“Not sure I want to find out,” Seth said.
“So you’re cool with this? Cool with killing someone, an innocent as the letter says, and then putting their blood on your body?” Michael said.
“Dude. Offer a solution or shut the fuck up. We all signed that shit, and now we’re fucking stuck,” Seth said.
“Like I said. Let’s argue this in person. See you assholes when you get here,” Wex said and closed out of Skype, shutting off the the argument.
They would figure it out. They always did.
Hours later and Wex hadn’t left his office.
He stared at his bank account and sent his accountant a message to put more money in it. He quickly got a replay that they needed to talk. Wex grimaced and turned his phone over so it was face down. He hated that phrase.
So he hadn’t been all that great with his money. His home wasn’t paid for and the cars in his driveway were all leases. His staff required salaries and he’d been coasting on back royalties for two years. Marty, his accountant, probably wanted to talk about the next album. Fuck.
But if he was broke, it wouldn’t be the first time. He’d just hit up the other band members for a loan. Except for Michael. He would never talk to his ex-best friend about money, or anything besides their music, for that matter.
“It’s time,” Wex said.
He dug out a prescription bottle and poured a pair of pills into his hand. Wex studied them for a few seconds before dropping them in his mouth. He dry-swallowed and kicked back to consider his monetary future. The Klonopin would take the edge off. It always did.
On second thought, better pop one more, just in case.
He considered dumping the Lamborghini and the Escalade. He hadn’t sat his ass in the red sports car in months and the Escalade, fully loaded, and then some, hadn’t been out of the garage in almost a year. His last endorsement deal had fallen through as the two parties’ lawyers had sat down at the table to sign. He was up for a new line of Damaged-inspired clothing, but Michael had put a stop to that. With each member owning twenty-five percent of the band, everything had to be unanimous. That fucked a lot of shit up for no reason other than spite.
A few hours later and Wex hadn’t done a damn thing besides look at old concert videos. Someone had captured them before the deal at a tiny club in Seattle. Blackstone had actually climbed a stack of amplifiers and played from fifteen feet up. The crowd had been crazy, and the circle pit had been absolutely insane. Kids slammed into each other, ran onto the stage, and then dove back into the crowd to be carried to the perimeter by the bouncers. The camera had panned around to show a smiling fan, bleeding from the forehead, being escorted up the walkway.
Sunny had beaten the shit out of the drums that night. She’d even taken to pounding out blast beats with the thick side of the sticks, stomping the double bass Gene Hoglan style. Back then, they’d been more interested in where they were going to get their next meal. Where they were going to sleep because the crappy tour bus barely had room for them and their crew. Where they were going to be the next night. It had been a struggle, but it had also been the greatest time of his life.
They had fired on all cylinders that night and even tested a new song that would appear on Tools for the Devil. The deal had been signed mere months before, but they had already seen a huge uptick in concert attendance. Their first album was just starting to hit the charts, but when it did, it was a race horse. Back then, Wex still didn’t believe the weird dude in the duster had been real. They’d signed something, in blood, but it had been in a dark room and the drugs and booze had been flowing pretty heavy that night.
A year later, the next album had been a monster hit. By the time they got off tour, they had already sold their first 1.5 million records and the sky seemed the limit. The crowds had grown, and the devotion to the band had exploded. In this way, the thing they’d made the deal with had grown in stature.
A door closed and a set of footfalls on the spiral staircase sounded.
“Payton?” Wex called out.
Her little dog, a Chihuahua named Mr. Fuckface, screamed into Wex’s office and commenced to barking its fool head off. Wex leaned over and offered his hand for a sniff. The little bugger licked his finger, growled, and then scratched at his ears, back foot slamming up and down while it did a little circle on the floor. Wex picked him up and put him in his lap.
The dog was a tiny hellion. At first, he’d told her there was no way he was going to have a dog in the house, shitting and pissing everywhere. Skeptical, he’d grown pretty fond of the little guy. Now Mr. Fuckface seemed to think Wex was the coolest person he’d ever met.
“Yeah, babe. I brought you a present,” she called out.
She appeared in the open doorway with a large white shopping bag in one hand. She wore a black leather dress that was open in the front to reveal a mile of cleavage. The skirt ended just under her ass. Payton also wore six inch heels and a huge smile.
“A present?”
“Yeah,” she said and pulled a riding crop out of the bag.
“Babe. We have like a dozen of those,” Wex said.
“That’s not your present,” she said and looked to the side. “Come here.”
A woman in her mid-twenties appeared. She was dressed much like Payton, except in red, with black lace that wasn’t leather but some gauzy stuff that showed all her assets to full effect. She wore nerdy librarian glasses over a cute upturned nose and had blonde hair that cascaded around her shoulders.
“Oh my god. It really is him,” she said when she set eyes on Wex.
“In the flesh,” he grinned.
