“Back! Everybody get back!” shouted the dude who was helping Nomad climb up over the edge of the stage. Ariel was there, her face drained of blood; she reached down and grasped his hand, and Terry leaned forward to grab hold of his shirt.
Nomad scrambled up onto the stage and then fell to his knees. The socket of his right eye was throbbing. Maybe it was already swelling shut. God, that was going to get black! Fucking took a shot! He felt like he was going to puke, the smell of gunpowder was still in his nose. He saw that the guy who’d helped him had a headful of spiky brown hair, a brown beard and on his bare chest a—fake?—tattoo of a horned red devil sitting astride a Harley. The bearded devilish Harley fan was holding out an open wallet and showing a badge to the crowd.
Berke knelt down beside Nomad and said something. It was all gibberish, he couldn’t make it out. “I think I’m going to puke,” he told her, or thought he did because he could hardly hear himself either. He began to try to fight free from his guitar, but it wouldn’t let him go.
Ariel was trembling. She backed away from the crowd. She could feel what was coming just about to break; she saw it in their faces, in their clenched fists, in their rage at having been born between the wasted earth and dirty surf. As the young man who’d tried to shoot her was being pulled to his feet, his gun now in the possession of Agent Nug, one of the Nazi Six stormed in and kicked the kid in the ribs with a black boot.
Maybe their anger was spilling over because he’d screwed up the show. Maybe they just wanted to beat somebody to death. Whichever it was, they started coming in at him and in another moment the FBI agents were fighting for the life of their prisoner.
Nomad sat on the stage. Ariel turned away, and thinking she too was going to be sick she headed through the corridor lined with black curtains. She ran into Truitt Allen, who looked questioningly at her and then ran past her to the stage. His .38 Special was in one hand, his Walkie-Talkie in the other.
Berke sat down behind her drumkit, where she felt the most comfortable in the world. She stared into the distance, at nothing. Terry stood watching fights break out across the amphitheater. He saw a young man in a blue shirt being knocked back and forth between two tattooed and grinning bruisers; the young man fell to his knees, blood streaming from his nose. Another dude, thin and bearded, was being stomped on by a guy in a Wildcats T-shirt.
Terry went to Ariel’s mike. Through it he shouted, “Stop it! Please, stop it!” but no one listened, and no one stopped.
True came to the edge of the stage, and looking out upon the madness he raised his gun into the air and began to fire bullet after bullet toward the silent red mountain.
TWENTY.
When Jeremy Pett finishes the job of shaving his hair off with the new electric clippers he’s just bought, he emerges from the men’s room at the Triple-T Truck Stop just off I-10 about nine miles southeast of Tucson.
He has taken a shower and used the facilities, and now—clean and refreshed and shaven to the pink—he goes out to the grocery section to buy some food. He needs items that don’t have to be cooked or even heated up, because there’s no electricity in his hidey-hole. The truck stop is only a few miles from where he’s been living since seeing his face, the description of his pickup and his tag number on television. He saw it yesterday when he was lying on the bed in Room 15 at the Rest-A-While Motel on South Nogales Highway, and after he saw it he stood up, quickly got his gear together, paid the old Hispanic man who’d asked him when he’d checked in on Saturday if he wanted a nice young college girl for company that night, and then he had hit the road. But not too fast, because he wanted to stay invisible.
He roams the aisles, picking up a few cans of pork ’n’ beans, a can of chili, three bottles of water, a pack of doughnuts and a bag of potato chips. He needs the sugar and salt, because it’s very hot where he’s living. He sees a rack of ball caps, and chooses a tan-colored one that has the red Triple-T logo. A candy bar or two would be good. He has parked around back, in among the protection of the semis at rest. His eye is always on the front entrance. In the waistband of his jeans beneath his light blue cotton shirt is his automatic pistol, loaded with a clip of eight.
At the Rest-A-While, which came equipped with many nice young college girls who knocked on his door after dark and smiled at him with meth-rotted teeth, he kept up on the news. The cable reception was fuzzy, hard to look at, but it had shown him what he’d needed to see.
One dead in Sweetwater, one in the ICU in Tucson. Sniper Stalks Rock Band. Tucson police and the FBI need community help in finding this man, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and may still be in the area. GB Promotions Presents Stone Church Nine at Gila Bend Thursday July 31st through Sunday August 3rd. The Five Appearing Thursday July 31st at 3:00, one show only. Tickets on sale at the site or available online through Ticketmaster. GB Promotions assures the fans that security will be tight and every precaution taken.
Don’t go there, Gunny had told him in Room 15, as Jeremy had been packing his stuff. Gunny had been standing in the bathroom door, his boots in the puddles of the toilet overflow from last night, the soggy towels lying like dead white dogs. I want you to rest today and tomorrow, Gunny had said.
“I’ve got to get out. They’re on me.” Jeremy was thinking one word and one destination: Mexico…Mexico…Mexico.
Gunny had told him they were not on him until they had him. Now, it was true they knew his name and face and the make and color of his pickup truck and his tag number, but…they’re not here, are they?
“Matter of time,” Jeremy had said.
Then you know what you need to do, Gunny had answered as he moved across the room. Dig yourself in.
“Mexico, Mexico, Mexico,” Jeremy had said. He’d zipped up his rifle case.
You’re not ready. Jeremy? Dig. Yourself. In.
And the way Gunny had said that, with all the iron-hand-in-the-velvet-glove persuasion that made a man admire another man, caused Jeremy to look toward the corner where Gunny was standing, just at the edge of the blazing light that slipped around the crooked curtains.
“Dig yourself in,” Jeremy had repeated, as if he’d come up with the idea. “How? Where?”
You’re supposed to be the Marine, Gunny had reminded him, with a dark stare.
Translation: guy with a pussy last name ain’t gone be no pussy, not in this man’s Corps.
Jeremy stands at the Triple-T Truck Stop’s cash register, waiting as the lady bags his groceries. She is also talking on a cellphone, so she’s working one-handed. And slowwwww. Up on a shelf behind the counter is a small TV for her entertainment, and it is from a KGUN-9 News Minute that he sees a young female reporter holding a microphone. At the bottom of the scene is the legend Violent Afternoon At Stone Church. That sounds like one of the many paperback Westerns Jeremy had read at Camp Fallujah.
“It happened about an hour ago, Guy,” the reporter is saying to, presumably, the anchorman. Her mane of brown hair whips in the wind and she makes a move to control it but no luck. Behind her, people with tattoos are milling around, mugging at the camera over her shoulders, showing the devil horns and sticking their tongues out. “During a performance by The Five band, a man drew a handgun and fired two shots. There were some minor injuries in a scuffle, but no one was seriously hurt and the shooter was taken into custody. We have some pretty startling video to show you.”
There is just a brief clip of bodies flailing around, the camera getting knocked back and forth, a glint of what may be a gun in someone’s hand, and then a figure with shoulder-length black hair jumps off the stage into the crowd.