by J. A. Huss
I realize the two security guys are still holding me, so I shrug them off and walk down the hallway and exit the house. TJ is leaning up against his Jeep, arms crossed, glaring at me. We lock eyes, see the rage like we’re looking in a mirror, and then I refocus on the front window of my house.
It takes me a minute to realize what I’m seeing.
Kenner. Sitting at my piano.
I feel happy and sad at the same time. I have to close my eyes for a second before getting myself together and walking through my open front door.
I round the corner into the music room and stare at his back. “Kenner,” I breathe out the word. It’s not a hello, or a question. It’s just… relief.
He nods his head slowly, but doesn’t turn around to look at me. His light brown hair is longer than normal and I can see the massive scar alongside of his ear where the bullet barely missed his brain. It’s mostly healed now. And his arms are bent, his hand balled up into fists and resting on the cover over the keys.
“Rock,” he says, standing up and turning around to face me.
He’s wearing a faded black Metallica t-shirt and a pair of jeans. But the only thing I see are his arms. Elias was the only Son of a Jack member with tattoos. He only had one and it was on his stomach. Kenner always said they were a way to hide who you were and become someone else, so he swore up and down he’d never get one.
But his arms are tatted up now. The beginnings of two full sleeves are outlined in black. He’s inked up from wrist to shoulder. Kenner shrugs, reading my mind. “I’m done, Rock.” He has to swallow hard to get the rest of the words out. “That guy is gone.”
I want to hug him—shit, kiss the fucker on the mouth, that’s how happy I am to see him here. Standing. Arms working. Talking. Whole. But I get the feeling that Kenner is not interested in my affection right now. So I have to swallow all that shit down and force myself to stand still. “I’m so fucking sorry, man.”
He frowns and lifts his hands up in a little shrug gesture that doesn’t reach his shoulders. “What are you sorry for?” He studies me just as carefully as I did him, his eyes resting on the scar at the base of my throat. “Living?”
I realize he’s asking me that because that’s what he’s sorry for. I know this guy so well. My best friend. Ever.
So I nod. I nod and say, “Yeah.” Because I am. I’m sorry I lived. I’m sorry I’m standing here and Elias, Mo, and Ian aren’t.
Kenner lets out a breath that might be relief and says the words so I don’t have to. “I’d rather be dead.”
Movement outside catches my attention. The whole crowd of people—cops, friends, brother—all stand there in front of the house waiting for answers. “Do you remember what happened? Did you see who it was?”
He nods. Slowly. So very, very slowly.
“Who?” My heart starts racing.
Kenner looks over his shoulder, a quick glance to check where everyone is at outside, then brings his gaze back to me. “Do you have somewhere private we can talk in here? They said they found cameras in every room. She was watching you.”
“What? Who? She?”
Kenner glances over his shoulder again. “Private, Rock. We need to have this talk in private because obviously, this bitch is not fucking around. Your girlfriend is dead if we do this wrong.”
Those words reverberate through my head like the music when we play in a stadium. I have a flash of a face. Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Skin tanned from days spent in the sun.
But looks are deceiving. I actually picture her mouth moving as she tells me that. We are hanging off the side of a mountain. Swinging and taking pictures of the things we dare to do. Things most people will never do. The only thing between us and death are the harnesses attached to a toprope anchor bolted right into the sheer rock face of a cliff.
“Rock?” Kenner says, bringing me back to him. “We don’t have much time. She’ll kill her, Rock. Just like she killed us. We don’t have much time. And if your friends think they can stop her from doing that, they’re wrong.” He hesitates, once again shooting a sideways glance over his shoulder. “She’s insane. And she’s been ten steps ahead of everyone since this started. They’re all wrong.”
I look around the room, then glance down the hallway to the kitchen. “The studio. It was locked until a few days ago. I doubt anyone got in there.”
“Take me,” Kenner says.
