Jesse squeezed out the door and Johnny locked it from the outside.
“Not to mention fire escapes,” Johnny said as they took a few steps down the alley and saw the fire escape on their left. “I’ll bet you were surprised when the waitress delivered drinks through the second-floor window.”
Jesse tried to make out Johnny’s face in the darkness. “You know, she scared the crap out of us at first.”
Johnny laughed and slapped his knees with both hands. “How about the weed?”
Butch responded. “That was right on time and it was some good shit.”
“You can thank my bartender for that,” Johnny said. “I don’t partake myself.”
Jesse couldn’t believe it. “Oh, man, you don’t know what you’re missing.”
“I know what I’m missing, all right,” Johnny said as he led them down the dark alley. “I’m tired enough as it is. Weed just puts me to sleep.”
In less than a block, Johnny stopped and knocked on a door that neither Butch nor Jesse had seen in the dark. “Watch yourself, it’s a pretty big step up,” Johnny said as a short man in a white server’s coat opened the door. They walked into the bustling kitchen of a large Chinese restaurant. The smell of fresh-cut onions brought a tear to Jesse’s eye.
Johnny saw Butch and Jesse checking out the kitchen. “Don’t worry. They make the best American breakfast around and they’re open all night.”
An Asian man who looked to be the owner greeted Johnny warmly and seemed pleased to be introduced to his musician guests. After names and handshakes were exchanged, he led them to a circular table with high, plush seats and eight-foot, red curtains all around.
The owner bowed to Johnny. “Nice and private, just for you. Many people are here from your club tonight.” Then he bowed to Butch and Jesse, “I know you do not want to be mobbed for autographs.”
Butch and Jesse had to laugh at that remark. Signing autographs was not yet part of their job description.
Once they were settled in, Butch leaned over the table. “Looks like you’ve got this whole town wired, Johnny.”
“The alleys of Shreveport are filled with surprises,” Johnny said. “Here, check out the menu. The omelettes are fantastic, so is the sausage gravy. I always get the country omelette with the gravy on top.”
Once the order was taken, Jesse turned to Johnny and asked, “How’d we do tonight?”
Johnny waited a moment before answering, “You boys broke my bar record. And it was on a Wednesday night. That is exceptional. I was going to wait until the end of the week to tell you, but you earned a three-hundred-dollar bonus tonight.”
Jesse was more than pleased. “That was one of the best crowds we’ve played. You do one great job on promotion.”
“You should be our manager,” Butch said.
Johnny held up his hand. “Hold on, cowboy. We just had our first date. Let’s not be getting married yet. Besides, I heard you have a manager.”
“Who told you that?” Butch asked.
“Your drummer’s father, Burt, I think his name is.”
“Did he say he was the manager?” Jesse asked.
“No, he said you’ve got somebody in New Orleans, connected with Dr. John, who put you in the studio and is about to make you all big stars.”
“Did you believe him?” Butch asked.
Johnny chuckled. “Of course not. I’ve been in this business too long.”
“So why did you hire us?” Jesse asked.
Johnny lowered his voice and got serious. “Truth is, there’s a bit of a buzz on you boys. Most of it is good. The Safari Club story put you on the map. People are starting to follow you guys around. But some of it isn’t so good.”
Jesse knew what he was talking about. “Like what?”
“Like you got yourself in the middle of a biker war and a drug dealing operation and people are starting to end up in federal prison.”
That remark got Jesse going. He told the whole story of the gang truce and having nothing to do with Dupre going to jail. He told him about Pete Dryer and the studio recording that wasn’t even good enough to use for promotional purposes. He told him about the cocaine dealing that was turning the bayou into a war zone.
“Sounds like you made the right move coming north,” Johnny said as the omelettes arrived.
The three dug into breakfast like starving men and continued talking about the band and the club circuit from Dallas, Texas, to Jacksonville, Mississippi. Johnny said he could help keep the band in steady work.
