The Five

by Robert R. McCammon

  It was a very entertaining show, this show after the show.

  Berke noted that there were lots of young chicks in here. Like nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. Some really beautiful girls. Carried themselves with style and attitude. But everybody was looking for something, and hardly anybody knew what it was. Sex? Sure, but that was just the flesh-deep layer. It was hot flesh, it was freckled and moon-white, it was tanned and smooth, it was ebony and lustrous, it was young and soft and pliable. It was why everyone was here, it called the sisters together, and many would say this was what life was all about, this was the whole picture, this was the reality and essence of sex and domination and at the end of the night a last tender kiss or a caustic comment thrown like a slap. But, Berke thought, hardly anybody here really knows what they’re looking for…which puts us right where straights are.

  Maybe it was to hang on to something as long as you could. Youth, beauty, coolness…whatever. Maybe it was about power over other people, making them dance to your tune. Striking back at people, for past indignities and pain. Whatever that thing was that you needed to find, sex was just the outer skin of it.

  Sitting on this sofa, watching the bodies go past and the games be played out, Berke thought of a card her father had sent her. Not Floyd fucking Fisk, but her real father, Warren Bonnevey. It had been sent to her on the eve of her first gig, when she was seventeen. Its colors were faded, it was spotted with yellow and looked like it dated from the ’50s. On the cover were feminine-looking bees with long eyelashes flying around a hive. Where it had said Congratu-lations On Your First Job, the word Job had been marked out and Gig written in.

  And inside, the verse had been:

  Congratulations on your new position,

  I know it’s just what you’ve been wishin’.

  I’d like to say a whole lot more,

  But that’s what cards like this are for.

  Try and try,

  Grow and thrive,

  You’ll be the busiest bee in a honey of a hive.

  Only the last line had also been marked out, and written in her father’s hand was: Remember no one here gets out alive. Love, Warren.

  Strange, yes. Unsettling, for sure. But then again, her father was insane.

  “Hi, I’m Noble,” said the darkly-tanned woman with blonde-streaked hair who held a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale in one hand and offered the other out toward Berke. She was maybe twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Had very beautiful green eyes, a confident voice. Wore a black tank top, slim-leg jeans and brown, scuffed cowboy boots. Nothing sparkly about her. Good enough.

  Berke shook her hand, and when Noble asked if anybody was sitting next to her, Berke said no, she was welcome to park it.

  “Hey, lemme ask you somethin’.”

  Berke turned from the cooler and her perplexing choice of bottled teas. Mike had come up behind her, clutching his ginger ale, box of doughtnuts and bag of beef jerky, which he’d already broken into. “Go,” Berke said when Mike hesitated.

  Mike glanced toward the door. Berke saw that a state trooper had just entered, a young very clean-cut looking Hispanic guy, and he came straight back to the cooler and got himself a bottle of apple juice. He nodded at them, Mike said, “How’s it goin’?” and then the trooper took his drink to the counter and started a conversation in Spanish with the woman, whom he seemed to know pretty well.

  “What’re you gettin’?” Mike asked her.

  “I don’t know. Is that what you wanted to ask?” She knew it wasn’t; he always approached things sideways, like a crab.

  “Ever try the V8 Fusion stuff? The tropical orange is good.”

  She looked him in the eyes, because he seemed awfully nervous. “What’s up?”

  Mike watched the trooper leave. Except for the woman and the boy, they were alone in here. “Hey… I was wonderin’…have you thought anymore about that song idea?”

  “John’s idea,” Mike explained. “You know, what he said. About everybody writin’ words to a new song.”

  “Oh, that bullshit.” Berke gave him a thin smile. “The Kumbaya song, right?” She decided to give the tropical orange a try, and reached into the cooler for it.

  “Well…yeah, okay…but…you know, maybe it ain’t such a bad idea.” Mike followed her to the counter. “I know what he’s gettin’ at, but—”

  “Busy work, that’s what he’s getting at,” Berke interrupted, as she put her money up.

  “Yeah, but…” Mike glanced out the window, through all the backwards soap-chalk words and prices written there. The fuelling was done. George had paid at the pump and was probably in the bathroom. Terry was getting back into the Scumbucket; it was Nomad’s turn to drive. Nomad and Ariel were standing in the shade, a distance apart. The trooper had raised the cruiser’s hood and looked like he was pouring water from a red plastic pitcher into the reservoir for his windshield-wash fluid. “Maybe it’s a good idea,” Mike said. “You know, to keep everybody together.”

  “We are together,” she reminded him, and pocketed her change. “How could we be on tour and not be together?”

  “Together…like…not gettin’ pissed at each other. Not blamin’ each other for the breakup. Like on the same wavelength or somethin’.”

  Berke had been about to go out the door, and now she stopped and stared at him very carefully, as if searching his face for a third eye. “Maybe I am pissed,” she said.

  He shrugged. The shrug said maybe he was pissed too, deep down, but repositioning was a fact of the musician’s life. Take it or leave it.

  “And who says we’re breaking up?” Berke went on. “So George and Terry are leaving. We’ll replace them and we’ll keep going.” Before Mike could respond to this wishful thinking, she narrowed her eyes. “Wavelength?” she asked. “What are you now, a pop psychologist?”

