“Two hundred dollars for the band, or two hundred dollars a person?”
The guy blinked. “You, personally, will take home two hundred dollars after you play this show.”
Shit. That was a good chunk of next month’s rent money. Three nights of shitty tips. A professional re-fretting job for her guitar, if she threw in a little extra. She’d had gigs that paid more, but not often, and only when she played with cover bands.
“How the hell did you swing that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I wrote a letter to the Student Activities Committee of every college I could find in a five-hundred-mile radius. Three hundred letters. These guys bit. Booked us, sight unseen.”
The last bit of explanation wasn’t necessary, Case thought. That they’d been booked without being heard was a given, or they wouldn’t have been booked at all.
Two hundred bucks.
Still, something compelled her to be honest with the guy. “I can’t save your band for you.”
“Ouch. Don’t hold back—tell me how you really feel,” he said, voice dripping sarcasm. “I’m not asking you to save the band. Danny’s pretty damn good, and—”
“Danny’s the drummer?”
“Yeah.”
“He is pretty damn good.”
The guy nodded. “And Quentin will do all right, I think. He sometimes chokes when he gets in front of people, but he’s solid. You’ll see. We’ll be a lot better with a good guitarist.”
She almost said something nasty about the vocals, but she stopped herself. If he was going to pay her two hundred bucks, she ought to let it go. Besides, he looked so fragile with his tiny mouth and bug eyes. He might cry.
Somebody put a hand on her hip, and she whirled, arm already half-cocked back. It was Damon, standing too close as usual and weaving drunkenly. The rest of the band and the bony chick who’d come in with the bass player stood behind him. “Good fuckin’ show, huh?” Damon said.
She lowered her arm halfway and took one step back, down the length of the bar. “Yeah, sure.”
“We’re all loaded up, and I’m gonna take off,” he said. He took a step toward her.
“Great. Get the fuck out of here. And don’t touch me again. Ever.” She took another step back.
He didn’t get the picture, or maybe he was just deaf. He took another step toward her. “C’mon, Steph—”
“Don’t.”
The note of menace in her voice must have been enough to break through the drunken fog in his brain.
“Who’s this guy?” he asked, turning to the skinny dude.
“Fuck off, Damon,” Case said.
The skinny guy, to give him credit, tried to calm things down. “It’s cool, man,” he said. “I’m John.” He held out a hand.
Damon slapped his hand away. “Yeah. What the fuck are you doing here, John?”
“Just talking business.”
Even Case recognized that as exactly the wrong thing to say. Here it comes, she thought.
“Business? What business do you have with my guitar player?” A light dawned in Damon’s dim brain. “Oh—you’re with the other band, the, the whatever-the-fucks.”
“Ragman,” John said. He swallowed nervously and pressed himself back against the bar.
“What business you got, Ragman?” Damon stepped toward John, getting right in his face.
“Just business.”
Damon shoved him. It was a pathetic, drunken shove, but John staggered back.
This was going to get very ugly. Damon had sixty pounds or more on John, and John looked like the kind of guy who’d never been in a shouting match in his life, to say nothing of a barroom brawl.
“That’s enough,” Case said.
“I’ll say when it’s enough. Steph.” Damon sneered at her, and then he turned back to John and made his move. He was big, drunk, and slow, and the movement was telegraphed seemingly hours in advance. He stepped forward and dropped his shoulder back. John just stared, with no idea that he was about to get his face caved in.
Case never explicitly gave the order, but as Damon stepped into the wide, clumsy arc of his swing, her fist moved on its own, flashing out in a blur. Damon’s head snapped back and blood flew through the air. He collapsed to the floor, moaning, with his hands clutching his face.
“Oww, fuck!”
Case gave the other guys a threatening look, but they obviously didn’t want any more of this. The drummer leaned down and tried to pull Damon to his feet. “Come on, Damon. We gotta go,” he said. Damon pushed backward, crablike.
“Hey,” he said as the guys hauled him off. He scratched at the air with one hand. Blood covered the bottom half of his face. “You’re gonna be at practice tomorrow, right?”
Case just shook her head, amazed.
She turned back to John, the skinny idiot who needed a guitarist. He stood there, shocked, his mouth hanging open and his eyes even wider than usual. Flecks of blood spattered his forehead.
“Looks like I need a band,” she said. She crossed her arms and stared at him. “So I’m in. Call me Case. Got a pen?”
She wrote her name, number, and email address on the back of his band’s mailing-list form, tore off the bottom, and handed it to him. “Your turn.”
He wrote something on the paper and gave it back. She stared at it. John Tsiboukas. “How the hell do you pronounce that?”
“John,” he said with a vague smile.
“Okay, then, John T. Send me directions to your practice room, and I’ll see you there. If you can also send me some recordings of the songs, that’ll go a long way.” She started to go, then turned around. “Make sure your bass player knows his shit.”
She left him staring after her and went to pack up her gear.
***
“Did I hear that right?”
John swiveled around on his barstool. Danny stood there, arms crossed and eyebrows raised, looking for all the world as if he were about to lecture a four-year-old. That’s what big brothers were for, John figured.
