Endgame (3 page)

T
he
limo swerved and came to a stop at the side of the road. An aging rocker, tall and thin in peg-leg pants, sleeveless T-shirt, and black leather vest, got out of the driver's seat and looked at the back tire on the passenger side.

“It's fine!” he shouted to the pair inside, a little louder than necessary.

The rear window rolled down. Clouds of cigarette smoke emerged. A Japanese woman with ragged purple hair and too much eyeliner squinted at him.
She looks like an Asian vampire
, he thought.
Neurotic bitch.
And still as big a pain as ever.

“Check it again, Pete. I don't want to die in this cock-sucking hellhole. Where the fuck are we, anyway?”

Pete made a show of kicking the tire. “It's fine, Sami Lee.” Now that he'd started, he would have to go round to all four tires, kicking them one at a time.
Always complete,
the Voice reminded him.

“We're almost there,” Pete said, trying not to glare at the woman sitting in the back seat next to Max Hardcore.

Max was the one Pete really worried about. Max with his thinning hair and his middle-aged paunch. He was still bad news, like the number thirteen or a black cat on Halloween. Max was the guy Pete didn't want to offend. If they were going to pull off this reunion gig, he'd have to stay on Max's good side. Hell, they'd all have to stay on Max's good side. Not that Max had a good side. This was one hellbent bad boy. A vicious, drug-addled twat. It was a wonder Kent died of an overdose rather than Max.

Crap
, Pete thought.
An entire week on an island with Max and Spike and Sami Lee
. Was there a worse hell he could think of? Not likely, but this was probably the last chance any of them would have to revive their careers. And if anybody needed it, it was Pete Doghouse, né Peter Harrison, from Spokane, Washington. Of all the losers from the Lilac City's gutters, Pete was the least likely to have made it. If he hadn't clung to the ragged coattails of Max and Spike as they battled their way up the punk-rock ladder, he might never have got out. For all the good it did him, though, it almost seemed he'd never left. He'd spent the last decade working in a factory warehouse just to make ends meet.

At work, no one cared that he used to be Pete Doghouse, bassist for the legendary Ladykillers. No one would be impressed if he told them he'd met Joe Strummer or traded dirty jokes with Johnny Rotten. So he didn't tell them. They didn't need to know who he was. Every once in a while, someone with a keen eye and a good memory asked if he was Pete Doghouse or if he might be related to Pete Doghouse, or even if he knew that he looked a little like Pete Doghouse, but he always denied it. To his fellow workers, he was just another down-and-out Joe who lifted boxes for a living and drank bad beer in dirty pubs after-hours.

He also didn't tell them about the Voice that told him to touch each box twice or crack his knuckles and pat that one three times on the top and another one on the bottom before piling them up in a corner and continuing with his work. They would only have laughed. And Pete Doghouse hated being laughed at. Worse, he could never have explained why he felt he had to do everything the Voice told him. So Pete kept to himself as best he could. He didn't have much of an urge to talk anyway. No sense in reliving past glories.

It was hard now for Pete to believe some of the things he'd seen and done in his time, but the heyday had ended. After the band broke up, he'd faded into the woodwork, like so many other out-of-work musicians from back then. He couldn't even get studio work. Not surprising, since he wasn't much of a musician. No one noticed for years that they could barely play a note, because most of their gigs had been such noisy bash-ups. There'd always been musicians to fix the mess they made of their early records. Max used to joke that he knew only three chords on his guitar. That was close to the truth, but it didn't seem like a joke now.

Pete peered into the car. Sami Lee had crawled onto Max's lap and was giving him little pecks on the cheek. If she didn't keep her mouth shut, Pete thought, he might do something he'd regret. It was bad enough that he had to book time off work to come out here, making some lame excuse about a dying mother-in-law. Then, once they'd decided to drive up together, Sami Lee insisted on going by limo. With her chain-smoking and constant carping, it had been pure torture. Worst of all, Pete had been the one to put the car on his credit card. How the hell did she expect him to pay for it? She probably hadn't thought about that. Max spoiled her, so it wouldn't occur to her that someone had to pay the fucking piper.
Bitch!

As he stood there fuming, a red Saab zoomed over the crest of the hill and headed straight for them. Pete had just enough time to leap to the shoulder as the car went roaring by. He caught a glimpse of an over-dressed business-type with dark skin sitting behind the wheel. The man barely glanced at Pete as he raced past.

“Fucking asshole!” Pete screamed, shaking his fist as the car disappeared in the distance.

He heard laughter coming from the backseat.

“What are you laughing at?” Pete demanded of the pair huddled together and smirking at him through the window.

“You, you fucking piece of shit,” Max said. “Get back in the car. We're gonna miss the boat.”

Pete got back in and glared at the couple in the rear-view mirror. They'd already stopped paying attention to him. He checked his image: the pale face, as though he'd grown up under a rock; the now-permanent dark circles under his eyes; and the dry, stringy hair. What a fucking mess. The factory was killing him. Clearly, he spent too much time indoors.

Sami Lee's giggles reached him from the back seat. He looked back to see her smirking.

“Get going, man,” Max commanded.

Pete ran a hand through his hair and sighed.
Gotta keep my cool
, he reminded himself.
These two are trouble enough without getting on their bad side
. He turned the key and eased the car back onto the road.

“Remind me again why we're doing this?” he said over his shoulder.

He heard a grunt.

“Money. What the fuck do you think?” Max said.

