Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

Next case. Jesus Christ. Truth is I feel weird even talking about cases . I mean, with my impressive juvenile resumé of drug-running and related criminal activities, it wasn’t like the State was going to fucking license me any time soon. And, besides, most of the people who came to me with their little problems weren’t the sort of people who were likely to want the authorities anywhere within sniffing distance of their own shit. Nevertheless, for the last eighteen months or so, the Donnelly larder had been stocked pretty exclusively by the proceeds of a series of adventures in private investigation, so turns out — licensed or not — I’d sashayed my way into becoming Nancy Drew for the meh generation.

“It was that guy,” Anna said. “I’m pretty sure. Have you got any more coffee?” She looked around my kitchenette with a hopeful expression, like the coffee could perhaps be somewhere other than the auto-drip’s empty pitcher and waggled her mug on the counter-top like she might tempt it out of hiding.

“I’ll make some,” I said, getting up. “What guy?”

“The guy ,” she said, giving me a look like what the fuck was wrong with me not keeping up with her tweets.

“Remind me,” I said, walking to the machine and swapping out the used filter.

“Took a stranger home after a gig,” she said. “Fucked him. Gone when I woke up. No name, no number. One of my 45s was missing.”

Come on. Of course that’s not what she said. What she said took the entire brew-cycle, but I’ve done you the courtesy of editing out the how-she-felt and the what-she-wore and the how-he-seemed-nice and the Emma’s-cool-but-she-can-be- so -jealous and all the rest of her Proustian-level-of-detail shit. Trust me, you owe me big.

I’d press her later for more clues to the identity of the gentle and sensitive young poet with whom she’d shared those brief idyllic moments, but first I wanted to know if what might have been stolen was something actually worth stealing. I asked her the name of the missing single.

“You probably haven’t heard of it, Kitty,” she said gently — you know, me being twenty-five and such a fucking square and all. “It’s called ‘The Devil Rides Shotgun’, by Guest Eagleton.”

Bless her. Everything’s new to seventeen-year-olds, even history. The record in question was certainly a rarity, but the story behind it was hardly obscure. They even made a bad TV movie about it in the early eighties, something I resisted telling Anna for fear it would break her hip little heart. Rockabilly legend Eagleton — not a legend at the time, of course, just another redneck punk lucky enough to be making a third single because his second had crossed over from the regional charts to the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 — recorded ‘The Devil Rides Shotgun’ in 1957. By all accounts, the recording itself went fine — single hanging mike, three-piece band, two takes and off to the cathouse, those were the days — but between the day of the recording and the release of the single Guest finally got around to reading his contract.

Discovering that the label’s owner — a scurrilous one, imagine that — had put himself up as co-writer of the song, young Guest, still fresh from the Kentucky hills and not one to wait for lawyers when there’s a sawn-off handy, broke into the record plant to personally stop the pressing of the 45.

Here’s the part of the story where fact shades into legend. It’s a fact Guest was shot by the first cop on the scene. It’s a fact that he fell from the gantry into the production line below. I don’t know for a fact he was dead before his face landed in the hot wax vat, but I sure hope so. It’s a fact that twenty-seven copies of the 45 were pressed before they could shut the line down. And the legend, of course, is that each of those twenty-seven copies contains microscopic remnants of their late creator because the flesh that was stripped from his skull by the molten vinyl was swirled away with it and stamped into the records themselves. You can believe it if you like. Snopes gives it a cautious “hasn’t actually been disproved” kind of rating.

Anyway, the final fact is that — whether the story of their extra ingredient was true or not — those copies of the single, though never officially released, have become Grail-like to serious vinyl junkies over the years. Springsteen paid nearly twenty grand for his copy back in his glory days, the nerd from Coldplay almost twice as much at a Sotheby’s auction three years ago. Anna got hers as a gift. Like I said, pretty girl.

It wasn’t even lunchtime before I was cooling my heels in the lobby of a mid-level talent agency on Beverly waiting to see the douche who’d picked Anna up and ask him nicely for the return of her property.

Here’s the thing about detecting that my more invested-in-the-myth colleagues don’t want you to know: like every other job, it’s really easy except for those rare but annoying times when it’s not. This thing of Anna’s took me one phone call to a barman I knew at the club where the Barbies had played, another to a customer he knew who’d spent time talking to the aforementioned douche, and a quick Internet search of employment records.

I’d given my name to the pretty young man at the reception desk and told him I needed to see Andy Velasco on a personal matter of some urgency. He’d told me he’d do what he could, but that Mr Velasco was very busy, and I’d bit my tongue and sat down to wait. But by the time I’d read Variety from cover to cover I figured I’d waited long enough and, in the next brief gap in the endless phone calls the receptionist was fielding, walked back over to his desk and said, “Where’s his office?”

The receptionist pulled a face. “I’m going to need you to sit down and be patient.”

“When?” I asked him.

“Excuse me?”

“When are you going to need me to do that?”

He hesitated, because — how the hell would he know — maybe I actually was that stupid.

“Now,” he said, with that weary politeness that’s supposed to let you know you’re dealing with a trained professional.

“Now?” I said. “So what’s with all the ‘I’m going to’ crap? Present tense. Future tense. They’re different for a reason.” Poor bastard. Wasn’t like he was the only idiot to talk that way but, you know, millionth customer gets the confetti and the coupon-book. Luck of the draw.

“I need you to sit down,” he said. “ Now .” Giving it his best firm and authoritative, just like the manual must’ve told him. Adorable.

“Well, I need Scarlett Johansson and a fistful of Rohypnol,” I said. “So that’s two of us that are shit out of luck.”

“I have no problem with calling the police,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said. “But I can guarantee you your Mr Velasco would.” He came up short on the snappy comeback front so I pressed on. “Tell him I’ve got a pitch for him. Re-imagining of an old classic. Statutory Rape and the Single Rockchick . Pretty sure he’ll want to hear it.”

Five minutes later, I was driving the single back to Anna’s place in Echo Park.

And five hours later, after a breakneck jaunt up and around the curves of Mulholland, I was about to be ushered in to a mansion on a hill by my new friend, Cody Garrity.

His little helper had clambered into Ilsa’s driver seat when Cody and I’d got out and, as he slipped her back into drive and started out of the courtyard roundabout, he dropped the window, grinned at me, and pantomimed a shot to my head. Charm. It’s just something you’re born with.

I returned the smile and nodded. “Catch you later,” I said.

He didn’t much care for the way I’d said it, I guess, because he slammed back into park like he was ready to get out and teach the bitch some manners.