I turn and walk down the hall, Kenner’s boots thudding on the tiles as he follows. I key in the code and open the door once the lock releases. The lights are still on from the last time I was down here with Missy.
Missy. I can’t lose her. And if Kenner has an idea of how to get her back and what the fuck we’re up against, well…
I wave him forward and he grips the rail hard as he descends, an indication that he’s not quite whole yet. I follow him down and we end up in the production room. He sits in the long, brown leather couch and I perch on the stool in front of the monitor, my nerves frayed with everything that’s happened today.
“Hook my phone up,” Kenner says, tossing it to me. I catch it, then find a white cord in a drawer to connect it to the computers. “My lock code is three four eight seven.” I look over at him, so many questions. “I’d do it myself but…” He hesitates. “But my fingers are still trying to figure shit out.”
I glance down at his hands, bunched up into fists, and understand. He only looks whole on the outside, just like I did when I came home. But he’s not. As fucked as it sounds, I’m the one who’s got his shit together right now.
That scares me a little. I’ve never been that guy. Not since Melanie died. I’ve always been the fuckup. The partier. The addict. Kenner was the responsible one. He was the rock, not me.
I tap in the code and his phone unlocks.
“Go to the photo album.” He waits as I do that. “No one got into my phone, Rock. No one has my code and even though they asked, and the cops wanted it, there was no good reason for a judge to let them. I wasn’t a suspect and they thought it was random.”
I look over at him again. “It wasn’t, was it?”
He shakes his head. “But I don’t blame you for forgetting her. I really don’t, dude.” I’m about to ask who, but I see the warning on his face. “Open the album dated March last year.”
I take a deep breath and double-click. I know what March last year was. That’s when the band forced me into rehab.
Pictures pop open, hundreds of them. But none of them are of rehab.
It’s me. And Kenner. And the blonde girl.
Everything slips into place as Kenner starts talking.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“It was a nice day,” Kenner says, his voice devoid of emotion. “Hot, but not too hot. Blue sky to match that girl’s eyes, you know?”
I nod, my eyes glued to the girl as I flash the pictures on the screen one by one.
“And I knew you were in a bad place, man. I knew it for months. Maybe since the day I met you, ya know? All the baggage you left behind up here. And I knew you weren’t right. The blackouts. The disappearances. But you always came home. And it didn’t take us long to figure out you were out rock climbing.”
“Yeah,” I whisper, remembering back to those days.
“We thought it was doing you good. So we let you go. That was our first mistake. The second was trusting that beautiful psychopath.”
He’s talking about the girl. “Alice,” I say, picturing her at the bar the other night handing me those magazines. Her expression. The way it pleaded with me to remember her.
“You know what?” Kenner asks.
“What?” I say, tearing my gaze away from the screen and focusing on him.
“You should never trust a girl named Alice. It’s just all wrong. And everything about this girl was wrong.”
“Except her deceiving looks,” I finish for him.
He nods. “Mo met her that day,” Kenner says, pointing to the pictures. “I’d met her a while back. And I did tru
st her. We climbed together for seven… eight months? I trusted her with my fucking life out there on those cliffs.” He looks down at his hands, wringing them together. “I’m so fucking sorry, dude. I’m the one who needs to apologize to you, because this is all my fault.”
Memories start flashing through my head as I click through the images.
You’re mine, Rock.
Forget about the past, Rock. It’s just me and you now.
Try some of this, Rock. It’ll make you feel better.
I did try those pills. Just little white pills that made the whole world smaller. Made everything inside me feel better. Made the past melt away.
Until it didn’t. But she was there. She was always there with something else to make it better. More pills, then needles. Then I was addicted.
“Mo knew immediately. Like…” Kenner exhales out a long breath. “Like instantaneously. And he came to me that day.” Kenner nods at the screen of the climbing pics. I start flipping through them faster, searching for Mo. “And he said, ‘Dude, this girl is psycho. She knows everything about me. Everything about us.’
