CROSSROAD BLUES
by
STEVE MALLEY
CROSSROAD BLUES
STEVE MALLEY
Smashwords Edition
Copyright ©2010 by Steve Malley
Cover copyright ©2010 by Steve Malley
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
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ONE
Kane picked his note and held it, long and wailing. The sound echoed off the stone faces of the buildings around him. Right at the moment the song could take no more, Kane fanned the reeds of his Oskar. The airtight cup of his two hands was broken, and the harmonica responded, transforming the single sustained note into a wild tremolo.
He bent that tremolo down into a chord change and picked up the chorus of Black Cat Blues. Nobody much played Jack Terrabonne’s songs anymore, but that one was perfect for the night: a tale of bad luck and bad women, with plenty of humor and bounce. Early drinkers and late shoppers responded. A small crowd gathered, and Kane was rewarded with the clink and jingle of coins.
Christchurch was good to Kane. His hostel bed was thirty-five a night, and every one of the four days he’d busked had earned him at least a hundred and fifty. Another week, Kane would have enough for a plane ticket.
Cathedral Square was where the best action was. The square was a constant churning mass of office workers, tourists and partiers, and every one of the city’s musicians, jugglers, and magicians knew it. It was the only part of the city where buskers needed a permit, and the cops kept up a heavy and visible presence to protect the tourists from drug dealers, junkie thieves and pickpockets.
Kane kept to Cashel Mall. The competition was more relaxed here, and since the street was closed to vehicle traffic, every shopper and worker passing was on foot. Kane played to the crowd. Lunchtime, he played a lot of Delta blues, working the harmonica through flashy bent notes and chord changes. Evenings and nights, the offices and stores were closed, and the people on the street were moving from bar to bar. For them, Kane played roadhouse blues and swamp boogie.
A fiddle joined in on another Terrabonne favorite: Backdoor Boogie. Kane looked past his scarred knuckles on the harmonica. The kid was back. Kane dipped his head in greeting, and across the street, the kid’s fiddle dipped a little salute in reply. His bow danced over the strings, and a quick little riff echoed in the cold air.
They took turns with the lead. Two junkies watched the performance from a doorway down the block, hollow-eyed and twitching. Four sleek young drunks stopped to applaud at the end of the song and left without dropping any change.
Kane dumped the contents of his hat into a Ziploc bag and dropped both bag and hat into his backpack. The boy was already playing again, some generic bluegrass tune that could have been any of four different songs. Kane waited until the end and dropped a wrinkled orange five.
“Still here, hey Yank?”
Kane shrugged.
“I would’ve thought you’d be gone by now.” The kid was maybe thirteen or fourteen, with thin wrists and a shy smile.
“Aren’t you out kind of late?” Kane said.
“Mum’s picking me up later.”
“I don’t like you being out here alone.”
“Relax, mate. It’s not like you’re in Los Angeles or anything. And besides, I’ve been doing this for over two years now. You’ve only been out here a few days.”
Down the block, the two junkies looked back at Kane, put their heads together and whispered.
“Can I ask you something,” the kid said, “What’s America really like?”
“Mighty big, that’s for sure.”
Kane stuck his hands in his pockets. He’d picked the heavy coat up in a thrift shop two days earlier.
“Ever been to L.A.?”
“No.”
“I want to go there, when I’m older and do my Big O.E. I’ll get a record contract and buy a mansion.”
“Keep practicing. You want to play the big stages, you need to be tight.”
“You ever play any big stages?”
Kane pushed his backpack with the side of his foot.
“I reckon this suits me.”
“You reckon?” The boy’s voice slipped from New Zealand’s clipped consonants and trilling vowels into an imitation American accent.
“You make me sound too much like John Wayne.”
“That right, punk?”
“No, that one’s Clint Eastwood.”
“Whatever. You playing or what?”
Kane smiled. “One more number before I call it a night?”
“Mate, the punters are just getting started.”
“They’re all yours.”
“Can we do Wayfaring Stranger?”
“Again?”
“This time save your harp for the bridge and take the vocals instead.”
They played, soft and soulful. The boy’s fingers were crisp and accurate on the strings, his face serious, almost grim. It was plain the kid had classical training, but he had a feel for this music too. The boy took his time, tried to capture the eerie beauty of its chord changes.
The two junkies were gone from the darkened doorway.
The song was one of Kane’s favorites. It took him back to when he was a little boy, memories of church choirs and afternoons helping his father in the fields. It took Kane back to being a hungry and unwanted teenager, busking on the streets.
Kane closed his eyes and sang. His voice was deep and mournful. Every word was the truth.
I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world alone
TWO
“Why are you doing this to me?”
The girl’s face was a puffy tear-streaked mask. A foot and a half above the top of her head, the black shape of Harlan Winters blotted out the moonlight.
“Shut up.”
Harlan wrenched the rope. The girl cried out as rough braided nylon tore soft flesh.
Harlan Winters loved Mexico, especially Jack’s ranch in the Yucatan. The night air smelled of stagnant water, wet leaves and vegetable decay.
Somewhere in the trees nearby, an animal was decomposing. The odor carried to Harlan on a shift in the breeze. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back. His tongue flickered gently behind his teeth as he tasted that faint scent of death.
“Please mister,” the girl said. “Pleasepleaseplease, you can let me go. I won’t tell anyone. Please...”
“I’ll let you go, just not yet.” Harlan showed his teeth. A blade of moonlight fell across his face. It lit his eyes, pale and silvery.
“You still smell too much like soap.”
“Couldn’t you at least loosen the ropes?” she said. Her voice was wet and choked. “Please? They hurt...”
Harlan hauled on the rope. The girl stumbled behind him, crying. She tried falling down and staying there, but Harlan wrapped one big fist in the girl’s hair and dragged.
A lightning-struck cottonwood stood in the center of the clearing. Harlan raised his arm until the girl hung with her heels kicking in the air. He pulled her higher, until her arms passed over and circled the tree’s blasted trunk.
Once the girl’s feet touched solid ground, Harlan walked away. She struggled and thrashed and screamed.
Like it mattered.
