Pipsqueak (20 page)

“One G-string coming up.” Sharp Eyes approached me with a smile and a coil of wire that was the string. “Whoa, wouldja look at this guitar!”

“What guitar?” The bandleader, Rob Getty, came in the room smelling faintly of booze. “What’s going on? We’ve got a gig in thirty minutes, fellas. Look sharp.”

“Who’s the squares?” Scuppy strolled in and stood next to me, holding a small suitcase and a music stand. I noted that the stand was fitted with three hemispherical cups of different sizes.

“Broken string. Just came in for a G-string . . .” I muttered, and turned to go.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Scuppy pulled me back by my biceps. “You don’t get away that easy. Let’s see that banjo. Baby! Signed by Meat?”

“Musiciansh!”
Nicholas blurted, and got a withering round of furrowed brows from the gang.

“You know Meat?” Getty pointed.

“Wait, I know this guy,” Sharp Eyes said. “You’re . . . whatsisname . . . that guy. You know, he played with Meat. He had that crazy mustache or something.”

“Right,” Getty snapped his fingers, turning to me for an answer.

Perspiration cascaded down my shoulder blades as I once again considered my wasted youth. Beetles, not Beatles. I had no idea how to answer.

“That’s right,” I said, nodding, smiling as best I could, backing to the door. “Gotta go. Thanks for the string. Catch you after the show, okay?”

I got to the door and saw that Nicholas and the Cummerbunds had abandoned me. Traffic was heavy in the narrow hall, opposing streams of talent and crew headed for their battle stations, and my retreat was blocked by another band moving toward the stage. Their wardrobe was variously of leather, T-shirts, headbands, hairy chests, buckskins, granny shades, and long, teased hair.

“Comin’ through,” one of them groaned.

“What’s this!” one leather-faced, toad-mouthed British rocker exclaimed, hand extended at my guitar. “Derrick, ’ave a look!”

“’Scuse us,” I heard Rob Getty announce, closing the dressing-room door.

“My, my, my!” Derrick backtracked, looked at the guitar, then at me over his granny glasses. “Meat give you that, did he? You should keep that in a glass case.”

I was confronted, of course, with Bart Derrick and Liam Madden, lead singer and drummer respectively of Speed Wobble. Via the miracle of hi-fi, they played my first slow dance in the junior-high gym, as well as my first run at the bases, a hot box where—as I wistfully recall—I was tagged out rounding second.

“Derrick, m’boy, you know who this is? It’s that fella. You know the one. He played with Meat.”

“Aw, yeah, right you are.” They nodded at me, waiting for my response. “He ’ad that mustache thingy—”

“That’s me,” I chirped.

“Di’n’t you used to play wid Stevie Winwood?” Bart stroked his chin.

“Don’t be silly,” Liam scoffed. “That was Pat Thrall.”

“No, it was Kasim that played wid Winwood,” Bart countered. “But you are right, this ’ere’s the other bloke.”

Liam gave Bart a derisive shove. “Kasim played bass for Cheap Trick, y’fool.”

“Gotta go, boys.” I started to drift down the hall. “We’ll, you know, rap after the show.” As I approached escape velocity, I ran smack into Roger Elk.

The sweat on my back breached the belt line.

Roger Elk looked me square in the face, turned, and continued on his way to the dressing room, into which he vanished.

I couldn’t believe it: He didn’t recognize me. I was beginning to feel somewhat Teflon holding Meat’s guitar, and I made for the stage area. As I approached, the stage coordinator leapt up from her stool, waving her clipboard at me. I hesitated.

“C’mon, this way! Take your place. Let’s go!” She held back a black curtain in the rear stage wall, and as I drew near I saw a door there.

“Right in there. Curtain in sixty seconds! Let’s go!”

Without any other direction, I did as I was told, and when the door closed behind me, I heard the bolt flip. Pausing, I tried the knob. Locked.

Before me was a steel spiral staircase down a brick shaft to a landing and catwalk that went right. The only available light was coming from below. Clutching Meat’s guitar, I slowly descended until I could peak into the lighted room.

Imagine the propeller room in a battleship. Or a mite’s-eye view inside a pocket watch. The room was a three-story brick vault, shiny steel shafts extending the width and height of the room, the ends fixed with giant pistons, pinions, gears, and chains.

