by LS Sygnet
I crowded closer to Devlin’s back. It drew his eyes over one shoulder. “You all right?”
“It occurs to me suddenly that I am grossly overdressed.” I felt like a librarian in a strip club. My turtleneck sweater was most certainly out of place. The jeans were new, not a hole strategically ripped anywhere for a tantalizing view for devouring eyes.
He paused in our trek and pressed his lips close to my ear. “Don’t kid yourself, Helen. What you don’t show is far more alluring than everything on display combined.”
“Spoken like an outrageous flirt,” still, his compliment made me feel a little bit better about the conservative attire. “If I’d known what this place would be like, I could’ve dragged out the leather for the occasion.”
Dev tugged me to the most forward barricade, past two more security staff. “Leather?” Dark ale tipped to his lips. “Do tell.”
“Don’t you remember the business with Uncle Nasty’s Bar and ... oh, never mind. You weren’t in Darkwater Bay yet when that happened.” I told an abbreviated story of my attempt to infiltrate a biker gang on the east coast in another life, back when I was still profiling criminals for the FBI.
His eyes danced in amusement. “I’d love to see that get-up, Helen. But this wouldn’t be the right place for you to show up dressed like one of Hell’s Angels. I don’t think there’s enough security in the place to quell the riot it would no doubt cause.”
“All right, you’ve laid the compliments on heavy enough for one night.” My eyes wandered to the crowd around us. The energy, combined with more alcohol than should ever be consumed in a public venue mingled heavily. It was enough to spike my paranoid radar. I started watching. There was no rational explanation for what I sensed. You could smell the fight brewing in the air.
“They’ll be moshing over there,” Dev’s eyes followed mine.
“Ah, so that explains it.”
“You know what a mosh pit is?” his eyes rounded in half-playful surprise. “Helen, I’m shocked.”
“I’ve never actually seen one, but I’m not ignorant to the phenomenon. Have you ever gone into that mess and… well, done whatever it is they do in there?”
“Hmm,” Devlin hummed from behind his beer. “When I was just a kid. That was the majority of the fun coming to these things.”
“I take it you’ve seen them before.” He wore an ancient long-sleeved t-shirt, emblazoned with the band’s logo and some hellish character that was trying to claw its way out of a grave.
“Fifteen times, not counting tonight. A bunch of my buddies from the corps and I would make sure we got together whenever we could to see them. Alas, they’ve all got kids and mortgages and corporate jobs, wives who pitched a fit at the mere idea that they’d be out partying with an old buddy from the Marines instead of at a respectable New Year’s Eve party. I was ready to go stag. In fact, I sold all the tickets except for the one I gave you tonight,” he said.
“I’m not sure if I feel honored or not.” Two small, typical-for-Darkwater women behind us were complaining about my ungodly height. One of them continued to jostle against me hard enough to slosh a mouthful of Guinness out of my cup and onto the floor. I turned enough to toss a withering glare a foot below.
“When the opening act comes out, I want you to move in front of me,” Devlin said. “Don’t want you getting inadvertently sucked into the pit. God help them all if they pissed you off and got treated to a display of jujitsu tonight.”
My eyebrow lifted. “You’re protecting me or them?”
“I don’t want to deal with paperwork if I’ve had a couple of drinks, and I can guarantee that nobody here would be susceptible to your brand of placating should you resort to self-defense.”
“Like you were?”
The lights dimmed. Smoke machines billowed something that smelled suspiciously cannabis-like into the cavernous space. Devlin’s arm snaked around my waist and maneuvered me in front of him before blue lights shrouded the stage behind an almost translucent curtain and magnified the shadows to monstrous proportions.
“Is this the main event?”
Devlin’s chin nudged the side of my head with the negative affirmation. “Opening act,” the words drifted into my ear over the low hum of bass guitar. The crowd surged behind us, and I felt gratitude for Devlin’s insistence of using his body as the barrier between them and me.