Jack Terrabonne’s Mexican ranch was over a thousand acres in the middle of nowhere. The nearest neighbors were none of them closer than an hour’s drive. The only answer to the girl’s screams was the guttural cough of a jaguar, hunting in the dark.
Harlan threw his head back and roared, exultant. Branches thrashed further and further away as the jaguar beat a hasty retreat.
This little piece of land was beautiful. Scrub oak and cottonwood, turtles and fish and birds, wild cats and poisonous snakes. The jungle was dotted with the rocky wet shafts of sinkholes, gateways to vast caverns of black water under the earth.
Harlan loved Jack’s Yucatan ranch.
Mexico was perfect. For an American, especially a rich and famous one like Harlan’s boss, this place was paradise. Jack’s money went a long way here. So did his pull with the local cops.
And backpackers came here from all over the world. They came to Mexico for the beaches, the drugs, the Mayan ruins, a thousand things. Sometimes, they found what was left of Boogie Jack Terrabonne.
A few of those found Harlan Winters.
Harlan and Jack both loved the same women, though maybe for different reasons. Even when he’d been married to that movie star, Jack had never stopped chasing the hitchhiker girls, the drifters and runaways and trashy women just passing through. As long as Harlan had known him, Jack had a thing for anonymous women at the edges of society.
Harlan’s thing was for women nobody’d miss.
This one was small and pale, junkie-lean. Her hair was shot through with streaks of purple and blue, and her face and body were full of winking pieces of metal. She’d come to Jack’s bed with a bad attitude, staring at Harlan like he was some kind of circus freak, treating him like the hired help.
Now she wept and thrashed, staked out in the middle of a jungle.
Harlan stepped into the tree line. He circled around the back of the jeep, with its still-pinging engine, its smells of motor oil and hot metal. The keys were in his pocket, jingling around with the bullets from the gun.
He felt good under the trees. Small animals scurried and skittered, night birds called and owls hunted in silence. The moon was bright and full, throwing silver light through the wind-rattled leaves.
The girl struggled against her bonds. No way she was able to reach the knot. She scraped all hell out of the soft flesh inside her arms. Harlan walked up behind her. The smell of her fear carried to him on the night breeze.
Harlan flared his nostrils and growled. The girl jumped and whimpered. Her hair was still wet from Jack’s endless showers. Sweat streaked her flanks and slicked her limbs. Mosquitoes clustered on her neck and face, at the backs of her knees and in the tender hollows behind her ankles.
She no longer smelled like soap.
Harlan leaned in. His breath curled warm and rank along the girl’s cheek. His lips brushed the fine wisps of hair that floated loose, just behind her ear.
“It’s time. You can go.”
The girl trembled at the touch of Harlan’s fingers on her skin. Three pulls and the knot was loose. One more, and the rope fell at the base of the charred and blasted tree trunk.
The girl fell shaking to her knees, rubbing at her bloody wrists. She looked up at Harlan with big wet eyes, shimmering puddles showing him twin reflections of the moon.
“I promise, I swear, IswearIswearIswear I won’t tell anybody about this. I--”
Harlan lowered his face to hers and roared.
“RUN!”
She ran.
Harlan watched her white legs scissor in the moonlight. He dug his fingers into the hard dark earth and waited for her to reach the trees. His lips curled away from his teeth in a tight savage smile, and the blood thundered in his wrists and throat.
The girl looked back over her shoulder. The great hulk of Harlan Winters sat crouched at the base of the lightning-struck tree, waiting.
She ran gasping for the safety of the trees. In seconds, her legs were pale flashes in the shadows under the dark leaves.
Harlan gave chase.
THREE
Jack Terrabonne woke to Black Cat Blues playing on his cell. He fumbled in the dark until his fingers found the flashing blue screen.
He looked at the name on the screen. Black Cat Blues started a second chorus. Jack sat up and rubbed his face with one hand. As his phone started to play through a third time, Jack cleared his throat and answered.
“Delton Adams, you old dog! How’n hell are you?” Jack heard his own voice, rolling, golden and musical. He smoothed his hair back with one hand, scarcely aware of the gesture.
“Delton old son, you get them latest files I sent through on that email?”
“They came through fine, Jack. Did you get a chance to look at that itinerary I sent?”
“That email sure is something, ain’t it?” Jack shrugged into a silk robe and stood in front of the mirror. Jack Terrabonne loved mirrors.
“You know,” he said, “I remember a day, I wanted to whip up a little track or two at home, I had to drop a big old magnetic tape in the mail. Why, this one time--”
“Jack did you actually read the itinerary?”
“I glanced at it.”
“Those tour dates start in under a month. And with The Old Time Country Gospel Hour going into production in September, this tour’s important.”
“Not much of a tour, you ask me. Just a heckuva lot of itty bitty shows.”
“Nothing small about the Iowa State Fair, Jack.”
“I’m headlining in Iowa?”
“Not headlining, exactly...”
Funny, Jack remembered a time when a phone call from Mexico to the States meant scratchy crackling static. Now he was able to hear every little bit of the discomfort in his manager’s voice.
Terrabonne couldn’t resist the urge to twist the knife.
“And what about some of them other dates? Shotkickers? Bob’s County Bunker? You booking me into bars now, son?”
At the other end of the line, where it was still half past nine in Los Angeles, Delton sighed.
“Look if you don’t want to do that summer circuit, would you at least think about--”
“You can just stop right there. Branson is not an option.”
“Lots of stars play Branson, Jack. Instead of chasing your audience down, a few dozen here and there all over the country, they’d be able to come to you. And as far as the Gospel Hour’s concerned, you just opening a club there would be great publicity.”
“Branson’s where old guitar pickers go to die. Nothing doing.” Jack hated the way his voice came out. It sounded whiny, peevish and old.
“It’d be a money maker,” Delton said.
“Money I got. What I need’s a new hit. Something to get me some radio play, put some butts in some seats. That’s what I need.”
“Jack...”
“You listen to them tracks I sent?” Jack Terrabonne cast a fond glance at the big round bed, its sheets twisted and stained. “I got me a good feeling about those songs.”
“You always have a good feeling.”
Terrabonne’s eyes narrowed.
“What you trying to say, Delt?”
“You really want me to be honest, Jack?”
