“Whoa! ‘Wheeled out’? You mean he’s going to be crippled?”
“No, he’ll walk again, but that bullet to his upper chest did tremendous damage. It’ll be a slow process for him to come back.”
“Oh, shit,” Nomad breathed, and came close to slamming his fist on the table. But he didn’t, because there’d been enough of that just lately.
“He will come back,” Allen said. “But at the very best, he’ll be in the ICU for several weeks, and they’ll be watching him for infection or other complications.”
“You sound like you’ve been there.”
“Not me personally, but I know some who have.” He checked his wristwatch again. “In a minute or two there’s going to be a knock at the door. It’ll be someone bringing your clothes and shoes wrapped up in brown paper and the contents of your pockets in a plastic bag. There’ll be some forms for you to fill out and sign. I’ll step into the hallway and give you some privacy. Just leave the jumpsuit and the jailhouse clogs on the table. Then we’re going to walk down the hallway to another door, we’re going to go through that, past a guard at a security station—who you will not speak to or look at—and out into the parking lot to my car. You understand that I’ve pulled a lot of strings and called in a lot of debts to get you out of here?”
“Yeah, I do. But why?”
Allen stood up from his chair, gripping the folder between his hands. “You come with me, and I’ll tell you. Not only that, but I’ll tell you Jeremy Pett’s story.” He walked to the door and then stopped. Nomad thought he moved with the crisp economy of a man who could without a doubt take care of himself in a fight. Again…military? Maybe more than the FBI?
“I’m not sure I want to go,” Nomad said. “Seems like it’s safer in here than out there with a sniper trying to kill me.”
“One big problem with your attitude, son.”
Son? Nomad had almost winced at that particular cheese sandwich.
“Your three bandmates aren’t in here with you,” Allen continued. “So to save them… you’re going to help me catch Jeremy Pett.”
Came the knock at the door. Allen opened it and went out, Kingston entered and dumped the package of clothes and shoes and the plastic bag of pocket stuff onto the table in front of Nomad. Kingston put down a ballpoint pen and a clipboard with some forms in it. Then he also left the room, without speaking a word.
Nomad sat looking at his belongings.
For better or for worse, the emperor had his clothes back.
He tore open the package. Then he got himself out of the jailhouse suit.
FIFTEEN.
Nomad realized he might be out of jail, but he was still definitely in custody. This message was sent to him by the sound of the doorlocks engaging on Truitt Allen’s black Acura TL sedan as soon as the engine started. The interior of the car was to Nomad disturbingly spotless, not an errant Kleenex nor crushed paper cup nor old hamburger wrapper in sight. Even the dashboard had been polished, and everything metal gleamed with psychotic perfection.
“Where’re we going?” Nomad asked as they pulled out of the lot.
“The medical center.” Allen had his sunglasses on against the glare. In profile he looked like a hawk with a lopsided beak. “Everybody’s waiting for you.”
“For me? Who’s waiting?”
“Sit back and relax,” Allen said, a command both benign and emphatic.
Nomad obeyed, figuring he couldn’t do much of anything else. As they approached the medical center, he saw a crowd of maybe forty or so people across Ring Road from UMC. They were gathered around two camera trucks, one from KVOA and the other from KMSB. Some of the people were dressed in long white robes and held handlettered signs. Nomad caught sight of what a few of the signs said as Allen drove past them, things like ‘God Hates The Devil’s Music’ and ‘Secular Music Praises Satan’.
“Are they protesting us?” Nomad asked.
“Protesting your music in general, I guess,” Allen replied, steering for the parking deck. “Any chance to be on camera, and people get themselves worked up.”
Nomad nodded. He had a secret. It would have amazed the other members of The Five, at least as much as it had astounded them that Mike Davis was a fan of Moby Dick, to learn that from age twelve, just after the death of his father, to about age fourteen John Charles had been an interested listener to WQRS-FM classical radio in Detroit. He’d discovered it after listening to the Cramps’ Stay Sick late one night on his record player and his mother had come into his room and asked him—begged him, really—to cut out the loud noise. So he’d gone radio surfing, hitting the FM rock stations, until suddenly he’d found a man talking about a piece of music called the Resurrection Symphony, which he’d learned later was Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number Two. The man—a music professor—was talking about the vocal parts of the Fifth Movement, translating them from German to English, and what stopped Nomad’s travels across the dial was the man’s calm, measured voice saying, O believe, You were not born for nothing.