The curtain fell, and sound waves blasted through my body with crushing reverberation. I had never heard the band before in my life – didn’t even know the name, but everyone around us seemed like they were born with the lyrics to the songs on the tips of their tongues. Arms flailed in the air, shouts rose in unison and the bodies waved back and forth drawn in by the magnetism of the music.
It wasn’t half bad. Certainly wasn’t my cuppa in my old age, but I didn’t despise it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the large crowd of mostly-male participants in the mosh experience. They thrashed about like spiders with severed vertebrae. I noticed the emergency medical treatment stations around the venue before Devlin and I had taken our places, of apparent exalted importance, front and center. My initial assumption was that they existed for acute alcohol poisoning. After seeing body-surfing up close, and the frenetic violence exerted by those acting like maniacs, I suspected that alcohol poisoning would be the least of treatment needs tonight.
My head tilted back and bumped Dev’s chest. “Feel free to act like an idiot if you want to,” I shouted over the din. “Don’t want you being restrained on account of me.”
He downed the remainder of his beer and tossed the cup on the concrete floor. Devlin’s hands spanned my hips and jerked me into a gyrating rhythm that matched the pounding percussion from the stage. I burst out laughing but went with it.
Before long, rivulets of sweat were running down my back. Only one tiny hint of a Johnny-thought flashed through my brain. The guy I knew and loved would be having a fit if he saw me burning senseless calories this way. But that Johnny didn’t exist anymore. He wouldn’t know me at a healthy weight any more than he recognized anything else about me.
Devlin’s hand slid up underneath my sweater. “You got something on underneath this thing?”
“Yeah. Why?” I shouted over my shoulder.
“You’re like a furnace, sweetheart. Take off the sweater and tie it around your waist.”
My eyes widened.
“Or by something under the sweater, are we talking lingerie only?” He grinned wickedly.
“It’s a tank top.”
“And?” Devilish twinkle in the eyes.
“That’s it.”
He started peeling the sweater upward. I raised my arms and let him do it. Devlin knotted the arms around my hips and rested his hands on my mostly bare shoulders. The band was mid-segue between songs when the singer shouted, “Stop, guys. Hold on a sec.”
The guitars stuttered to a halt.
“Dude, yeah, the big guy with the babe down front.”
My eyes drifted up and met the singer’s. He smirked knowingly.
“All access?”
Dev threw up the horns.
“If you get her outta the jeans before we’re done with the set, you’ve got free VIP access for the rest of my career.”
The drunken revelers roared approval, whether they could see who was being encouraged to engage in lewd behavior or not. My palms slapped over my face. I felt Devlin’s laughter ripple through me. One arm wound around me for a quick hug at the waist.
“You’re a hit,” he murmured into my ear.
“Yeah, yeah,” New Yorker Helen made an appearance, albeit brief. I couldn’t help but notice that the milieu around us shifted significantly after my sweater hugged my hips. Gone were the petite girls leaning over the metal barricade between us and the stage. Instead, sweaty, bare-chested males grew in numbers.
I’m not vain enough to believe that the draw was my skin. Still, Devlin wrapped himself around me a little more intently. Either he was concerned, or t
he ultimate lightweight drinker who decided to push the dare to the limits.
Ned’s practical joke condoms were buried in a bathroom drawer at home. I had no intention of digging them out for Dev or anybody else.
I focused on the music, and much to my surprise, discovered that I was sincerely having a good time. Even though I was pretty well geriatric compared to the average age of the people around us. God, when did the world get so full of young people?
The band finished their set with high energy that left the crowd pumped and primed for the main event. The lights went down before blinding me with full-on illumination while tour techs switched out equipment for Pan Demon.
“You want another drink?” Dev asked.
“I’m good for now. Maybe after the show we could go somewhere and decompress a little? We’ve got such a great spot, I’d hate to lose it.”
Devlin nodded. “Plus if we try to get through the masses out there stocking up on booze right now, we’ll miss the beginning of the main event.”
