The Armageddon Rag Read online

  And up in front stood Hobbins, legs spread, head thrown back so his waist-long white hair cascaded down behind him, eyes blazing scarlet, one hand clutching a microphone and the other clawing the air. He wore a black denim suit with buttons made of bone, and on his crotch was sewn an American flag with the Eye of Mordor where the stars ought to have been. He looked like something supernatural, slight and small yet possessed of a vitality that shrieked at the darkness and held it at bay.

  Against the great purple sun was a single word, in spiky black lettering, that looked like a lightning bolt mated to a snake. Nazgûl, it said. And down below, very faint, gray against the blackness, it whispered Music to Wake the Dead.

  Sandy slid the album out of the jacket cover and placed it carefully on his turntable, set it in motion, and turned up the amp all the way. Tonight he wanted it loud, the way it had been when he first heard it, back in ’71, the way the Nazgûl meant it to be played. If that bothered Sharon, upstairs shuffling her papers, that was her tough luck.

  For a moment there was only silence, then a faint noise growing louder, something that sounded like a teakettle whistling, or maybe a missile coming down. It rose until it was a shrill scream that went knifing through your brain, and then came the heavy sound of drums as Gopher John laid down the backbeat, and then the guitars cut in, and finally there was Hobbins, laying full-force into “Blood on the Sheets.” The opening lyric gave Sandy a strange small shudder. Baby, you cut my heart out, the Nazgûl sang, Baby, you made me bleeeeed!

  He closed his eyes and listened, and it was almost as if a decade had gone away, as if West Mesa had never happened, as if Nixon was still in the White House and Vietnam still raged and the Movement still lived. But somehow, even in that tattered past, one thing remained the same, and in the darkness, lit by the songs of the Nazgûl, it was etched clearer than ever.

  Jamie Lynch was dead. They had, indeed, cut his heart out.

  TWO

  I see a bad moon a-rising/

  I see trouble on the way

  Sheriff Edwin Theodore was called “Notch” by all and sundry in his jurisdiction, for reasons that were not readily apparent to Sandy Blair. Notch was a small, gaunt man with terrific posture, a narrow pinched face, rimless glasses, and iron-gray hair that he combed straight back. He looked as if he ought to have been holding a pitchfork and staring out of a painting. Sandy took one look at Notch and decided to call him Sheriff Theodore.

  The sheriff fingered Sandy’s crisp, white, officious business card while looking dubiously at Sandy himself. For a moment, beneath Theodore’s pale watery scrutiny, Sandy felt like it was 1969 again and he had hair down to his ass and a stainless-steel peace medallion on a leather thong around his neck. It was an effort to remember that, scruffy as he was, he didn’t look much worse than any other reporter. Maybe he was wearing jeans, but at least they were expensive jeans, and his brown cord jacket ought to be acceptable enough, even if it was a bit on the old side. He ran a self-conscious hand through his mop of thick black hair and felt briefly thankful that he had long since given up wearing his beard.

  Theodore handed back his card. “Never heard of no National Metropolitan News Network,” he said brusquely. “What channel is that?”

  “Not television,” Sandy said, deciding that he’d better play it straight. “We publish a national music and entertainment tabloid out of New York. With Lynch’s rock connections, the story is a natural for us.”

  Sheriff Theodore replied with a small, parsimonious grunt. “Press conference was two days ago,” he said. “You missed it. Most of the other newspaper boys come and gone by now. Ain’t nothing new.”

  Sandy shrugged. “I’ll be working a feature slant,” he said. “I’d like to interview you about the case, talk over whatever theories you’re working on, and maybe go out and take a look at Lynch’s house, where it happened. Do you have any leads?”

