The Demon Senders Read Online Free PDF Page A

someplace and, again in a drug induced stupor, convinced myself I had left it in the van and didn’t carry it with me into my apartment that night. Hell, I figured I saw the feather on the ground, thought Al would love to play with the damn thing, and brought it home to him as a present.
    I was feeling pretty good about my explanation until I got to the fourth bar during my gig finding tour.
    During the day, most bars are either filled up with lunch crowds, sales people avoiding making business calls, or are pretty much empty. That’s how things were at the first three bars I stopped in that day: Empty except for a few old men working hard at doing nothing but chasing a buzz.  
    When I walked into the fourth bar, things looked pretty much the same: A few people scattered around the bar, sitting as far away from one another as possible, their eyes lovingly caressing the glass of pain-reducing liquid in front of them. I walked up to the barkeep, extended my hand and went right into my well rehearsed pitch.
    “Trevor Mac, local musician. I’ve played at a few area bars and want to drop off my demo CD for you to take a listen to. I know you have live music here a few days a week, and would like to talk with the owner about setting up a gig.”
    “I’m the owner,” the barkeep said, his face glued to my business card. The fact he didn’t look up gave me pause. The card I handed him was one I designed and printed myself. There wasn’t anything special about it, except it was my card. I guess that made it special to me. “What kind of music do you play and how much you looking to get for a gig?”
    I was stoked. Most of the time, a bar owner would take my demo CD and my card, tell me they’d take a listen and call me if they liked what they heard. But this guy, this owner, was already asking about my fees.
    “Depends on how many hours you need me to play,” I said.
    “I never said I need you to play. Just asked what kind of music you played and how much you charge to play it.”
    “I like to get four hundred dollars for four hours of playing. As for my type of music, I like to call it American nostalgia.” I know I didn’t come up with that term but, damn, I liked it. Kind of got people thinking, and people thinking about what kind of music American nostalgia was meant they’d either pay me to play or come out and listen to me play.
    “I have no idea what the hell American nostalgia is and I won’t pay more than two hundred dollars for someone I never heard of. So tell me again; what kind of music do you play?” The owner finally lifted his gaze and met my eyes with an intensity I wasn’t expecting.  
    “Anything from country to modern pop. I throw in a few of my originals as well. They seem to go over pretty well.”
    “You have your own equipment or do you need to rent mine?” the owner said, the intensity never wavering.
    “I have my own gear. I do all the set up and break down myself. I’ll get here an hour early and won’t leave till an hour after my final set.”
    “Suppose you expect me to feed you and keep you hydrated as well?”
    “That would be nice but if it’s an issue…”
    “You bringing the feather along with you, Mac?” a voice mumbled from the darkest corner of the bar. “That feather is a good luck charm, I imagine. Will keep you light as . . . as light as a feather, I suppose.”
    The owner glanced over towards the patron, then back to me. “Friend of yours?”
    I blew my chance at landing the gig right then and there. I ignored the owner and walked slowly towards the man who asked me about the feather that no one could have possibly known about. I half expected to come face to face with the old man I nearly killed a few days earlier coming back from Shorty’s. But it wasn’t him and this man wasn’t old.
    “Who are you?” I demanded, my voice kept low and stern.
    “Doesn’t matter who I am, Trevor. Let’s just agree to leave each other alone. You go about your