Someone offered a joint. I held up one hand and declined as politely as possible for a cop. It wasn’t long before a contact high from the gray cloud shrouding the floor buzzed through me. “Shelly won’t like this,” I yelled at Devlin.
“Nah, we’ll be fine,” he said. “You worry a lot, don’t you?”
“I’m not used to being senseless.”
Devlin’s right eyebrow shot north. “That’s not been my observation since I met you.”
“Wine is a different animal.”
“If you say so.”
A wave of sobriety rolled through me. “Dev, you’re not into the drug stuff are you?”
He grinned. “Not on your life. I figure God didn’t give me an infinite number of brain cells. I don’t plan to intentionally fry them by doing something stupid. Though I will admit that when I was in the corps, we dabbled a bit with this and that.”
“Hmm.”
“Are you having a good time?”
I nodded. “Much better than I thought I would have.”
Devlin tapped my shoulder with one finger and pointed toward the stage. “See that little fucker up there?”
He stuck out like a sore thumb in Darkwater Bay. His closely cropped hair looked dirty gray-blond under the stage lighting. I guessed his height at no more than five-eight, a little paunchy in the belly, and the lower border of a tattoo peeked from beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt. Those were the remarkable details. I nodded. “What about him?”
“Knew him in the Marines. Before Chris had him dishonorably discharged.”
Our eyes met.
“Really? What did he do?”
“Officially, they booted him on account of his winning personality. The military doesn’t put up with a lot of bullshit that can’t be fixed with a pill.”
“A personality disorder? Was it a real one, or did they dump him because he really had PTSD?” The military didn’t like the public exposure it received over the intentional misdiagnosis of true Axis I disorders in lieu of Axis II. Apparently, treating a long term disorder caused by military service was something the government had no interest in pursuing. Therefore, those with the misfortune of acquiring true post traumatic stress disorder were labeled with something for which combat isn’t a cause and dumped out of the system.
“Oh, they nailed it – at least they did in my opinion.”
“Then why did you say officially they dumped him because of a personality disorder? If he’s really got one, that’s a legitimate reason to discharge him.”
“Because they preferred something neat, rather than underscoring why don’t ask, don’t tell was such a piss poor idea.”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“Nope, and neither would anybody else unless they saw old Fulk in action.”
“Fulk? Was that some sort of corps nickname for the guy?”
Devlin laughed and hugged me. “Sadly for him, it’s his real first name. Fulk. No wonder the guy was such a fuck-head. His parents must’ve hated him before he developed a personality to slap a label like that on him.”
“And now he’s a roadie for Pan Demon?”
Dev grinned and shrugged. “Great place to get drugs and chicks, I guess.”
“So he wasn’t gay?”
“You’d think, looking at him, wouldn’t you? No, Fulk hates homosexuals. The real problem with this guy was that it was his mission to ferret out every queer he could accuse and see to it that they got to boot. As you can imagine, that sort of shit wouldn’t fly with Chris.”
“Can’t imagine it would, although I have to admit, I wouldn’t imagine that Darnell would go out of his way to be an advocate for that group as a whole.”
“It had nothing to do with the work we were doing, Helen. Chris judges people solely on merit for the job at hand. He doesn’t give a damn what the guys do on their own time, so long as they know how to follow orders and fight.”
“I can see that about him, yes,” I said.
“Fulk decided to go after Chris’s second in command in our unit. Let’s just say that when all was said and done, he was the guy that got kicked out, not Major Wesley.”
Another curtain floated around the front of the stage before the lights dimmed.
“Devlin, did you know that this guy would be here tonight?”
“Not a clue,” Dev said. “I hadn’t thought about him in years. Can’t say I’m surprised to see him working for Pan Demon, though. He almost singlehandedly destroyed my love of the band.”
“Oh my,” I sighed with a dramatic shake of the head.