“Just say it.”
Delton took a deep breath and fired in.
“Mandy’s Song is just a warmed-over version of Pussyfootin’ Heart, and those others you sent along are just more of that same good-time bubblegum honky tonk you’ve been selling for the last thirty years.”
“Well hell’s sakes, man, don’t beat around the bush.”
“Look, there’s nothing wrong with fluff and schmaltz, but that stuff’s just not the current market.”
“You even listen to them lyrics?”
“Jack, will you at least think about Branson?”
Jack’s phone shattered against the wall. By the time his temper was spent, Jack’s voice was hoarse and strained and much of the furniture in the room broken.”
***
Kane checked back on the kid at midnight. He found the boy sitting a sidewalk with his violin case shut between his feet. Waiting for his ride.
The two junkies waited in the dark. They huddled together in an alley behind the kid, watching the boy and whispering. Their postures were tight, agitated and intent.
Predatory.
Kane circled the building and stepped up behind them.
“Nice night,” he said. “Cold.”
Both men jumped. Their faces and hands were a mass of ticks and twitches. Their eyes were bright shards of broken glass set deep in their skulls.
Kane shifted his pack on his shoulder. Behind the junkies, the kid sat waiting on the curb.
The junkies looked Kane up and down. He stood with his feet apart and his hands away from his sides. A naked bulb burning in an upper story window threw hard planes of light and shadow across his face. His eyes burned with amber light.
“We weren’t--”
“I’m sure you weren’t.”
The junkies looked at each other and at Kane. One licked at dry cracked lips. The other swallowed twice, hard.
The junkies might have been fiending, but they weren’t stupid. They were desperate enough to think about robbing a child, but not desperate enough to tangle with Kane.
“So,” one said, “what are you gonna do?”
“I thought we’d all stand right here til the boy’s mother picks him up.”
“There’s two of us...”
“Yup.” Kane shifted slightly on his feet.
“It’s your call,” he said.
The three men stood facing each other in the urban dark.
***
The broken red yolk of the sun had just begun to climb the horizon when Harlan Winters dragged his ass back to Jack’s hacienda. The summer heat was like a living thing only just beginning to rouse and stir. Soon, it would devour every trace of the cool wet night.
Harlan was covered in mud, blood and darker fluids. No way he wanted to track this kind of mess over Jack Terrabonne’s clean terracotta tile floors.
A sinkhole lay a couple hundred yards behind the hacienda. In the first light of morning, the surface of the water was bright green with slime. In the shadows, the water was so dark it was almost black. Its rock walls, chalky and white in the day, glowed with a bloody light in the first rays of the new sun.
Harlan dived into the sinkhole. His body made a huge and ugly splash, and he sank beneath the surface. The water was like ice. No one knew how deep this shaft was, or how far it traveled below the ground. Divers sometimes explored underwater caves like these for hundreds of miles. For Harlan, the thought of miles and miles of black water trapped beneath the earth exerted a powerful pull.
The green water grew dim as Harlan’s body sank further from light.
The water around him was almost black before Harlan resisted its temptation. He kicked hard against the dark until his head broke the slime on the water’s surface.
Harlan treaded water and scraped at his big hairy limbs. By the time his shovel-sized hands clawed their way up the rocky shaft, Harlan’s skin was red and raw.
The house was still asleep. No one saw Harlan enter, or tracked his dripping progress through the halls to his room. He dropped his wet clothes on the floor of his room and fell into bed. The morning heat soon dried his puddled trail, and Jack Terrabonne’s maid staff cleaned every other trace of him from the halls.
His room they left alone. The maids knew better than to disturb Harlan Winters in his lair.
FOUR
Golden light slanted low through the western windows by the time Harlan woke. He shook himself like a bear, pulled on his boots and hunted the dusty twilight halls.
Harlan found Jack in the study. The strains of a twelve-bar blues walk led Harlan to the right room. The missed notes, botches and restarts told him just how drunk the old man was.
Terrabonne did his most serious drinking in his study. It was his favorite room in the hacienda. Whole lot of knotty pine paneling in there, dark leather furniture and a couple of heads mounted on the walls. The deer were both ten point bucks, shot there on the estate, though not by Jack. It was Harlan pulled the trigger on both of those particular animals.
Harlan stopped in the doorway. Terrabonne waved him in without looking up. The famous man’s thousand dollar dressing gown hung open. The gown was spotted with wet brown stains, and the man’s chest was plumed with long silver hairs. The skin underneath was saggy and tanning-lamp brown. Only the six-string Dobro across Jack’s knees saved Harlan from seeing a whole lot more.
The room was dark, stifling in the summer heat. Flies buzzed in the corners, and an eye-watering fog of alcohol fumes filled the room.
The dying sun was a great red eye, almost closed. The sky outside the windows shifted from the color of bleached bone to that of a blood-filled bruise. A single lamp burned on Terrabonne’s desk. Its green shade threw underwater shadows across the upper half of the room.
Harlan dropped his bulk into one of the wood and leather easy chairs. The furniture groaned under Harlan’s weight, but it held. Despite over twelve hours’ sleep, Harlan still felt tired and drained, hellish.
“You weren’t here last night.”
Harlan gave his boss a narrow-eyed look and growled. Terrabonne was a damn mess. That world famous hair hung limp in his eyes, and the man’s tanned and pampered skin looked bloated and gray.
“I needed you, and you weren’t here. Where were you?”
Harlan said nothing. In the deep gloaming of the room, his eyes were bright with a feral and dangerous light.
“I mean it, hoss. Where were you?”
Terrabonne looked up. His face caught the light, and his eyes were puffy and red.
“Taking care of your business.”
“Not all night, you weren’t.”
“You didn’t expect me to drop your girl at that little bitty airstrip in Ticul, did you? I ran that gal on out to Chetumal, sent her on back home.”
“Still...”
Harlan chuckled, raspy behind the liquor. “All right, you caught me. After I got that pretty little gal’s butt on a plane, I stayed awhile in town, took care of a little business of my own. That okay with you?”
Terrabonne leaned forward, suddenly earnest. Small batch single malt splashed out of a cut crystal tumbler. Brown spatters stained the hand-braided Navaho rug.