They finished what turned out to be a belt-loosening meal. Johnny got quiet as he leaned back in his seat to relax.
Butch and Jesse started talking about what it would mean to hit the road and, possibly, leave New Orleans. They talked for some time until their conversation was interrupted by Johnny’s cowboy hat falling off his head and onto the table. Johnny had fallen into a deep sleep. The top of his head was bald as an eagle. This came as quite a surprise, since he looked like a longhaired, country boy in his hat.
“Should we wake him up?” Butch asked.
Jesse nudged him awake. Johnny grabbed his hat and put it back on his head. He could tell Butch and Jesse were amused and somewhat embarrassed by his baldness.
Johnny wasn’t worried in the slightest. “Relax, boys. I know I’m bald. Now you do too. What can I say? It’s a bitch getting old. And, don’t forget. It’s going to happen to you too.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ROSE
Johnny’s cover charge had gone up to fifteen dollars by Saturday night. The Divebomberz were the toast of the town. The crowds were standing room only, and there was a long line outside the front door. Local musicians and artists had come around on Thursday and Friday to make friends with the band and join the all-night, after-show parties on the roof of the Royal Royce Hotel. The air was crisp but not too cold for drinking whiskey and smoking pot and marveling at the lights of the city. Dawn was always a beautiful surprise to those left standing.
Jesse was not on the rooftop Sunday morning. He had gone home with Rose. The band saw it coming. He and Rose had gotten more and more friendly with each passing night. Butch and Dale tried to talk him out of it, but Jesse was on a mission. Why would he listen to his old friends from Indiana if he wouldn’t pay attention to the Voodoo voice? The voice had specifically told him to not be tempted by Rose. He kept reminding himself what Carmen had said about not having to do everything the voice said.
Rose let Jesse drive her home in her car, kissing his ear and neck and rubbing his right leg as he drove. He was in a breathless tunnel of love by the time they made it to her place. She held his hand as she walked him up the stairs to her second floor apartment. In an amazing fluidity of motion, she unlocked the door and led him straight into her bedroom. He kissed Rose at the edge of her bed. Her lips were hot and wet and tasted like trouble.
They left the light on as they began slowly and sensually undressing and caressing each other. She fully aroused him with her fingers and long nails and took him into her mouth. Then, she fell back on the bed, naked and inviting. She looked even more beautiful than Jesse had imagined.
“Come to me, Jesse,” she implored. “I need you.”
Jesse joined her on the bed and began kissing her all over as she moaned in ecstasy. He closed his eyes and devoured her delicious body. She was moist with desire.
Suddenly, he felt her stiffen in fear. She pushed his head away. He opened his eyes and realized the bedroom light had gone out.
At first, he thought someone had turned off the switch. He sprang out of bed, looking for an intruder. He heard Rose cry, “Jesse, what’s wrong?”
When he found no one, he told himself the light bulb must have failed. His hand felt for the switch. It was in the off position. Someone, or something, had turned off the light. He had purposefully left it on because the light had been erotically caressing and bathing her soft, pale skin. He stumbled around the corner, cursing the darkness, again looking for whoeve
r or whatever had flipped the switch. Even in the darkness, he knew no one else was in Rose’s apartment. He felt for the switch again and flipped it up.
The light came on in both the bedroom and in Jesse’s mind. He turned his head around, slowly and warily, to look back at the bed. He was afraid of what he was about to see. He sensed the Voodoo voice was playing tricks on him.
He saw Amy, naked in the bed and every bit as beautiful as Rose. She was looking right at him and crying softly.
“No,” he said as he turned the light back off.
“No, what?” Rose said. “What do you mean, no? What’s wrong with the light?”
Jesse turned the light back on and saw Rose again. “I mean, no, I can’t do this. I mean, no, I’ve got to go.”
