Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) (6 page)

I don’t know how long I sat there, being empty. When you have nothing, when you
are
nothing, it’s not like you account for the time.

You just are.

And after a while, there isn’t even a you.

Slowly, my eyes took in my ink. The colors. The thick, black lines that separated one section from another. The contours, the shading, the careful attention to detail. My tats brought me back, deliberately, like they had a process. A plan.

A mission.

That voice? It suddenly said,
You can do this.
 

I could? What the fuck could I do? What
this
could I do? No money. No ID. No bass. Not even a fucking beat-up guitar.

No Dad.

No brother.

No love.

I don’t cry. For the record—
I don’t cry
. Didn’t cry when Mom died when I was eleven. Didn’t cry when Dad came back and took over for us, his first question about how to find the local Social Security office so he could apply for our survivors’ benefits. Didn’t cry when he started bringing weird guys home and one of them—

I don’t cry.

You can do this.

The voice sounded like Darla this time.

Elbows on my knees, I looked up. No light in the bathroom, so the only way I could see was from the shine of sunlight through the open door. The toilet paper roll was empty. The room reeked of my bile. My mind felt like cotton candy mixed with beer.

My mouth tasted like that, too.

A plan. I needed to take all the details in my head and turn them into puzzle pieces. Make the pieces fit.

No money. No phone. No ID. No instruments.

What do you do?

Think think think.

You start at the bank. I had four hundred bucks in a saving account you couldn’t access with my debit card. Even if Johnny blew through the checking account, he couldn’t get that. 

Unless he beat me to the bank.

Five minutes later I reeked of puke and sweat, my body running on adrenaline to the local credit union where I’d just sprinted, three long city blocks past junkies and whores and perfectly fine moms pushing baby strollers and happy dads with kids in baseball caps. 

I stopped in front of the bank’s door. If this was going to work, I could look like this. A few deep breaths, some stretches to look like I’d run on purpose. The grim reset button inside me being pushed. The steady decline from being wired to being calm.

Cool.

My goal is to look like a guy coming in to take money out of his account like it was no big deal. Like any other day.

Like a person you don’t need to ask for ID because he’s just so...okay.

That whole expectations thing is a game. Do what people expect of you and when you’re actually lying, you can get away with so much more.

“Hello?” the teller chirped. I remembered her. Sort of. Her face. She’d worked here for a while. “Is that Tyler? Haven’t seen you in months.”

I smiled. Her face brightened.

See? We’re on our way.

“Yeah, Linda.” Thank God for name tags. “How’s it going?”

“You out for a run?” Her eyes raked over me. So that’s how it was. I gave her my best flirt face and tried not to freak out on the inside as seventeen different pieces of me all screamed in the jail of my ribcage.

Just let the calm, cool, flirty dude take charge and it’ll be all right.

“I am. You work out, too, I see,” I said. She glowed.

I picked the right words for once.

“How can I help you?” she asked in a low, suggestive voice.

“I need to take out some money from my account.” I grabbed a withdrawal slip and scribbled the number from memory. I wrote three hundred fifty dollars. Needed to leave some or she’d ask too many questions.

Stay in the range of safe. Too many standard deviations from the mean and you draw attention.

As I slid the slip under the glass counter her fingers touched mine. Lingered. “Nice ink,” she said. “Who did the flowers?”

I looked down. Flowers. That’s right.

“Oh, you know.” Deflect. “You got any tats?” I made myself give her an obvious once-over. Any other situation and I’d find her fuckable, but right now my cock hung in my pants like a loose seatbelt.

She leaned in, giving me two eyefuls of creamy cleavage. “I do, but...I can’t show it here.”

“Really?”

Linda pulled back and looked at my withdrawal slip. She opened her cash drawer as her eyes went to her computer screen.

Please let this work. Please let this work. Pleezeletdiswork.
The words became a chant in my head, all meshed into one ball of sound. Like static.

She keyed in some numbers, then a machine clicked. Shuffling sounds. A stack of bills appeared in the drawer. She grabbed my hand, hard, and pulled it under the glass barrier. A ballpoint pen pressed into my flesh.

