Sprayed Stiff (15 page)

“No way,” Rick said. He chugged some beer.

Tessa shook her head once, decisively, and I could see she would be tougher to get through than her six-foot-two husband. Then there was Jon, who’d slid his chair over until it was touching mine. He was probably stronger than he looked, but I bet I could take him. Hmm. Maybe I could find a distraction. Maybe one of the thong-wearers on the dance floor. I would have to get creative once Rick went backstage. I couldn’t let him do it all alone.

The wretched bunch had started the last verse of their last song, “Mama in a ’Dillo.” The armadillo had actually been flattened by a tractor-trailer rig, but the hitchhiker who had kept it company for hours finally saw his mother’s face in the shape of the dead critter.

“Nice,” I said, sarcasm thick.

“It’s supposed to be symbolic,” Rick offered in generous defense of his music compadres. “I think.”

“Maybe they’d be a market for your songs,” I teased. “They seem to like armadillos. Your ’dillo could fall out of his limo….”

Rick stuck his tongue out at me, and Tessa hid a smile behind her gimlet.

Roadkill sauntered off the stage after a lot of flashing of their wet armpits and flipping of their sweaty, overly long hair. It didn’t take much to imagine they were smelling like their name about now. Rick took a final swig of his beer before following them backstage.

Speaking of sweaty, Mario and Trudy returned to the table, giggling and gasping for air. I don’t know if they danced that hard (my bet was on Trudy) or were that out of shape (my bet was on Mario), or whether the pressure gradient of the number of bodies per square inch put the temperature up around two thousand degrees out on the floor (all bets were on this one). Jon rushed to get them a pitcher of water. Then they started telling us about their adventures—how someone had grabbed Mario by his family jewels and wouldn’t let go until Trudy agreed to dance with
her.
Okay. Then three women invited Mario to an orgy in the women’s bathroom.

“Did you go?”

“Dios mío,
Reyn!” Mario blushed and crossed himself.

“Cat’s claws and dolphin’s dongs, Reyn. Would you have gone?”

“Never been asked,” I said truculently.

Jon, returning with the water, drilled me with a questioning look that I ignored. The shocking auntie, no doubt.

But they weren’t finished. Apparently, a Hollywood talent scout was here visiting his sister-in-law and had seen Trudy. He’d tried to convince her during the squished armadillo song to move to Hollywood and work as a body double for Nicole Kidman. He named a healthy six-figure salary for official features, with more off the books for whenever Nicole might want to use her to fake out the media in order to sneak someplace else herself.

“That’s something to think seriously about,” Tessa said, reviewing the scout’s business card Mario had handed her. “That would be a good living.”

Trudy looked aghast and shook her head. “Why would I want to go around my whole life as someone else?”

Every now and then, I was reminded of why she was my best friend. We shared a smile.

Tessa put the card on the table and shot a nervous look at the backstage door. I’d noticed she’d been fidgeting, which was unlike a woman who could sit as still as the Rock of Gibraltar. I put my hand on her forearm, and she jumped.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m worried about Rick.”

“He’ll be all right. You know Rick, he’s just palling around before he gets to the point.”

Tessa nodded uncertainly. “But it’s been a half hour already.”

I hadn’t realized it had been that long, but the Trujillos could drag out a story. I leaned toward Tess. “We’ll give him a little more time, then I’ll go looking for him.”

“Not much more time, please, Reyn.” Tessa was almost in tears. “What I’m going to tell you, please keep between us.”

I glanced around and saw that Jon was being entertained by Mario’s reenactment of the crotch-grabbing incident. I nodded. “Of course.”

“Rick had a problem with drugs, before we got married. In fact, that’s how we met. I was assigned to be his public defender on a possession charge. He ran with a bad crowd, but I saw he was a good person. I made him promise if I got him off, he’d go to rehab. He did, and he’s never touched them since. But he’s avoided the lifestyle since then, too. His agent is the one who deals with the musicians….”

“Oh, Tessa, I’m so sorry I asked for his help in this deal with Lexa. If I’d known, I never would have asked him to go somewhere that might tempt him.”