“Harlan? I ask you something, old hoss?”
Terrabonne’s mouth flapped open and closed. In that moment, his real age showed through despite all the botox, face lifts and chemical peels. The flesh hung slack from the bones of his skull, ancient, brown and deeply lined. His neck and jowls wobbled yellow in the light, and the upper half of his face was lost in green shadows. Flies turned buzzing little spirals over the spilled liquor.
“Hoss, you didn’t...?”
A low rumbling rose from Harlan’s throat.
“Didn’t what, Jack? Just what is it you’re worried about?”
Terrabonne licked his lips and looked to one side. Saliva gleamed at the corners of his mouth.
Harlan’s nostrils flared. On the other side of the study window, the earth still carried the scents of dust and of the last trapped heat of the vanished day. Here in this air-conditioned room, Harlan smelled only water and mold and, under the mechanical chill, a faint scent of rot.
Harlan scratched the hair at the side of his neck. He looked Terrabonne straight in the eye and smiled. Terrabonne was drunk, but not so drunk he didn’t flinch.
“Lord, Jack. How far back we go, you’n me? All this time, you think I’m about to start selling what I know to one of them scandal sheets? Maybe let a couple of them paparazzi in to take a few pictures?” Harlan threw his head and snorted. Terrabonne relaxed his hunched-up shoulders.
“I know, hoss. I know. It’s just, you didn’t come back last night, and the boys didn’t come back either, and...”
“And you started to worrying.”
“I trust you, hoss. You gotta know I trust you, but some of these boys--”
“The boys don’t know shit. I make sure of that.”
“A lot of folks’d pay good money to hear about, you know, about my visitors. It could really screw things up for me.”
“I know it,” Harlan said. It was Jack’s old fear, worse than ever since his last divorce. Lord knew the tabloids had raked Jack over the coals a good few times, but Harlan doubted anyone still gave a rat’s ass.
Of course, word got out about Harlan’s shallow graves back in those hills, Jack Terrabonne’s face would be all over every channel, though not in the way he wanted. Jack didn’t know it, but they were both better off with Harlan fanning those fears.
“What’s that?”
“I said that girl, that Mandy? She’s gone, right?”
“Yup.” Harlan licked his lips and said, “I sent her home.”
“You don’t think...?”
“She ain’t gonna talk on you none. Wasn’t cheap, but I’m sure she’ll keep her mouth shut.”
Wasn’t cheap, either. Jack’s household cash was lighter by over eight thousand bucks. Not that it was doing the girl much good.
Terrabonne plucked a few strings on the Dobro. Drunk and sloppy, the man was still better than most would ever be. The tune sounded kind of like Pussyfootin’ Heart, only different.
“I been thinking, hoss...” Jack slapped the guitar’s strings into discordant silence.
He reached for the tumbler on his desk. Scotch sloshed wild against the sides, and the rim of the glass rattled against his teeth as he drank. After the last brown streaks had swirled down the sides of the glass, Terrabonne wiped his mouth with the back of one wrist.
Harlan watched in silence. His employer’s eyes watered, and his lips were red and wet, like a girl’s.
“We go out on tour this summer, it’s gonna mean a lot of crowds, lot of fans, whole lot of panties thrown up on the stage.”
“You say so.”
“Hoss, we don’t need that kind of publicity. The Old Time Country Gospel Hour’s my ticket to a comeback, but you know my reputation. One little whiff of scandal, those polyester assholes’ll pull the plug.”
Harlan shifted in the too-small seat. The chair groaned in protest.
“You want to lay low for the summer. I gotcha.”
Terrabonne stared out the window for a spell, drunk and quiet. The last glowing red cinder of sunlight disappeared over the horizon.
“I’m sick of this place.” he said.
“You want--”
“It’s too hot here, and too close to the States. Any damn journalist with half a notion’s just a charter flight away. I tell you, it’s too damn close.”
Jack Terrabonne sneered at imaginary enemies and threw his tumbler at the wall. Liquor flew and glass shattered.
“I want Whispering Pines, goddammit!”
Harlan pulled himself up out of that chair.
“Hell are you still standing there for, you useless pile of crap?” Jack shouted. “Get movin’, you damn freak!”
Harlan’s boots echoed on the floorboards as he thundered from the room.
FIVE
The next morning Kane spotted a group of Germans in the hostel lobby, checking out. Two men and two women, all carrying enormous aluminum-framed packs and wearing sturdy shoes. Kane spoke to them for a few minutes and caught a ride into a pretty little town named Geraldine.
He spent the next couple of nights staying in the local backpackers. Days, he busked in the park for passing tourists, and the second night he sat in with a country band at the local pub. Icy teeth were just beginning to nip at the edges of the plain, but the peaks of the nearest mountains were already scumbled with snow.
The morning of the third day, Kane climbed into a battered blue campervan with three other Americans. They were rich college kids, soft and smooth, turned loose on the world for a summer vacation. None of them had figured on New Zealand just coming into winter.
Kane split gas costs and played a few songs for them on the way. Mid-afternoon, they drove through a mountain pass where the snow was already falling, thick and fast. An hour later, the campervan came down into raw and solitary country. Isolated vineyards and orchards were surrounded by high craggy mountains and misted dark lakes. The free map from the tourist center called this place the Southern Otago.
***
Whispering Pines was one hundred six years old. The timbers and stones of the main house were smooth, gray and weathered.
The original farmhouse had grown over the generations. A spare room here, a new wing or an extra story there, until the house stood rambling and misshapen. What began as a three-room home eventually grew into fourteen different bedrooms and eight bathrooms scattered through a maze of dark and twisting halls.
The old sheep station sat vacant for years before the rich American came along. True to form, the first thing he had done was to tear off the roof and build a third story penthouse. The new addition looked tacked-on, fragile and modern, all blond woods and glass. Lots of glass. People who could afford the heating wanted their view.
Some sort of musician, the second thing the American had done was to rename the house after some old song.
A lot of actors and musicians owned spreads in the Otago. Like the others, Jack Terrabonne’s New Zealand property spent most of its days empty.
