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“Yeah. Think about the competition he’s up against. Colonel Tom Parker. I’m going to breeze by the dressing rooms and see if there’s any reaction there.”

“Think they’ve heard?”

“This is a pretty bizarre event to hide. Besides, I just directed the investigation toward the Elvis pageant. I bet those impersonators will hunger for my hide; they don’t want to break their concentration for anything.”

“They should be glad you’re here to protect their hides. If someone wants to kill ersatz Elvi, there’s a whole menu to choose from.”

“I suppose you’ll sacrifice your time and your best interests to accompany me down into the heart of Elvisdom?”

“You do need a witness to prove the innocence of your intentions. Just how many Elvi did you say are on tap downstairs?”

“It’s a regular microbrewery of megalomania.”

“Oh, goodie!” Electra rubbed her hands together and put her muumuu in motion.

Chapter 33

Bad Moon Rising

(Elvis sang this Credence Clearwater Revival hit in some of his 1970s concerts)

Matt shrugged on his faux sheepskin jacket, but he didn’t pull on his leather gloves.

He knew by now that a straggle of fans would be waiting outside the radio station for him to autograph a motley assortment of ephemera: his photographs, their autograph books, even the occasional T-shirt.

Leticia Brown encouraged this departing ritual. He dreaded it.

For one thing, he couldn’t help feeling defeated at the end of every show. The Midnight Hour had turned into the Elvis Hour. The phone lines bristled with calls from pro-and anti-Elvis listeners. The list of stump-Elvis questions had grown to three pages.

As if sensing this mob excitement building, the mysterious caller had remained mysteriously silent last night. Matt was being upstaged by a no-show.

He was annoyed with himself for not liking it, for wishing the sonofagun would end the suspense and just call, even it was to admit the whole thing was a hoax. Which was what it had to be, of course. Better to be revealed as the butt of a sick joke than to be stood up by a phantom.

They were always female, his fans, and they made him nervous. They looked at him with such fevered, hungry eyes, especially the Elvis groupies, as if he were an artery to the heart-blood of the King. He had a feeling they would slit his throat if they thought that would revivify Elvis.

Why else were they standing out here in the chilly dark collecting worthless autographs from the pen of a pseudonym? Still, they flocked to him when he exited the building with the touching excitement of residents of a home for the mentally challenged welcoming a rare visitor to their world.

And maybe he was more than slumming in the alternate universes of talk radio and media idolization. Maybe if they didn’t have this outlet, this hope, their lives would implode, or explode.

Matt smiled and signed, won over despite himself by their enthusiasm. Of the six fans tonight three werestudents and three were middle-aged. The twenty-five-toforty-five-yearold age group seemed to have better things to do than fandom.

He glanced beyond their crowding shoulders to the distant street light.

No ambiguous silhouette stood in wait.

Matt wondered if he had become caught up in Elvis fever, had imagined that witness to his first encounter with fans. Was this how Elvis had started? With a paltry few? No, they had come in droves from the first. Evidently Matt didn’t have that animal magnetism.

The very notion made him laugh, and the fans laughedwith him, delighted that he seemed happy to give them attention.

Attention. That was the key. Every human, and every animal, craved it. At times. Now he’d had his fill.

The street light had a running mate tonight: a full moon that hung above it like a hovering UFO. Blue Moon of Kentucky. Something Elvis had sung, or some amalgam of song and memory that Matt had made up? He wished them good night and mounted the English-made motorcycle called a Hesketh Vampire, so well named for nocturnal jaunts.

They eyed it with satisfaction. Elvis had loved motorcycles.

I hate this thing, Matt wanted to shout at them. It was borrowed, once-removed, from a man he at best disliked and at worst envied and feared. It was as obvious and noisy as it was spectacular and fast. Spectacular and fast had never been Matt’s speed.

He hated the ostentatious way you had to rev the engine before kicking off onto that aerial act of balancing a thousand-pound machine like it was an English bicycle. And the thing tilted like a pinball machine on curves and turns, defying gravity.

Elvis had loved the rush of speed, at first in any wheeled vehicle, than in any kind of mood-altering pills by the fistful.

Matt only felt safe being sober, maybe sometimes in the worst, humorless sense of the word. He really had to look into buying a car, when he had a minute, now that he had the money. At least motorcycle helmets guaranteed a measure of anonymity, as well as safety, he thought, fastening his. He felt instantly cocooned, muffled, disguised, and glanced back at the dark knot of people gathered against the station building’s lit panel of glass door.

Then the Vampire swooped him away on a rush of air, sound, and motion, a magic carpet that roared. The motorcycle thumbed its chrome tailpipes at the deserted streets as he made his way toward the lights and the main thoroughfares. Its Vampire whine lifted into the wind and then skittered away like an echo.

The full moon rode over his shoulder, almost as if it was an unborn twin to the silver ‘cycle … a high, shy shadow of the machine clinging to the ground. Matt could hear a distant howl borne by the wind. They kept pace, the moon and the motorcycle.

And then the second whine accelerated.

It was gaining on him.

The moon hung in its same position, eternally fixed to match the Vampire’s speed.

Matt checked the side mirrors.

A single moon of blinding light flared in his right mirror.

Either a car with one defective headlight was behind him, or another motorcycle was taking this same route.

He couldn’t make out much beyond the reflected Cyclops eye of light tailing him. Whatever sped behind was black and cloaked by the night itself.

He swerved suddenly left at an empty intersection with no stop signs.

The light swerved with him, showing up in his left mirror.

No car could maneuver that quickly.

Matt accelerated, the lighted dashboard dials seeming to intensify with the increased speed, as if the Vampire, given its head, was grinning like a Jolly Roger and showing neon teeth.

He knew the route; otherwise he wouldn’t have dared hit … fifty, fifty-five. The area was industrial, not residential, at least.

He didn’t know why, but he felt impelled to shake the shapeless form behind him.

It was like being a kid again, this visceral panic, this unshakable sense that something ugly was gaining on him.

Basements sometimes did that to you. Dark placessymbolically and implicitly connected to the blackest regions of imagination and primal fear.

Usually open streets had no potential for terror, not to men who thought they knew how to defend themselves, or at least to avoid obvious trouble.

But this burr of light that kept to the same, tail-gating distance, waltzing with the Hesketh Vampire in a dance nobody had requested or assented to … he had to lose it.

Matt recalled an abandoned service station coming up at the next intersection.

He would zip into it, through the empty gas lanes, around back and out the other side, onto a small road leading to an office park with a maze of buildings. He’d lose the thing that followed him there.

Islands of gas pumps looked like totems in the sick light from too few street lamps. He zoomed between them. A hard right almost had him reaching a foot to the ground to keep the cycle from overbalancing. But the Hesketh held, or he did, and the perilous, semihorizontal turn was history.