The crowd around us grew restless. Nothing happened behind the curtain, while the lights were still out. We were close enough to see movement on the stage, to hear a few shouted curses.
The curtain billowed, and a large man with wild ginger hair that nearly reached his waist appeared in front of us.
“Son of a bitch, Darkwater Bay! How the hell are ya?”
A deafening roar made my brain shudder.
“We’re having a bit of technical difficulties with our motherfuckin’ equipment, thanks to the incompetence of a soon-to-be-fired fuck-hole, so if you could bear with us for a few while we rip off an amp from our brothers who warmed y’all up so beautifully, we’ll be out as soon as possible. We’re gonna tear this joint down tonight, my demons!”
A cacophony louder than the first pierced my skull.
“Have another beer, smoke a little more green, and we’ll be right back.”
I felt Devlin stiffen behind me. The hand that hadn’t strayed far from my hip all night vanished. Dev fumbled in one pocket and procured his cell phone. I glanced at the screen when he held it up.
Text message from Finkelstein.
If you’re at that concert, head backstage now. We need a cop on the scene ASAP.
“Shit,” Devlin said. “Technical difficulties my ass. Maybe somebody finally put poor Fulk out of our misery.”
Chapter 3
We both had out cell phones and badges as security escorted us past the barricade in the front of the amphitheater to the exit back stage. I wasn’t sure what to expect, perhaps sexual assault, given some of the wilder stories about bands in this genre of music.
What we found was unexpected. Devlin’s old compadre from the Marines was standing over a large black box with a screwdriver in one hand while five men – four of whom sported some seriously wild hair – yelled obscenities and accusations at him and each other.
“All I’m saying is that he couldn’t have done the goddamned sound check, Drake. If he had, he’d have figured out that the son of a bitch wasn’t working.” This from Ginger-hair who urged the crowd to imbibe in heavier drinking as a pastime before the main event. “Now we gotta have fuckin’ cops out here because douchebag is too stupid to keep the groupies from dumping shit into my stack? Please!”
I pushed forward, a little surprised at how Devlin suddenly seemed to hang back. I whipped out my badge. “Detective Helen Eriksson, Darkwater Bay
Police. What’s the issue, gentlemen?”
All eyes crawled over my skin. I was certain I displayed the paragon of police professionalism – beer on my breath, no bra, sweaty tank clinging to every protruding bone. Nice. The specific order of ogling was chest, legs, chest, face, badge. I rolled my eyes.
“We were at the show. This is my partner, Detective Devlin Mackenzie.”
“Son of a bitch,” Fulk muttered.
Devlin found his voice – and his spine. He stepped forward to my side. “Underwood,” followed by a curt nod. “What seems to be the problem, guys? You can’t tell me that the police are required to deal with a problem with your gear.”
Ginger-hair stepped forward. “You know this asshole?”
I wasn’t sure which person he was addressing, the unfortunately named Fulk or Devlin. Ergo, I had no idea who the asshole in question was. “Sir, if I could get your name –”
He cut me off with a leering gaze. “Absolutely, cupcake. I’m Scott Madden, and Pan Demon is my band. I’m not the one who called the cops, but I sure as hell wasn’t as pissed off when you showed up with your pretty little… badge.”
I glanced at Dev. Is this jerk serious etched into my brow. He shrugged.
“Who’s actually in charge here and capable of explaining why our lieutenant asked us to come back stage?” I didn’t pretend patience any longer.
The shaggy representative stepped forward and extended his hand. “Drake Swanson, tour manager, detective. I called the police.”
The others followed suit – drummer Burke Baxter, bassist Lenny Rawlins, guitarist Cliff Hartman.
“Nice to meet all of you,” I dipped to the knee in the sarcasm pool, “but none of this tells me why the police are required. Are we talking about a crime here, or is someone irritated that an expensive piece of equipment was damaged? If that’s the case, I’d suggest you file an insurance claim, have your internal security tighten up so fans aren’t around anything of real value and stop wasting the police’s time.”