  She again started to push through the door, and a little heat rolled in but Mike stopped her by saying, “I’ve started writin’ a song. I don’t have a whole lot of it, but… I was kinda hopin’ you’d take a look at it, before I showed it to anybody else.”

  Berke was silent. For a few seconds she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her face revealed no emotion—her barrier against the world, and everything that was in it—but her heart was touched. She thought for a quick fleeting instant that she might tear up, but no way she was going to let that happen. The truth was, she loved Mike Davis as much as she could love anyone. They were a team, the backbone, the foundation, the rhythm twins. He gave her a rough elbow to hold onto, and she gave him a punch in the ribs to show she needed it. They had clicked from the very first, if clicking meant the sharing of fart jokes and beer from the same bottle. And now here he stood, asking her to do this for him. It was important to him, she could see that in his eyes. Before I showed it to anybody else, he’d said.

  But she was who she was, and even this could not be made easy. “You’re not falling for this song-writing crap, are you? Tell me you’re not that stupid.”

  He smiled, but the corners of his mouth were tight. “Maybe what I’ve written is no good…likely it’s not…but nobody ever asked me to write words before. Yeah, I know it ain’t what I do. What I’m supposed to do, I mean. But who says I can’t give it a try?” He saw the flicker of derision in her faintest of half-smiles and he picked up his tempo like a double thumb slap. “If it was to be okay, and maybe start off a new song everybody could be part of…then I’d be doin’ a good thing for the band, right? And…hey…you could maybe add your part, too.”

  “We’re not the writers.” Berke’s voice was low and patient, as if speaking to a small child or a dog. “John, Ariel and Terry are the writers. I have no idea—none, nada—about how to write song lyrics. Come on, let’s hit it.” She went out, with Mike following right after her.

  The trooper had lowered his hood, and with a squeegee was washing a layer of dust from his windshield that the malfunctioning fluid reservoir had failed to clear.

  “Please,” Mike said.


  Berke had only taken a couple of strides from the door. Once more she stopped, because she realized there was a time to play the game of cruelty and a time not to be afraid to be kind. And this definitely, undeniably, was that.

  She faced him. “Okay,” she said with a sigh, “show me what you’ve got.”

  “In my back pocket. The notebook.” Cradling his ginger ale and snacks, Mike turned around so she could get to it. “Listen, really… I appreciate it. But keep it to yourself, okay? For right now, I’m sayin’.”

  “Right.” She was having trouble getting the green notebook out. With jeans that tight, his balls must be either the size of raisins or swollen up like apples. “Jesus! How do you get these damned things on?”

  “Just pull.”

  “Hard ass,” she commented, and then the notebook came free. The effort of it caused her to stagger away from him a few feet.

  Something hit the window between them.

  There was a sharp high crack, and suddenly a hole appeared next to the soap-chalk dollar sign of the price on a Budweiser sixpack. Berke saw it, and Mike saw it, and they watched as silver creepers spread across the glass from the edges of the hole. Then Mike turned his face toward Berke, to ask her what the hell just happened, and Berke saw a second hole appear as if by magic—fucking wicked magic, she thought in an instant of slow-motion shock—in Mike’s forehead about an inch above his left eyebrow. The left temple bulged outward, as if a fist had struck it from within, his mouth remained open in what he’d been meaning to ask Berke, and at his feet the bottle of ginger ale burst like a bomb against the concrete.

  Mike was aware of a great pressure in his head, and suddenly he was falling away from Berke, falling away from the Texas heat, falling away from the Scumbucket at the pumps and his friends who waited there, falling backward in time.

  It was the damnedest thing. He was falling backward as if on a reverse rollercoaster, a fast trip, a breathtaking trip, and there was nothing he could do but fall. And in this falling, this ultimate repositioning, he possessed a life in rewind. He passed through a whirlwind of bands and gigs and smoky clubs; he went back past a table full of whiskey bottles, back past a jail cell that smelled of swampy August; he passed his daughter Sara, and he thought to try to touch her cheek, or her hair, or her shoulder, but too late, too late, she was gone; he went back past bad-ass cars and sorry-ass cars and pick-me-up trucks, and bass axes of many colors; he passed a white dog and a black dog and the face of Grover McFarland watching him with stern disapproval under a yellow lamp; he fell backward past many faces, many shadows, through a place of darkness and despair, and then in what seemed the last light of summer, the sad light, the light of saying goodbye to all that was, a hand with freckles across the back of it reached out of nowhere and grasped his hand, and a familiar voice said, very clearly: Gotcha.

  He was dead before he hit the ground.

  There was a second or two of silence, while Berke stared at the fine mist of blood that reddened the air where Mike had been standing. She saw that he’d dropped the doughnuts, but he had clamped hard to the beef jerky. His left eye had turned a vicious shade of crimson, and blood had begun to trickle from the hole in his head.