Jesse dressed himself, bolted out the door of Rose’s apartment and ran most of the way back to the Royal Royce Hotel. It was a four-mile run. What had just happened? Had the Voodoo voice taken control of his conscience? Had it flipped the light switch? Since when did he pass on an opportunity to pleasure himself? What about seeing Amy in the bed? He had never had such a vision. Previous pangs of guilt, yes; visions of guilt, never. His powers of self-forgiveness had always been truly awesome.
Hearing the voice was one thing. Having the voice take control of a room and what he saw in it was frightening. If it could turn off a light and show him a vision of Amy, what would stop it from stabbing him in his sleep if he did something really wrong?
He had almost run out of the panic by the time he found himself in front of the Royal Royce Hotel. He could hear distant sounds of a party still raging on the roof. As he was heading for the front door, a beer bottle shattered on the sidewalk in front of him. One more step and it would have killed him. The bottle was at least half full. His shoes and pants were soaked with beer. It didn’t matter much since the rest of him was already soaked in sweat from the run.
As he jumped out of his skin in shocked surprise at the shattering bottle, a deep realization broke through his fear and confusion. The voice might have turned off the light and shown him Amy in bed. But it wasn’t the voice that made him leave the apartment. It was his love for Amy. He felt ashamed for going home with Rose.
He walked in the hotel, got in the elevator, and shut the door behind him. As the creaky old beast hauled itself up to the fifth floor, Jesse realized what Carmen meant when she talked about the connection between love and Voodoo. He could hear her speaking. “They are both part of the same thing, the eternal river that flows through souls and connects us to the spirit life.”
Whether it was Voodoo or love that made him faithful, it didn’t matter. He stepped up and out of the elevator onto the fifth floor. It felt good, being loyal to Amy, at least in the end. It felt right.
He climbed through the window at the end of the hall and up the rusty fire escape to the roof. Tim and Butch were smoking a joint and looking nervously over the edge of the building.
Jesse walked up and surprised them. “Looking for the beer bottle that almost killed me?”
Butch whirled around. “Jesse, how close was it? We heard it smash on the sidewalk. Thank God you’re okay.”
“What should we do?” Tim asked.
Jesse had to laugh. The two of them looked so stoned and so horribly guilty. They thought he had been completely drenched by the exploding beer. They didn’t realize he was mostly soaked in his own sweat.
“You might start by cleaning up the mess down there,” he said. “If word gets out you’re throwing beer bottles off the roof, the party up here will be over for sure.”
Butch tried to explain. “We didn’t throw anything. Tim tripped on that piece of wood you’re about to step on.”
Tim demonstrated. “I let go of the bottle as I caught myself on this ledge. I was lucky. The ledge is only two feet tall, as you can see. I could have gone over myself.”
“Did anybody call the cops?” Butch asked.
Jesse told him no. “It’s four in the morning. Your secret is safe with me.”
“What about the front desk?” Tim asked.
Jesse had to laugh again. “There is no front desk at the Royal Royce. This place is a ghost hotel, especially at night. But, come on, let’s go down and do some clean up. I’ll help.”
Rene and Dale were entertaining a group of people near the back ledge of the roof. Rick had gone down to his room to sleep on the floor.
“Careful not to drop anything over the edge,” Butch said as they headed for the fire escape.
Dale tried to slow them down with a question. “Where you guys going?”
Rene knew what they were doing. “What did you drop?”
Butch kept walking. “Just a beer bottle. No cause for alarm. We’re going to clean it up.”
“Did you kill anybody?” Dale laughed.
“Not yet,” Tim said.
“So, a strange and scary thing happened to me at Rose’s apartment tonight,” Jesse said as they started picking up glass off the sidewalk.
“We knew that’s where you went,” Butch said.
Tim joined in Butch’s disapproval. “What about Amy?”
“Well, that’s just it. Rose and I were getting hot and heavy when the light went out.”
Butch tried to correct him. “You mean the light came on.”
Jesse realized he had to explain. “No, we were keeping the light on.”