Today, Whispering Pines hummed with activity. In the grounds outside, a team of gardeners hired out from the landscaping company placed beds of hothouse flowers on display in the cold earth. Their colors were beautiful in the golden autumn light. In days, the flowers would be dead.
Jack Terrabonne’s baby blue Porsche Boxster and the two new Range Rovers were inspected and tuned. His prize white Arabian horses were curried, groomed and freshly shod. Fresh gravel was laid along half a kilometer of curving driveway and carefully raked.
Inside the house, the four maids assigned by the agency were hard at work.
Shutters opened in the main house. Furniture was dusted, the boiler stoked, towels and fresh linen laid. In the front hall, remodeled by the rich American, the imported Italian marble floor and Austrian crystal chandelier were polished until they shined. In all fourteen guest bedrooms and the master suite, white sheets billowed in the light.
Whispering Pines was returning to life.
***
Harlan Winters hated New Zealand.
The Gulfstream IV started its descent. Harlan squirmed in his seat and growled.
He’d been cooped up in this upholstered metal tube a damn long time. The Gulfstream’s cabin was a little over six feet tall, a good seven or eight inches shy of the top of Harlan’s head and nowhere near enough room to stand up straight. The jet stopped three times to refuel: San Francisco, Hawaii and American Samoa. Not one of those stops did Harlan get a half-decent chance to stretch his legs.
Jack Terrabonne was a spoiled child at heart. Whispering Pines he’d decided on, and Whispering Pines it would be. Once the decision was made, every mile they put between Jack and his latest indiscretion lifted the man’s spirits.
Inside the Gulfstream, the house was rocking. Jack Terrabonne in a good mood meant life was one big party. Jack sat stretched out on the plush couch across from Harlan, picking out tunes on his guitar. The boys punched each other’s arms and helped themselves to the open bar at the back of the cabin. Dollar bills flew thick and fast in a pickup poker game, and explosions of rough laughter echoed through the cabin every time Jack changed one of his songs to a dirty lyric.
Harlan sat alone. He stroked the fresh lock of hair in his shirt pocket and breathed the cold recycled air. He fought the urge to lift the dry dark braid to his nostrils and breath in that Mexican summer night.
The ocean grew distant in the porthole window. Soon the mountains were visible from both sides of the plane, and the blood surged in the top of Harlan’s head as the jet slowly lost altitude.
Terrabonne leaned over and bounced the tips of his fingers on Harlan’s knee.
“You all right over there, old hoss?”
Harlan stirred in his seat. “Jet’s pretty good.”
“Pretty good? They’ve got this damn thing fitted out like a Vegas whorehouse.”
“Still a rental.”
Terrabonne laughed. His mouth opened wide, and his teeth were big and white and shiny.
“Hoss, I swear sometimes you don’t know how good you got it. I ever tell you how it was back when I started? We had this big old diesel bus, scraps of yellow paint still showing through here and there and--”
“Bout a thousand times, Jack.”
Terrabonne’s lips pressed together. He plucked an angry little riff on the Dobro and slapped the strings silent.
“I think I know what’s biting you,” Terrabonne said. He flashed that trademark aw-shucks grin and winked. “You’re missing Mexico. I bet you had a little gal back there in the hills.”
Harlan had a few back in those hills. More than a few.
“Mexico’s sweet,” was all he said.
Jack let out a loud wicked cackle. Only hearing what he wanted to, same as usual.
Harlan’s eyes shifted to the round porthole window.
Harlan ignored the buildings. His eyes and his thoughts were on the land: sixty-three hundred acres of ridgeline and valley and thick old-growth pines. One big square fingertip returned to the lock of the girl’s hair.
“Ain’t right,” Harlan said. “Perfectly good summer going to waste north of the equator, and we come back here when it ain’t even ski season.”
“Don’t you worry on it too much, hoss. I know you miss those senoritas, but I’m sure you’ll find some pretty little filly to keep you busy while we’re here.”
Harlan nodded and wiped his palms on the leg of his jeans. That was exactly what he was afraid of.
Mexico, Harlan was safe enough. But cops in New Zealand took their jobs seriously. No telling what might break loose if Harlan ever let himself go under those dark and hissing pines.
SIX
Mid-afternoon, the American kids pulled off the road. A dirt track curving off into the distance marked the turnoff for their farmstay, and Kane got out.
The main highway was two lanes of well-worn blacktop. Every time Kane heard the hiss of approaching tires he put his thumb out, but no luck. He walked. The road took Kane past amber fields thrashing in the wind, long stretches of wire fence that hummed and moaned and silent mountain lakes, their waters still and dark. On every side, high craggy mountains held close to their secrets.
The place called out for words and music. Kane wondered if he had it in him to write that song.
After a couple of hours Kane crossed the Shotover River. He stood a moment at the edge of the concrete span, watching the choppy patterns of pale froth on the surface of the raging black water.
A short distance upstream, bungee jumpers dove from a narrow bridge of rusted iron. Their screams were quickly lost in the river’s deep-throated roar.
It was gorgeous country: rugged, austere and beautiful.
***
The Gulfstream came down low and did one last turn around that enormous damn S-curve of water before it touched down at Queenstown International Airport.
To Harlan, that seemed a big name for such an itty-bitty airstrip. One runway, and that only just about big enough for charters and regionals and private jets like this one. The Gulfstream might just as well have been landing at the airstrip back in Chetumal.
The jet taxied to a stop and the pilots opened the door. It folded out into steps down onto the tarmac. The air that came rushing into the cabin was clean and cold.
One advantage to travel by private jet: Customs was a joke. Two jerkoffs in blue uniforms came on board and flipped through the stack of passports with little more than a headcount. Declaration cards were squared up in a neat little stack without so much as a single piece of baggage being opened, and the Customs agents filed off the plane. Harlan looked around at the scruffy bunch of low-rent carny-types in Jack’s entourage and imagined flying commercial. The thought made him shudder.
Jack shifted the guitar off his knee. Harlan gestured and the boys hopped up, got themselves busy with everybody’s bags. Terrabonne leaned back, his fingertips against the point of his cheek, his blue eyes flat and expressionless.