  Theodore ignored the question. “Did my talking at the press conference. Got nothing else to say. Ain’t got time to be repeating myself for every fool reporter comes up here late.” He looked around the office with a disgruntled expression on his face and beckoned to one of his deputies. “I’ll have one of my men run you out to Lynch’s place and answer your questions, but I can’t spare him more than an hour, so you get what you want quickly, Mister Blair, or the National Metropolitan News Network is going to be shit out of luck. You understand that?”

  “Uh, sure,” Sandy said, but Theodore hadn’t waited for an answer. A bare few minutes later, he was packed into one of the sheriff’s cars, heading out of town in the company of a gangling, horsefaced deputy named David (“Call me Davie”) Parker. Parker was about Sandy’s age, though his receding brown hair made him look older. He had an amiable smile and a clumsy way of moving.

  “How long will it take us to get to the house?” Sandy asked as they pulled out from the curb.

  “Depends on how fast we go,” Parker replied. “It isn’t far as the crow flies, but it’s all back roads. Takes a while.”

  “I’m only supposed to have you for an hour.”

  Parker laughed. “Oh, that. Don’t worry about it. I’m coming off shift and I got nothing better to do, so I might as well run you out to Lynch’s. Notch is just out of sorts with reporters. Two of them spelled his name wrong after the press conference.”

  “It is Theodore?” Sandy said, checking his notes.

  “Yeah. But it’s Edwin, not Edward.”

  Sandy was double-checking that when the deputy said, “Speaking of names, you’re Sandy Blair, right? The writer?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “I’ve read your books. Two of them, anyway.”

  “Which two?” Sandy said, astonished.

  “Open Wounds and Copping Out,” Parker said. “You sound surprised.”

  “I am.”

  Parker gave him a shrewd sidelong glance. “Cops do read, you know. Well, some cops. And this isn’t the wilderness you New Yorkers think it is. We get movies up here, books, newspapers, even rock and roll.”

  “I didn’t…” Sandy began, then thought better of it. “What did you think of the novels?” he asked.

  “Open Wounds was too depressing for my taste,” Parker said. “You write pretty well, I’ll give you that. Didn’t like the ending of Copping Out.”

  “Why not?” Sandy said, a bit bemused at the idea of chewing over the merits of his first novel with a deputy in the Maine woods en route to a murder site.

  “Because your hero is an asshole. What’s the point? He’s finally gotten a decent job, he’s making some money, being responsible for the first time in his life, and he chucks it all. For what? Even he doesn’t know. If I remember right, it ends with him walking down a street, wondering where it leads. It doesn’t even bother him that he’s out of work, that he’s let down everybody who was counting on him.”

  “But that’s the point,” Sandy said. “It doesn’t bother him. It’s a happy ending. He’s free. Finally. He’s stopped selling out.”

  “Wonder how long that lasted,” Parker said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “When did you write that book?”

  “I started it back around ’69 or so, but I didn’t get around to finishing it until I left the Hog seven years ago.”

  “Well,” said Parker, “all this bopping around being free was fine back then, but I’d be curious to know how it’s lasted. How’s your guy like poverty after a decade of it? Where does he crash these days? Bet you he don’t get laid as often now as he did in your book. I’d like to see this jerk in the Eighties, friend. I’d lay odds he’s selling out again.”

  “Touché,” Sandy said glumly. “All right, the novel’s a bit naïve. What can I say? It was a reflection of its time and social context. You had to be there.”

  Parker glanced at him. “I’m about your age.”

  “Maybe it depended on which side of the barricades you were on.”

  “I wasn’t on either side. I was over in
’Nam, getting shot at while you and your characters were getting stoned and getting laid.” The deputy was still smiling, but there was a faint bitter edge to his voice that Sandy found unnerving.

  “You weren’t there on account of me, friend,” Sandy said. The subject made him uncomfortable; he changed it. “Let’s talk about this Lynch business. Who did it?”

  Parker had a warm laugh. “You come right to the point. Hell, we don’t know who did it.”