  Even as Berke made a noise—a scream, choked sob or anguished moan, whatever it was she couldn’t hear it—the young trooper was running toward her, and when he saw the wound in the fallen man’s head and the bullet hole in the window he drew his own Sig Saur .357 semi-automatic service pistol. His eyes were wild; he was well-trained, yes, but two bullets from the blue had a way of turning anyone’s Sunday afternoon a little chaotic. He shouted, “Everybody on the ground!” as he made a rotating scan with the pistol held in a double-handed firing grip. Nomad took a step forward, and the trooper levelled the pistol at him and yelled, “I said on the ground now!” because he didn’t know who had a gun or not, where the shots had come from, or really what the shit was happening. So Nomad dropped, Ariel dropped, Berke fell to her knees beside Mike’s body and, numbly, grasped his arm to shake him conscious, and alerted by the noise George came out of the bathroom pulling his pants up. “Get down! Down!” the trooper commanded behind his weapon. George went down, holding his arms out in a posture of surrender.

  “You! Out of the van!” the trooper shouted at Terry, who immediately slithered from it and lay spread-eagled on the pavement. When the woman who ran the station emerged, with the boy behind her, the trooper told her in Spanish to get back inside, and she was trying to tell him that a piece of flying glass had hit Carlos and he was bleeding from the chin. Then she saw the body on the concrete and she backed up and the boy with the gashed chin gawked and started taking pictures with a cellphone camera.

  “Get down! Get down! Get down!” the trooper hollered, his voice ragged, as he advanced on Berke with his pistol aimed and ready.

  She was shivering. There were tears in her eyes, and she couldn’t seem to draw a whole breath. But it occurred to her, in a blank cold place beyond the horror, that she ought to tell him disco was dead.

  And so too, she realized, was her buddy, her rhythm twin, her rough elbow to cling to.

  She lay down beside him, on the hot pavement, and suddenly she was aware of a breakage within herself, a rupture, a failure of a weak seam that had never before known such pressure. She began to weep quietly at first, and then began to openly and brokenly sob as she had not cried since she was a girl too young to keep a cold lid on her cup of pain.

  Her friend was dead, and dead too was The Five.

  Dead, dead, deader than dead.

  EIGHT.

  George stared at the black telephone. Your basic landline, no nonsense here.

  “Nine to get out?” he asked, and the chunky detective, the guy who was always wearing the cowboy hat, nodded. The second detective, a foxy Hispanic woman in her mid-thirties with manicured red fingernails and eyes like pools of bittersweet chocolate, was watching him from her chair across the table.

  George punched the nine, got the outside line and then dialed the rest of the number. He made a note of the time from the clock on the white plaster wall. They didn’t want him to use his cellphone. They were going to sit in here and listen, and George figured the call was going to be recorded. The detectives were smalltown, but there was nothing soft or lax about them; they were interested in all the details, even what George was about to say. They made him as nervous as hell, and he hadn’t even done anything.

  The number rang in Austin. On the third ring, Ash’s machine answered and left the usual message: I can’t pick up right now, but after the tone leave a yadda yadda yadda. George had realized before that Ash had a little bit of a lisp, but it was very pronounced on the machine.

  “Ash, it’s George,” he said when the tone sounded. “If you’re there, pick up.” He waited a couple of seconds. “I mean it, man. Really. Pick up like right now.”

  There was a click and Ash was there. A problem? Ash wanted to know.

  “Listen,” George said. And something about his voice made Ash repeat the question, only now in his firmest big boy agent inflection. “Mike Davis…” How to say this? Just the truth and nothing but. “Mike Davis has been shot,” George went on. “He’s been killed. He’s dead.” Like it had to be repeated. There was utter silence from Austin. “It happened about a hour and a half ago, a few miles east of Sweetwater. We’re at the police station right now. In Sweetwater. Wait, wait, wait,” George said, when Ash started asking questions so fast the clipped Indian accent was getting in the way. “Let me tell you. We were at a gas station. Mike and Berke were talking out front and all of a sudden…a bullet got him in the head.” God, that sounded weird! Like something from any number of action flicks, but when it was real it was stomach-churning. George had already taken his turn at puking in the bathroom. “They say he was probably dead…like…right then.” Ash started throwing more questions at him, rapid-fire, and the truth was that George had always had difficulty understanding him and now everything sounded like
a freaking mashup of English and Hindi.

  “About an hour and a half ago,” George said again, because he caught that question. “Yeah, yeah…everybody else is okay. I mean…we’re mindfucked, but we’re okay.” He paused, trying to grasp what Ash was asking. “No, they didn’t catch anybody. They think…” He looked across the table at the woman. “Can I tell him?”

  She nodded.

  “They think maybe it was an accident. They don’t know exactly yet where the bullets came from, but they’re thinking it was from some woods across the highway. Yeah, I said bullets. There were two shots. They think maybe somebody was in there shooting a rifle, just dicking around.” The detectives had told George that the little cluster of thorny scrub-brush and trees, maybe sixty yards wide on the other side of a cinderblock building where truck engines were repaired, drew shooters after what they called ‘varmints’. There were rats, gophers and snakes in that mess, and kids with rifles shot it up. The repair shop had been closed, so nobody had seen or heard anything, and likewise from a few ramshackle old houses over there. “No, right now they have no idea who it was,” George said.