Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book

by Adrian Birch

  Half the crowd was down in front of the stage dancing drunkenly. Morgan bought beers and managed to pour a shot’s-worth of whiskey from a flask tucked into her purse into each. “Boilermakers!” she yelled over the speakers.

  I could tell already that the concert wasn’t going to end well. There was just this feeling in the air. There were too many guys who basically wanted to drink, drink more, and then break whatever rule they could find. Halfway into his set, Bryce Tripp slowed it down again, this time playing a crooning love song. A guy nearby took the opportunity to slow dance with this girl I vaguely recognized from the beer garden. He had his hands all over her, and then he started really grabbing her ass. I was pretty sure she’d been with somebody else at the beer garden. It was actually kind of weird how the guy wasn’t just grabbing her ass, but totally reaching around and down between her legs. And she was just letting him go at it.

  That’s when I got knocked over.

  Some guy had trampled into me, fists swinging. As I fell, his elbow caught me behind the ear. I spilled what was left of my second boilermaker and scraped my palm.

  “Asshole!” Morgan screamed and leaned down to help me.

  I stood up just as the guy who’d knocked me down—the same guy I’d seen with the girl in the beer garden earlier—punched the guy she was dancing with squarely in the face. Then yet another guy I’d never seen before pushed them both right back into us, and we got knocked over again.

  An all-out brawl broke lose.

  Morgan and I crawled to the edge of the stage, and Bryce Tripp finally stopped playing. A security guard took over the microphone while a handful of rent-a-cops tried to stop the melee. I checked my palm, which was only barely bleeding, and my head. I felt fine, but that may have had a lot to do with how drunk I was at that point.

  When I looked up, Morgan was talking to Bryce Tripp. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Why’d you stop playing?” she yelled out while the scuffle continued on, barely abated, behind her.

  I was sure Bryce Tripp would just ignore her, but he actually smiled and said something. Neither of us could make it out over the bullhorn.

  “What?” Morgan screamed. I hadn’t seen her this drunk in a long time.

  Bryce Tripp smiled again and shook his head. I couldn’t believe it, but he actually approached us at the foot of the stage and knelt down to talk to us.

  “They won’t let me keep playing,” he said. “It’s actually in my contract.”

  He had piercing, icy-blue eyes. I honestly don’t think I’d ever seen anyone better looking that close in person.

  “You know,” he added, and shrugged, “the ‘safety of the performer at risk’ and all that.”

  Morgan was in full flirt mode. “So you always do what they tell you to do?”

  She had this weird ability to flirt without making a total ass of herself, no matter how drunk she was.

  Bryce Tripp laughed. He was even cuter with a full grin. I actually felt a wave of attraction pass over me as he spoke.

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “I usually do pretty much what they tell me.”

  Morgan put on a pout and pretended like she’d lost interest. “Well, that’s a shame.”

  “No, not really,” Bryce Tripp shot back, still grinning. “I get paid all the same. This is my third brawl in two months. Just means I get the night off, which is fine by me.”

  He stood, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a stack of what looked like business cards.

  “Couple of backstage passes,” he said, handing one to Morgan and one to me. “Looks like I’m free for the evening. Why don’t you come on over and say hello?”

  Then he gave us a friendly wave and walked away.

  As soon as he’d left the stage, Morgan clutched her pass and screamed. “Oh my fucking God! How do we get back there?”

  We looked around and saw a little security gate beside the stage. It seemed to be the only way in.

  By then the brawl had shifted toward the grandstands and we were able to make our move. We had to avoid an inebriated trucker pinned to the ground by a couple of security cops, but we managed to race to the side of the stage without getting knocked over again.

  I couldn’t stop laughing. I hadn’t forgotten the body, but I was so drunk by now, I didn’t even care that someone had just died.

  A little, panicky security guard was the only person manning the backstage gate. He was so focused on the brawl, standing on his toes and yelling into his cellphone, that he just waved us in without even really looking at our passes. He was probably used to letting girls with passes backstage.