She shook her head, and shot another look at the backstage door. “No, Reyn, it’s not your fault. I could’ve made some excuse. We could’ve stayed home. I just thought it had been long enough.”

“Maybe it has. I’ll go find him.”

“Will you dance with me?” Jon walked up beside me. I looked at Tessa and nodded our secret pact. I could’ve asked Jon to go with me, but something told me my watchdog might need saving instead of the other way around.

“Sure,” I said, and he led me out to bump and grind to the canned rock music that had been playing since the Wretcheds exited. AC/DC. Journey. At least I recognized some of these songs. One verse into the second song, and I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. Tessa caught on and distracted Jon long enough for me to detour to the backstage door.

The only problem was that there was a man the size of the door standing against it. He watched me with the expression a toad wears when contemplating a fly dinner. None. “Hi, handsome! I need to get back there to see my boyfriend.”

No response. I don’t think he was even breathing. I reached into my purse to get a mirror, and one huge hand shot out and shackled my wrist in an iron grip. “No monkey business,” he growled.

“Oh, no, no, no,” I coughed out, and swallowed my shock. “I was just going to, uh, repair my lip gloss before I see, uh, Asphalt.”

“Asphalt? He has a girlfriend, and it ain’t you.”

“Oh, no. Really? How do you know?”

“’Cuz you got a lot bigger tits than her.” I looked down at the cotton spandex cowgirl-print blouse I was wearing. Wrong choice. The guard toad had his eyes right between the silk-screened rope and the girl’s Stetson. Gross. Wouldn’t you know, the only time I out-breasted somebody and the only one who noticed was the most abhorrent human in the place. “Oh, well, gotta go, I guess, if she’s beat me to him.”

I pried his fingers off my wrist and beat a path to the bathroom to come up with a Plan B. A cretin with greasy blond hair down to his fourth rib pushed out of the men’s room. I recognized him as the Wretched Roadkill bongo player, and an idea grabbed me as he tried to slink by. “You are so hot!” I rubbed my hand up and down his right bicep (what I could find of it) and tried not to puke.

“Yo?” For a second I wondered if he didn’t speak English; then I realized that rockers probably didn’t speak my kind of English regardless—I’d have to use the universal language of love.

I smiled and winked and rubbed. Against other parts. I had to get backstage. His bloodshot eyes tried to focus. I pressed against him. “I wonder if you could get me backstage?”

“No can do, Piece.”

I didn’t think he was talking about joy-to-the-world kind of peace. Too bad. Where were the sixties when you needed them? At least their free love had some moral high ground. This guy only got on high ground when it flooded or when he smoked some weed. I cleared the gag out of my throat and tried to sound sultry. “I’ll give you a piece to thank you if you can get me into the Roadkill dressing room.”

His grayish lips spread in a humorless grin. “Now, that might be fun. But I go first.”

Whoa. I thought I was starting to hyperventilate. “You go first,” I agreed, pushing him off me and turning him around to lead the way around the guard toad. I sneaked a look at Tessa and saw she was desperately trying to keep Jon from turning around to see me. Trudy saw me, though. She cocked her head and opened her mouth. I shot her a warning look.

“Hey.” The guard toad grabbed my arm. “I thought you wanted Asphalt.”

“I’m moving on. You’re the one who told me he had another girlfriend. Were you lying?!” I let my voice rise a little. The toad actually showed an emotion: pissed off.

“Asphalt? Why do you want him? I’m better,” blondie whined. “And bigger.”

“Prove it,” I shot back boldly.

My escort grabbed my other arm, yanked me free of the guard toad, and shut the backstage door behind us. I skittered down the darkened hall. “Hey, wait for me,” he shouted.

None of the doors were marked, of course. I paused and he caught up with me, surprisingly fast for a pot-head. “Now for that thank-you,” he said, pushing me against the door to the left. Before he could collect, the partially opened door slid open. I fell in and was face-to-face with a bigger problem.

A much, much bigger problem.