“What did you just do?” Danny asked.
John grinned. “Found us a guitarist.” His voice was hoarse from singing even the short set they’d played.
“Yeah? You might want to tell Seth that.”
“Sure, no problem.” John waved it off. “He’ll be upset, but we all know he’s not very good.”
“He busted his ass to get ready for this show,” Danny protested.
“I know he did. That’s the sad part.”
“That’s pretty fucking rude, John.”
John held up a hand. “I like Seth. He’s a good guy. But we’ve been trying like hell, and—well, you heard him play.”
Danny deflated, dropped his big hands to his sides. “Yeah. That was bad.”
“Besides,” John added, “she’s really good.”
“She’s really angry, if that’s what you mean.”
“She’s good. You know it.” John tapped the side of his glass thoughtfully. “Kinda hot, too.”
Danny gave him a serious look. “Careful there, bro. You know Rule Number One.”
“No worries. I was thinking about presentation. She looks good onstage—should help get us some attention. Besides,” he added, remembering the way she’d laid out the singer of her own band, “she’d probably break me in half.”
Danny grinned. “True that. What did what’s his name do to piss her off?”
“Invaded her personal space, I think.”
“Note to self.”
John laughed again. “No kidding.”
“Well, looks like this place is all partied out. I’m gonna go get the car,” Danny said. “See you out front?”
“Yeah.”
Danny headed for the door. John nursed his beer, staring at the row of bottles at the back of the bar and thinking.
Stephanie Case. So that was her name. She didn’t remember him—why would she have?—but he’d seen her band once before, playing some hole in the wall downtown. The band had been o
kay. She had been amazing. She played scorched-earth guitar, taking no prisoners and leaving smoldering ruin in her wake, and John had been enthralled. He’d watched nothing but her for the whole set, and then panicked and run like hell out of the bar before she got off the stage, afraid he’d say something unutterably stupid if she passed close enough for him to say hi.
And then she’d walked in just before his set tonight. He wished he hadn’t recognized her. In the time it took him to place the face—and that had not been long at all—he’d gone from singing for the fun of it to singing for her, and he didn’t need anybody to tell him how incredibly fucking stupid that had been. He’d tried to turn the performance up to eleven just for her, but his nerves had worked their peculiar evil, and instead of delivering a transcendent performance he’d been even worse than normal. What had he been thinking, that somehow he’d magically impress her and by the end of the set she’d be clamoring to join his band?
Actually, that was exactly what he’d been thinking, he admitted. A whole series of increasingly fantastic scenarios had slipped through his head while he tried to perform. None of them were realistic, but by the third song, he had known he was going to fire Seth. He needed killin’, as they said here in Texas. How he was going to convince Case to join up he hadn’t had the foggiest clue. The friction with her own band had been a near-miraculous stroke of good luck, and then the invitation to play the college show had jumped into John’s head while he was talking to her.
Yeah, and that had its own set of problems he’d have to navigate. He shook his head, put his empty bottle on the bar, and started toward the door. There’d be time to worry about all that later.
Outside, the street was dead—midnight downtown on Easter Sunday dead. The shops and clubs were mostly dark, and the parking meters stood, lone sentinels in front of empty spaces. The only movement was a plastic cup lid skittering along the sidewalk, blown along with a small cloud of grit.
To John’s right, a man leaned against the brick wall of the bar, cigarette burning down in his hand. Tight blue jeans, white silk shirt unbuttoned at the throat, black cowboy boots. He gave off the vibe of an old rock-and-roll guy, his years long past. The kind of guy who’d missed fame and fortune by a hairsbreadth, the kind of guy you might catch at some hole-in-the-wall blues dive playing his ass off, and you’d walk away thinking, Fuck! He’s good! Why haven’t I heard of him? Maybe John had seen him somewhere—that might account for the vague sense of familiarity he got from the guy. The guy had been inside watching the set, but John couldn’t help feeling he’d seen him somewhere else.
The guy gave John a thin smile and took a drag.
John nodded absently and looked down the street for Danny’s car. Nothing moved anywhere.
“You don’t have the money, do you?” the guy said. His voice was a low, hoarse whisper, the sound of an oily rasp dragged across wood.
John’s attention snapped to the man. “What did you say?”
The guy took a step closer, and an awful scent, fishy and ripe with decay, hit John’s nostrils, faint but foul beneath the smell of cigarette smoke. The guy grinned without humor. His face was sharp, angular, and though he was getting on in years, age had done nothing to soften those angles, and his grin was that of a hungry animal. Strings of greasy black hair, shot through with white, tumbled to his shoulders. “Don’t get me wrong,” he whispered. “I think you did the right thing. She’s the piece you need.”
“I don’t know who you are, but—”
The guy narrowed his eyes, and John simply trailed off. What was that stink? Was it carried on the man’s breath, or did he sleep in a trash bin behind a sushi restaurant? Christ! “There’s the other thing, of course,” the guy said, “but if you’ve got what it takes, I can help you with that.” He trained his eyes on John’s, and there was something dark and deadly in them. “And, Johnny my boy, I think maybe you do.” He put his hand on John’s shoulder and leaned in toward him.
