The Ghost and The Hacker (Dark Fire Book 3) (9 page)

I wait for her to actually answer the question, but she's quiet.

"Mom.  Was there a warrant out for his arrest?"

"Yes," she says, sighing.

I'm not even mad.  I already knew the truth.  "Dad lied to me."

"And he spent every extra hour he could trying to find evidence there was another perp, Sarah.  You know full well he never thought Zachary would have done such a thing.  But how would it have looked if he refused to put out a warrant against his daughter's boyfriend when there was a witness placing him at the scene?"

My mother: an amazing memory, logical and insightful, and so fucking annoying sometimes it makes my head hurt.

"Mom, the witness was his dad- a man who died a few years ago when he tried to knock over a bank outside Lakemont.  Obviously, the witness had a few character flaws."

"He had a history of
unreported
domestic abuse, Sarah.  Not the kind of record your father could use to brand him a liar, or even pin him with the thefts.  He didn't have the money on him and there was no evidence that he'd been breaking all the windows down Main Street."

"He probably used a baseball bat, mom."  I tap the power button on my new computer and it sparks to life, everything humming like a sleek racecar.

I will be eating ramen for a very long time to pay for said humming racecar.

"Your father did make a comment shortly after Mr. Coffield died, though, that strikes me as odd now."

I sit forward in the executive desk chair.  "What did he say?"

My mom hums under her breath like she always does when she's remembering something.

"If I recall correctly, a bunch of uniforms had to go through Roger's place above the bar after we found out he'd been killed.  They brought box loads of paperwork back for your father to go through with the County Sherriff's office.  It took them almost all weekend, but when your father came home, he said, 'I feel like I finally get to sleep now, Mary.'  And eight months later, he died.  I never really thought to ask him about that night.  It only really sticks out now that you're asking about it."

I'm really grateful for that amazing memory I was pissed off about earlier.  There were boxes of paperwork, which means box loads of stuff that would have been scanned and added to the case file.  Now I have stuff to search through.  Along with the search for a warrant, I have something else to look for.

Zach

I can still smell her, despite a second shower after she left.  She's in my skin and in my brain and- Oh, Jesus, I've fucked up.

I should have trusted her.  She would have made it out of that ghetto on her own.  I shouldn't have worried about her living there to begin with; Her dad made sure she could defend herself before she ever met me, which in hindsight was probably one of the only reasons he let his daughter date Roger Coffield's son.

She could and would have kicked my ass handily.

I'm only out of the shower a little while when Cy comes back from running errands.

"Hey man, where you been?"  I give him a fist bump and step back.

"Had stuff to do," he says cryptically, though he looks a little sad.

It's not odd that Cy's been on his own a bit.  He tends to have days where he just needs to get away for a while.  What's odd is him being missing
overnight
.  Cy doesn't sleep with groupies or roadies or fangirls.  If he's out getting some strange, it means he's in a relationship.  But he's obviously not in a relationship he can talk about, or he'd be telling us all about it.

Our
Dad
can be an over-sharer.

I note with some confusion that, after a couple hours of errands, his hands are empty.  He doesn't have anything in a grocery bag, or a videogame in a plastic sleeve.  He's not even carrying a six-pack of my rootbeer, which means he forgot to pick more up like he said he would.

Griffin and Nicki show up twenty minutes later and we order delivery.  While we're all waiting, they ask me how the pursuit of my
Night of Dreams
girl is going.  I let out a broken sigh and admit that I fucked up.

"I keep bumping into her.  I keep getting the chance to make it right but I keep fucking up.

She's amazing, you know?  I should have just trusted in that.  She could kick my ass.  I knew that.  I shouldn't have gotten involved.  I just ended up fucking everything up anyway.  It's just...I just...She's so amazing, and god!  I'm still crazy about her.  She's beautiful and so smart- so fuckin' smart.  She always was so smart.  And I was this loser from the wrong side of town who lived above the bar, and she was, like, this princess.  Her Dad was the Police Chief.  Did you know that?  That's how perfect she had it growing up.  Straight-laced and straight A's and just straight up beautiful.  I'm-"

I look up to see Griffin's eyes glazing over and poor Nicki looks like she just wants to escape.

"I fucked up."  I take a sip from the second to last vintage root beer bottle in my stash and curse Cy for reneging on his promise to get more today.

When Justin comes in, I nearly breathe a sigh of relief that the focus isn't going to be on me anymore.  When Andy follows him in, I make a dash to the hallway to discretely order more food from the Thai place down the street.

