The Five

by Robert R. McCammon

  The deal was, though George felt no need to say this, the detectives thought it might be an accident just from the distance involved. The repair shop was two hundred yards on the other side of I-20 and the varmint woods was another hundred and fifty yards, at least. So it looked like an errant, careless couple of shots—high-velocity, for sure, but that wasn’t so unusual, they said—that had carried right across the highway.

  “They’ll know more later,” George said. “They’ve got cops swarming all over the place.” When the Scumbucket had pulled away from the pumps, following the car the two detectives were in, the gas station had been secured with the yellow crime scene tape and it looked like a parking lot for police cars and paramedic vehicles. A slim yellow metal tube had been pushed through the hole in the window to show the angle of entry. What looked like a surveyor’s tripod with a monocular attached had been set up in line with the yellow tube, aimed at the varmint woods across I-20. Over there were more police cars. The cops were prying the first bullet out of the station’s rear wall. George assumed they would also remove the second bullet from Mike’s brain, but when the Scumbucket had pulled out The Five—ex-Five—had left their bass player under a sheet on the pavement. George had been glad to be leaving, because he’d seen a body bag being taken out of the back of a white truck and the way Berke was so torn up…it was for the best they were getting out.

  “The thing is,” George went on, “they want to notify the next-of-kin. No, they want to do it from here. Right. So… I don’t have that information. I know his parents still live in Bogalusa, but…yeah, right. Would you do that?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to the detectives, “He’s looking it up on his laptop.”

  They waited.

  “You guys were on the way to El Paso,” the woman said, without expression. It had been explained to her, the whole story, and she’d already checked their website, but around the station she was called ‘the Digger’, with those long red spade-shaped nails. The title was on her coffee cup. She could not stop until she got to the bottom. They were a team: Lucky Luke and the Digger, known to the general public as detectives Luke Halprey and Ramona Rios.

  “Yeah,” George answered.

  “Going straight through, then,” Lucky Luke said, chewing on a toothpick.

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Emerson, I have to ask you…do any of you owe money to anyone here? And by ‘anyone’, I mean a person who might feel they’re not going to be repaid and may be…um…a little vindictive about it?” asked the Digger.

  “No. Well… I don’t. Owe anybody money,” he clarified. “What’re you saying? That this was a ‘hit’? Over money? I thought you said it was an accident.”

  It was Luke’s turn to clarify. “Might be an accident, that’s what was said.”

  “How about drugs?” The Digger’s arched black eyebrows went up. “Anybody gotten on the wrong side of a dealer?”

  “No! Hell, no! We’ve never played this area before. How would a shooter even know we were here?”

  “That would my next question,” said the lucky one. “Did you stop at that station because maybe you had a meeting planned with somebody?”

  “Think about that before you answer, Mr. Emerson,” the Digger cautioned.

  “No. I mean…we didn’t have any meeting planned. Wait a minute…go ahead,” George told Ash, who gave him the number in Bogalusa. He relayed the number to the detectives, and Luke wrote it down on a notepad that advertised Big Boys Barbecue. Then came the moment that George had known was coming and that had to be done. “I guess that’s it,” he said, and when Ash didn’t respond George spoke with what felt like a stone sitting in his gut, “We’ll work out how to get Mike back, and then we’ll come on in.”

  “We’d like you to stay here tonight,” the Digger told him. “Let us call around, just to check some things.”

  “Stay here?” George asked, stricken by the thought of sleeping in a police station.

  “A motel,” Luke supplied. “Get a good night’s rest.”

  “Oh. Okay.” George turned his attention back to the matter at hand. “They want us to stay here tonight. And listen…you might as well start making the calls.” Ash said he would, and that he was so sorry for this senseless tragedy and there would never be another bass player like Mike Davis, and for George to tell everyone else how sorry he felt. “One more thing,” George said. “A woman from the local paper was here and asked us some questions. She said she wouldn’t file the story until the cops gave her the go-ahead. I just wanted you to know.”

  Ash thanked him for that, then said he would immediately call Roger Chester.