Sometimes in the dark and the quiet, especially after his father was gone, he’d wondered what he’d been born for. Where was he going? What was he supposed to do with his life? They were heavy questions for someone his age, and there were no answers, and in the dark and quiet he could hear his mother reading Bible verses to herself in her own room, and sometimes crying a little bit as if what the Bible had to give her was not nearly enough of what she needed, and that was why he grew to despise the dark and the quiet.
But that weird music with the strings and the piano and the horns and the harps on WQRS pulled him in. Some of it could put you to sleep for a hundred years. But some of it sounded like war. Some of it sounded like the questions he asked himself about his life, if he were to put them to music. Here and there would jump up a piece that made him think of his dad swaggering across a stage, and then there would be music that sounded like a procession of ghosts carrying their lamps through a cemetery at midnight.
Kind of like the Cramps, only not as loud.
From the public library he’d checked out a book called The Lives of the Composers. He’d kept it way overdue until he’d finished it. Now, some of those fuckers had waded through swamps of deep shit. Writing by candlelight and thrown out into the street when they couldn’t pay their rent, and people hating them and acting like they had no place on earth because they heard things in their heads the mundanes didn’t.
Those protesters back there. Nothing new about them, Nomad thought. People hated that Resurrection symphony, the first time they’d heard it in Berlin. That Russian guy Stravinsky, the first time his Rite of Spring was played, in 1913, there was a huge riot. And there was that story about Mozart, the Michael Jackson and the Prince of his era, writing an opera for an emperor and the emperor saying, when it was over, “Too many notes, my dear Mozart!”
To which Mozart had replied, “Just as many as are necessary, Your Majesty.”
Even Mozart had had to deal with the suits, Nomad thought. The dudes who timed the songs and checked the notes in search of a single. The Dustin Daye-killers.
Same as it ever was.
Nomad couldn’t fail to note a police presence around the hospital. A cruiser was prowling slowly along Ring Road and a second was sitting at the front of the hospital where its occupants could see and be seen. Allen found a slot about mid-level up in the parking deck and pulled in. The door locks clicked open. Nomad got out and followed his new warden into the hospital. Allen carried the brown folder with him. They went past the elevators and took the stairs. Allen paused in the hallway to show a police officer his ID, and then they entered the waiting room that Nomad had walked out of early Sunday morning.
It was reunion-time. Ariel, Terry and Berke were there, all of them looking as tired and haggard as if they’d been the ones spending two nights in the lockup. Also present were three other people: a brown-haired young man in a dark blue suit and a red-striped tie whom Nomad didn’t recognize, and two others he di
d—Ashwatthama Vallampati and, unexpectedly, Roger Chester, the ‘RC’ of RCA. Everybody but the unknown young man, who wore a Bluetooth headset, had been sitting down when Allen and Nomad walked in, and now they stood up to show their good Texan, Oklahoman, Massachusetts, Californian and New Delhi manners.
“Dude!” said Terry, smiling as he came forward to bump shoulders and knuckles. “You enjoy your state-paid vacation?”
“No swimming pool,” Nomad said. “Not a lot of chance to sunbathe, either.” It was obvious they knew where he’d been; Captain Garza had probably told them on Sunday. Nomad saw sleeping bags folded up in a corner. He guessed the floor and sofa were not very comfortable. Maybe his bandmates had changed clothes and cleaned up in the public bathroom, but a scatter of soft drink cans, water bottles, candy and granola bar wrappers completed the story. They had been right here at UMC since Sunday morning.