“You sure you and Spike will be able to get along after all this time?” Pete asked, wondering if that was possible. They'd been inseparable in the early days, like some sort of freakish science-fiction twins. Since the breakup, as far as anyone knew, they hadn't spoken a word to one another.

“Harvey says he's into it,” Max replied with a bored shrug. “If that cunt can do it, so can I.”

A train sped past them on the left. They held pace with it for a while before it veered off into the hills. They might have outraced it, but Pete had to stop the car every time he saw an Arby's. He didn't know why; the Voice just told him to stop.
Pee time
, he'd say, to groans from the back seat. Or,
Got something in my eye. Won't be a minute
. How else to explain you're under the control of a voice in your head? Then he'd go in, take a breath, and wash his hands in excessively hot water before returning. He didn't know why he had to do it, but if he didn't follow the Voice's commands the tension became unbearable. By now, he knew it was easier to submit.

An hour later they arrived at a small fishing village — mostly locals and a few tourists in town for the season. The car windows rolled down as the three occupants looked around. Sami Lee hated small towns. Small towns, she knew, tended to breed small minds. Anyone different was looked on as an outcast. They were either feared or scorned and sometimes both. Her mother had lived through Second World War Japan — she remembered Hiroshima — so Sami Lee knew humans could adapt. If she had to, she could survive worse. In some ways, punk rock had been kind of an atomic blast.

Pete stopped the car to ask for directions to the boat landing. A woman with a small boy looked the car over. The kid's face was shiny with wonder.
Probably never saw a limo before
, Pete thought.

The woman smiled when he greeted her, but her expression darkened at the mention of Shark Island.

“The wharf's down past Pacific Ave,” she told him, pointing out a few clapboard houses up ahead.

“Uncle Mark nearly died on Shark Island,” said the boy, his face alive with this colourful bit of news.

“Is that so now?” Max said to the boy through his open window. “What did he nearly die of?”

“Experiments,” the boy said, both solemn and proud to impart such important facts.

Max looked at the boy's mother.

An anxious look crossed her face. “My brother-in-law was helping with the construction on the island last year. They said it was just ordinary construction, but I don't know. He's all right now, but he got some bad burns on him when it happened. It was some secret government operation, is what we think.”

Conspiracy theory bullshit
, Max thought. He nodded. “You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it was aliens behind it. Happens all the time,” he said, as the window rolled up and the car moved on.

By the time they reached the dock, a small crowd had gathered.
Fans
, Pete thought with a hint of excitement he hadn't felt since the old days.
They've heard about the reunion
. But in fact, it was just a group of fisherman come to look at an old rig they were thinking of rejuvenating. No one paid much attention to the trio of rock 'n' roll misfits passing by as if they were looking for a costume party that had ended twenty years earlier.

Then Pete saw the red Saab off to one side. He didn't have to guess it was the same car that nearly knocked him off the road earlier. And there, standing next to the Saab, was the man who' d barely glanced at him as he raced past.

The guy was watching them with a cocky expression. Pete thought of saying something to wipe the smirk from his face. In the old days, with Spike and Max and Kent to back him up, he would have done just that. These days he was more cautious. You never knew what son of a bitch might be carrying a knife.

He was saved any further aggro when a big man in a lumber jacket came toward them. He could have been ex-navy or a gym trainer a little past his prime.

“Are you for Shark Island?” the man asked, looking them over.

“That's us,” Max said. “I'm Max. This is Sami Lee and Pete.”

“Edwards,” the man said, holding out a hand. “I'm here to take you over in the boat.”

They all shook hands.

Max looked down at the bags. Edwards picked them up without a word and hoisted them over his shoulder.

“Are you a Rain City native?” Max asked.

Edwards gave him a queer look. “You mean a Seattleite?”

“Yeah, that. Are you?”

“No. Just a Spokane boy off his turf.”

“You don't say,” Max said. “Us, too.”

Just then the Saab driver came up to them. “Are you heading for Shark Island?” he asked.

“Yes,” Edwards said.

“I'll be going with you then,” he replied. He looked at Max. “Hello, Max.”

Max gave him a flinty-eyed assessment. Pete knew that look. If he wanted to, Max could take you out with a glance. If he decided in your favour, though, you were treated like a member of the in crowd.

“Who the fuck are you?” Max grunted

“I'm your lawyer,” the man said with a wink. “I've been hired to make sure you get what's coming to you.”

Max's features hardened. “And what might that be?”

“A fair deal — this time around, at least.”

Max nodded gruffly. “What makes you think I need a lawyer to get a fair deal?”

“Believe me, Max — you're going to want my advice before you sign any of those offers they're about to throw at you. You can't trust the record companies as far as you can throw them, which isn't far.”

“Record companies?”

“They didn't tell you?”

Max shook his head. It was the first he' d heard of a record deal.

The man gave him a shrewd look. “I'm talking about
Endgame
, Max. They want you and Spike and Pete here” — he glanced over at Pete — “to finish it. If you want to, that is. No one tells the great Max Hardcore what to do. Least of all me. I'm just here to give you my professional advice.” He paused. “It worked for you once before.”

Max glanced at Pete and Sami Lee, but said nothing.

“You don't remember me, do you?” the man asked.

Max squinted hard and gave him a good look. In fact, he did look familiar, though he couldn't have said why.

“Think back, Max. Twenty years back.”

All three of them looked at the guy again.

“What did you say your name was?” Pete said.

“Noni Embrem.”

“No shit! Fuck — I hardly recognized you, man!” Max said, grabbing Noni's hand and pumping it enthusiastically.