  The area behind the stage was strangely empty. There were couches set up outside, and a cold-cut buffet, and coolers of what I assumed to be beer, but no one was around. Bryce Tripp’s trailer—the same one that had blocked my car—was now pulled up alongside this sitting area.

  But Bryce Tripp himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Morgan grabbed a beer from a cooler and sat on the couch to wait.

  Just then a guy came out of the trailer. He was dressed in tapered jeans and a fitted shirt and looked ready for an L.A. nightclub.

  He lowered his sunglasses, and it was only then that I realized it was Bryce Tripp, the same guy who’d just been singing twangy country songs in a Stetson cowboy hat.

  “How do you like my disguise?” he asked.

  “I can’t say it’s an improvement,” Morgan said.

  He folded his glasses and stashed them in his vest pocket.

  “So where are we going?” he asked, ignoring Morgan’s comment. “If I’m going to buy you drinks, you two have to lead the way. I’ve never been here before. Where are we, anyway? Muldoon? Is that what it’s called?”

  “Muldoon,” I confirmed stupidly.

  Morgan laughed. “Which means there’s only one place to go! Come on.”

  * * *

  The Buckshot Saloon is the single establishment with a full bar in Muldoon. During fair time it never closes, and it’s basically standing room only, twenty-four hours a day, all weekend.

  I didn’t think anyone recognized Bryce Tripp when we came in. He turned the head of just about every girl he passed when we made our way inside, and at least a dozen half-sozzled guys sized him up, but he looked so different out of his western clothes that no one realized he was the same guy on all the concert posters. Everyone figured he was just someone’s out-of-towner friend; some pretty boy from the city.

  “Well, ladies,” he said, wedging himself into a place at the bar with Morgan and me on one side, and Tuck Schroep, my second-grade teacher’s husband, on the other. “What’ll it be?”

  I was already barely able to keep my balance, but I let him order me a shot of whiskey.

  It was while I was doing the shot that I saw Shawn at the back of the bar. He was nodding drunkenly at one of his friends from the mill.

  For a moment I worried he’d see me shoulder-to-shoulder with this extremely attractive stranger—the only guy in the bar in skinny jeans—and get upset.

  But in exactly the next moment, I hoped he’d see me. I thought again about his complete inability to help Ian with the body in the locker room, and the way he’d laughed at me with Jason. Fuck him.

  “Nate!” I yelled at the bartender, pounding my hand and drawing as much attention to myself as possible. “Three more Maker’s!”

  I had no idea if this worked because I lost sight of Shawn when a surge of about a dozen people spilled in from the cancelled concert. I’m sure the bar was well past its legal capacity. I could hardly breathe.

  By the time our next round arrived, Tuck Schroep was talking at Bryce and Morgan from beneath his hairy white mustache.

  “…clean off!” he was saying, making a chopping motion with his hand. “That’s right. I’m telling you. Somebody’d cut his thingy clean off!”

  He was talking about the body.

  I knew the news of a mutilated corpse in the girls’ locker room was going to spread like prairie
fire, but not this fast. Mrs. Whipple must have told anyone within earshot after the football game.

  And now everyone was on edge. All of a sudden, I could tell. The people in the bar weren’t just drinking because it was fair time—they were nervous, afraid. Things like this didn’t happen in Muldoon. I’d never even seen Tuck Schroep drunk before, not ever, come to think of it.

  “What’s he talking about?” Bryce laughed. He couldn’t seem to figure out if Tuck was crazy or not.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. I was desperate to come up with a way to change the subject. Before I could think of how, though, Tuck broke in again.

  “Fella was trying to rape one of the girls, I guess!” he declared. “One of the cheerleaders. I don’t know which one of them cut it off, but one of ‘em did. Good for them, I say.”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. At first I thought it was someone trying to pay Nate, but whoever it was kept his hand there and pulled a little, gently turning me around.

  It was Ian.

  “How’re you holding up?”

  I practically knocked Morgan over hugging him. “You’re already here! I didn’t think I’d see you.”

