This Is How It Really Sounds (14 page)

“Deal.”

All three of them stood up and shook hands together. The singer felt a swelling of joy and relief. The untouchable was getting closer.

 

3

Tiger Claws a Tree A Precious Duck Flaps Its Wings

Knowing Bobby and Beth
were backing him up made it marginally easier to see his life dismantled piece by piece. It went fast. The meeting with Lev and Jason had been on a Wednesday. By Friday he'd signed for a new apartment and some organizer woman from Panama had come over and put little colored stickers on all his shit: blue for stuff they were moving, green for stuff they were selling, and black for shit they were throwing out.

Like when his mom had moved into the nursing home and everything had to be cleared out. He'd been getting ready for the
Wreckage
tour so he hired a service to take care of it, but his sisters still got on him for not helping. The single day he'd shown up, one glance into the Dumpster had destroyed him. The blue ceramic mixing bowl, the one Mom used to make cookies in, sitting there on the heap with the crack finally broken completely open, and he'd started to tear up, and Cody was like,
Forget it man, it's gone,
and it was gone: his childhood, his father, the kids in the neighborhood. In a few months, Cody would be gone, too, stupidly. Chugging that rum, and everybody too wasted to know they needed to call 911. That was some fucking wreckage, all right. The show went on, everybody saying shit like,
Cody would want us to go on,
but the reality being that it was their first big tour and
they
wanted it to go on. It had that weird dead-friend vibe, beneath all the blow jobs and the interviews and the parties, like Cody was looking over their shoulders all the time, not disapproving, but insistent, and it gave a weird dimension to the tour, one he never talked about except with Duffy and Bobby. He never wrote a song about it, never knew how, just like he'd never write a song about the mixing bowl in the Dumpster or that house outside Wilksbury. It didn't rock.

He was supposed to be helping the process of closing up his house, but on the last day he just lay on a couch with a bottle of Jägermeister and watched it all wash away. Moving guys in and out for three hours. A couple of them asked for autographs between hauling his stuff. The stereo equipment, the pool furniture, the chrome floor lamp, the guitars. Fifteen years of his life turned into yellow tags at a secondhand store. When the only thing left was the couch he was lying on, he stood up, stepped into his sandals, and walked out.

This is what it came to. Two years in Tacoma with his high school band, then a couple more in Seattle, then three more in L.A. before the DreamKrushers got signed. Everyone thought rockers appeared on the scene after a few months of club gigs; they didn't see the humiliating grind that led up to it. Asking for favors from people who owed you nothing, building mailing lists of potential fans, begging people to please come to your next show, please keep on liking you, because somehow you might be able to turn all that liking into a better gig, a bigger spotlight, a contract, a million dollars, a future of parties where you hung with people you couldn't quite imagine but that were somehow better than the ones you presently knew. A little bit like the perfume ad, where you thought you were going to be elegant and in control, when what you were really aspiring to was having some unseen rich guy feel you up in his limo. Which was kind of funny, actually.

*   *   *

Once he got into the new apartment, Bobby was the one who got him focused. They still had to find the Crossroads guy: he'd fallen off the charts a while ago, and they needed to know where he lived and where he hung out. Bobby would look into that, but if he was going to find this fucker and beat him down, he needed to prepare. “It'd be a shame if you tracked this punk down and got your ass kicked,” Bobby said. “Plus, he might have a bodyguard, so you can't dink around. I've put together a list of some martial arts teachers. You just have to pick one.”

Bobby would always call ahead and make sure the instructors knew he was coming. There were some fans out there; a few autographs got signed, and one of the instructors told him that “Looking for the eXit” was one of his favorite songs. But mostly he was treated as no big deal, which made him a little uncomfortable amid all that sweating and kicking and shouting.

The different schools were like different styles of music. The big tae kwon do studio had rigid files of identically dressed students in white pajamas, each kicking and shouting in unison, banging the heavy bag with jumping, spinning motions that would probably go over well in his act.