“This is Chloe. Chloe has been a bad girl. Would you like to watch me punish her?” Payton asked with a smirk.
Her friend obediently turned and stuck out her butt. “Yeah, Mr. Wex. Want to watch us?”
“Give me thirty seconds and I’ll be right there,” Wex said, no longer interested in nostalgia.
The sound of the crop smacking Chloe as the two walked to the bedroom made Wex hurry up and close out of his apps and put his PC in sleep mode. He put Mr. Fuckface down and rubbed the dog’s head. The pup barked at the corner of the room a few times and scurried out to find some trouble.
Wex grinned and a wave of dizziness swept through his head. He shook it off. Just the Klonopin haze kicking in. When he got done with the girls he’d hit the heavier stuff. Or maybe while they were at it. That way he could watch it all in a shroud.
Before he got up from his desk he popped a pair of Viagra, one for each of them.
2
Heaven and Hell
Michael
Michael Blackstone picked up his beat up Ibanez Destroyer, the same guitar he’d purchased after the first big royalty check had come in back in 1984, and plugged it into a 10” Orange amp. He set the fuzz level to Jimi Hendrix levels and scratched out a blues scale to warm up.
Michael sat on a stool and worked out a couple of riffs that had been hammering away in the back of his head. He stretched into a galloping fill then noodled a solo that would fit the song.
He leaned over, hit the DAC, and then played it all again. Later, he would break the song up and send the MP3s to his bandmates so they could ignore them, as usual. Assholes.
This room had nothing but good memories. It was filled with Damaged memorabilia. From hand drawn concert posters from the 80s, to a photo of the band bowing before two hundred and fifty thousand fans in Argentina. The walls were soundproofed with the best acoustic foam in the world, but he couldn’t tell the difference between it and the empty egg cartons he used when he had been sixteen years old. Those had been collected over a summer by hitting up neighbors on his paper route. Then his mother had lost her goddamn mind as he’d plastered them all over his little eight by ten bedroom.
His practice room contained a glass enclosure in case he needed to lay down a track for an album or tweak something for a live record. No one wanted to hear all the little fuck ups that occurred when you playe
d live. Fans claimed they did, but there was no way he’d drop something with the hint of a dull string or a hammer-on that didn’t quite catch.
After the Skype call, he’d decided to wander upstairs and screw around on some new stuff. Lights twinkled from soundboards, and knobs sat waiting to be tweaked. He played for another half hour and got some good stuff down. Some of it wasn’t so great so he erased a couple of tracks. Others, he saved for a future album should the need arise.
Fuck. They were so late on this album it wasn’t even funny. The record studio was screaming for blood. Promoters wanted them to go on tour a year ago but they’d managed to blow them off. They’d been pressured into dragging out a few tunes from the vault to complete a greatest hits album. Those songs, pre-1984, were so bad Michael had finally talked the rest of the band into leaving those tracks in the shitter.
After 1984, things had changed in a big way
Michael put the guitar down and approached his door. Even though this was a soundproof room, he didn’t want Giselle catching him in the act.
He dug out his keys and unlocked a hidden cabinet door in the corner of the soundboard. He slid out heavy lead lined box and put it on the floor. There was a double combination lock but he knew the numbers like the back of his hand.
He popped the case open and extracted the document.
Even after thirty-two years, it was just as fresh as it had been back then. It still reeked, too. Smelled dusty and had an iron tinge. The parchment was clearly anything but paper. Sunny insisted it was human skin, she’d even commented on it the night they’d signed.
Michael read over the contract for the five hundredth or so time, then put it back in the case and locked it away again. They all had one, in the same condition, and they all kept them hidden from the world. Or in Wex’s case, hidden even from himself. He had that room, the one he’d shown Michael once. Michael had been so disgusted with the imagery. Wex had told Michael that he kept the old piece of paper in a boarded up wall. Great, Wex, way to live in denial.
“Fuck you and your deal,” he muttered as he slammed the door.
The soundboard’s lights dimmed, then lit up brightly before fading back to normal levels.
He sat on his knees for a few minutes, head down, lost in thought.
Michael put his cables away, turned off his amplifier, stowed a sound pedal, then stood up and stretched. His six foot two frame was long and skinny thanks to a diet he and his wife were on. Getting ready to go on tour meant long hours on stage. If he wasn’t in good shape, he’d be huffing and puffing before intermission. In the old days, they’d been able to play for hours without stopping. Now they were too old and had incorporated a twenty-minute break in the set so they could recover. Used to be, he’d drink himself half-silly during the intermission. Now he was on the wagon and even attending meetings. Giselle had helped him get sober and he was grateful. Most of the time.
Dealing with Wex, however, always made him want to down a half liter of Jack, then chase it with some uppers.
Michael’s house was on the hill overlooking Los Angeles. Today it was clear and the sun was out in force. A hint of haze threatened to descend on the city but, for now, it was all puppy dog farts and wily unicorns dancing in the clouds. Goddamn but he missed taking LSD.