“Kinky,” Tim said.
Jesse continued. “Anyway, the light went out, mysteriously, and when I turned it back on, it was Amy on the bed instead of Rose.”
“What happened to Rose?” Butch asked.
“When I turned the light off and then back on, it was Rose again.”
Tim was beginning to understand what the Voodoo voice was doing for Jesse. “The Voodoo turned the light out and changed Rose into Amy?”
“That’s how it feels to me,” Jesse said.
Butch voiced his feelings. “More like your own guilt did it. And, might I add, I’m glad to see you living up to your vows.”
Jesse got defensive. “We’re not married yet.”
Butch shrugged his shoulders. “You might as well be.”
Tim was beginning to process the tale. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me the voice is actually moving things around in your world? That makes it more than a voice. That makes it a force of nature. That makes it something that could get scary.”
Jesse pointed his finger at Tim “Exactly. Next thing you know it will be throwing beer bottles off roofs to shatter at my feet and jolt my thought process into a new gear.”
“Now, you’re getting carried away,” Butch said.
Tim had to speak his mind. “The thing about the voice is it makes you feel different after you hear it. It’s only spoken to me once, but ever since then, I’ve felt an almost out-of-body thing, like I’m watching myself from somewhere else.”
Jesse ran his hands through his hair. “For me, it’s more like somebody else is watching so I’d better be on my best behavior.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
DMITRY
The band returned to New Orleans for a few days after their successful first week in Shreveport. They wouldn’t have long to regroup. Johnny had them booked on the club circuit along Interstate 20 across northern Louisiana. Towns like Minden, Ruston, and Monroe all had watering holes that were still hiring live bands. So did Vicksburg and Jackson, Mississippi; Hot Springs and Little Rock, Arkansas; Longview and Tyler, Texas; and thousands of towns across the middle of the country. Disco deejays had not completely taken over the heartland.
“You can always find work if you’re willing to hit the road,” Johnny said. “There’s more bars in this country than churches. And, if you’re smart, you can play the churches too.”
Between playing nearby towns and making regular returns to Johnny’s Cimarron as home base, it looked like The Divebomberz could be working steady for the foreseeable future. As Johnny laid the endless road map out in front of them, Jesse saw huge potential for makin
g money. He wasn’t thinking what it would be like to play the same songs, over and over, night after night, until all the clubs and all the drunks started to look and sound the same.
Jesse was glad to get back to New Orleans. He needed to touch base with Carmen and Pete and Casey to find out what was going on with the Voodoo voice and the cocaine cartel and the Wheelers and the Gypsies. He wanted to know if Dupre had been able to bond out of jail. He tried to explain to Amy why he wouldn’t be seeing her much for the next several months.
She turned her back on him as he was talking and stared out the window. When she turned around to look at him, he could see she was already crying. “Oh, I see. I drop everything and move to New Orleans to be with you so you can hit the road and leave me here alone. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Amy was a good, strong woman, but her one weak spot was her terrible fear of abandonment.
Her father had died suddenly when she was only ten years old. She could never forget the day her daddy collapsed in the garden of the new ranch house he had just finished building for the family. Her frantic mother yelled for Amy to call the ambulance. She tried and tried but the phone was busy. It was on a “party line,” several residences using the same telephone number. It took Amy fifteen minutes to make the emergency connection. By the time the ambulance arrived an hour later, even a ten-year-old girl could see her daddy was never coming home.
It took years for her to stop blaming herself for her father’s death, but she never got over the nagging fear of being left behind. Daddy had been her best friend and her hero.
Jesse wrapped his arms around her and held her close as she tried to stop crying. “Honey, I’m not leaving you. I’ll be coming home all the time and you can come hear the band whenever you want. We won’t be that far away.”
“You’re going to have so many groupies you’ll forget all about me.”
Jesse held her head in his hands and kissed her on her salty lips. “We’re getting married June sixteenth, remember?”
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