  He looked at me a little warily. He’d changed clothes and was wearing a black hoodie with “ARMY” written across the chest. He glanced at Bryce, then back at me.

  “How’re you holding up?” he asked again.

  “Fine!” I yelled over the bar’s noise. “Fine! Totally fine. Drunk off my ass, but fine!”

  Bryce Tripp spied Ian out of the corner of his eye, turned, and held out his hand. “Hey, I’m Bryce,” he said, charmingly.

  Ian shook his hand. He was polite, but wary. “Ian.”

  I was pretty drunk at that point, but I could see right away that Ian was the only person in the bar who recognized Bryce Tripp from the posters.

  “Buy you a shot?” Bryce asked him.

  “Nate!” Morgan yelled to the bartender before Ian could respond. “Four more!”

  Ian grinned at me for the first time since he’d said hello.

  “I did say I might have one drink.”

  Bryce raised his shot glass. “Well, then, to—where’d you say we are? Muldoon! Prettiest little place I’ve ever avoided getting my ass kicked. So far.”

  Morgan laughed, we all clinked Bryce’s glass with ours, and I drank down yet another whiskey—who knows how many I’d had by that point?

  And that’s when my memory of everything starts to get hazy.

  I remember Morgan talking to Ian about bear hunting with her dad, and Ian nodding and listening to her drunken blather because he was too nice to tell her to shut the fuck up. I remember grabbing Bryce Tripp’s arm and peeling him away from Tuck Schroep—something I never would have done if I hadn’t been so totally wasted—and staggering with him in tow onto the insanely crowded dance floor. I think I remember seeing Shawn watch us dancing, but I couldn’t say for certain.

  Next, I just barely remember asking Bryce if he smokes, and then buying cigarettes from the vending machine. I think I remember having one more shot at the bar—and I’m pretty sure Morgan actually talked Ian into having one with us, too—before going outside. There was another moment outside—this one very hazy—when Bryce bummed someone’s last match, and he laughed when I told him he’d have to “monkeyfuck" me, which meant lighting my cigarette from his. But I can barely remember this at all, and I can’t really say if it was before or after that second round of shots with Morgan and Ian.

  And that was it, really.

  The rest was totally gone. Anything else that happened that night is completely blacked out from my memory.

  The next thing I remember was waking up alone in the Starlight Motel, without a phone or a car, and, now, with night coming on.

  * * *

  I had no choice but to walk the half mile from the motel to the fairgrounds where I hoped my car would still be parked.

  All the way there, I still felt surprisingly great.

  I kept expecting a massive hangover to hit me, but it never came. I didn’t even have to pee, and I wasn’t really thirsty at all. I don’t think I’d ever felt more rejuvenated in my life.

  It was only when I reached the highway that I realized something was wrong.

  It was the Saturday evening of the Muldoon fair weekend, but there wasn’t a single car on the road.

  Traffic should have been bumper to bumper and even worse than last night. At any other time of year, an empty highway would have been perfectly normal, but not tonight.

  I walked faster. My feet crunching through the gravel at the road’s shoulder was the only sound I could hear. It occurred to me, hurrying along while the sun sank into the mountains way off in the west, that I hadn’t seen a single person since I’d woken up. Not one.

  The lights at the rodeo arena were on. And most of the street lights, too.

  But as I approached the fairgrounds, I saw that all of the carnival rides were totally dark. The Ferris wheel’s motionless silhouette rose up over the feedlot’s corrugated tin roof. There was no blaring carnival music, no roar of souped-up engines at the Saturday-night destruction derby, and no cheers from the grandstands.

  I hopped the fence into the parking lot.

  There were only a few cars left. I was so relieved when I spotted my little gray sedan parked all alone in the dimming evening light, I practically ran to it.

  I’d lost my set of keys along with my phone, but thank God Shawn always insisted I keep a spare hidden under the battery. I popped the hood and found the extra key right where I expected.

