The Five (26 page)

“That’s some awesome music,” John Charles said, and Nomad had to agree. The fifteen songs, two nearing the seven-minute mark and one up there over ten minutes, were absolutely mindblowing. They flowed from and into each other, they went in unexpected and amazing directions, the arrangements and vocals were off the hook and there were mid-song key and tempo changes that should never have worked but to Nomad sounded like some of the freshest, most vibrant music he’d ever heard. Plus it had a last song, ‘The Last Song’, that made Nomad lie awake at night hearing it over and over in his head and thinking this was going to be a huge breakthrough biggie for Ezra’s Jawbone.

“You know how that went,” John Charles reminded him.

“The fucking suits,” Nomad answered. He remembered hearing from his shell-shocked friend the lead singer that the first impression of
Dustin Daye
from MTBF was that there were no singles. That some of the tunes—fucking ‘tunes’, they called them—were way too long, that kids wouldn’t listen to tunes that long. That this really was, and sorry but we have to be truthful, one of the worst, most confusing collection of tunes we’ve ever heard. That Ezra’s Jawbone had already set up its hard rock/country funk vibe on its first two releases, so this attempt at a product does not play to the market. That there’s no sense to be made of people sitting talking to themselves, or having ghosts—or whatever the fuck they are—roaming around. And then there’s the religion angle, and we’ll be the first to say we respect all views and opinions but this is really where the shit starts to slide. MTBF is not a contemporary Christian label; have you seen our iTunes hit list lately? No religious tunes on there,
nada
. So when you get into this area, you are walking on sinking sand. Your audience wants to be
entertained
, not preached to. This is an
entertainment
business. So we have to say, and we’re all in full agreement on this, that
Dustin Daye
is not releaseable as it is. Now, having made that clear…we can hook you up with a proven production team we have in mind who can help rework this record, but you’re going to have to give them more control to do what needs to be done, because Bogdan Anastasio and Ji Chao require complete authority.

“Those sick fucks,” sneered John Charles.

“Can you
imagine
that scene?” Nomad asked. “The suits sitting in a conference room listening to
Dustin Daye
and saying it’s shit because there aren’t any
singles
? And these are the same guys who’ve driven the whole fucking business over the cliff, you know.”

“Right,” said John Charles.

“Didn’t lower the cost of CDs when they could have,” Nomad said. “Should’ve dropped them to half-price. So there go the independent CD and vinyl stores down the tubes, and those indie stores were the lifeblood, man.” He stopped to sip his black coffee. “It won’t ever come back to what it was,” he told himself, in his mental voice.

“You have to keep on keeping on,” John Charles said.

“Do I?” Nomad asked, and then he saw the waitress coming with his food and John Charles slipped back into him because they both were hungry.

She again offered him no eye-contact. She thumped the steak sandwich plate down and then the platter of…

“What’s this?” Nomad asked.

Her eyes became slits when she looked at him. “It’s the au gratin potatoes, just like you asked for.”

He had smelled the yellow cheese striped across the top of the potatoes before he saw it. “I can’t eat that,” he said.

“You
ordered
it,” she answered.

“No, I ordered the
Greek
potatoes.”

“You ordered the au gratin.”

“Listen, ma’am,” Nomad said, feeling his guts start to clench. George would’ve said
Easy
,
take it easy
. “I know what I ordered.” She just stood there staring at him, her coal-black eyes fierce and her head cocked to one side as if it were getting ready to fly from her neck and bite his dick off. “Okay,” he said, and he put up both hands palm-outward to keep the peace. The other customers were watching. “Just forget it, okay?” He pushed the offending potatoes aside. “I’ll sit here and eat my sandwich, that’s really all I—”

“No, if you want Greek potatoes, I’ll get you Greek potatoes!” said the waitress, as she snatched up the au gratin. Her face was all screwed up and getting red, the anger about to burst forth like snot from her nose and spittle from her mouth. “I’ll get you Greek potatoes, but you
didn’t
order ’em!” It had almost been a shout.