R
ICK
U
GARTE,
surrounded by the members of Wretched Roadkill, had a marijuana cigarette pinched between his forefinger and thumb halfway to his lips. At least, I thought it was a doobie; before now I’d only ever seen one on TV. Hey, I was a good Episcopalian girl from Dime Box, Texas, where a rebellious teenage night out only included some raw Thunderbird and a shotgun. Not that that was a whole lot safer, mind you, it was just different.

Anyway, the doobie looked unsmoked to me, which was good news. But I was seriously pissed, which was bad news. When I get mad I don’t see red, I see nothing but my own anger. I was mad at myself for getting Rick in the situation where he’d fall off the wagon after nearly two decades. I was mad at him, too, for doing it when he had the greatest wife and kids in the world.

“You dumb bastard!” It was really meant for both of us—Rick and me. The Roadkill, though, seemed to take it personally. They all jumped up like lions interrupted from their first kill in a month. I didn’t care. Ah, the armor of fury. I grabbed Rick by the arm and hauled him to his feet. For the first time I noticed he was looking grateful and, I have to say, a little sorry.

“You ought to be sorry, Rick Ugarte, for wanting to mess up all these years of sobriety just for a little toke with a bunch of loser strangers. Loser smelly strangers, at that—”

“I
am
really sorry, Reyn,” Rick said a little too loudly. What was up with him? Maybe he had taken a toke after all. His tone of voice was weird. “
Really,
really sorry.” His gaze dropped to his right.

That’s when I saw the gun. Duh.

The Roadkill leader—whose extreme height, protruding Adam’s apple, and avian eyes reminded me of a vulture—had a Smith & Wesson double-action nine-millimeter pointed into Rick’s right kidney. I allowed myself a moment of pride when I realized I could identify the gun. At my request, Scythe had spent an entire afternoon a couple of months ago with a collection of weapons testing me on different types before he taught me how to shoot. He’d told me it was the weirdest date he’d ever been on, but wouldn’t he be pleasantly surprised when I could identify this particular gun? Well, if I lived to tell him, that is.

“We have to get rid of them both now,” the lead singer grumbled. I noticed the ash sprinkled on his black T-shirt, which read
BLOOD
in red. Maybe he’d been smoking weed since they went backstage. I looked at his bloodshot eyes. Maybe since he’d woken up that morning. That boded well for diminished reflexes. I eyeballed the gun.

“Blood,” my erstwhile escort argued, “don’t go doing anything without thinking. You, Guts, and Gore always fly off the handle.”

What an image. I couldn’t resist asking, “You guys call yourselves Blood, Guts, and Gore?”

“That was the name of our first band, man.” Guts shoved out his lower lip. He had an electric guitar slung around his neck and talked in a permanent shout, like he’d been playing that guitar a little too loud for a little too long. “We got it legal and all, man.”

“Y’see, we played together for years before Asphalt and DD came in,” Gore explained, holding a pair of drumsticks, which he air-played for emphasis. He rocked his head back and forth to the imaginary music. “We were awesome, but we needed more zap and bang. And our agent said we needed a more marketable name. He’s the one who came up with Wretched Roadkill.”

The leader, Blood, bobbed his vulture neck. “Yeah. Killer name. When we expanded, we wanted the guys we hired to get with the whole theme. But Asphalt, our bass guy”—he nodded to the skinny guy in black behind the couch, presumably Lexa’s boyfriend—“Ass is such a wuss, he wouldn’t take a name that had anything to do with violence. DD, though, our bongo dude, he’s really one of us.”

“DD?” I was almost afraid to ask as I slid a look next to me.

“Date with Death,” my escort clarified proudly.

“Ah.” I nodded. “How visceral.”

Rick just shook his head, worried, I guess, that my big, sarcastic mouth was going to get him killed.

“Visceral, just like your music,” I added helpfully to the group of perplexed, stoned faces.

Rick looked up—toward heaven, presumably—and shook his head harder.

“Did you just dis us, man?” Guts glared at me, then proceeded to mock-pick a manic tune out on his guitar, chanting “Dis, dis, dis.”