  “Are we done here?” George asked, and Luke told him the band members could follow them over to the Lariat Motel on East Broadway, get them checked in, and that there was a Subway nearby where they could eat dinner. Not said, but what George certainly felt, was that the detectives wanted to keep a rope around them and that the questions were far from finished.

  He had his own questions. Who on this God’s earth would have wanted to kill Mike Davis? And in Sweetwater? No, it had to have been an accident. A kid in the varmint woods. Had to be.

  < >

  In another room, a TV was tuned to the Weather Channel. The four people who sat on the orange plastic chairs in this room pretended to be watching it. Nomad had always thought that the Weather Channel was a kind of Zen; it emptied your head with its colorful images and soothed your mind with the illusion of control. Right now they needed all the Zen they could get.

  A policeman came through to ask something of Lucky Luke and the Digger. Berke, who sat apart from the others and was wearing Nomad’s sunglasses on her pallid face, sat up straight and called out in a strident voice, “Did you find it yet?”

  The policeman, unnerved, looked to the detectives for help. The Digger said calmly, “We’ll let you know when we find it. I promise.”

  Berke settled back in her chair. Her lips tightened. A weather map sparkling with sun symbols reflected in her glasses.

  Nomad glanced quickly at Ariel, who sat a few chairs away with Terry on her other side. She was hollow-eyed and wan, and she occasionally made a catching sound in her throat as if awakening with a start from a very bad dream. Terry stared alternately at the television and at the floor, his eyes heavy-lidded behind his specs.

  “We’re going to a motel,” the Little Genius announced. “Stay there tonight.”

  “You take them over,” the Digger said to her partner, in a quiet voice. She took the Big Boys Barbecue pad with the phone number on it. “I’ll do this one.”

  Nomad didn’t think he could stand up. To an outsider, he might have appeared the most composed of the shattered group. He might have seemed the least in shock, the most able to bear this tragedy and to rebound the fastest from it. But the outsider would have been criminally incorrect.

  In the past ninety minutes, he had relived his own personal nightmare a hundred times over.

  < >

  Johnny, there’s no roadmap.

  But.

  It had been different that night. That August 10th, 1991. A Saturday, outside the Shenanigans Club in Louisville. Nearing midnight, and in a parking lot bathed in blue and green neon Dean Charles and the Roadmen starting to pack up the van after opening for the Street Preachers. John was a boy, a son, a fan. Dad was the bomb, the Killer. Played a gold-colored Strat that could cut through an arrangement like a razor through a hamhock. And sing…that man could wail. He was a bottle full of lightning. Up there on stage, front-and-center in the godly glow, all that power coming off him, all that energy and life. He was one of a kind.

  And then out in that parking lot, when they saw the two flat tires on the van, the old blue cat sitting crooked on her paws, and somebody said, “Oh, shit,” and somebody else growled, “Motherfucker!” because John was one of them, he had heard it all, he was a veteran of the road even at twelve years old.

  Dean had looked at his son and shrugged and g
rinned in that way he had of saying nothing in this world was such a big deal that it tugged you out of shape, you could always find your way back to the center of the cool world the musician lived in, and he said as he always did in such situations, “Johnny, there’s no roadmap.” Then he’d paused just a second or two, maybe thinking it over for the first time, and he’d said to his son with that slip-sided smile, “But…”

  “I’m gonna end it now,” said the man who had just stepped out from his crouch behind a parked car, and Dean had regarded him only with mild surprise, as if expecting a visitor who was late in coming.

  < >

  John had been standing next to his father when the pistol in the man’s hand spoke. It had shouted into his father’s left ear, and John remembered how his father had winced at the loud noise, because his father had always cautioned John to guard his hearing, he only had one set of ears.

  The pistol had gone off twice more as Dean Charles was falling, a whiff of gunpowder and a smell of blood in John’s nostrils, the boy falling back in shock, falling as his father fell, one to be called dead four hours later in the hospital and the other left behind to relive the moment over and over again.