The kung fu class did most of their motions standing in place in a deep, wide stance—straight, powerful punches and big circular, whipping motions. He liked their outfits, too: black pajamas with little frog closures. But when he tried a class, they set him in place and told him to hold a horse stance for five minutes. Legs wide, knees bent. After one minute, his thighs were shaking, and when he went to sit down, the instructor came and gave him a lot of noise in that Chinese accent. He walked out, just to show him he didn't have to take his shit, no matter what kind of master he was.

Bobby took him to some sort of Hsing-Yi-Bagua thing, with a fat, middle-aged instructor who wore his gray hair in a ponytail and looked about as dangerous as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. They spent the first twenty minutes standing still with their arms out in front of them in a circle, breathing. Then they moved to a different position, and breathed some more. Then they walked around in a little circle moving their arms, like a little dance. Then they did some more breathing, just in case. Nobody looked particularly athletic: there were some stocky housewives and a couple of older guys. The master had a huge potbelly, which he said he used for Jujube gut. “Here,” he said, “punch me in the stomach as hard as you can.”

“Isn't this what killed Houdini?”

He insisted, so Pete punched him as hard as he could, a big wide swing that seemed to sink into the instructor's fat belly as if into a tub of Jell-O. The instructor never lost his smile. It was impressive, but he wanted to learn how to hit people, not how to absorb hits. And that belly? Seriously! That's what lipo was for.

He tried Muay Thai, but after one session with a personal trainer his shins were bruised and the muscles in his hips hurt. The Shito Ryu class was in a storage unit in Pasadena. They'd shoehorned a locker room and a tiny reception area into some raw space lit with fluorescent bulbs. The instructor was a tiny Japanese man who spoke bad English and obviously hadn't heard of him. The style itself looked businesslike and effective, but he couldn't see driving all the way to Pasadena to work out in a storage unit. At the boxing gym, they looked at him like they were just waiting for the chance to hit him in the face. The Brazilian jiujitsu class: no way! They'd break him in half!

He went through a dozen schools in three weeks, until it seemed like Bobby had run out of styles. “Pete, you're going to have to get serious about one of them. You can't keep blowing them off.”

“I just don't feel it, Bobby!”

“I got one more guy,” Bobby said. “I don't know too much about him. I heard about him through a bodyguard friend of mine. Evidently, he's got a lot of experience at the kind of skills you need. He used to be some kind of spy, or assassin. I'm not sure what, but it supposedly involved killing people.”

Pete was in the tiny exercise room of his apartment, walking on his treadmill, but he stopped and let himself be carried backward to the floor. “Don't you think that's a little harsh?”

“I'm just saying, this is the guy's background. His name's Charlie. He's a war veteran and he helped train the Navy SEALs. I don't know anything else about him. Just that he can teach you what you need to know and help you find this guy and get close to him.”

An assassin. At the very least, it'd be an interesting conversation. He'd never met an assassin before. “Set up a meeting.”

“Evidently, you don't set up a meeting with this guy. You let him know, and then he'll set up the meeting with you.”

They agreed, and the musician began to wait. With the imaginary assassin on his way, he began to train harder to be ready for him. He didn't want to look like a pussy. He hit the treadmill every day and started upping his time and speed. He started going to the gym again, eager to get to the weights and start lifting them, looking in the mirror afterward at his swollen muscles and imagining how intimidating it would be for his adversary when he finally confronted him.

But lifting weights was so boring! In fact, every day he seemed to do a little less weight lifting and a little more magazine reading. Or steaming. Or hanging out at the juice bar and scoping out the talent. Then he'd hit the weights for a few reps and call it good. Some days he spent half his time in the lounge, reading magazines. He had to keep current on the music business, not to mention reality shows and stuff so he could make good career choices once his new song took off.