“She gave us a compliment, you boner,” Blood chastised, glaring over his beak nose with those bulging eyes. “It’s too bad we have to kill her if she likes our music.”

I almost corrected him before a sense of self-preservation stopped me. I smiled benignly instead.

“But we still have to kill her, man,” Gore pointed out, crashing a dirge on his air drums, his hair swinging, as stringy and sweat-soaked as the rest of the band’s. It was such a uniform look that I wondered if they hadn’t found some hair product called Greasy-Sweat: Get the Instant Nasty Without the Hard Work. “Him, too.”

Uh-oh. He might beat me to death with his sticks. It was almost scarier than the gun.

“I’m the one you need to kill, not Rick. He came here because I asked him to. He’s doing me a favor. He didn’t even know Wilma.”

“Wilma? Who’s Wilma?” Gore demanded, pausing with a stick held high.

“Like Fred’s wife on
The Flintstones,
man?” Guts wondered, stroking a last note on his guitar and shaking his body in what looked like an epileptic seizure.

“No.” Irritation that these boneheads were terrorizing me and Rick began to overcome my fear. “Like the woman in Terrell Hills you whacked.”

“Hey!” My escort, DD, took a threatening step toward me. “The only thing we’re whacking is our—”

“Excuse me, miss, but we haven’t killed anyone!” came a reedy voice from the back. Everybody froze. The manners were definitely out of context. Asphalt’s mournful eyes met mine. Great, leave it to me to find someone to feel sorry for in this sea of scum. Those eyes implored. If he was right, I had to look somewhere else for the killer. That is, unless I got killed myself by a flying drumstick or a bullet.

“Not yet, we haven’t.” Gore started laughing in short bursts that reminded me of a machine gun. I glanced down at the Smith & Wesson the giant vulture still dug into Rick’s kidney.

“Why do you have to kill us, anyway?” I asked carefully.

“If she doesn’t know, why do we have to kill her?” Asphalt asked.

“Her buddy here knows,” the leader answered, with a twist of the gun that made Rick gasp. “This dude knows unusual quality when he sees it. He noticed right away. We have to off him. Then she’ll know he got offed, so we have to off her. Get it, Ass?”

What a nickname. But with a name like Asphalt, what did he expect?

“Get on with it, man,” Guts demanded, air-strumming his guitar faster and faster. He bobbed his head to the manic rhythm as he continued, “Maybe I can get a new song out of this. I gotta watch the blood real close. Maybe the look in her eyes when she stops breathing.”

“Wait a minute,” DD said, grabbing my elbow. I yanked it out of his hand. “She owes me for letting her in here.”

Boy, did I ever. Too bad I didn’t have some thumb-screws on me. I could apply them directly to his—

“Can’t we have some fun first, Blood? All of us?” DD wheedled, trying for my waist this time. Jumping sideways, I shivered in revulsion.

Rick stood suddenly, and I thought he was a goner as Blood scrambled to keep the gun on him. “Stay away from her,” Rick warned bravely.

Oh, great, chivalry wasn’t dead, but I probably would be. And maybe my balding knight in shining leather, too. Why my being raped bothered him more than my getting shot, I didn’t know, but I appreciated it nevertheless. I smiled at him in thanks.

“No fun,” ordered Asphalt, my newest best friend. His bandmates looked at him in shock, but before they could chime in he added, “And we can’t kill them here, anyway.”

“Where, then?” Gore asked, banging his drumsticks on the top of the couch now.

“Out back, and we’ll throw them in the Dumpster, man.” Guts strummed.

“That’s too close, you boner,” Blood told him. “Besides, people on the street will hear.”

“Let’s strangle them instead,” Gore offered, tapping a tune on the back of his shoe, and began to sing, “strangle, strangle, let her dangle…”

“No, that’s too hard,” Vulture Boss argued. He seemed to be loosening his hold on the gun. I watched for a chance to grab it. “How about those woods behind those tract houses out on the highway?”

“I’m not going in the woods,” Gore whined, his drumsticks paused in midair. “There’s creepy animals in the woods, like coyotes and snakes and stuff.”