“Come on down, Junior, an’ join the campfire,” Bing’s voice called up to me. I couldn’t see him at first, but he and Bowler stepped out from under the catwalk, lazy pistols in their hands. Nicholas was with them, wrists shackled by cuffs in front of him.

“The Four Lads only look dumb,” Nicholas called out. “They ID’d us. Might as well come down, Garth.”

Chapter 29

B
ing held a pistol to Nicholas’s head. Bowler, still in that same Lucky’s Speed Shop shirt with the two red dice, twirled a set of handcuffs. “You two pixies have been a genuine nuisance,” he sneered. “For the last time.”

I started down the gantry, then down the metal steps to the machine-room floor. Overhead, I heard what sounded like goose-stepping Nazis. I looked up at the wooden, joisted ceiling and saw that the verticals of the steel shafts ran up to platforms connected to the ceiling. The stage was overhead, and the shafts, cables, pulleys, and chains operated a complicated system of stage elevators. Gantry catwalks overhead served as access for the troupe to various elevators. The Nazis, I assumed, were the Uptown Belles opening the show with their high-kick signature fan dance. From below stage,
Lord of the Dance
would sound like a die-stamp factory.

The subbasement level where we stood was strictly for the mechanics and maintenance people. Hither and yon were yellow signs warning of imminent mechanical peril.

“Now what?” Nicholas shrugged at our captors.

They didn’t have to answer. A latch clicked, and down the spiral staircase behind me came Roger Elk and Scuppy, the former in a tight little tuxedo, the other in a cream dinner jacket with shoulder pads built like Jane Russell. Sporting smug grins, they rested their forearms on the railing and admired their captives. I stopped at the top of the short stairs separating me from the clutches of Bing and Bowler. I lifted the guitar sling from over my head.

“They may think they’ve been a big nuisance,” Roger Elk began, “but like raccoons, they are too easily caught.”

“I’m curious, Roger.” Scuppy folded his arms, projecting his voice like there was a stage audience to please. “I’m curious about what keeps our two chums going. What did they want?”

“Well, Scuppy, the one—Garth, the one with the guitar—wanted the squirrel puppet. Can you imagine?”

“The puppet?! Is it valuable?”

“Not particularly. Obviously, it is to him.”

“That’s going to cost him dearly, wouldn’t you say? And how about the other one? The one with the swelled head?”

“I’m not sure what he wanted. I’m not sure it matters.”

“I dunno. Mind if I ask him?”

“Go right ahead.”

Nicholas answered before he could ask. “Cards on the table. I’m looking for Bookerman.”

“You told me you were looking for Pipsqueak,” I grumbled.

“It amounts to the same thing.”

Roger Elk and Scuppy seemed highly amused.

“Looking for Bookerman? Why?”

“Insurance fraud. Chicago Mutual, like most insurers, doesn’t like paying out a lot of money on big double-indemnity life-insurance claims. They also don’t like accidents where the body is never recovered. Lost control, broke through a guardrail, spun out onto the ice, dropped through the ice into Lake Michigan. They paid it to Scuppy Milner Bookerman, his nephew and executor of his estate, and he used it to bankroll the launch of Fab Form. But they don’t pay out that kind of money without following up. They keep tabs on the benefactor for years, see what he does, try to figure if there’s been a scam. Lotta times, they manage to get their money back, people go to jail. They had a big, thick file on Bookerman and knew all about his efforts to regain his puppets. When one of their legions of researchers saw that one of the puppets was stolen in New Jersey, and someone was murdered in the exchange, and that you were in New York . . . well, let’s just say insurance companies don’t believe in coincidences. They hired me to check it out for a percentage, which amounts to a nice piece of change. That’s why I’m here.”

Roger Elk’s smile was gone.

A vein in Scuppy’s sizable forehead threatened to burst like a fire hose. Scuppy looked at his watch. “I’d better get upstairs.”

“Tell me one thing,” I said, looking up at Roger. “Why tonight? Why here?”

He grinned. “We’ve got a huge live-TV audience at rapt attention, and some of the most influential people in the nation are here. We influence them, they help influence the rest of America. Do you really think we wouldn’t be better off without video games, Web surfing, and reality TV?” Roger’s grin faded.

