by Z. Rider
He could have signed a big mortgage on the strength of the contract they had with High Class, but they were so deep in debt to the label he had a hard time justifying taking on more on top of it.
He liked this place too. Liked that it was paid for at this point, just taxes, insurance, and utilities to worry about. Yeah, he’d still like a place in the woods, but that vision had downsized to a one-room hunting cabin with a woodstove and creaky furniture. If there was a lake nearby, fine, but no lake also meant fewer people—just him and the trees.
One day.
Jesus, he felt like he was leaving the place for good. Reluctant to step out the door and never come back.
Someone laid on the horn—and by “someone” he meant Mike, because nobody actually in the band was enough of a control hard-on to insist on driving the van themselves, or to keep blaring the horn all over the neighborhood at fuck o’clock in the morning.
He backed out the door, pulling it shut with him, and locked up.
When he climbed in the van’s side, their tour manager—behind the wheel just like Dean’d expected—turned his head. “It’s not like we’re on a schedule or anything.”
He started the van moving before Jessie’d even pulled the door shut.
Nick was curled up on the farthest back seat, his jacket covering his head. Dean dropped his bags behind Nick and made his way back up to the front row.
“Anything I need to know about in those bags?” Mike asked.
Since Dean hadn’t managed to get away with the nickel bag last night—no. Mike didn’t actually care if they had drugs on them; he just wanted to keep tabs on what, where, and how much, in case the bus was about to be searched.
“What happened?” Shawn asked as Dean dropped onto the bench beside him.
The tape on the bandage itched. He touched the edge of it. Felt the ghost of a thump underneath him, and his saliva shriveled away. “Dog bite.”
“What?”
Dean patted his jacket pocket. Shit. He didn’t have cigarettes either.
“Must have been some dog,” Shawn said.
“I think it was wild.”
Shawn’s eyebrows rose.
“I don’t want to get into it.” He didn’t know how to explain a fake dog bite, and he sure as shit didn’t know how to explain what he really remembered from the night before.
Jesus—he’d run over some guy.
He reached inside his jacket, hoping, but no—no cigarettes. He’d have settled for stale ones. He leaned forward. “Can we stop at a convenience store?”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Mike said.
“Did you get it looked at?” Shawn asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Is he asleep back there?” Because Nick smoked, might have some on him.
“Who knows?”
“Aw, fuck, come on,” Mike said, the van held up at a red light.
“It’s not like we’re gonna get there and they’ve got our shit all loaded and ready to go,” Shawn called forward.
“Yeah,” Jessie said, leaned back in the passenger seat with his sneaker against the dash. “We’ll get there, and they’ll just be starting.”
“That’s because when we get there, they realize they need to move their fucking asses,” Mike said. The light turned green, and he gunned it. “We have a schedule. Every day you assholes are on tour, you get a little farther behind on it. I just want to start out even with it instead of already behind the curve, if it’s okay with you.”
“It’s fine with me,” Dean said. “As long as we can hit a store on the way.”
“You want to stop and get your nails done too?” Mike asked.
Dean stretched his leg out and laid his head back. “Nope. Carton of smokes’ll be just fine.”
2.
* * *
Carl shifted in the midmorning sunlight blazing through the Cougar’s windshield, sticky and itchy in his clothes. His hair, when he dragged his fingers through it, stood up and stayed that way.
No one had come out of the building.
He didn’t know what to think.
People didn’t sleep in bars. It wasn’t even that big a place. He imagined it had to be just about all barroom in there, a couple closet-sized restrooms, a little office that maybe doubled as inventory storage. The roof was a little high, but not enough for a second floor. Maybe the basement? But there were no windows in the short foundation, at least not that he could see from behind the wheel. Maybe—he hoped—there was a bulkhead on another side of the building. An unlocked one.
His mouth tasted like shit. He’d started smoking once it got light. It hadn’t helped. He needed a cold drink—orange juice sounded like heaven right about then—and if he waited another ten minutes to empty his bladder, he was going to lose it right in the seat.
He cranked the engine up. He needed to get a look at the rest of the building anyway. He crawled the Cougar past, craning his neck for a good look. Three shuttered windows, nothing at basement level except weeds and litter. He went around the block and came up behind the building. The rear door was shut, a couple wooden steps leading up to it. The windows on the main level were shuttered just like the others. No sign of a bulkhead anywhere. He turned up Main Street, the way he’d come, the St. Michael medal swinging from his rearview. Eggs sounded almost as good as orange juice—or would once he took care of his bladder. There was a diner just up the street, close enough to keep an eye on the bar if he sat in a window booth. He parked out front, the car easy to get to if the bikers made a move.
He shoved the handgun back under the passenger seat, reached in back for the manila folder. Leaving it on the table he wanted, he gave a nod to the waitress and strode through the scattering of tables toward the restrooms.
When he got back, a menu sat by his folder, a napkin and silverware. A glass of water. He chugged half of that down, glanced at the menu, pushed it aside.