“Hey, we don’t have a song about a snake, man!” Guts interjected. “We could shoot it, then drive over it, and I could watch the guts come out and write a song about it.”

Guts was warming to this new idea, strumming and humming lyrics to himself, and I thought I ought to encourage it. “And maybe it will have recently eaten, and you can have double roadkill.”

“Double roadkill, man.” Guts threw his head around like he was possessed, but I think he was feeling a beat. “Wow, that is so cool. You’re pretty cool, dead girl.”

Okay, two compliments in one night. The guard toad thought I was chesty, and now I had enviable roadkill songwriting abilities. At least I was going to die with a healthy sense of self.

“Maybe we’ll kill her real slow, and she could write a song about how it feels to die.” Gore looked me up and down—apparently planning all the fun ways to torture me. He tapped on my shoulder and my head with his drumsticks until I batted them away.

All of them but Asphalt whistled and nodded to each other. “Cool idea,” Blood admitted. “It might work.”

A yelp came from the back of the room, and a pale, skinny someone in a black bodysuit streaked out from behind the couch and made for the door.

“Hey, catch her!”

“It’s just Asphalt’s bitch.”

“Start shooting!”

It was Lexa? What had happened to the mango Chanel? Where’d she come from? Behind the couch?

Asphalt leaped after her, and they both busted out the door and blew past the man standing in the dark hallway.

Scythe? His weapon was drawn and pointed into the dressing room. The laser blues met mine for a second, and all I could see and feel was their intensity. “Police! Everyone, hands up.”

Poor Boss Blood was having a hard time keeping up with the action, one too many tokes for him somewhere along the way. He’d waved the gun belatedly toward where Asphalt and Lexa had been, then swung it around toward me. Rick took advantage of the mellow fellow’s slow reflexes and knocked it loose.

His long arm dropped.

Scythe fired a warning shot into the upholstery.

We could hear screams in the club.

Scythe stayed in the doorway, I imagined so he could check down the hall to make sure Lexa and Asphalt weren’t going to ambush him.

The nine-millimeter had flown toward the couch, bounced off, and landed between me and DD. Now, I might have left it there. I mean, Scythe was in charge of this turkey bake, plus with his muscles all on alert and his laser blues at full blast, he looked scary, and I think he was already mad at me. But when DD slipped me this creepy grin and dove for the gun, my reflexes took over. I dove faster. I grabbed it gingerly, remembering how sensitive the trigger on these babies could be and not knowing if the safety was on. Then a pair of hands grabbed my ass, and I figured out the safety was on or I would’ve wiped out the entire room as I was goosed.

“Hey, let go!” I kept the gun on the disarmed boss vulture while I tried to yank my booty out of DD’s hands. He started kneading. I started doing the mambo to shake him loose. “Right now, buddy. Or your date with death will read today.”

“Cover the door,” Scythe barked at me, and before I could swing the gun that way, he was gone and so was the vise grip on my ass. I shot a look behind me and saw Scythe holding DD by his long hair. He kicked him in the groin and dropped the now huddled, moaning mass on the floor.

The other wretched members of the decomposing band winced. Guts looked like he was going to puke his namesake out. “Man, did you
have
to do that?”

“Man,”
Scythe mimicked, “I can do a lot worse unless you drop your guitar, march over to the wall, kiss it, and keep your hands up and on it until the Austin PD gets here.”

I heard sirens now and wondered if I could’ve heard them before. Adrenaline was doing weird things to my perception—it was narrowed, tunneled, allowing me to notice only the things that had direct bearing on my survival. This had happened to me only twice before in my life. Once when I’d almost met my maker, and once when I’d kissed Scythe in my kitchen.

Scythe ushered the men in black over to the wall and motioned to me to keep my gun on them. He took Rick with him back to the dressing room door, talking to him in low tones that I strained but failed to hear. Damn. Scythe took his badge out and stuck it in the vee of his white button-down shirt, presumably so the Austin police wouldn’t shoot him when they blew in. Hey, I was in all black—except for the cowgirl on my chest—like the bad guys. What about me?