She bit her lower lip as she wrote her number on the pad of my hand.

“I get off at three,” she whispered, “if you want to get off, too. I’ll show you my tat and you can show me...everything you got.”

I swallowed. The money was right there. Just had to keep up the act for thirty more seconds.
C’mon Tyler. You got this. You got this.
 

She had to see how fake I was from the look in my eyes, right? Didn’t she? How could I feel so deeply inside me and have people not sense it? Not see it. Not even know it was there? 

I looked at her and smiled, focusing on a spot between her eyes. If I looked directly at her I was fucking freaked she’d figure me out.

“Sounds good.” She slid the money to me, still holding my hand. I picked up the bills like they were a beating heart and tucked them in my pocket. Linda let go of me. It took everything not to exhale loudly. 

“I’ll see you?” she asked, eyebrows up, questioning. Flushed cheeks and a sly, almost-evil grin rounded out her look.

“Sure.”

“Have a nice day,” she said in a neutral voice as another teller walked behind her.

“You too,” I called back as I walked out, face frozen in a smile.

I made it outside and around the corner before I puked again. Some poor insurance agent’s building got the remains of my stomach in their cluster of pansies. Sorry, dude.

I straightened up and took a deep breath. Looked around. No one saw me.

And I had three hundred and fifty bucks to get me through this. Thank fucking God.

I wasn’t quite so empty anymore.

Maggie

The knock at the door wasn’t that unusual. Mom was gone, Lena was at the office working again, and in our little subdivision kids were constantly selling stuff in school fundraisers.

Except kids don’t stand at nearly six feet and have tattoos the color of candy all over them. And they don’t start conversations with, “You got a car and a guitar I can borrow?”

“Excuse me?” 

“Darla call you yet?’

“
Excuse me?
Tyler, what the
hell
are you doing at my house here in St. Louis?” My hinky meter went from zero to
Oh Holy Fuck
. I’d never had a stalker before, but I’d worked with plenty of women on campus who had, plus after my rape I’d been followed by news camera crews and frat boys who thought— 

“Chill. It’s cool.” He kept his voice low. Too low. “I live here.”

“You do not live here.”

“I mean I live in St. Louis.”

“Get out!”

“Did Darla call you?”

“No.”

“Your phone off?”

“What? What? What are you talking about? Why are you asking me questions about my phone and Darla and Tyler Gilvrey what in the fucking hell are you doing outside my mom and dad’s house?”

I pulled back, imagining myself at a distance from this. My therapists had recommended that when I faced massive fear. Imagine you’re at a distance, giving advice. I could feel the plume of terror threatening to overtake me, and if he made one move toward me, I’d—

And then he did. One simple step toward me was all it took. Instinct flooded my veins and I pulled one foot up, twisted my hip and kicked him with my leg at a perfect right angle, my flat, bare sole hitting him square on in the nuts.

I didn’t know a guy could scream like that.

Mrs. Wilmer from next door shrieked as Tyler folded in half and fell backward off the two-step front stoop. Her little Labradoodle, a mocha-colored puffball with pink and purple ribbons above its ears, began barking furiously and shot across the yard.

“Margaret! Margaret! Is this man hurting you?” Mrs Wilmer called out. She had been watering her flower bed with a hose and a watering sprayer and came over, still holding it. If she was four-foot-eight I’d be surprised, and she probably weighed less than most backpacks at my college. Her bangs were cut straight across and about a half-inch from her hairline. She wore giant glasses that looked like something from a 1980s sitcom, and she normally walked with a walker.

That woman fairly sprinted to my aid.

I felt like one of those spin art canvases, my inner world twirling and splattering into patterns that would later be beautiful and enchanting but right now were just smears and chaos.

Her dog...what was its name?...jumped right on Tyler’s leg and sank its fangs into his calf.

Who knew Tyler could hit notes
that
high?

“Help! God, ow, help!” he shouted, hitting three octaves at once, rolling on the ground.

Mrs. Wilmer turned purple with rage. “You can’t hurt Margaret! How
dare
you!”

Tyler answered by shaking the leg the dog was biting.