  “I have to find it,” Berke said, but to whom she was speaking was unclear. She hadn’t moved from her chair.

  “It’ll turn up.” George stood over her. “Come on, it’s time to go.”

  Nomad counted slowly to three, and then he got to his feet. As he followed the others out of the police station into the solid heat of late afternoon, he thought how ridiculous this situation was. How utterly fucking ridiculous. Two days ago he’d been burdened with the fact that The Five would end their last tour in Austin on the 16th of August—the Month of Death, as far as he was concerned—and then it would be back to putting another band together, another name, another vibe, another set of personalities—and here he was, here they were, on the real last day come way too soon. And Mike dead. Dead. He had experience with sudden death, yeah, but at least he’d found out later that his father, one of the wiliest tomcatters to ever sneak in a housewife’s back door, was responsible for a Louisville beauty-shop operator divorcing an out-of-work husband who owned ten guns. It would have made a farce, a black comedy directed by the Coen brothers starring George Clooney, but with blue contacts, and to complete the tragedy the man who had shot Dean Charles had walked about five yards away and shot himself under the chin, leaving behind two more children who would always feel an empty hole at their birthday parties. So as terrible as that was, it had made sense. But this…if he believed in God, which he did not, he would have heard the sound of cruel cosmic laughter, funny to no one else. Now he had to stop seeing Mike fall down over and over again in his mind, and he had to stop hearing Berke’s strangled scream or he was going to lose it right here on the Sweetwater street.

  George took the wheel and followed the detective’s car. Berke sat way in back, by herself. The sunglasses stayed on. Nobody could look at anybody else. Nomad stared blankly ahead and silently chewed on his insides.

  On the drive from the gas station into town, Berke had suddenly come out of her state of coma and cried out, “The notebook! I left the notebook!”

  “Hold on!” George had said. He was already about to jump out of his skin, and this outburst had nearly started the rip along his spine. “What notebook?”

  “Oh Jesus, oh Christ! I dropped it! I had it in my hand, I must’ve dropped it!” Berke sounded close to hysteria, which put everybody else nearer the edge. “Did you see it?” she asked Ariel, who shook her head. “We’ve got to go back!” she told George. “Turn around, we’ve got to go back!” The last two words had been almost a shriek.

  “Take it easy!” Nomad had said. “We can’t go back right now!” They were following the two detectives, who might not have understood or appreciated the Scumbucket pulling off and turning around.

  “You shut up!” Berke spat at him, her eyes enraged. “You fucking shut up!”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” Ariel had turned around and grasped one of Berke’s hands, and Terry was trying to console her as best he could, but Berke wasn’t finished. She tried to jerk her hand away from Ariel’s, nearly spraining Ariel’s wrist, and she snarled, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” but Ariel kept hold of her and kept calmly repeating, “Settle down, come on, settle down,” until some of the fight-against-the-world went out of Berke. When it went it went hard. Berke’s shoulders trembled, she lowered her head so no one could see her face, and she began to weep—almost silently, but not silently enough. Through it all, Ariel did not let her go.

  Nomad and George had exchanged quick glances. Berke Bonnevey, who made an art of detachment, was caught in the open with nothing to hide behind. No flippant remarks, no casual scorn, no big bitchin’ set of Ludwigs. Just her, torn open. Witnessing it was almost as much of a shock as the shooting had been.

  In another moment Berke’s crying seemed to stop, because she sniffled and ran her free hand across her eyes. Nomad had said, “Here,” and that’s how she got his sunglasses.

  At the police station, the story had emerged about the green notebook, which Nomad had remembered was on the picnic table next to Mike. “Something he wanted me to read,” Berke explained. “It was important to him.”

  A call had been made to the scene, but Luke—maybe explaining the origin of his luck—reported back, “No dice. It’s not there.” Then, sensing Berke’s slow and painful retreat into the sanctity of herself, he’d offered, “It’ll turn up, though. When everything gets catalogued.”

  Nomad had taken that to mean it might have been thrown in with Mike’s box of doughnuts and bag of blood-spattered beef jerky on the meat wagon, but he kept his mouth shut.