  They had turned off the main road some time back and were winding their way through a thick stand of woods, all orange and rust in the late afternoon light, on a narrow dirt track. The car was riding roughly, but Sandy spread his notebook on his knee and stared down at some of his questions. “You think the killer was local?” he asked.

  Parker spun the car deftly around a sharp turn. “It’s doubtful. Lynch kept to himself pretty much. This damned road ought to tell you that much. He liked his privacy, I guess. Oh, I suppose there was some friction between Lynch and those who had dealings with him. I mean, he didn’t exactly blend in. But nobody had any reason to go kill him, much less do it… well, the way it was done.”

  “Cut his heart out, you mean?” Sandy said, making a note. The motion of the car turned his handwriting into a scrawl.

  Parker nodded. “This is Maine. That’s a New York kind of thing to do. Or maybe California,” he added thoughtfully.

  “Did they find it?”

  “The murder weapon?”

  “The heart.”

  “No. Neither one.”

  “All right,” Sandy said. “So it wasn’t local. Any suspects, then? You must be investigating someone.”

  “Well, we’re playing with a couple of theories. Nothing really seems to fit, though. We thought maybe robbery at first. Lynch might have been washed up in the music business, but he was still rich as hell. Except there’s no evidence that anything was taken.”

  “You’re forgetting the heart,” Sandy said.

  “Yeah,” said Parker, noncommittally. “The other thing we’re thinking is that maybe drugs were involved somehow. Lynch had a couple of convictions, you know.”

  Sandy nodded. “He supplied hash and coke to his groups. That’s well known. Does it tie in?”

  “Oh, maybe. Rumors were that Lynch had lots of wild parties. Rumors were he kept drugs on hand. We didn’t find any. Maybe somebody killed him for his stash.”

  Sandy wrote that down. “OK,” he said. “What else?”

  The deputy shrugged. “There’s some other funny things about this murder.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you. We’re there.” They swung around another curve and over the crest of a hill, and suddenly there was Jamie Lynch’s house ahead of them. Parker pulled the car to a halt on the gravel of the circular driveway, and Sandy climbed out.

  Surrounded by woods on all sides, the house sprawled comfortably amid the riot of autumn foliage. It was a modern, tasteful place, built of red-gray stone and natural wood, with a red flagstone patio to one side and a large outdoor deck above it. A dozen steps of unfinished wood led from the base of the drive to the front door. All the windows were tightly shuttered. A large tree was growing through the roof.

  “There’s a little creek runs through the living room too,” Parker volunteered. “This place is even more impressive at night. Lights up all around here.”

  “Can we go inside?”

  Parker extracted a set of keys from his jacket. “That’s why we’re here.”

  They went in the front door. The interior was wood-paneled and deeply carpeted. Each room was on a slightly different level, so they went up and down small three-step staircases constantly and it was hard for Sandy to decide how many floors he was dealing with. Parker gave Sandy a quick tour. There were skylights, stained-glass windows, and—as advertised—a creek running through the living room, around the trunk of the old tree. The kitchen was modern and clean. The four bedrooms had water beds, mirrored ceilings, and fireplaces. And the sound system was incredible.

  Lynch had an entire wall of records, and speakers mounted in every room. It could all be operated from the living room, the master bedroom, or Lynch’s office, Parker said. He showed Sandy the nerve center, hidden behind a sliding wooden panel in the vast living room. It looked like the bridge of the starship Enterprise. The main speakers were taller than Parker and wafer-thin. “You could have played at Woodstock with an amp like this,” Sandy said in astonishment. “This is concert-level stuff.”

  “It’s loud,” Parker agreed. “That’s a factor in the case.”

  Sandy rounded on him. “How so?”

  “I’ll get to that,” the deputy said. “First, let me go through this with you. C’mon.” They went back to the entryway. Parker opened another sliding wall panel to reveal more lights and switches. “Security system,” he said. “Lynch had alarms on alarms. Paranoid fellow. You’d think somebody was out to kill him. The alarms were never tripped. No one broke in. Death came walking right up to the front door.”