“And now you want to hurt my little Attila! Sic ‘em, Attila! That’s right. Protect Mommy and Margaret!”

Tyler rolled on the ground like he was on fire, then shifted one leg under his hips, starting to stand.

Mrs. Wilmer shot him in the face with the hose sprayer.

And he went down. Boom.

“Ah, fuck, Maggie, help me,” he moaned. 

“He said the ‘f’ word! How
obscene
!” Mrs. Wilmer said to me, enraged. Her eyes bulged and her browned teeth were bared at Tyler in an odd symmetry with her little dog. “Margaret, go get one of those portable telephones and call the fuzz!”

“The...what?”

“We need to get the fuzz out here to arrest this mugger!”

“No police!” Tyler groaned.

“See! He’s going to stand up and kidnap us and do unspeakable things!”

I looked down at the ground. Mrs. Wilmer still had the hose focused on Tyler, and Attila wasn’t letting go of his leg. My crotch kick left the guy folded in half. With the colorful arm tattoos he looked like something out of a Garden Club display.

“Call Darla! Call Charlotte,” he groaned. “They’ll tell you why I’m here.”

“Who are Darla and Charlotte, young man?” Mrs. Wilmer bent down and sprayed him in the eyes. “You can’t pull one over on us!”

Attila released Tyler and shimmied up his body, licking his face.

Pure adrenaline raced through me, but I took a few steps backward. Phone. Where was the phone?

Mrs. Wilmer mistook my uncertainty for fear. “I’ve got him, Margaret. Don’t worry. Between me and my little honey bunny Attila, we’ll keep you safe.”

Tyler let out a sound of outraged pain.

It wasn’t
my
safety I was worried about any more.

I sprinted into the kitchen and grabbed my phone and turned it back on. It had run out of power, and I’d been charging it all morning, and—

Seventeen messages?

Oh, shit.

I ran back to the front yard before Mrs. Wilmer went and got her six cats and made them try to eat Tyler, too.

“You’re calling 911?” she asked, eyebrows raised. I could only imagine how many replays this story would get for the next year at her bridge club. And at the local church she attended. And everywhere in town
but
social media.

“No, Mrs. Wilmer. Just checking to see if Tyler’s telling the truth.”

“You
know
this criminal?”

All I could do was nod.

“Quit waterboarding me, you old bat!” Tyler sputtered, the water choking him.

“You apologize for that remark, young man! I am not an old bat. What a nasty thing to say!”

“And making your dog bite me while you torture me with a hose isn’t nasty?”

“I’m a good Christian woman!” she protested. “I am
never
nasty!” 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Tyler said.

“You cannot take the name of the Lord in vain like that!” She pointed the hose at him. “Apologize to God or I’ll...”

“What?” he shrieked. I had one eye on my row of messages and one on him. It was a treat to see him so...emotional. So fired up. So—anything other than droll and dry and contained.

Tyler was one big bundle of muscled schadenfreude right now.

Messages. A ton of them. Most from Darla. Something about Tyler needing help getting to L.A. by Monday night. Then a stream of them from Charlotte. 

“Does he have a partner hiding in your house? Are you being kidnapped, Margaret?” hollered Mrs. Wilmer. “Please shout if you are!” followed by growling sounds, then Tyler whimpering.

Oh, boy.

By the time I got back to the front stoop with the phone, Tyler was standing. He was crumpled a bit from my kick, and rubbing his bitten calf. He was soaking wet and while I should have felt pity or empathy or anger or something any decent human being would feel, all I noticed was how his wet t-shirt molded to what appeared to be an eight pack of abs.

Oh, my.

Mrs. Wilmer adjusted her glasses, then switched the hose into her left hand as Attila seamlessly leaped into her right arm and nestled in, panting at me like she expected a treat.

“Good dog,” I muttered.

Tyler mumbled a single-word obscenity.

“I’m fine, Mrs. Wilmer,” I explained.

“Glad someone is,” Tyler interrupted.

“Shut up, Frown.”

He did.

My phone buzzed. A call. I slid the phone open and caught Charlotte.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked.

I surveyed the scene. “Do you really want to know?”

“Is Frown there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.”