“And she did,” Kenner continues. “She did. You know, you hear about stalkers, right? And we’d laugh. Because…” Kenner and I both grimace. Because we had no idea how crazy people can get. “Because they’re fans, right? They love us. Who are we to complain when people love us?”
We are silent for a few moments. I picture that image I just saw in the magazine a few hours ago. “That’s not love,” I say. “What she did to us wasn’t love.”
He agrees with a slight nod. “So that night, after we packed shit up and headed home, you went with Alice and Mo and I were in another car. We decided on rehab. I mean, we knew you were using, but we also knew this girl, somehow, some way, was the one responsible for that.”
“And you forced me to go away and never talk to her again.”
“This is all our fault. We didn’t know how sick this bitch was until she showed up in Big Bear and started shooting.”
I see the danger now. I see it very, very fucking clearly. “If she has Missy—”
“She’s dead, dude. If we do this wrong, she’s dead. She knows you love this girl. Jayce filled me in on what’s been happening up here and hell, man. I’m surprised Alice hasn’t killed you both yet.”
“Do you know where she is?” I ask, just as the panic starts to kick in. “Kenner? Do you know?”
He gets up from the couch and takes his phone, unplugging it from the computer, and starts awkwardly fumbling with the touchscreen to pull up email. “She’s been sending me these for about a week now. I can only assume when they reported I was awake she got antsy.” He hands the phone to me. “But I have no clue what it means.”
I take the phone and read the messages. They are short sentences. About fifteen of them. I scroll up and start reading them from start to finish. “They’re verses,” I say. “Like a song.”
“Bitch is crazy, Rock. Straight-up crazy. But I think it’s like, one of those psycho clues killers send to their victims. Or cops, you know? I think there’s a message in there. And I think you are the only one who can figure it out.”
Kissing her, not me? the first message says. So young and innocent, up against that tree.
“Do you know what that means?”
I know it. I know it immediately. “I did that interview with Metal Notes, way back when we first started releasing music on the internet. Remember? Mo was brand new, just barely with us. And no one thought it was a good idea. We were too new. We didn’t want to paint ourselves into a corner with contracts and shit. We wanted to be a mystery, hold our cards close. But I wanted to do it.”
To piss off my father, I realize now. So he’d see it. We must have a hundred Metal Notes Magazines down here in the studio. Packed away in boxes. He read that fucking magazine every month and I knew he’d see this too.
“The Valentine’s Day interview. What was the best kiss of your life?”
We stare at each other for a few seconds.
And then I say, “She took Missy there.”
“Where?”
“That waterfall in the woods. It’s not far from here. She fucking took her there.” I get up to tell TJ and the cops. But Kenner is suddenly agile and quick, because he grabs me before I get to the stairs.
“Don’t tell them, Rock. If they get there and spook this bitch, she will do crazy shit. And I don’t mean to be a dick, but if your girlfriend is even still alive, she won’t be once they storm that place with cops.”
He’s right. Alice is not sane. She will shoot first just like she did up in Big Bear. I see it now, for real. In my head I play that night out just the way it happened. Mo answering the door. Bang. He flies backwards, blood spattering everywhere. Ian was next, bits and pieces of Mo blasted him in the face and then she shot him too. Elias and Kenner lunged at her. I was on the other side of the room, looking out the window. Looking at the side the mountain we were gonna ski the next day. Elias took a bullet to the chest, and Kenner ducked…
“Alice has been in town for weeks, Kenner. She knows everyone is looking for the killer. I saw her at Float’s. Fucking TJ hired her as a waitress.” And then I get a sick feeling in my stomach as I picture him yelling at her in the hallway the other night. “And he fired her when she approached me on Monday.”
“How far is this place? We have to go, Rock. The only chance you have of getting your girlfriend back alive is to take her. Talk Alice into letting her go. Lie, dude. Just flat out fucking lie. We cannot threaten her or she will shoot us all.” He points to the scar on the side of his head as proof.