“So, Scuppy and his boys twenty-four/seven on the boob tube?” Nicholas asked. “Or is that why Aurora Corporation has been buying up all those forgotten, bargain-basement AM radio stations all across the country? Going to one-better all those conservative talk-show hosts?”

I gave Nicholas a cross look. “You didn’t tell me that part.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t exactly a wellspring of information either.”

Roger Elk waved a hand at Bing and Bowler. “When you’re through, drop them in the counterweight shafts. Nobody will find them there for a while.” He trotted up the spiral stairs after Scuppy.

“Hey, don’t I even get to know about Bookerman?” Nicholas complained loudly. “C’mon!”

“Shaddup.” Bowler gave Nicholas a lazy slap across the face and turned to me, waving a set of handcuffs. “You. Get down here.”

I methodically plunked down the steps, holding the
Bat out of Hell
guitar across my belly. I had been expecting the immobilizing fear, the twist in your gut that keeps you from doing anything counter to your best self-preservationist instincts. But the fear wasn’t there—yet.

“C’mon, buster, we don’t got all night, you know.”

Ultimately, it was the wisecrack that stung my fear into a savage anger. I got to the bottom step.

Gun at his side, Bowler said, “Gimme that guitar.”

So I gave it to him. With a sweeping diagonal uppercut to the jaw.

A few teeth and a cloud of blood vapor replaced Bowler’s grin. Meat’s guitar resonated with a beautifully discordant chime.

That one was for Fred.

Bing swiveled his gun from Nicholas’s head and aimed it at me. I was still a step away with the guitar, and he fired at the same time Nicholas shoulder-slammed him. The ricochet pinged through the room. They both went down, the pistol clattering off to one side.

I stepped over to where Bing was just grabbing his pistol, wound up, and delivered a golf swing to his head. The gun went off again as he crumpled back to the concrete floor, sparks bursting across the room where a circuit box got punctured. Lights flickered.

That one was for . . . well, it was for Fred too, dammit.

“Garth!” Nicholas hobbled to his feet, kicking the guns to the far end of the room, under some machinery. “Brilliant! Brilliant!”

Bing’s cardigan covered his head, but there was a growing red stain on it. I turned back to where Bowler was sprawled, to make sure he was still down. Blood gurgled from his empty mandible, and one of his sleeves was torn. Time for a new bowling shirt.

The Uptown Belles ceased their Nazi tromp, and our ears were filled with the machine-room hum. Nobody upstairs would have heard the shots over that racket.

I propped Meat’s guitar against a shaft. That’s when I noticed the bullet hole through the soundboard. I eased down onto the ground to keep from falling.

“Okay, Garth, take it easy.” I felt Nicholas’s hands massaging my shoulders. “Breathe into your sleeve. You’re hyperventilating. Attaboy, easy, now.”

I’m not sure how much time passed, but it was only a minute before Nicholas broke the calm.

“Okay, now. Stand up, Garth. We still got work to do.”

I looked over at the two sprawled retros. “They dying?” The question was completely academic. It’s not like I spent any time thinking about how many people they may have killed or which one killed Vito or Marti. I really didn’t care.

“Probably not.” I saw that Nicholas had one of his hands free and that the handcuffs still dangled from one wrist. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. Look, Garth, if they’re trying to kill us, don’t you think that this thing with the spheres needs stopping? They wouldn’t be going to all this effort if the spheres didn’t have some effect.”

“Listen!” I held up a finger at the ceiling. Ever so faintly, and echoey, I could make out a drumbeat and Scuppy’s wailing voice. “They’re playing.”

“Shit!” Nicholas ran for the stairs.

“Wait. The elevators.” I pointed to a panel on the wall, from which conduits piped throughout the room to hydraulic pumps and motors. At the panel, there was a diagram, and it quickly became evident that a series of three-position (
UP
–
STOP
–
DOWN
) lever switches were manual overrides to the elevators. Not only were they unnumbered, but they were locked with small padlocks.

Nicholas patted his pockets and shrugged. “They took my lock pick.”

I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, one of those big, old silver jobs.

“What are you doing?”

“This is the first switch. It should be the first elevator, right?”

Nicholas looked overhead and then back at me. He smiled. “Sure.”

Raising the extinguisher over my head, I brought the bottom edge down on the padlocked switch. I hit it again, and then again. The third time was a charm.