I'm about to end the call when Andy asks me to double the order, so I do.  When I get back to the living room, Cy's face is fading from a blistered sunburn shade back to normal.  He's sitting next to Justin and the two are having some conversation I can't hear until Justin sticks his fingers into a carton of noodles, pushes them into his mouth and then says, "Besides, if I'm gonna hurt someone, it would be him."

He points at Griffin, who cringes, stands, and hands his bowl to Nicki.

"I owe you a free one man.  I won't stop you.  Just don't be mad at Nicki."  He pauses and then goes on to say, "I'm crazy about her, man.  I have been for more than six years."

"Damn weird way of showing it, screwing a new fangirl every night."

Cy, Nicki, Andy, and I keep having to turn our heads back and forth to watch this play out, like some kind of verbal ping pong game.

Griffin looks pissed.  "I would have married her six years ago, but I knew there was a good chance it would have destroyed the band.  I couldn't do that to them."  I points to me and Cy.  "Or to you.  So I sucked it up.  Figured it was all in my head anyway."  He pulls Nicki to him and goes on to say, "Turns out, it wasn't.  When I realized that, I married her, Justin."

I gasp loud enough that people could hear it.  Holy shit.  Justin is actually going to kill him, and now, they're related.

Damn.  My head hurts.

Griffin's voice is low, but we all hear him say, "No fucking around on her.  No fangirls in my bed.  No more panties in my pocket, man.  I'm done.  I'll back out of Dark Fire quietly.  Just don't be mad at Nicki.  I had to trick her into marrying me and I've done everything I could think of to convince her since then."

Justin crosses his arms and shifts his stance, lifting a brow.  "Convince her of what, precisely?"

"How much I love her."

"And I believe him," Nicki adds.

Griffin leans in and touches his forehead to hers, his fingers stroking along her cheeks.  I just spent over an hour in bed with Sarah, yet the sight of Griffin and Nicki in love has me insanely jealous because even if I manage to convince Sarah to keep a sexual relationship a secret between us, I can never publically touch her cheek like Griffin is with Nicki.  I can never announce my undying love for her without someone in the pop doing some digging to see if we have a past.  Which we do.

Just not as Sarah Jennings and Zach
Moore
.  And
that
will definitely be unearthed.  And when that little nugget sees the light of day, I'll be heading to jail, or at the very least, go to trial for that spree- something that would kill Dark Fire even if I'm found innocent in the end.

So I do something I should have been doing all along.  I try to make sure my friends have the Happily Ever After I had been hoping for with Sarah.

"It's almost as disgusting as watching you and Andy, dude," I say, trying to compare the love Nicki and Griffin have with the love he has for his girl.

Cy seems to get where I'm going with this.  "He fucking held her hand at dinner on Wednesday."

"I'm sorry!  I knew they were seeing each other, but I had no idea they were married!"  Andy's in tears again and while her face is mushed up against Justin's chest, I'm close enough to hear most of it.

Her words make me want to join her in crying because all of it is about Griffin and Nicki's long-suffering, hidden love.  She talks about how unbelievable it is that their love survived all these years.  That they love each other so obviously, everyone can see.  How they'll make beautiful babies...

I see Griffin's eyes get huge with that one, but Nicki looks equally distressed so he seems to calm down.  They whisper to each other and then I try to wrap the conversation up a little.

I want to feel good about helping them, but the insane jealousy is still there in the back of my mind.  I'm not perfect, okay?

"If it means anything, I'm pretty sure Griffin looked like he was going to ralph at Kermit's when the owner of those panties threw her breasts in his face.  Nice save there.  You still managed to make it smooth, even though you only signed her shoulder."

Surely, Justin noticed that?  Griffin was usually all about signing anything a chick offered him.

Griffin's voice is loud when he says sternly, "I'm not doing that anymore."

"You don't want to sniff panties anymore?" Nicki asks him.

"Only panties I want in my hands and face are yours, Nicolette."

I gag.  I don't want to think about that.  Nicki's like the band's little sister.  Cy's biting his lip and choking a little too.  He gets it.

Justin's watching Griffin and Nicki.

Andy is
still
crying.

Justin and Griffin head into the kitchen to get something for Andy to drink and we all wait to hear the sounds of fists and grunts of pain.  We don't hear anything until the guys come back out, Griffin hunched over as if he took one to the stomach.

Nicki screams, "What the fuck did you do to him?" shattering our eardrums and the silence.

"He didn't do anything, baby.  Calm down."  Griffin's standing fine now, walking upright and I realize this is another example of Justin's fucked up sense of humor.  At least Andy's chuckling now and not crying anymore.

I see Cy acting twitchy before he asks, "So...  Do we still have a drummer for tomorrow night?"

