True clicked the video off.
Nomad suddenly realized where he was.
He was nearly in the corner. He’d been backing up, a few inches at a time, until the corner was right behind him and there was nowhere else to go.
He felt an incredible pressure, as if he was in one of those centrifuge things the astronauts use, he was spinning around faster and faster and the flesh was being pushed back from his skull. He thought of a crazy thing. The thing that musicians shouted when everything went wrong, when the fuses blew, when the speakers made everything sound like muddy shit, when the lights malfunctioned, when half the CDs were broken in their cases, when the crowd lost their patience and hollered for blood or refunds, when every note you hit was a clam and every word you sang was lost in a looping shriek of feedback.
He thought: More cowbell.
But down below that, down deep in a horrible place, he was thinking that he had never dared to consider the possibility of an afterlife, the possibility of something human beings called in their limited knowledge Heaven and Hell, never dared to, because if he considered those things, if he let them in, then he would have to believe that his hero…his idol…that man…would be called upon to suffer for the pain he had inflicted on a woman who’d loved only him.
And John Charles would remember that when they told him in the Louisville hospital his father had died from a trinity of gunshot wounds, his first silent judgement and ever to remain silent had been: He deserved it.
Oh my God, John thought, behind the hand he’d put up to cover his mouth. Oh my God.
“They rushed him to the hospital,” True explained. “He’s all right. Physically, that is. If you can look beyond…all that damage. But he’s gone inward. They’ve got him on suicide watch.”
Terry breathed out with a whooshing noise. Berke couldn’t look anywhere but at the floor. Ariel’s gaze went to John.
“We caught another man,” True told them. “Coming up the side of the mountain with a .22 rifle. Obviously he was intending to get in position for a shot, though I can tell you he probably would’ve shot himself first, by accident. He’s a part-time handyman and full-time…what was your term, John?…nutbag. Lives in a trailer park about forty miles north of Stone Church. His neighbors say he’s always talking about hearing voices. He’s mounted all sorts of homemade antennas up on the roof of his trailer, says he was an electronics expert in the Navy. Not verified. Anyway, his neighbors say he thinks his trailer is sitting on what he calls a ‘comm line’. Know how he described it to the police? An ‘angel line’.” True’s smile didn’t stick. “He says there must be a really important reason for the girl in that Five band to be dead, because the angels are very disturbed with her. Disturbed with the whole band, really. He says the angels are putting it out on the line everywhere, every second of every minute of the night and the day, to everyone who can hear. He says they’re getting a little…his word…frantic. Kind of like a telegraph line of the spirits, I suppose,” True said, and he shrugged. “If you believe in that. So this guy, he decides if the angels want her dead, this is a good way to show what side he’s on. If you believe in that.”
He closed his laptop.
He arranged the notepaper on the writing desk that had never seen a pen put to a letter.
Then he turned to The Five, and very clearly and as forcefully as possible without sounding—as Berke would say—‘creeped out’, he said, “I want you to tell me—right now, nothing held back—what you people have gotten yourselves involved with. Whatever it is, and it may sound strange, or…illogical, or whatever. You may not even know what kind of boundary you’ve crossed. But listen…do not hold anything back. Anyone want to speak?”
“They’re two crazy people,” Nomad said, but for one time in his life his voice was weak because he knew he was lying. He was still standing with his back against the corner, his hands up at his sides and curled into fists, ready to knock something down.
“I’ll speak,” said Ariel.
TWENTY-SIX.
From the front on the sparkling, electric-bright Sunset Boulevard the Cobra Club was a dreary brown-painted building with no windows, no sign and no evidence that it was in use except for clear plastic displays on the walls showing band posters and an ornate black gate that was locked over the entrance until eight o’clock.
Inside, at a little past midnight, the club’s stage crew had finished setting up for The Five. The place was packed and noisy. It was another black box club, the walls deepest ebony. The bar in the lounge was lit by yellow bulbs behind ceramic fixtures shaped like cobras. Behind the stage was a backdrop of a large red-eyed cobra rising from a basket, painted on black velvet. The big, silent black-and-silver JBL speakers, still cooling down from the hard harmonics of the previous band, Twenty Million Miles To Earth, promised the moving, chattering crowd a continuation of mind-blowing entertainment to go along with the three-dollar beer, the mixed drinks and the house specialty, the Cobra Cock.
Rock and roll, baby.
The particular difference on this night, of any other night of the club’s checkered and sometimes violent existence, was that everybody who wanted to come in had to stand just beyond that open black gate while two men in Cobra Club T-shirts scanned their bodies with metal detecting wands. The women had to open their handbags. Everyone and everything coming in had to be scanned. If a nipple ring or a Nefertiti piercing or a labia bead made the wands squeal, or in the case of the male a dydoe, a dolphin, an ampallang or any of the other insertions into or through the summer sausage, then it was either go let the female or male police officers stationed inside pat you down in a curtained-off room or take your metalled pride somewhere else, like the Viper Room further along the boulevard. No likee, no have to stayee.
Some left. Most stayed, because they wanted to say that not only had they been felt up by the cops, they had seen the Band That Will Not Die.
It was a hectic scene backstage. The road manager and four members of Twenty Million Miles To Earth were still moving their gear out along the narrow green-painted corridor to the stage door while being trailed and delayed by a knot of various people who wanted something. There had been a problem with the Lekolites and the techs were going over the wiring. Two of the crew were arguing with the stage manager about who had last had possession of a missing gobo, and someone had left a handcart full of coiled elecrtrical cables out where its metal edge nicked the ankles of anybody going past, like a cobra bite.
Through this confusion, Ariel moved in a hurry because she had to pee.
The several bottles of silver needle tea she’d consumed during the long afternoon and at dinner had been going right through her. It was nerves, she thought. It was from the video of Connor Addison’s attempted suicide by M&Ms and True’s story of the man who heard voices in the trailer park. It was from her own revelation of what she believed the song to be, and her belief that the girl at the well was using them to write it for reasons unknown. It was from her retelling of the dream, and her revisiting the image of Jeremy Pett vomiting forth his dark air force. It was from the interviews with the news media here at sound check, and from the guy who’d shown up with a business card saying he was the head of A&R at Manticore, and he had some great ideas for their future but since there were no longer five of them they shouldn’t be called The Five, they should be named Death Ride. It was from talking John down when he wanted to tear the guy’s head off his neck, because John was in a fragile state, and she would never have said that about him but he wore the sick and uneasy look of a little boy caught walking through a cemetery at sundown. It was from warding off other A&R people with other business cards and other great ideas, and from the radio interviews and the throngs of people who were waiting outside the radio stations with CDs to be signed and more questions to be answered.