Harlan grabbed the box from the cabinet beside him. The box was walnut, with pieces of brass at the corners and the hinges. Wherever Jack Terrabonne went, Harlan Winters was never far behind. And wherever Harlan traveled, the walnut box was close at hand.
He unsnapped the latches and raised the lid. The .44 sat nestled in its dark velvet bed, next to its tooled leather holster and two orderly little rows of ammunition. The smells of gun oil and saddle soap mingled in the air.
That was one other, major, advantage to travel by private jet. Poor bastards flying commercial had to take off their shoes and give up their liquor and hand cream. Rich people, it was like they got to run around on some kind of honor system.
Harlan picked the gun up, flipped open the gate and loaded the weapon. Jack moved in his seat and shifted his gaze out the round porthole of glass. The boys noted that single restless movement and began to scurry faster.
Harlan clipped the leather holster onto his belt and shuffled through the envelope of cards until he found the carry-permit for New Zealand. This wasn’t the Yucatan, but Jack Terrabonne’s name and money did at least have that much pull.
Down on the tarmac, planes were scattered like some kind of parking lot. Tourists going home, hunters and fishermen taking puddle-jump charters out to the backwoods, fat cats like Jack with private jets: They all had to use the one small terminal, then run across a crazy maze of painted lines to get to their planes without some propeller-driven antique turning them into cat food.
It was even colder out in the open. The mountains were close and purple and capped with snow, and the wind had a definite bite to it. For Harlan, it felt good to stand up straight again, never mind the stares and whispers from the other travelers.
Jack Terrabonne posed on the tarmac, that icy wind ruffling his perfect silver hair. He squinted heroically and angled his face into the sunlight, until he realized there were no photographers to care. Harlan grabbed the nearest of Jack’s boys, a lean and mean-eyed man named JD, and hauled him around.
“Harl? I--”
“The hold. You don’t want one of them airport fellahs to drop something, now do you?”
“I’ll get to it. I just gotta...” JD looked up into Harlan’s eyes and swallowed. The thin man’s voice trailed off to nothing, and he wiped his mouth with the brown-stained tips of his fingers.
Harlan didn’t have to tell him twice. JD started cursing out the others, and they were all on it double-quick.
Ten minutes later, three gleaming limos pulled out of the lot. Jack and Harlan sat alone in the lead car. Harlan poured a bourbon on the rocks from the limo’s wet bar and handed it to Jack. Terrabonne sipped and stared out the window. Neither man spoke.
A lone dark figure stood at the crossroads. The drifter wore a black coat and a three-day beard, and his eyes seemed to burn right through the dark mirror-tinted glass.
Jack Terrabonne’s fingers slipped on his glass. Liquor spilled, staining his pants. The three cars made the turn onto the main road into Queenstown, and the drifter faded back into the distance and the dust.
Without him being conscious of it, Harlan’s nostrils flared and his tongue flickered between his teeth, tasting the fan-blasted warm air.
***
Kane watched the three black limousines grow small in the distance. He waited until they were lost from sight before he hitched his pack up on his shoulder and got back to walking.
For some reason, an old Robert Johnson song flashed through Kane’s head. The one about the Devil waiting in the crossroads at sundown.
A single red ember burned just below the horizon by the time he made it into Queenstown.
SEVEN
The hostel foyer was beat to hell. A dark threadbare track was worn down the center of the stained orange carpet. The front desk was scarred and cigarette-burned, most of its useable area taken up with racks of pamphlets and fliers, tourist orientation magazines and other free handouts.
The air in the lobby was hot and stifling. For Kane, those backpacker hostel smells of boiled noodles and wet socks were comforting and familiar. The girl at the desk sat huddled in her coat, a steaming mug cupped in her hands. Dreadlocks like cords of soft black wool hung in her eyes, and she had three small steel rings in the left-hand corner of her lower lip.
Kane stepped in close to the counter, and the girl looked up from her magazine. Her eyes were a vivid and poisonous green: burning, fevered and intense. Pale purple smudges shadowed the hollows of her eyes.
There was something wild and feral about her. Kane’s first thoughts were of Celtic war goddesses and blood-drenched shield maidens. He took a half-step back without noticing.
As quickly as it came, that dangerous light faded from her face. Iron door slammed shut, and a careful bland mask was cemented in place.
“Single’s eighty-eight fifty, double’s one-forty.” Her voice was rough and smoky, her accent soft and Irish. “If it’s one with an en suite you’re wanting, those are twenty dollars more. Otherwise, toilets are just down the hall.”
“Dorm bed’ll be fine,” Kane said.
“That’s fifty-five.”
“Sign out front says beds from sixteen dollars.”
The girl’s mouth twisted up at one end. The steel rings danced.
“What can I say? The owner rents two beds at that rate, just so he can hang that sign up.”
Kane pulled a Ziploc bag out of his coat pocket. It was heavy with bronze one- and two-dollar coins and smaller silver twenty- and fifty-cent pieces. The bag made a sound like sleigh bells when he dropped it on the counter.
“That’s fifty,” Kane said, and fished a crumpled five out of the front pocket of his jeans. The Irish girl made a soft noise through her nose and started separating the coins into piles.
“Feck you do, rob a parking meter on the way in here?” Her dreads rustled softy against the shoulders of her coat as she shook her head.
“When I play, it’s mostly coins people throw in the hat.”
“Busker, eh?” The girl looked at him, her gaze as sharp as a welder’s flame. “Then what sort of music do you play?
“The blues,” Kane said. “I play the blues.”
***
Maeve watched the tall stranger out of sight. American backpackers came through the hostel all the time, mostly milk-fed college students whinging at the tops of their voices about prices and poverty while paying their rooms with platinum and gold cards.
This new stranger was different. He wore a three-day beard and a three-month haircut, a big black coat and clothes that would shame a scarecrow.
He also carried himself with a loose lazy grace that Maeve associated with hard and truly dangerous men. In Maeve’s experience it wasn’t the loud blustery types you had to watch out for. When the wheels came off, it was always the ones with that sleepy-eyed confidence who turned the most frightening.
Pity. The stranger had those sharp high cheekbones Maeve fancied and amber eyes a shade lighter than melted caramel. Long fingers, strong hands and that broad heavy-lipped mouth. It was almost enough to make her overlook the scars on his knuckles and the fact that he lied about being a musician.