  “Meaning he knew the killer?”

  “So we think. Either that or it was the Fuller Brush man.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, we construct it this way. The killer or killers drove up open as you please, got out, came up the front steps. Lynch met them and let them in. The lock wasn’t forced or anything. They went into the living room. That’s where the argument began. We found evidence of a struggle, and we think Lynch was overcome quickly and dragged back to his office, unconscious or unresisting, maybe dead. But we don’t think so. The living-room carpet shows drag marks. You haven’t seen the office yet. Come with me.”

  Sandy followed him dutifully back through the living room. This time Parker pointed out the marks in the carpet before he took out the keys again and unlocked the office door.

  Jamie Lynch’s workspace was an interior room, three times as long as it was wide, with a slanting skylight overhead but no windows. The only furniture was a big horseshoe-shaped mahogany desk, a chair, and twenty black filing cabinets that looked very stark against the deep milk-white carpeting. One long wall was covered floor to ceiling with mirror tiles, inlaid with decorative swirls, to make the office seem larger than it was. All the other wall space was taken up by posters and photographs; glossies of Lynch clients famous and infamous, pictures of Jamie and various celebrities, concert posters, political handbills, album cover blow-ups, commercial posters. Sandy looked them over with a faint pang of nostalgia. There was Che and there was Joplin, cheek-to-jowl. Nixon was selling used cars next to the infamous pornographic American Taco poster that had gotten a concert canceled and almost caused a riot. The far north wall, behind the desk, was taken up entirely with old Fillmore posters. “Quite a collection,” Sandy commented.

  Parker sat on the edge of the desk. “This is where they killed him.”

  Sandy turned away from the posters. “On the desk?”

  The deputy nodded. “They had rope. They bound him to the desk top, spread-eagle, one loop around each limb.” He pointed. “See the bloodstains on the carpet.”

  There was a large ragged stain by one of the legs and a couple of smaller ones around it. Against the white carpet they were painfully obvious, now that Parker had pointed them out. “Not much blood,” Sandy said.

  “Ah,” said Parker, smiling. “Interesting point. There was a lot of blood, actually, but our killer was fastidious. He pulled down one of the posters and spread it across the desk under the victim, so the wood wasn’t ruined. You can see where it’s missing.” He nodded.

  Sandy turned and looked, and finally noticed the blank spot among the posters, high on the east wall, about ten feet from where they stood. He frowned, bothered, yet unable for the moment to say why. “Weird,” he said, turning back to Parker. “How was Lynch found?”

  “The music was too loud.”

  Sandy took out his notebook. “Music?”

  Parker nodded. “Maybe Lynch was pl
aying a record when death arrived. Maybe whoever did this put one on to cover up the sound of Lynch screaming. Either way, there was this album playing. Over and over, endlessly. And it was playing loud. You said it yourself, this isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill home hi-fi. It was three in the morning and we got a noise complaint from Lynch’s nearest neighbor, a half-mile down the road.”

  “That loud?” Sandy said, impressed.

  “That loud. It was stupid, too. Our man probably only missed the killer by a minute or two on that dirt road. It doesn’t add up. Whoever did this, they were real careful otherwise. No prints, no murder weapon, no heart, very little physical evidence, no witnesses. We got a tire track, but it’s too common, useless. So why crank up the stereo like that? If they wanted to hide Lynch’s screaming, why not turn it off after he was dead?”

  Sandy shrugged. “You tell me.”

  “I can’t,” the deputy admitted. “But I’ve got an idea. I think it was some kind of hippie cult thing.”

  Sandy stared at him and laughed uncertainly. “Hippie cults?”

  Parker was looking at him shrewdly. “Blair, you don’t think every reporter who comes nosing around gets this kind of grand tour, do you? I’m giving you all this because I figure maybe you can give me something in return. You know things that I don’t. I know that. So talk.”