The waitress showed up, and he ordered orange juice, coffee, a couple eggs over hard with toast. When she left, he opened the folder. Reports and photographs and newspaper clippings from the series of P.I.s he’d hired over the past two years, his bank account leaping downward with each new lead. Each had gotten him closer, but ultimately they’d gotten him nowhere—until now. Until Walker. Walker who’d got him to the bar and refused to get him any more information. Walker who’d gone silent, refusing to take his calls.
The waitress brought a cup of coffee, a little pitcher of cream.
“Thanks.” He didn’t look up. He’d arrived at the picture he’d been thinking of in the dark, the one of the soldiers in Korea. The resemblance between the dark-haired man and the biker he was tracking was unsettling. Not far from his canary-eating smirk stood a wide-shouldered man, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, taller than the sergeant. While the other guys in the photo—the canary eater and the other three whose faces Carl could see—had helmets like metal mixing bowls turned upside down on their heads, this one was holding his at his thigh. His hair was short on the sides, thick on the top. Blond. A lock that might have been carefully combed over to the side at one point had fallen loose, making him look more like a bar brawler than a lieutenant.
Of the other guys, one had his tongue out, his eyes rolled to the side. Another had his thumbs tucked under the straps of his backpack. The guy on the far end was angled away from the camera, his face tilted toward it, a scar white at the lower curve of his cheek.
A quarter century ago. The guys in the photo were the same age as the guys at the bar last night.
The waitress came with his eggs and juice. He shoved the photo back in the folder.
He watched the bar through the plate glass as he ate. The row of chrome out front glinted in the sunlight; the building itself was silent, shut up.
When the waitress came by with the coffee carafe, he said, “Hey, let me ask you a question.”
She cocked her hip, the carafe jutting out. “It’s your nickel.” A pocket in her apron bulged with her order book. She acted
older, but looked not more than a year or two ahead of where Sophie’d be now, her hair pulled back into a ponytail the way Soph used to wear it. But the waitress had auburn hair, her eyes dirty green and set wide apart. She had a scar under her lip, a pale nick.
“Do you know anything about the bike club? At the bar down the street?”
She shrugged. “I don’t really hang out with that kind of crowd.”
He smiled. “I didn’t think you did. I just thought you might know something about them, you know, in general.”
“They have a skeleton on a motorcycle on the back of their jackets,” she said.
With the outline of the moon in the background. “They call themselves the Black Sun Riders?”
“I guess. They never come in here.”
“Do they ever leave there?” He thrust a thumb toward the window.
“I guess. I don’t pay them much attention. Can I get you anything else?”
“No, thanks.”
“All right.” She tore off his check and put it on the table.
“These windows must rattle when they go by,” he said. They took up most of the front end of the restaurant.
“Don’t hear them much during the day.” Her gaze skated over him, and she added, “You don’t look like much of a biker,” before she walked off.
In another life, he might have liked to have owned a motorcycle. Ride through the desert with hot wind in his hair. Not give a shit about anything except school, bills, falling in love maybe. If it had just been his parents that were gone, he might have been able to do that—knowing Soph was safe, knowing she was graduating high school, maybe heading off to college, his aunt and uncle taking good care of her. Things would have been okay, even then. They’d just started getting over the car wreck that had killed their parents, as “past it” as you got, at least.
When he paid the check, the day was pushing toward noon, the sun high and bright in the sky. Shops were open, doing a steady business. A little ways past the diner, he spotted a pay phone. He stopped at his car to dig out a rattling can, scooped a handful of coins from it into his pocket.
He punched in the apartment’s phone number, one eye on the bar.
“Where are you?” Tim asked, his voice sludgy like he’d just woken up.
“Two blocks from the bar.”
After the kind of grunt that accompanied a lazy stretch, Tim said, “Was it everything you’d hoped for?”
Carl turned his back to the bar, as if the place could read his lips, and pushed closer to the phone, his fingers bumping over the segmented cord that connected the receiver to the box. “I saw him this morning.”
A yawn stretched across the line.
“He went into the bar and hasn’t come out. Is that normal, to hang out in a bar right through morning?”
“I’d have thought they’d close at two or something.”
Leaving out the part about creeping around the building with a gun, he said, “It’s locked.”
“Well that’s strange, I guess.” It came across the line flat.
“They’ll come out sometime,” Carl said, “or unlock the door for business this afternoon.”
“I still don’t know what good you think you’re going to do.” Tim didn’t know about the gun. Carl had almost told him, but he wanted to keep Tim out of trouble when this all went down. He wanted Tim to be able to say, I had no idea.
Tim said, “He’s going to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never even been to New Mexico. You’ve got me confused with someone else.’”
“I don’t have him confused.”
“And then he’s going to call the cops and have you dragged off to the loony bin.”
“I don’t have him confused.”
A sigh, and then, “When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to figure out how to get him alone.”
The silence was more than just a vacancy in the conversation. It was crowded with things said a thousand times, not worth saying again.
Before Soph had gone, Tim had been at the edges of his life: the other side of a social studies class, bagging groceries at the Furr’s Carl would buy his cigarettes from, sitting at the counter at the burger joint everyone went to. He’d stepped in from the edges when Soph had happened, just an accident really—he’d been walking by while Carl had sat on the gym steps the afternoon after, Carl too numb for any of it to feel real yet. The only pain getting through at that point was the pain of him fucking up, letting it happen.