Yeah, I think in my head. He’s right. She already killed Ian, Mo, and Elias and took her best shot at Kenner. “But how do we get there? There’s like two dozen cops outside.”
Kenner shrugs. “I guess we’ll have to explain and hope to God they understand.”
“Wait,” I say. “I have bolts on the cliff at the back of the house. That place is only about two miles away if we cut through the woods. We could hike up there.” I walk to a door that looks like a closet on the wall opposite of the stairs. But it’s not a closet. I pull the door open to reveal the gun safe and Kenner is right up next to me, the Kentucky boy in him already understanding. We shoot each other a look and then we both nod as I punch in the code and open it up.
We take two high-powered mountain rifles and two Glocks. We’re just checking the barrels and looking for some ammo when I hear TJ yelling upstairs.
Kenner and I shoot a quick look up at the door to the kitchen, then each other. “Get rid of him,” Kenner says.
I grab the bullets and cartridges we’ll need and shove them into his open hands. “My climbing racks are in the front room. Grab them. I’ll meet you out on the back deck.”
I take the stairs two at a time and burst through the door just as TJ is opening it. I push him back into the kitchen, closing the door behind me.
“What the fuck is going on down there, RK? Do you not understand how serious this situation is?”
I drag him through the kitchen towards the front door. “I just need a few more minutes, Teej. He’s fucking traumatized, OK? He needs a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute, Rock.” He sneers the stage name and even though it pisses me off, I focus on Missy. If Alice really has her, and she’s still alive, she won’t be for long.
“Ten minutes,” I say. “I think he might be able to remember who did it, OK? But he’s having a hard time, TJ. Just give me ten goddamned minutes!”
There’s a whole crowd of people in the front room and I know Kenner needs to be here to get our gear to go down the cliff, so I stick my fingers on my tongue and whistle to get everyone’s attention. “Out!” I say. “I need everyone out. You have no warrant, so get the fuck out and give me a few minutes to get this shit straight.”
There’s a roar of protest from everyone… except Jayce. I realize she knows more than the rest. Kenner must’ve told her something. Maybe
not everything, but something. When I look at her she gives me a little nod. “Out,” Jayce says. “He’s right. Kenner needs a minute to get himself together. I won’t have you guys forcing him into something that will affect his mental state afterward. Everyone out.”
Say what you will about Jayce, but she knows how to command a room. They call her all kinds of names in LA. Bitch, mostly. But formidable is also at the top of the list. She stands toe to toe with the guy I can only assume is the lead detective, yelling up into his face until he’s so worked up, his partner drags him outside to calm him down. TJ is the last to leave, so I follow him out, shutting the door behind me so Kenner can get to the gear.
“Ten minutes, TJ,” I tell him as I lead him down the driveway. Jayce is talking to Gretchen and Sean, who both look over at me with frantic looks. “He knows what happened. Maybe even who did it. He just needs to let it out in his own way. Just like I needed to come up here and see all you guys before I could remember.”
“Do you remember?” TJ asks, whirling around to look at me.
“Some of it,” I say. “But not who did it,” I lie. “Ten minutes. Please.” I beg. I beg for real. “Because if I lose Missy…” I have to look away and take a deep breath.
TJ huffs out an exasperated breath of air. “I’m timing you, RK. Ten minutes and then we’re taking his ass down to City Hall for questioning.”
I nod. “Be right back.” And then I run back into the house, slam the door, and head to the back deck. Kenner is there, looking over the railing at the sheer cliff below.
“Can you rappel?” I ask him. “I know you can’t climb, Kenner. But can you rappel down?”
He looks at his hands like he doesn’t recognize them, but nods. “I can do it.”
We slip the harnesses up over our hips and buckle them tight. Then I hand him a sling with gear on it, and start snapping on carabiners and cams just in case. I swing a leg over the edge, clip myself in to the ropes that are bolted to the rock just below the deck, and then stare at Kenner. “I’ve got it, OK? We’ll go down together.”
