If you believe in coincidence... . Green Sun Chapter 20 Enemy Action? by Donna Lamb

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"You heard those songs somewhere else, sir?" Bruce asked. He glanced down at the tiny, big-eyed blonde still clinging to his left arm. She looked up at him with a puzzled expression, her blue eyes guileless.

Mangas snorted, "Don't take Arthur's noise about me being an officer serious. That was back before you were born. I'm just Mangas, unless you want something out of me." The old Indian had no expression at all but his dark eyes seemed to twinkle with amusement.

Bruce grinned. "Well, then, where did you hear Hollie's songs before? Mangas?"

Hollie smiled, though she couldn't have said why.

Arthur laughed. "Oh, oh, here it comes. Gramps is going to tell us how he dug the Panama Canal, single handed." The big Apache made motions with his hands, as if measuring a fish that kept getting larger.

Mangas chuckled. "No such thing. I was still in short pants when the canal opened, going to grammar school with the white family that raised me in Pasadena." Bruce blinked at this piece of information. The old guy had had an unusual life, a very long unusual life.

Hollie looked from Mangas to Arthur to Bruce; the younger men looked impressed even though Mangas had denied building the canal they were talking about. She tried to get back to the point. "Um, you've heard the songs before?" she asked.

Mangas nodded. "In a little nightclub in Los Angeles, back in the thirties. Woman named Clara Washington sang them. She used the stage name Clara Moon." He pulled his pipe out and looked at it thoughtfully. "There are recordings, she had a career for a number of years." He put the pipe back in his pocket.

"How can you remember her, Mangas?" asked Arthur.

Mangas shrugged. "I used to own some of her records. And we grew up together. Her mother kept house for my family in Pasadena."

Bruce wanted to ask more questions to straighten out the chronology but something stopped him. "That's... that's just a... a huge coincidence, isn't it?"

"If you believe in coincidence," said Mangas. Arthur snorted.

"Huh?" said Hollie, feeling she'd missed something.

"Do you know where she might be now?" Bruce asked. He looked troubled, his brow wrinkled and the corners of his mouth turned down.

"Clara was a few years younger than me; if she were still alive she'd likely be in a rest home somewhere," said Mangas.

Arthur closed one eye and looked at the old man around the bulk of his own big nose. "You ain't shittin' us, are you?"

Mangas shook his head. "As it happens, I know that Clara died back in the sixties. She's buried in Pasadena, next to her mother, in the plot my adopted family owned."

"Huh?" said Hollie, again. What the discussion meant to her situation completely escaped her and she didn't like Bruce's worried expressions.

Bruce said to her, "You couldn't have heard her sing those songs, but you could have heard a recording or someone else singing them."

"I guess so," said Hollie. "Does it matter?"

The men looked at each other, Mangas amused, Bruce still concerned, and Arthur's face expressionless as if he'd just bitten into a juicy koan.

"Well, we're trying to help you find out who you are," Bruce said.

"Oh. But don't you have my name? I mean, the name on those papers?" She gestured toward the SUV. She knew it wasn't the name she'd had before but it would fit her better as a woman and being unable to remember her male name, she'd begun to think of herself as 'Hollie'.

"Yes, but that's just your name, it's not who you are...." Bruce sighed. "If we know who you are, we may know if anyone is looking for you -- or that money."

Hollie glanced at the suitcase packed with $100 bills. "That's a lot of money, isn't it?"

Arthur grinned and Mangas chuckled. Bruce agreed. "That's enough money that someone might be willing to kill--a lot of people--for it. We need to know where it came from and...and...how it got into your suitcase."

"I know other songs," Hollie said, trying to be helpful. "Lots," she added after thinking for a moment.

"Do you know 'Stardust'?" Arthur asked.

She nodded and opened her mouth to begin singing but Mangas interrupted, "Do you know 'Summer Wine'?" he asked. She shook her head, looking confused.

Bruce couldn't stand it any more. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

Startled, she looked up at him. "Um?" she said.

"You're too cute," said Bruce, sounding so serious that she thought she'd done something wrong.

"I am?" she asked, a little worried and a little dazed as she realized she'd just been kissed by a man.

"You are too cute," agreed Arthur. "It's an incurable condition." He looked serious too, though his eyes twinkled.

"It's what?" she asked, looking even more confused and cuter than ever.

Mangas chuckled. "Do you know 'Downtown', Hollie?"

Relieved that she could answer the question, she nodded. "Do you want me to sing it?"

Mangas shook his head. "Not right now. Maybe later." He took his pipe out of his pocket again, looked at it and put it back.

"You know something or you've figured something out," Arthur accused him. "Enlighten us, O Skinny Buddha-of-the-Desert."

"Call it a guess," said Mangas.

* * *

When the phone rang, Richard and Jo had been mid-snuggle in Jo's big bedroom next to the upstairs studio in her Burbank home. "We going to answer that?" Richard asked lazily around a mouthful of Jo's neck.

"B-better," said Jo. "I told Ellie and Arnie we'd be here. They got a new music video to show us." She tried to sit up but Richard kept one arm across her middle, holding her round little butt against his thigh while he reached the phone with his other arm. Jo giggled and wriggled.

"Hey! You wanna answer the phone or start something again?" Richard asked.

"Yes!" Jo said, squeaking when Richard tickled her.