Berke came over to slap him a high-five and comment on the bitch kiss he’d taken to the cheek. Suddenly Ariel was standing right in front of him. He looked into her eyes. Today—this moment—they were dark gray, the color of rain from a troubled sky. He recalled the things he’d said to her from the Pima County Jail. Your land of rainbows and moonbeams. Do whatever the fuck you need to do. If you want to try to save sick animals, go be a vet.
And maybe the worst: Stop holding onto me.
Because he knew it was the other way around, and without Ariel’s presence he feared his anger—at the world, at his father for betraying his mother and being so damned good at it, and at himself for being not nearly as talented as he pretended to be—might rise up and eat him alive.
She hugged him.
She put her arms around him and leaned her head against his shoulder, and he realized that the most awesome thing…the most totally amazing thing…
…was that he did not pull away.
Then after a few seconds she looked at him and nodded, to welcome him back to his family, and he said a little nervously, “I missed you guys.”
“John?” Roger Chester thrust a brown hand at him, and Nomad shook it. “Glad we could get you out of that situation.” He had the kind of voice that takes over a room. He was trim, in his early sixties, and was tanned year-round from either playing golf or spending time at his second home in Cozumel. He wore tortoise-shell glasses that slightly magnified his dark brown eyes. He had curly white hair and a neatly-trimmed beard. His blue jeans were the trendy dirty denims, and he wore a red cowboy-style shirt with pearl-snap buttons under a dark blue blazer. Nomad had met him only once before, on the day he and the others had signed the contract for representation, and even then it had been brief because Roger Chester had just stopped by Creedy’s office to ask a question about the new CD from Creedy’s hot zombie-goth band I Died Yesterday. Creedy was Ethan Creed, who’d been The Five’s agent for about three months before he took off for another talent group in Miami. Then The Five’s career was handed over to the new man at the agency, Ashwatthama Vallampati.
“Hello, Ash,” Nomad said, and Ash said in his clipped accent, “Hello, John.”
He didn’t really care much for Ash, and he didn’t think Ash cared much for The Five. Ash was twenty-six years old, tall and fashionably slender, was handsome in an exotic way that could slay the Texas chicks—or the Texas dicks, because it was unclear which way he swung—and he always wore black suits and white shirts with neon-colored ties. His blue-black hair was always combed straight back and fixed with glistening pomade. He always smelled of bitter lemons. He always looked to Nomad as if he wore a faint half-smile of smug arrogance. The Roger Chester Agency handled maybe thirty bands and another dozen or so single acts. They had a couple of country-western heavy hitters, the Austin All-Nighters and the Trailblazers, both of whom had won Grammys. Roger Chester handled those personally, as well as the monster heavy-metal thrash band Shatter The Sky, who’d just recently returned from a European tour. Of the rest of the bands fighting for attention and a place in the public sun, The Five was probably down in the basement with the mutts. Or at least that’s how Nomad felt Ash viewed them. To Nomad, Ash was all talk, big plans and no energy, and when something fizzled Ash just shrugged and let it go like he wasn’t responsible.
Nomad figured Ash was on his way to Los Angeles, and thought of his job as more of a babysitter for spoiled wailing brats than a professional working to break a band out. Yeah, he did some things, like getting the spot with Felix Gogo, and obviously he was doing something for the other five or six bands he handled, but Nomad always remembered that one time in Ash’s office Ash had said to him, “Your band doesn’t really make any money for us, but we keep you around because we personally like you.”
Nomad and Ash didn’t shake hands.
“I am grieved about this tragedy.” Roger Chester was standing so close to Nomad that Nomad could smell the orange Tic-Tac on his breath. “Mike Davis was a great bass player, a great musician. As for George Emerson…thank God he’s going to live.”
Nomad doubted that Roger Chester even knew who George was. “Are his parents here?” He’d directed the question to Allen.
“They flew in Sunday night. I’ve spoken to them, they’re good people.”
“Like I say, thank God he’s going to live,” Roger Chester repeated, as a way of gaining control of the room again. “All right then, Mr. Allen—or should I say Agent Allen?—where do we go from here?”