He often thought of the man he was waiting to meet, picturing him in his forties, with dark hair and eyes and a navy-blue sport jacket, like James Bond. Or else he pictured him as a sort of human vulture, tall, pale, and bald, with aviator sunglasses that he never took off and a grave demeanor through whose lengthy silences blew the monotonous music of death. Or something like that. He'd have a low voice, be kind of slim but wiry, never smile. He'd be a good character for a song.
Hit man, do not follow me, with your graveyard voice and your little bag of time. Hit man, do not follow me, I had no choice and I
something, something
blind.

But the hit man didn't seem to be following him. Two weeks passed, and he started to suspect that Bobby had been bullshitting, or that someone had been bullshitting Bobby, or maybe, and this depressed him, that a real pro just wasn't interested in working for a washed-up front man. The Pete Harrington name still impressed people, at least the little people. For people in the business, though, Pete Harringtons were the cheapest commodity around, used-up artists who'd had their day and didn't have enough talent or charisma or whatever it took to keep that day rolling out to new horizons. Maybe this assassin had talked to some industry people or just put two and two together.

The whole thing was starting to feel empty. He still had no fight training and no plan for just how to do this. He didn't even know where Peter Harrington was! New York? Kickin' back in the Caymans with all the other tax dodgers? Bobby said he'd handle it, but maybe he was only going through the motions after all. A different future was starting to unroll, one where the other Peter Harrington kept on living large in some unknown place on his ripped-off fortune while this whole dream of justice went colorless and shapeless and dead, leaving him just another dumbass at the gym training for something that would never happen.

So when the word came down, he wasn't ready for it. He'd done his first set of reps, or actually half a set, then decided to take a break and have a cold soda. He eyed the room to see if there were any good-looking babes who recognized him. There was one he'd been seeing the past couple of weeks: former vixen but, shit, probably older than he was. He sat in his usual chair in the lounge and picked up a copy of
Rolling Stone
. Wedged into the table of contents was a white piece of paper. It said:

YOUR MAN IS IN SHANGHAI

He stared at the message. Was it for him? It seemed like it might be, but maybe it was for a woman whose boyfriend was traveling in China. Maybe Shanghai meant “trouble” in some sort of new gang talk. Some drug dealer's runner was in trouble with the law or with another gang.
You're in fucking Shanghai now, motherfucker …

He decided to be cool, to keep pretending to read the magazine while he looked around. There were a dozen other people in the lounge, the usual mix of young people wearing sweat clothes or leotards. The older woman was watching him.
I have so made you, hit man!
Or hit woman. Whatever it was.

He'd noticed her watching him the past couple of weeks. She had blond hair and a thin face, an older woman's body kept in near-mint condition by some kind of fiendish exercise program. A little bit worn, but wearing it well. Maybe she was forty-five, fifty. Of course! If you're going to be a hit man, what better way to conceal your identity than to be a woman! Take away the leotards, and
definitely
the kind of chick who'd put a snubby in your kidney and pull the trigger. When he caught her eye, she smiled at him.

He got up and walked over to her, brandishing the note. “Okay. You got me!”

She said, “I guess I did!”

He put out his hand. “Pete Harrington. It's a pleasure to meet you.”

“I know exactly who you are. I know all about you. I love your music!”

“Cool. I'd be a little intimidated if you didn't like my music.” He was getting a weird vibe off her. “We should probably talk someplace with a little more privacy, don't you think?”

She looked at him carefully then raised her eyebrows. “We could do that.”

He managed to find an empty massage room and lock the door behind them. He turned to her. “So … How did you find out he's in Shanghai?”

The woman kept her smile but tilted her face quizzically to the side. “Who's in Shanghai?”

“Peter Harrington. The guy I'm looking for.” He held up the piece of paper. “
This
guy.”

She laughed softly. “You were always very mysterious, Pete.”

“You didn't leave this note?”

“No.” She looked at it, then at him, licking her lips. “If I'd left it, it would have said something else.”

“Oh!” Getting the vibe now. No mistaking it. “So … Do we, um, know each other?”