"All right, then," he said. "Whozit?" he asked into the receiver. "It's Ellie," he said passing the handset to Jo.

She took the phone, "Oh, hey, Ellie. Sure, come on over. Richard and I were just taking a b-break." She giggled and squeaked again as Richard gave her a stroke under the ribs. "No, really," she added. "Um, half an hour. I'm sure." She laughed and pretended to bonk Richard with the phone, "He'll b-behave," she told Ellie before hanging up.

"Half an hour?" said Richard, quirking his eyebrow.

"Lemme up," said Jo, pulling at his arm around her waist. He released her and she stood up, pausing beside the bed to look down at Richard's long, lean frame. "Well?" she asked. "We've got time for a shower, stinky b-boy." She posed her own slender body invitingly. After a year and a half and some special medical attention, the bullet scar on her right shoulder hardly showed at all on her lightly-freckled pale skin. She flipped her ginger-blond hair and turned to wiggle her ass at him.

Richard's interest in showering with Jo became very apparent.

* * *

Soundman Arnie Roberts, with some advice from Jo, had engineered the release of the "bootleg" audio tapes from the night Jo got shot at Wrangler Jill's onto the internet. Before Jo even got out of the hospital, the grass roots demand for an I-NO-Y album had turned into a prairie fire.

Elspeth Huffnire, a film student at UCLA, had come forward with her digital footage of several parts of the show, including a dimly lit and poorly vantaged ten dozen frames of the actual shooting. Which, oddly enough, made it look as if Richard had been the one to take the bullet fired by Cheryl Aronhaus, the assemblyman's irate wife who had thought that Barry had been having an affair with Jo.

After Ellie and Arnie had massaged the footage, music videos started appearing on You Tube. Ellie's sampling technique mixed up some of the songs into a dramatic ten-minute video with a storyline about the shooting, followed by two three-minute dance videos. The dramatic video played up the mystery of what had actually happened and the dancing videos displayed the band's energy and skill, all adding fuel to the blaze of public interest in the new group and keeping it alive and hot for weeks.

As soon as it became apparent that Jo would recover completely from her injuries, a bidding war erupted amongst indie labels wanting to produce an album for I-NO-Y. Tom Harmon and Andie Moore, the band's agent and new manager signed them up with Millennium Buzzards Nest for two albums and promotional tours. Jo, Arnie and Lemon Jones had produced the studio album I-NO-Y nine months after the shooting followed by a short winter tour through six cities and the release of the band's second album I-NO-Y LIVE * NEAR DEATH including tapes from the arena shows and the debut performance at Wrangler Jill's.

Jo hadn't recovered enough to play keyboards on the winter tour but made up for it with new songs and some electrifying performances during the first half of the NEAR DEATH summer tour. Blues-rock legendary drummer, George "Gogie" Luft, who'd also been shot in a separate incident the week before Jo's shooting, would be joining the band for two appearances in the latter half of the tour and would become the group's semi-regular studio drummer, letting Richard do some piano and guitar work. Kylie and Paul "Bugs" Benjamin remained with the band, too, providing Bugs' unique rolling guitar sound and Kylie's steady moral and rhythm support.

With very little in the way of interpersonal conflict, I-NO-Y looked set for a long and successful career.

After their shower, Richard went downstairs to let Ellie in while Jo finished getting dressed.

Arnie had come along with the young film student, less than half his age and barely one third his weight. Ellie dashed inside waving a freshly burned DVD. "Dynamite on steroids!" she enthused. "Going to knock your socks clean to Malibu!" The dark-haired young woman sometimes described herself as a "Jewish Dolly Parton pixie clone." To complete the image, she wore cut-off jeans and a rather tight Tinkerbell t-shirt.

Arnie and Richard chuckled. "We got a good mix on the sound," said Arnie.

"Don't get technical on me, guys," warned Richard. "Jo's the electronic whiz, you know. If it don't run on gasoline, it's too high tech for me."

"I'm just saying, we got a good mix. It sounds good," said Arnie.

"Looks good, too," said Ellie. "Black backgrounds, each of you dancing to a beat in turn. Who knew Bugs could get down without a guitar around his neck?"

They laughed and Jo's giggle joined them from the stairs.

* * *

From Greenwich to Honolulu and everywhere the calendar still showed Strangefellows Day, the demons who answered to the Devil in Drag went mano a mano with the heavenly corps of Guardian Angels. In Manhattan, an angel fed a demon into a paper shredder; in Surinam, blood-sucking flies chewed an angel into hamburger; in the Yukon, a ghost bear devoured the ectoplasmic corpsicle of a frozen demon and on Easter Island, a minion of hell toppled a 160 ton statue onto an inattentive Clarence.

"This is fun!" said Sophie Drake, the Devil in Drag. They cruised down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena on their black touring Harleys while keeping mental tabs on demons scattered over two-thirds of the globe.

Bill C. Bubb made a rude snorting noise with the mouth in his armpit. "We're wasting time," he said. His silvery full face helmet concealed the fact that he didn't actually have a face in the usual way.

"Sure," said Sophie Drake. "But don't forget why we're doing this; it's not just for the fun of it." She giggled. The electric blue trim on her bike matched the blue inserts in her black and fuchsia leathers.

"We've still got about twenty hours to make trouble in," said Bubb.

"Memorable trouble," agreed Sophie. "Hit it!"

They left rubber down the middle of the Boulevard.