You dumb shit, you didn’t write it down
, Nomad nearly said. But he did not. He took a long deep breath and he grasped the edge of the table with both hands and he tried to force a smile that did not take. “Listen,” he began.

“Quit telling me to listen! I can hear you, you think I’m
deaf
?”

“No, I’m just saying—”

“You want Greek potatoes, I’m gonna get ’em for you!” She began backing away from him, as the other waitress rubbernecked out from the kitchen and the cashier girl poked her head around the corner.

It came from Nomad with surprising force: his rough whiskey voice, demanding “
Stop
!”

She took two more steps in retreat before she obeyed, and then she seemed to hunch her shoulders forward like a pit bull bitch about to attack.

“Please.” Nomad heard his voice tremble, as rough as it was. “
Please
.” He was starting to shake, he was starting to come apart at the seams. Mike was dead. George might be dead within the next twelve hours. The crucial period, the doctor had said. But right now, right this minute, this felt pretty crucial too. The Five was staggering toward its grave. Nomad thought his heart was beating too hard, he needed to calm down,
easy take it easy
George would say but the Little Genius was not at his side and might never be there again.

“Please,” Nomad breathed, “just let me eat my sandwich. Leave me alone and let me eat my sandwich. Alright?”

A burly sandy-haired man in a cook’s apron had come to the kitchen door and was looking over the top of the other waitress’s head.

Nomad’s waitress gave a tight little grin, a nasty little smirk of victory, and she said in a voice like a hammer driving a nail into Nomad’s skull, three beats: “No. Prob. Lem.”

Then she turned around with a dramatic sweep like Bette Davis in that movie Berke had been watching and carried the platter of cheesy potatoes away. The cook and the other waitress retreated before her. The kitchen door closed.

Nomad started eating, but he couldn’t taste anything. Whatever war he’d walked into the middle of, whatever was eating at this dominatrix waitress and made her flail out at him, he wanted none of it.

“Stay cool, man,” said one of the students, who must’ve thought Nomad was the cause of the trouble. When Nomad glanced at their table, all three of them were staring at him so he couldn’t tell which dork had spoken. He returned to chewing his way through the sandwich, and then one of the guys made the mistake of letting out a chortle, a slobbery laugh hidden behind a fratboy’s greasy hand.

Nomad felt the flashfire burn across his face. He turned his head toward them, picked out the heftiest one to aim his full beams at and said, loudly enough to be perfectly understood, “Hey, are you Moe, Larry, or that fat fuck who gets his ass whipped?”

They all glared back at him without speaking. Suddenly the couple got up from their booth and, hand-in-hand, headed for the cashier.

He wanted to tell them not to worry, that nobody was going to get hurt, that he had his spike of anger under control and they didn’t have to rush out the—

Something was slammed down upon his table so hard it made him jump.

He looked up into the face of his waitress, who had come up on him so fast he hadn’t realized she was out of the kitchen.

“There,” she said, with a twisted smile. Her eyes were small black circles of rage, but at the center of their darkness was a red glint of triumph. “That suit you?” Medusa couldn’t have hissed it better.

Nomad saw that she’d brought him a platter of Greek potatoes.

Oil kept to a minimum.

Just as he’d asked.

They were perfect.

She grinned at him.

He could not let this stand.

George was not here to talk him down. Ariel was not here, to be at his side whether he wanted her there or not. The memory of Mike’s body being put into a white coroner’s van and George’s body being lifted into the back of an ambulance and Dean Charles’s body lying sprawled on the pavement mixed together, bled into each other like the songs on
Dustin Daye
, and from that neon-lit, heat-stroked Hell Felix Gogo told him to know his role and a sniper in a suit reloaded his rifle and three fratboys laughed behind his back and the waitress gave him perfect Greek potatoes and said it was no problem.

He was a mass of clanging alarms and trapped terrors, and just like that he broke.

It was a quiet breakage.

He said, with sweat sparkling on his cheeks and forehead, “Ma’am?” Whose voice was that? He didn’t know it. He was aware of the other waitress, standing again at the kitchen door to watch.

Well…it was showtime.

“Ma’am?” Nomad said again. “There’s something in my food.”

