We really needed my car.
The only thing we could agree on was that we’d parked it next to a dumpster by the PfefferBrau Haus, but here was the problem: The PfefferBrau Haus took up multiple city blocks, and the brewery wasn’t exactly square. It had alleys. It had grain chutes. It had skybridges. It had railroad tracks (railroad tracks!) with no trains. It had multiple corners with multiple dumpsters, and that nasty smell like someone was cooking cereal in tomato soup.
“Let’s circle around one more time. Maybe we left it on the other side of the brewery.”
“Please don’t say ‘brew,’” Crock contributed from the curb, where he was unhelpfully sitting, head between his knees, waiting for Ev and me to solve the problem of how we were going to get twelve miles home to Gresham.
I hated Crock so much at that moment. Bad enough that, thanks to a passable fake ID, he’d been in the bar shotgunning microbrews, leaving Ev and me stranded in the mosh pit, and that he borrowed my “I Have Seen the Abyss and Went to Denny’s” button without asking and was wearing it now, flecked with spew.
But honestly: Couldn’t he have made an effort? As it was, that drunk homeless guy in the tinfoil hat was more helpful. At least he had raised his head when we asked him about my Gremlin, and muttered something about monstrous evil lurking in the bowels of the city, blah blah blah. You know, the whole end-is-nigh crap.
“Maybe we’re remembering the sign wrong. Maybe we left it in front of the plasma center?” Ev asked. His voice came out all wrong, like a grunt. We all donated plasma. It was like donating blood, only for cash. Not much cash, though. Just enough for the latest Ramones album.
I shook my head. There was no mistaking the PfefferBrau Haus. And then there was its history. I’m not a superstitious guy, but the only reason I’d parked here was that no one else wanted to. It was as though what happened to Sherell Wexler was contagious, even though that’s stupid. After all, you can’t catch a case of having your throat slit and being shoved into a vat of porter, can you?
This place creeped all of us out. All the more reason to forget about the piece of paper in my pocket.
I slipped my hand in to make sure it was still there. And it was. I knew without looking it was the color of beer froth and blood. I had the writing on it memorized, having folded it and unfolded it a million times in the club bathroom, to the beat of synthesizers and drum machines cranking out a rhythm that, whatever it was, wasn’t music.
Ev bent over. He had a bad case of grow-out. Under the dreadlocks was a layer of baby-fine blond hair. They were impressive dreads, long and dyed all the colors of the rainbow. Our senior class at Gresham High had voted him Most Unique—a title I clearly deserved—just because he had better hair than any white guy living or dead.
He said, “Listen, I know how much you love your car, man—”
“Ginny. Her name is Ginny.”
“—but I think we should call your sister. Just for tonight. We’ll look for your car in the morning.”
He was right. It was the middle of the night and we were stranded in the warehouse district of northwest Portland. The buses had stopped running hours ago. We didn’t have enough cash for a cab to Gresham.
We were screwed.
That was when Ev’s eyes squeezed shut in pain. He slammed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and doubled over. You would think I would be used to that by now, since Ev’s suffered from migraines since puberty, but I’d never seen him like this. He was writhing on the sidewalk, rolling right on the black spots of old gum and cigarette butts.
I rushed over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay, Ev? You pack your meds?”
“DOES IT LOOK LIKE I BROUGHT A PURSE?” he barked. “Shit!”
I remember thinking, Oh god. This isn’t a migraine. Something else is going on—when he appeared, the guy who was about to change all our lives.
He came out of the brewery shadows, walking loose-limbed and easy.
The hair was what I noticed first. It was egg-yolk yellow and poufy and high. He looked in our direction without seeming to really see us. He was wearing a loose blue shirt under a yellow thousand-dollar jacket, and he exuded cool.
Could it be . . .?? He looked a lot like David Bowie. And we would know, because Ev won a look-alike contest that netted him a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate to Jojo’s Records. This was years ago, in his pre-dread days, when all his hair was still blond and baby fine.
Behind me, Evan groaned. I propped him up against a wall, but he slid down it, his eyes practically rolling back into his brain.