Tim had come up to sit beside him, tell him he was sorry.
He’d wanted Tim to go the fuck away, but he’d mumbled “Thanks.”
After a few minutes, Tim said he’d seen her that night, when he’d dropped Jonesy off for the game. I can’t believe… she was just… she was just right here. Tim had gripped the edge of the steps. His eyes had been wide with the frustration and helplessness Carl himself felt so keenly.
They’d sat at the top of the stairs until the sky had turned orange.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Tim said, finally, all the way in New Mexico. “Especially if it’s not even the right guy.”
A recording butted in, asking for money.
Carl looked at the change scattered on the shelf under the phone. Instead of popping more in, he said, “I’ve gotta go.”
“Don’t do anything fucking stupid.”
He swept the quarters into his hand, the sun hot on his head. Back at the car, he smoked three cigarettes, leaning against the door, looking but not looking at passersby, wondering what they thought as they passed him. Wondering what they knew about the bikers.
He tossed the last cigarette on the ground and climbed inside, cranked the engine, and pulled up in front of the convenience store, that much closer to the man he was after.
3.
* * *
While the crew loaded equipment into the belly of the bus, Dean mounted the steps, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other, a pair of convenience-store sunglasses perched on his face. Life seemed a lot more pleasant with those on, and his last pair was in the jacket he’d lost. He’d had to borrow cash from Shawn to cover the purchase, but at least he didn’t have to worry about food for the next two months. Per diems would help with alcohol. He’d be all right.
The bus had that steamed-fabric and burned-vacuum-belt smell that wouldn’t survive more than a day or two of eight guys leaving their dirty socks in it. One of his bags went under the bus, the other he dropped on the “junk” bunk in the narrow sleeping area. In his pocket he had one more thing from the convenience store, and he pulled it out while he leaned a hip against the bunk.
The bus swayed, people climbing on and off, traversing its aisle. He managed to pluck the cotton out of the mouth of the Tylenol bottle with his cigarette clamped between two fingers. He dumped two pills onto his slashed palm.
His teeth ached, he’d come to realize during the van ride. All the way across the front. He must have hit his mouth on the ground when the biker’d tackled him, though how he hadn’t bloodied his nose at the same time, he didn’t know.
It was funny how different pains turned on in their own time: the neck and knee when he woke in the truck, the cheek when he’d first touched it—now it smarted whenever he moved his face. And now his teeth.
“Hey, hey.” Teddy turned sideways to fit his bulk through the bunkroom door. One of their roadies, Ted hauled equipment and kept fans at bay, usually just by crossing his arms and standing there, but he was also their guitar tech, with fingers more nimble than you’d expect and an almost preternatural talent for coaxing failing equipment back into service.
Dean shifted toward the back lounge to let Teddy drop his stuff in the junk. Heat came off the man like a furnace—ten in the morning and the tips of his hair were already pointed with sweat from loading up.
Dean popped the Tylenols in his mouth and chased them with coffee, grimacing as it went down his throat. Some of the best coffee he’d ev
er had had come from gas stations, but this made his stomach kick before it even reached it. He doubted he’d finish it.
The first thing Teddy pulled out of his bag was a hand towel to sop up the sweat on his face.
Their first big tour, they’d taken three roadie-slash-security guys, two guitar techs, a drum tech, light and sound guys, someone to handle the merch sales, and their first big-tour tour manager—and why not: the record label was supporting the tour.
Man, they were dumb.
They could still tour with a crew like that if they wanted to—just give in and dig their hole with High Class so deep they’d be able to smell Chinese food when they looked down it. And maybe that was the way they were supposed to do it—shut up, sit back, and enjoy the ride. It wasn’t like High Class was going to come after them to pay up years down the road when they were on the downslide side of their careers.
It wasn’t like it was real money—the argument Nick sometimes made. “It’s just numbers on paper. It’s make-believe. There’s no money there.”
But there was money involved, coming in every time someone walked out of a record store with one of their albums. They were just never going to see that money. And that was bullshit.
“Man, this is October?” Teddy said, running the towel over the wide back of his neck.
“Feels about right for October,” Dean said. It was probably sixty outside.
Nowadays they toured with two techs who doubled as roadies, a sound guy who doubled as their merch guy, and Mike—who right then grasped the back of the driver’s seat with one hand, his clipboard in the other, and said, “Who’s not on the bus?”
Nick’s head popped up the stairs behind him. He ducked under Mike’s arm, then straightened to swagger up the aisle in a snap-front shirt and dark glasses, his ear, as always, poking through hair he hadn’t yet bothered to pull a comb through.
“Is that it?” Mike said. “Everyone else on? ’Cause if you’re not on, you’ve got a long fucking walk to NYC.”
“If we’re not on,” Nick said, “we don’t know you just threatened to leave us in Haverhill either.” He dropped his jacket on a couch in the front lounge, then dropped himself next to it.