“
What
?”

He picked up the platter of Greek potatoes and slid out of the booth with a slow, smooth motion, and he said, “Your fucking face,” in a mild matter-of-fact tone before he grasped the back of her head and pushed the platter into her stunned mug.

She shouldn’t have screamed as she did, like a wild animal. She shouldn’t have reached out and clawed at his face and kicked at his shins. Because he would’ve thrown down a tenner and walked out, but with lines of blood rising from the scratches on his left cheek and one of his shins nearly cracked he also gave an animalish roar and shoved her away from him, and she fell back over a table and chair and went down on the floor still screaming.

The three stooges should not have jumped him from behind, either. They should not have tried to catch his arms and pin them at his sides and drop him to the floor by kicking his legs out from under him. All that just made Nomad punch loose from them, pick up a chair and start swinging. “Come on, man! Come on!” shouted one of the guys, but whether he was wanting Nomad to stop fighting or to advance on him was unknown, because the chair crunched him across the left shoulder, he grabbed at his injury and scuttled away and he didn’t say much after that.

The middle-aged man fled with his book. The other waitress was screaming
Call the
cops! Call the cops!
The waitress with lightly-oiled Greek potatoes on her face came rushing at Nomad with a dinner knife raised in a stabbing position, and Nomad in his red rictus of rage got the chair between them and drove her back across another table. “Jesus Christ! Stop it!” someone shouted, and Nomad saw the cook standing in the kitchen door. Then the bravest or most stupid of the young men caught him around the neck from behind and tried to wrestle him to the floor. Nomad dropped the chair and thrashed like a maniac to get loose. The blood was pounding in his head and dark spots swirled before his eyes. He gave the guy an elbow shot in the ribs, followed up with another one that drew a grunt of pain, and then he broke free, turned around and swung a right fist that popped a jaw crooked. A second punch to the face ended the discussion because the guy ran for the door holding a bloody mouth.

It might have finished there, if the waitress had not thrown the ketchup bottle at Nomad’s head.

“Fuck you, you motherfucker!” she shrieked just before she threw it, giving Nomad enough time to dodge it and save his skull, but the bottle crashed through the front window. Then Nomad, who heard George’s voice in his head begging him to stop but who was now locked into what seemed almost a catharsis of hallucinatory violence, picked up another chair and threw it at her, and she ducked down as it passed overhead. The chair crashed into the
Argo
, the painted ship upon the painted sea, and knocked a plate-sized hole in the mural’s wall just above the waterline.

Two seconds after that, the cook came out of the kitchen holding the pistol.

He was red-faced and shaking and he held the gun out toward Nomad with his finger on the trigger and he bellowed, “I’ll
shoot
you, you sonofabitch! I’ll—”

Nomad only had an instant in which to flinch, because then the bullet had sizzled through the air past his left ear and followed the ketchup bottle through the glass onto East Congress. The cook was looking at the pistol with horror, as if he were grasping a spitting cobra. Nomad staggered to the side, against the booth he’d been occupying, as he saw the cook bringing the gun back to bear on him.

“Don’t move!” the cook shouted, but by then the coffee cup that Nomad had thrown was on its way, and as the man lifted an arm to deflect it he—by accident or by intention—fired again.

The bullet punched a neat round hole in the booth’s red vinyl seat. Nomad saw the pistol’s barrel searching for him. In either desperation or madness he picked something else up from the table and flung it and the lump of healing crystal hit the cook smack on the collarbone, causing him to stagger back against the wounded
Argo
.

Nomad attacked. He propelled himself at the cook with his head down and his shoulders ready for collision. He was his own bullet.

Before Nomad got to his target, the waitress on the floor grabbed at his legs and tripped him up. Still, his momentum was enough to hurl him forward, and before the cook could get the pistol between them Nomad hit him so hard they almost crashed straight through the
Argo
into ancient Greece, or at least the kitchen. They fought face-to-face, the cook trying to get the gun in position and Nomad trying to pin the gunhand. Then Nomad head-butted him and suddenly all the fight jumped out of the other man, his fingers opened and Nomad was holding the pistol.