Cy's holding his breath.  As our Acting Dad-slash-manager, he's the one who will have the toughest job if we suddenly have to fill a guest slot as a drummer.

"Yeah. I guess I'll stay."  Griffin sounds all resigned, like an asshole, and I smile when Nicki smacks his arm.  It's like I'm controlling her with my mind.

Cy needed it, too.  He's breathing again.

Griffin's explanation about the Vegas wedding is succinct: "We went to Vegas the Sunday after the show at The Tap.  Got married.  Came home."

When Teddy rings the bell at the door with the rest of our dinner order, I jump up to get it.  When I come back, I've got a fork in one hand and a plastic bag full of food in the other.  I place the food in front of Andy.

"My lady."  I bow and present the fork to her.

"You're such a sweetheart!" she gushes.  "You tell your Sarah to call me.  I'll vouch for how amazing you are."

The carpet is suddenly incredibly interesting.  "No.  I fucked up."

"What does
that
mean?" she asks.  I get why she's confused.  I'm a hundred times more confused and it's
my
life.

"Good luck with that," Cy says to Andy.  "We've been trying to figure out what he's talking about with this whole 'I fucked up' thing all evening."

I drop back to the couch, all alone, arguing with myself about what to tell them. 

"Oh!"  Griffin pulls out a DVD from his jacket pocket, holding it high above his head as if in victory.  Now that they all have the wedding video to watch, I'm rescued from having to add anything to the conversation.

The video plays and we give Griffin shit for not writing his own vows.  Andy nearly cries over how romantic it is- Griffin basically kidnapped Nicki to Vegas.  I'm not sure how that's romantic.  It seems more like a felony and Stockholm Syndrome to me, but I'm currently sitting alone, kicking my own ass for being a fucking idiot, so what do I know.

Andy's better now; she just looks like she wants to punch Griffin now that Nicki has explained how Griffin proposed: "He said something about how I should get used to him footing the bill for flight upgrades, mentioned he trusted me with his American Express, and then he asked me to marry him."

I want to hit him now too, but at least Andy's not crying.

The conversation continues late into the night, Andy falling asleep curled into Justin.  Nicki and Griffin periodically leave the room one at a time, only to return together with huge smiles twenty to thirty minutes later.  Oh yeah...  We have
no idea
what you guys have been up to...  Sure.

"Dude, maybe you should take your wife home now.  I don't want to know what you guys keep doing in my bathroom."  Cy crosses his arms.

"Speaking of which," Justin says quietly.  "Where are you guys going to live?  Your place, or yours?"  He punctuates his question by pointing to Nicki first, and then Griffin.

Nicki speaks up first.  "I think we're mostly going to be at his place.  My place is so much further from everything- my office, here, Justin's..."  She tries to stifle a yawn.

"Now I know you need to take her home, Griff.  She's about to pull an Andy."

"Am not," she argues, yawning again.

"Come on, wife.  I have plans for you yet and they involve you being conscious."  Griffin scoops Nicki off the couch and she has to hold back a squeal of delight so she doesn't wake Andy.

"Actually, can I talk to you guys for two minutes?"  I follow them into the kitchen where Griff pulls Nicki's coat from the back of a chair and helps her into it.

"Yeah.  Sure.  What's up?"

"If you're not going to be at Nicki's place, would you mind if I crashed there for awhile?"

"You and Cy okay?"  Nicki's gaze darts back to the living room where Cy is sitting on the couch, chuckling over something Justin is saying.

"Remember how I said I fucked up?"

"Nope.  Not even a little.  Please.  Tell me again how you fucked up with your girl," Griffin says dryly.

I give him a
fuck you
with my face and finger and then grip the back of the chair I'm standing behind.  "I need to move out of the building.  It's the first step toward making it right."

Griffin scratches the scruff on his chin, pulls his coat up a little higher to cover his neck, then he shrugs, and looks at Nicki.

"Yeah.  Stay as long as you like," Nicki says, smiling.  "I'll probably put it on the market someday, but it's yours for as long as you need it.  When did you want to move in?"

"As soon as I can."  I grip the chair back harder.

"Alright.  Move in as soon as you want and I'll try to clean out as much as I can.  Housekeeping only comes every two weeks, so I'll have to make an extra appointment for tomorrow morning."  Nicki buttons her coat up to stay warm, but I wonder how warm she'll actually be in those little skirts she wears all the time.  I know she's done it for years because I've seen her, but I wonder how she can possibly be warm enough in snow in those.  I once saw her trudge through six inches of snow in a skirt and some boots she called
Uggs. 
Little bits of snow were all over her legs but she didn't even seem to notice.