Neon Moon

Blake surveyed his tiny room inside the apartment he had shared with Lennie. What he needed to do was have a place where he could calm his thoughts and think through his next steps.

His things were still there, untouched except where the police had gone in to find evidence of foul play. Since there was nothing to find, they had left everything as it was when Blake had died.

He would be left in solitude for awhile longer. It would probably take awhile before they were cleared out by the landlord. No one wanted to occupy an apartment that was known to have been the place where a death occurred.

There was his twin mattress on the floor covered neatly with a clean white comforter. Next to it was his bass amp which he used as a night stand. Beside that was a small chest that held all his clothes and personal items.

Aside from a single large poster of his band pinned to the opposite wall, there was nothing else of value. The most valuable thing he owned was his electric/acoustic bass guitar and he already had that thing in his weapons cache.

He hovered in the middle of the room for awhile, doing nothing more than thinking through the situation.

There were five members of his band.

Aside from himself, there was Adam Stuart the lead guitarist, Terry Williams the keyboardist, and Ray Street the drummer. There was also the newest member Jazzie Hunter, the vocalist and the band's only female member.

Two of them were going to get hit by the demon mafia boss. He needed to know which two.

"Hey, Marvin. You there?"

Nothing.

He also tried calling Maysie, to no avail.

The silence grew with each passing moment. Maysie did say to call her if he needed to contact her and that she would respond if she was not busy.

Obviously, she was busy—with her next victim!

He had no idea which of those remaining four members were going to be the next victim, but since the ghouls weren't responding to his calls, he would need to go visit his band-mates individually and observe their actions.

With a final look at his bedroom, he gave a silent prayer and rose up through the ceiling, into the darkness of a muggy LA night.

The first place he need to go to was the nightclub where they worked the weekend gigs. It belonged to Ray Street, so he at least would be here. Although it was a Tuesday night, the club should still be open.

Outside the pink and purple structure of the Neon Moon, Blake hesitated as he noticed the yellow crime-scene tape around the area. From where he hovered, the rhythmic thumping of Hip Hop music could be heard coming through the main doors which had been propped open by one of the medics.

The music was on, but there was nobody dancing. The cops had cleared the place out.

There was a beat-up Chevy truck parked in front and a stout middle-age man stepped out.

Blake narrowed his eyes. This was the same middle-aged cop who had been at the scene of his own death. At the time, it did not register much within his mind because he was still in shock, but now the details of that day began coming back to him in crystal clear images. This man was wearing the same worn blue jeans, wrinkled red tee-shirt, and scuffle-toe sneakers in some indeterminate grey color.

The middle-aged man surveyed the scene with a sad shake of the head and then walked in.

Without hesitation, Blake followed him into the club.

Blake knew this place well. He had been working at the Neon Moon for over a year as a bartender, and when his band played, he was their bassist and male vocalist.

Even on a Tuesday night, this place should have been jammed pack and humming with a huge crowd, but it was oddly deserted.

The darkened interior was lit only by the strobe lights. Amidst the booming bass coming from the speakers, a myriad of colored spots bounced off the large disco ball and spun along the walls.

A hiss from all corners at regular intervals released puffs of floral-scented smoke. The smoke hazed up the room, causing the light spots to shimmer and float in midair.

Combined with the color-changing strobe lights and the effect was like floating inside a ball of fireworks. The light show had been timed to explode in syncopation with the pounding of the drums and the staccato of the electronic noises emanating from the speakers recessed within the ceiling and along the walls.

Hanging high above the midst of all this dizzying confusion, at the center of the large shiny wooden dance floor was the mirror-encrusted disco ball.

It was twirling in slow and lazy defiance despite a heavy encumbrance dangling under its sphere by a rope that hung down perpendicular to the ceiling.

Under the disco ball was a fallen ladder, the only judge and jury of the case.

Blake fixed his eyes on the dead weight, amazed at the macabre beauty of the expired form. The corpse's neck had snapped where the rope had done its job and was jutting at an odd angle to the body that had gone stiff with rigor-mortis.

The corpse was whirling along in a dreamy dance of death with the mirrored ball as its partner-and-executioner. It danced on, long after the man had bowed his final number.

"Hey John." A voice spoke out from behind him.

Blake turned around and saw a grizzly blonde haired man holding a bag of almond cookies from some Chinese store.

He walked right through Blake and handed the bag cookies to the middle-aged man.

"Sorry I'm late."

Blake winced as he 'felt' the man walk through him and looked up to see the back of the man's head as he moved towards John.

"It's cool George." John smiled at the treat and promptly wolfed down the cookies in several bites. Without even glancing backward, he tossed the empty paper bag over his shoulders and into a nearby waste receptacle.

The blond man named George whistled, marveling at the perfect shot that seemed effortless, almost careless.

"You'd have made a perfect basketball player."

"Yeah, except for my height and weight, which is too short and too fat, respectively." John sniffed with disdain.

"Grisly, ain't it?" He indicated at the stiff revolving corpse in the middle of the light display.

George turned back to the crime scene.

"And how. But it's beautiful in a horrifying way."

John turned his head towards the DJ area. "Hey! You over there. Can you turn off this loud music so we can hear ourselves think? And while you're at it, turn on the goddamn lights!"

Instantly, the sound shut off, leaving behind a void that seemed to Blake, worse than having the blaring music on.

The fluorescent bulbs from the ceiling panels flared up, shedding light onto an ugly dingy dance hall that had stained carpets, cracked table tops and a dirty dance floor.

The grimy disco ball, with its randomly missing mirrored squares, slowly came to a revolving stop along with its heavy corpse load.

Blake squeezed his eyes shut.

The light had revealed, in gristly detail, the identity of the person hanging on the disco ball.

Blake had arrived too late to save his bandmate, the drummer and owner of the Neon Moon, Ray Street.