John opened his mouth, grasping for some kind of reply, and Danny’s car pulled up. The tires squeaked against the curb. The guy took his hand off John’s shoulder.
Danny got out. “All right,” he said. “Let’s load up.”
John glanced at him and then back to the guy, who was already walking away, the heels of his cowboy boots clacking against the concrete.
“Yeah,” John said to his brother. “Sure.”
***
They loaded the car in silence. Quentin and Seth had already taken off, so there was just Danny’s drum set to load up—an appreciable amount of equipment, but at least none of it was very heavy. They crammed it into Danny’s little hatchback and headed toward John’s place. It wasn’t far.
They pulled up outside the little shack John was renting, a tiny hovel with barely basic amenities stashed on a lot between a bunch of four-bedroom historic houses. The shack was a placeholder for the lot, and it was evidently so ungodly old that it had been grandfathered in despite the neighborhood’s now-stringent neighborhood-association rules. It should have been bulldozed twenty years ago.
“You doin’ all right?” Danny asked him, as usual. “Making ends meet?”
“I’m okay.” John hopped out of the car without looking at him.
“Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” John shut the door. “See you at practice,” he said through the open window.
“Yeah. You bet.”
Danny pulled away, and John walked up the sidewalk to his humble shack, set way back on the lot. He fumbled with his keys in the streetlight for a moment before finding the keyhole. The idea of locking the door was kind of a joke—a good hard kick would probably tear the door right off its hinges, and if it didn’t, a good hard kick three feet to the left would almost certainly put a hole in the wall—but it was habit. That, and he was worried that if he made it too easy, he’d come in one day to find that a dozen homeless people had taken up residence.
He got the door open and went inside, not bothering to turn on the light. Electricity cost money, and the grungy yellow streetlight painting the blinds was bright enough for now. He walked through the small, empty living room and down the short hall to his bedroom. He threw his notebook on a shelf made of cinder blocks and scavenged lumber, already groaning under wobbly stacks of magazines, books, CDs, and DVDs—his whole exhaustive collection of rock history. The souvenirs of half a dozen college road trips and other expeditions were lined up neatly along the top shelf. A broken drumstick from a Steve Earle concert he’d driven three hundred miles to see. A ticket stub from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A shot glass he’d smuggled out of the Whisky a Go-Go, that epic landmark of LA’s rock scene, a place that had shocked him by turning out to be about the size of a large bathroom. He even had a stick of Elvis lip balm, all he’d been able to afford on his short trip to Graceland. One day he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Jeff Buckley’s grave and collect a stick or a rock or a handful of dirt. Something.
It was a good collection of stuff, and he had visions of talking about it in an interview one day in the not-too-distant future when he was rich and famous.
John lowered himself to the mattress on the floor and sat against the wall. Usually he’d crack open his journal after a show and write down a few thoughts, but he felt a mean headache coming on. The shakes, too. He always had a post-show adrenaline high, even if they played just for the sound guy (which was typical), but his anxiety this time had been thrumming like a string that had been wound too tight, and his mind was so revved up now that he doubted he’d get any sleep tonight.
Stephanie Case was going to play in his band. Fantastic.
His stomach twisted and did an unpleasant flip-flop. What had that guy said outside the club? You don’t have the money, do you? John didn’t know how the guy knew that, but he was right on, eerily enough. Case thought she was going to make two hundred bucks, the guys thought the show paid two hundred bucks total, and the reality was that it paid forty dollars plus tips.
John had been so excited about the possibility of playing a real show instead of new band night for a change that he’d guessed what the guys would accept for doing the show and put up the remaining one hundred and ten bucks to pay them himself. It would clean him out, but it would get them in front of a college crowd. At some level, he realized it was stupid and he never should have done it, but he had done it, and he had no intention of backing out.
Except now he’d promised Case the whole two hundred bucks—fifty of which he didn’t even have, because that would have been his imaginary share of the take.
Tomorrow’s problem, he thought. Or the next day’s.
He swallowed and started to feel a little better. The show had sucked, there was no question about that—but somehow he’d managed to snag one hell of a guitarist.
Now he’d just have to figure out how to keep her.
Chapter 2
Practice was held in a rented practice room that was just like all the other rented practice rooms Case had ever seen. Four people and all their equipment were jammed into a room the size of a modest walk-in closet, one of dozens packed into the carved-up space of a defunct elementary school. The walls were lined with grey egg-crate foam that did nothing to dampen the sound of the speed metal band rehearsing in the next room. Why was it, she wondered, that there seemed to be a speed metal band next door to every practice room she set foot in? It was like a malign cosmic law, proof that there was no God.
At least there was no porn on the walls. That was a welcome change.
She arrived early, as she always did, reasoning that practice was supposed to start at seven, so she should get there beforehand and set up. Be ready to play at seven. It never seemed to work out that way, so she was pleasantly surprised when John and his drummer were there waiting for her. John had already made a spare copy of the key, which he handed to her without a word when she came in.
She paid the two of them little attention, setting up her gear while Danny set up and tuned his drums and John fiddled with the PA.
Voice Page 2