Nomad had already assumed that Allen had previously paid a visit to this room, speaking to Berke, Terry and Ariel as well as to George’s parents, but he had no idea what Chester was talking about. Nomad frowned. “Go from here? Back to Austin, that’s where. The tour’s over.” He got no response from anyone. “Listen, if we’ve got a fu…” He decided he didn’t care what Allen thought about his language. “If we’ve got a fucking sniper after us, I think we’d better go home! Don’t you?” He looked back and forth between Chester and Allen.
“It’s not that simple,” Allen told him, and those four words had the sound of doom. “Why don’t you sit down?” He motioned toward one of the folding chairs that had been brought in for the extra people. “Everyone take a seat. I want to tell you what you’re facing.”
Nomad sat down in a chair beside Ariel. He was thinking of what Allen had said at the jail: You’re going to help me catch Jeremy Pett. When all the others had settled, except the young man in the dark blue suit who remained unintroduced and who stood silently by the door, Allen took the central position in the room and opened the brown folder.
“I’ve already told you who he is, but I haven’t told you what he is,” Allen said to the group. “He’s a veteran Marine. He served two tours of duty in Iraq as a sniper, so he knows his business. Training to be a sniper is the toughest discipline in the Corps. They teach the doctrine of one bullet, one kill.” He paused for emphasis. “That’s the ideal. It doesn’t always go that way on the battlefield. But Pett’s record says he had thirty-eight confirmed kills and another forty-two probables. His last kill was in 2004, though, and now is now. He’s been through some hardships. They’ve worked on him. He’s probably let himself slide physically. Mentally, too. So he’s not nearly as sharp as he used to be…but…he’s given himself a cause of some kind. He’s invented a mission. Which obviously involves killing the members of your band. He followed you to Sweetwater and got himself in position across from that gas station. He must have been right behind you all the way from Dallas.”
“Hold it!” Berke said, lifting a hand. “How do you know all this? How do you even know this guy is the one?” She’d seen Jeremy Pett’s driver’s license photo when Allen had introduced himself to them this morning, and he’d told them he would explain everything later but he had to go get John Charles out of jail first.
“The police passed along to us some information from a Detective Rios in Sweetwater. She did some digging after you’d left town. Nothing was making sense to her, but the fact remained that the shooting looked professional. So she went to your website and sa
w your latest video. She started thinking that maybe the video had triggered somebody with a military history, somebody who had experience with long-range shooting. If that was true, then this person might have decided to follow you to your gigs.” Allen glanced quickly at Nomad, to show he had a good memory for a guy his age. “To stalk you, and to set up his shots. That sounded to her like a military sniper. The question was: where did he start from? So…she took it upon herself to make calls first to the Austin PD and then she spread out to the PDs of the towns between Austin and Dallas.”
“Looking for what?” Nomad asked.
“A recent missing person report, filed around the 20th. The problem was that, if this sniper fits a psychological profile, he’ll probably live alone in a rented house or apartment, he’ll have trouble making social contacts and trouble keeping a job. So if he’s taken off on the road to follow you, there might not be anybody left behind to notice he’s gone. But…in this case, Jeremy Pett had made a contact, and there was a missing person report that caught her interest, filed on Monday the 21st, in Temple, Texas.”
Allen pulled up another sheet of paper from the folder to be sure he got the name right. “Pett’s apartment manager, Teyo Salazar, told the Temple police he went into the apartment with his key to leave a sack of tamales because, as he said, Jeremy was very depressed about his finances. Inside, he found blood on the carpet, on the wall and in the bathroom. The tub had been drained, but there was blood evidence in there as well. Also a box cutter, and some drugs in the apartment. So Mr. Salazar calls the police, and they start looking for Jeremy Pett but he’s nowhere to be found. They relayed this information to Detective Rios, who started a search of Pett’s personal history. She discovered that Pett was a decorated Marine sniper, discharged in January of 2005 after the second battle of Fallujah. Then she turned to his credit card history. She learned he’d used his credit card to buy gas at a station about ten miles west of the one where Mike Davis was killed. The time on that transaction was twenty-some minutes after Mr. Davis’s death.”
The Five Page 26