Still, for Maeve it had been a long and lonesome time. She had the knife in her boot if the article got out of hand, and it wasn’t like she had anything else to do, not with her rightful quarry still among the missing.
Maeve tapped the edge of the American’s registration card on the counter, speculating. Bridey’s shade, dead and brittle, watched from the shadows nearby, her expression remote and unreadable.
***
They said you never forgot your first. Harlan was never quite sure what that meant in his case. For him, only one thing mattered worth a damn, and Harlan didn’t know how to do the math.
Lots of folks didn’t count animals. Harlan wasn’t sure himself. All he knew as a boy was that they made the right noises and the light still faded in their eyes.
Harlan never knew the first human he killed either. Just eight years old, no dad at home to teach him right, he was already saddled with a reputation as a bad seed. Nobody would’ve believed him, but Harlan honestly hadn’t known the bum was sleeping in that shed when he set it on fire. He hadn’t even known until he heard the grown-ups talking about the bones they found in the ashes and debris.
It hadn’t stopped him from burning. Small as he was back then, arson and animals were all Harlan had. Something inside him had found its voice in the crackle and snap of dancing flames.
Imagining a human trapped inside just added to the rush.
***
Kane’s room had peeling green paint and flickering lights. There were six bunks, four of them taken. Kane pocketed his harmonica case, ditched his pack in the locker along with the hostel’s cheap brass padlock and key and shut the door. The padlock Kane used was his own: steel, heavy and solid.
Kane stopped back at the front desk. No one sat there now. The counter was notched and stained and scarred, its surface piled high with stacks of tourist leaflets, fliers and free handout booklets. A fresh greasy smell of boiled noodles hung in the air. Kane surveyed the handouts, stuck a booklet in one pocket and headed out into the cold autumn night.
“Off to see the sights, eh?”
The girl from the front desk stood out front. A cigarette burned between her fingers, smoke curling blue in the autumn air. She held a red-and-white pack of Marlboros out to Kane. He raised one palm and shook his head, and she tucked the box back in her pocket.
“Kane,” he said and stuck out his hand.
The girl took his outstretched hand. Her grip was firm, warm and dry. Her fingertips lingered on his palm as her hand came away.
“Maeve.”
“Any good places to eat around here, Maeve?”
She waved one hand in a vague circle. Her cigarette’s burning cherry took in the spill of lit windows and neon down the hill.
“Good, cheap places.”
“You’ll be a Yank, eh?”
“American, yeah.”
“Well, there’s your Subway and McDonald’s and that over on Shotover Street, or you might fancy the Jetburger, up on Register. It’s Kiwi... You’ll get a proper feed there, and they won’t mind your bags of coin so much, either.”
“You off the clock now?”
Maeve raised one eyebrow and flicked her glowing filter into the darkness.
“Not till midnight. And you can’t handle me, Yank.”
The rings at the corner of her lip flickered in the faint light, and she looked back over her shoulder at Kane as she turned away.
He watched her walk inside, and she knew he watched. The black cutout of her shape swayed against the soft buttery light coming through the doorway.
Maeve stopped at the open doorway. She looked back at Kane. The thick fall of her hair hooded her face from sight. Only her eyeshine was visible: twin points of cold green flame.
***
In the Ruckus Room at Whispering Pines, the party was raging. Farrel, Turk and Callum played pool with a some of the local boys. Poker chips and folding money went back and forth across the green felt table at the far end of the room. A basketball game played on the flatscreen in the corner, and songs by Jack Terrabonne blasted on the juke.
Harlan hated Jack’s music. An endless loop of Boogie Jack Terrabonne hits had played in the background the whole of Harlan’s adult life. Jack wouldn’t allow anything else in his presence.
The bar was self-serve that night. Nobody seemed to mind. Harlan Winters rattled the ice around in his glass and raised it to his lips. Lynchburg, Tennessee was halfway around the world, but no matter where they were, good old Jack Daniels still left the same sour mash burn down his throat.
It wasn’t what he wanted, but it would have to do.
Harlan stood at the window, his back to the crowd. His silhouette in the glass was a black hole cut in the party reflected behind him.
Harlan looked out through that man-shaped hole at the night beyond. The frost on the grass showed pale and ghostly, but the moonlight didn’t touch the black heart of the forest beyond.
Gruff voices exploded in laughter. Harlan heard Terrabonne’s sawtoothed bray among them, looked to find the man himself in a cloud of cigar smoke, surrounded by local politicos. ‘Greasing the wheels’, Jack called it.
Terrabonne had the civic-types eating out of his hand. No mean feat, considering some of the other, more famous folks they got in this town.
But then, maybe it wasn’t so crazy after all. Taking care of Boogie Jack Terrabonne, Harlan had rubbed up against more than his share of Hollywood types. In person, most of those rock and movie stars were a bunch of fussy old men, spoiled brat kids or flat-out junkies. Terrabonne came off smooth: good-humored, boyish and just-folks. With that deep brown tan and headful of wavy silver hair, the man looked the part too.
And when he wanted to, Jack Terrabonne still had that old-time star power. A star in a long slow eclipse, but Jack had the knack for making people forget, making them feel the magic.
Harlan turned back to the window. Nothing moved on the frost-stubbled field stretching back into the treeline.
Jack was right: Mexico was sweet. All it took there was money, and Terrabonne still had plenty of that. And Mexicans understood the power of the man behind the man.
Back at the hacienda, Harlan pretty much did as he pleased. Same for Jack’s place in Jamaica. Even the ranches in Tennessee and Aspen, there were ways. New Zealand was different.
Harlan never let himself go here. Not really. He hoped he never would. Not unless he found the perfect opportunity.
Maybe not even then. Safest to steer clear of temptation. It was an act of will for Harlan to keep his fingers from the lock of hair in his pocket. He tried not to think about what he’d do when the hair’s scent faded.
Up at the bar, neighboring ranchers and the area’s top cops clustered around Jack Terrabonne. The locals all towered over Jack, warm basking expressions on their faces. Jack was smiling, back-thumping and laughing like he’d just heard a particularly fine dirty joke.