  The Lariat Motel on East Broadway was small but clean, with a swimming pool behind a white fence and a sign that said Guests Only, Swim At Your Own Risk. The place had maybe a dozen rooms, all on one level. It was built to resemble a ranch house, with different brands burned into every door. George checked them in, got two rooms adjoining with free cable and complimentary Cattleman’s breakfast of biscuits and jelly with coffee or orange juice in the morning. Luke waited for them to take their bags in. Before he left he said he’d check back with them around ten o’clock that night.

  They ate at the Subway, which was in a stripmall about half a mile away. Picked at their food, really, but they knew they had to get something down. Berke kept the sunglasses on, even past the point where the sun began to set. She ate half a small bag of chips. No one talked very much; it seemed somehow disrepectful to talk about any subject but Mike, and that subject could not be touched.

  Finally, when everyone had eaten as much as they could and the time had come to go back to the Lariat for a night of quiet Hell and mindnumbing cable fare, Terry said, “John…”

  …there’s no roadmap…

  But no, Terry did not say that, as Nomad might have heard a ghost speak from a corner of the Subway where the sun had already left town.

  Terry said, “What’re you going to do?”

  “Going to do? When? Like in the next minute? Five minutes? A fucking hour from now?” He felt the heat rising in his face, and he saw Terry’s eyes widen behind the glasses and Terry shrank back a little from the table because the dynamite’s fuse had been lit. “Is that what you mean?”

  “No, I just mean—”

  “Then what do you fucking mean?”

  “Sir!” said the middle-aged black man behind the counter. “Please watch the profanity.” He motioned toward a young couple with a little girl and an infant at another booth. Three sets of eyes were on Nomad.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” Nomad said, to both the counterman and the other customers. The heat of anger became a blush of shame. He took a deep breath to get himself under control, and then he levelled his gaze at Terry again. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he answered. “I’m going back to Austin tomorrow, and I’m going to go home and sleep for a couple of days. Then when I can think straight I’m go
ing to call Ariel and Berke and see if they’re still in. If they are…and they don’t need to tell me yea or nay right now… I’m going to work with Ash to find replacements for you and for Mike. And for you,” he said to George, who sat impassively. George had a little dab of mustard on his lower lip. “Then we’ll go from there, with whoever works out. We’ll come up with a new name, we’ll start rehearsing, and coming up with some new material. If Ariel and Berke want to be in, fine. If not, fine. But I’m going to keep on doing what I do. So that’s my plan. What’s yours?”

  Terry hesitated. He felt himself falter. He liked peace, liked for everybody to get along. He liked to be liked. He knew that if he came across as calm and measured, it was because nine times out of ten he was stealthily backing away from confrontation. It had been one of the hardest things ever to tell them he was leaving the band. How many weeks had it taken to get those words out of his mouth? And he might have gone many weeks more, if George hadn’t opened up first. One thing he truly feared, and he’d feared it since being in the Venomaires, was stepping into John Charles’s rage radar, of being the target of the anger he’d seen erupt way too many times. There had been some pretty hideous scenes between John and Kevin Keeler, before Kevin had suffered his mental breakdown on stage in Atlanta. But now Terry, who had thought Mike was one of the best bass players he’d ever heard and not only that but a real friend whom he would mourn in his own way, alone with one of his keyboards, decided that John was not going to blow up here in the Subway. There was no point to it; what was done was done, and even John Charles knew he couldn’t roll back time before some kid with a rifle had fired two stupid bullets.

  “When we get back,” Terry replied, “I’m going to pack up my car and drive to Albuquerque. I’m going to visit Eric Gherosimini. After that, I’m driving home and take the loan from my dad. To start my business.”

  Nomad took the last drink of his Coke. What could he say to that? It was a plan. He realized that Berke would probably be wanting to get to San Diego, to open those boxes her stepfather had left her. Another plan. The Little Genius had a plan too, the bastard. Nomad caught Ariel’s gaze from where she sat with George at the next table.