,” Deke had said. “We’re gonna stay and watch the show.” Asshole.

  Alan walked to the end of the street, past the lights and the occasional line of people. He heard the thump and buzz of a car with an oversized stereo a street down, and over that, a woman’s laughter. More laughter after that, from behind him, and there was an eerie, familiar quality to it.

  Alan turned around.

  There were four of them, skinny rocker kids from the club. The laughing woman was, he was pretty sure, the woman who’d pointed at him on his way out, like she was marking him. She wasn’t much more than a girl, really, and an underfed one at that, and the three bony punks she was with didn’t look like much, either.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Alan asked.

  She giggled, and the other three stood smirking to either side. Two of them started to come closer, flanking him.