  But the car door wasn’t locked. That was odd, because if there was ever a time I’d be sure to lock my car door, it was during the fair, especially since I’d parked in such a public spot.

  I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could and go home—or maybe to my parents’ or to Ian and Danielle’s—and figure out what the fuck was going on.

  I tried not to think about the unlocked door for now and jammed the key into the ignition. Just as I put the car in drive, I noticed something on the passenger seat.

  It was a man’s sweatshirt. I kept my foot on the brake and held up the fabric.

  It was Ian’s black army hoodie. The one I’d seen him wearing at the bar.

  So Ian had been in my car last night.

  I tried again to think as hard as I could about what happened after we were all at the bar, but it was no use. I had no memory whatsoever of anything after that.

  In the dimming light, I almost didn’t even see that there was something else on the seat. But when I moved the hoodie aside, there it was.

  A gun. Ian’s gun. I recognized it right away.

  Ian wasn’t one of those guys who packed heat everywhere he went, but he must have been carrying it last night in the bar. He must have had a reason.

  But why would he have left his gun in my car? With the door unlocked?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Something was wrong. Something was really wrong. I had to get to Ian right away. I had to talk to him and find out what the hell was going on.

  I hit the gas and drove my little car as fast as I could toward the fairground’s nearest exit.

  The exit was in the back, near the stockyard. On the way there I saw that everything at the carnival was totally shut down. All the food stalls were closed, and as far as I could tell, even the animals had been taken out of their pens. My headlights flooded the road and all of the motionless rides, but I didn’t see a single soul.

  When I reached the gate, I found it was blocked.

  A pair of wooden police barriers spanned the entire road. What the fuck was going on?

  Someone knocked hard on my window. I almost screamed.

  “Ma’am?” It was a male voice, but it was too dark now to see who it was. Another couple of pounding knocks. “Can’t leave here, ma’am.”

  It was a cop. He was knocking on my window with his flashlight. I don’t know if I was more relieved that it was a cop and not
someone trying to kill me, or that it was simply another human being, the first I’d seen that day.

  I rolled down the window.

  My eyes adjusted to the glare of the flashlight, and I could see that the cop was Jason. Fucking great.

  “I’m not authorized to let you through here, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am? Who’s ma’am? What the fuck, Jason?”

  “Ashley. Whatever. You can’t pass through here.” He was obviously still hungover, but this wasn’t stopping him from acting like an asshole cop now that he was on duty. “Vehicles can’t come or go until the search is over. Why are you even here? Why aren’t you at home?”

  “I’m trying to go home,” I said. “Just let me out.”

  “Can’t. Can’t let anyone in or out. We still haven’t caught those guys yet.”

  “What guys?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jason leaned casually against my car and folded his arms. This enraged me even further. “The guys who attacked that girl. Where have you been?”

  Immediately my thoughts leapt to Haley. “What girl?”

  “I don’t know.” Jason shrugged. “Some girl. Some kid. It was two guys who did it. We’re still looking for them. We’re combing the fairgrounds. It’ll take some time. The whole place is locked down—here and the high school both. How do you not know about all this? Everyone was supposed to be out by two-thirty last night. They were announcing it for hours over the PA.” Now he grinned that stupid smug grin of his. “Where were you?” He laughed. “You were fucking hammered last night! Having a little too much fun?” He gave a few rabbit-like thrusts of his pelvis.

  I was too worried about Haley to care.

  “Who was the girl, Jason? Just tell me who the girl was.”

  “I told you I don’t know, Ashley. Maybe if you weren’t so shitfaced drunk last night you could have found out for yourself.”

  In the briefest of moments I thought about the gun under Ian’s hoodie. But I wasn’t stupid.

  I had to focus on getting home as soon as possible, then calling Danielle on the landline. All I cared about right now was making sure that Haley was okay. I tried to remind myself that there were probably hundreds of little girls at the fair last night. But if something had happened to Haley after she’d begged me to take her to the carnival, and I wasn’t there… I’d never forgive myself.