It was a familiar scene.
Harlan Winters remembered the glass in his hand. He knocked back the last of the melted ice and bourbon and let the empty fall. Nobody noticed the sound of breaking glass.
Harlan stood inches from the cold surface of the picture window. The party roared louder than ever behind him.
His thoughts were focused through the black shape of his own reflection, into the night beyond.
EIGHT
Queenstown had a reputation as a party town. New Zealand was a pretty quiet place in general, But this little crescent of streets clustered between the lake and the mountains reminded Kane of Amsterdam made over with a western theme.
The town center was three long curved streets and maybe half a dozen cross-streets. Kane walked the whole of it without much trouble, trying to get a feel for the place.
Queenstown smelled like money. Too much money. The 1800’s Gold Rush buildings were all gift-shop clean. The cars, trucks and Hummers parked in the street were all new and expensive. There were a lot of high-end restaurants and exclusive boutiques. And bars. It seemed like every other building was a bar, some of them advertising twenty-four hour a day open times. The town looked like one big party.
Kane found some low-end stuff too. Down one end of Shotover there were a couple of internet cafes and a laundry place, a single tattoo parlor and a combination strip club and brothel with the word Diamonds scrawled across the front in purple neon. Just like the boutiques and restaurants, these too operated out of historical buildings with an Old West look.
What Kane didn’t find was a good place to busk. He told himself things might look different after a good meal and turned his steps toward the blue and white sign for Jetburger.
Maeve hadn’t lied. The place was clean and cheap, its burgers the size of hubcaps. Kane sat with his glossy tourist booklet and ate two of the burgers. After half a day walking, he needed the fuel.
He wasn’t the only one. The restaurant saw a steady stream of young people, well-scrubbed and healthy and chatting in at least four different languages. All had wide bright smiles and sleek expensive electronics. Their conversations were loud and laughing and full of references to bungee jumps, whitewater rafting, mountain biking and jetboating.
The adventure-seekers almost all paid with plastic. Not a lot of loose change in a crowd like that. Kane wandered up the slope of the street, looking for a bar. Faint strains of rap and pop carried from open pubs, and groups of rolling drunks moved from door to door. Not a single sign or flier advertised live music. Only one bar looked like any sort of prospect.
The Bunker was smoky and dark. Southern rock and country played on the juke, and faux-Western junk hung from the walls. Autographed photos of movie and rock stars hung behind the bar, a group of Germans dressed like cowboys played pool in the side room, and two Israeli girls sang along with Johnny Cash in heavily accented English.
What the place didn’t have was a stage. Or a dance floor. Or any place for a live band to set up, much less any sign one actually played there. Kane’s fingers brushed his harmonica’s leather case, and he headed to the bar with a fistful of coins.
***
“I can’t believe they lock us in at night,” Beth said.
“I guess.”
“Don’t you think it’s kind of creepy?”
“Creepy’s that big walking haystack. He smells like cat pee.” Tanya took a generous swallow from her wineglass and wiped her mouth with the tip of one finger.
“So being locked in doesn’t seem weird?”
Tanya shrugged. “Sure it’s weird, but it beats making the drive out from town every day. And where else are you going to make this much money?”
Beth Fairman sat on one corner of Tanya’s bed. Out in the hall, three different songs played in three different rooms. Beth figured they’d all end up in one room sooner or later. It felt good to be out of that drab blue frock, and the other girls in the house did seem to be okay.
“What about all those nondisclosure agreements and stuff?”
“I know! This guy is, like, insane about the press.” Tanya gestured with her glass, and Beth passed the wine bottle over. There was a cellar full of the stuff, and the staff had their own section they were allowed to take from. The staff section was all cheap Australian plonk, but it was more than most employers allowed. The girls could drink as much after hours as they wanted, just as long as they brought the bottles into the quarters before nine.
“You ever clean for rich people before?” Beth said.
“Sure. You?”
“Couple of times. Back in Auckland, I worked this waterfront condo thing. They were all rich there, but you never really saw them, you know?” Beth stopped to sip wine from a juice glass. “And I worked for this one couple, they were like attorneys or something. At least, I think that’s what they said, I never saw them actually do anything. This is different, though.”
“That’s because the old guy’s famous. Famous people are different from rich ones.”
“Mister Terrabonne? What’d he do?”
“He used to be some kind of singer or something. Mum knew who he was. She got more excited about him than she did when I was on staff at Shania Twain’s place, out by Glenorchy.”
“You worked for Shania Twain?”
Tanya shrugged. “Sure. Most of one season, anyway.”
“What was she like?”
“Oh, you know.” Tanya tipped the wine bottle up and poured the last dribble into her glass. She dropped the empty on the carpet and pulled an unopened one from under her bed.
“No free wine at her house, that’s for sure.”
The two girls clicked glasses. Beth hoped she’d like it here. She’d never seen anything like Whispering Pines.
***
Midnight, the hookers showed. The owner of the local skin joint brought them, and for once that asshole Lasker got it right. Harlan looked the girls over as they came in: they were just about believable.
The six women stood together, shuffling and giggling, while Harlan laid down the law.
“All right, listen up. It’s a party in there, everybody go on have a good time. Whatever. But if Jack seems even a little bit partial, you are fucking into him. Got it?”
Whatever the whores saw in Harlan’s face quieted them down right quick. Big eyes and nodding heads and not one single goddamn giggle between them.
“Good,” Harlan said. “Any questions?”
“Um, how are we supposed to know which one’s Jack?”
“Jack Terrabonne? The country star?” Harlan searched the girl’s face for a flicker of recognition. Nothing but blank looks.
“Jack’s got a big white pompadour and a dark tan, y’all can’t miss him. Now get.”
The clicking of heels echoed down the hall. A safe distance away, feminine talk and laughter started up again.
“They great or what?” Lasker said.
The pimp was shaved-and-shiny bald, average height and gym-weight solid. Harlan towered over him.
“You only brought six.”
“Bloody hell, man. How easy do you think this is? The Southern Otago’s not exactly chocker with part-time models don’t mind turning the occasional trick. As it was, I had to fly that lot in from Auckland and Wellington!”