Michael’s front gate had a huge MB in cursive wrought iron. When it opened, the letters broke apart with the M on one side and the B on the other. In the driveway was a black Cadillac Ciel, a concept car he’d seen in a movie and decided he had to own. His palatial estate ate up an acre of space and he had an Olympic sized pool, a hot tub that could sit fifteen, a sauna, and a marble patio that was larger than the home he’d grown up in. The house payment alone was enough to buy a new SUV every month. His utilities were outrageous.
Still, it was all chicken scratch compared to how much money he’d made over the years. Unlike Wex, Michael didn’t blow his earnings on whatever caught his eye. Michael had long ago employed a financial advisor to help invest his royalties and endorsement deals outside of those created by the band’s manager, Maximillian August.
Michael never needed to worry about money again.
He had other concerns, chief among them, the rapidity in which the demands had been arriving.
“The hell were we thinking,” he muttered.
At first they had arrived yearly. Then when the band had hit it really big, the letters arrived quarterly.
Over the past six months, they had arrived every thirty-one days, and he had a feeling that if they didn’t get in the studio and put something out, they’d be arriving even quicker. It was Satan’s way of hurrying them.
Michael put his guitar on the rack and turned off his amp. His wife, Giselle, should be out lounging by the pool so he went out to watch her. The trip from the upstairs recording studio took him down a long hallway with platinum records hung along one side. The other was covered in framed pictures of the genesis of the band. He paused at one and regarded the image. It was in black and white and portrayed Damaged at their most vulnerable. The four of them lounged on a couch. There was a long glass table in front of them and on it was their first major recording contract.
Ironically, this was the same scene they had been in just three months before that, when they’d signed a different kind of deal. That room had been in a seedy hotel that had been converted to a club. The four of them giggled and tossed back shots as they’d taken turns drawing blood, repeating words from the stranger, then signing parchment with a raven’s long feather quill the man had produced from inside his duster. The writing had been all but unreadable but the terms had all been spoken and agreed to by the members of the band.
The man had smelled like vanilla bean with undercurrents of Sulphur. His face had been well lined, like creased leather. Michael had assumed it was from too much sun before the man had started to talk to them in a soothing voice that would fit a television nightly newscaster.
Michael shook his head to clear the image and took the stairs two at a time.
When he found Giselle, she was indeed stretched out, face down on a piece of white lawn furniture. She hadn’t bothered to put on a bikini top and her thong was so tiny it disappeared between her butt cheeks. He sat down next to her and grabbed a bottle of sun tan lotion. The pool furniture had come from a specialty shop in town. It was said that none other than Marilyn Monroe’s figure had once graced the chairs.
A glass of water sat next to a pitcher that collected condensation on the outside. It was filled with lemon, cucumber, and grapefruit. She had a special brand of Voss delivered every month from Norway. Michael turned over a glass and poured himself a cup. He wished he had some vodka to add to the bitter water.
“Doing okay, babe?” he asked.
“I am, thank you my love.” She turned her head to regard him and lowered her sunglasses. “I was just getting some sun before we go out for lunch. Where would you like to eat?”
“You dressed in that tiny thing, how about in bed. You’ll be the main course.”
“You’re in a good mood today,” she said.
“Not really. I just got off a Skype call with the band. Wex is being an asshole like usual,” Michael said and took a seat next to Giselle. He poured a little lotion into his hand and worked it into her thighs.
“That feels nice,” she purred. “Why can’t you two make up. You have been friends for so long.”
As always, Giselle’s slight Swedish accent made him think about other things. They’d been married for three years and, while he’d been in lust with her at first sight, he’d quickly learned she had a very smart head on her shoulders. She now oversaw his image and had taken over for Jarod, his old financial advisor. Since she’d been in control, she’d made smart investments and added to their wealth.
Wex liked to talk shit behind his back. He felt like Giselle was the band’s Yoko. But Giselle had done nothing but make good decisions for him and the household. Used to be he’d rely on others for investments. Now, she ca
me to him with ideas and she always had her ducks in a row. She was competent in providing cost analysis and profit projections. After a few months of this, he’d given her carte blanche.
“I’ll don't know if we'll ever be friends again,” Michael said. He moved to her back and massaged her shoulders.
She shrugged his hands off so she could roll over. His eyes moved down her lithe body as she sat up.
“What about happier news, eh? I heard from Marshall that they would like to start a line of amplifiers with your name on them.”
“I back Orange. Always have and always will,” he said.
They’d been good to him when he started up and if there was one thing Michael was good at it was loyalty to his old friends.
“I know but this offer. It is quite enticing. I left the numbers inside, on the kitchen table.”
“I’ll look at them later. I’m enjoying the view at the moment.”
The left side of Giselle's lips quirked up in a half smile. She took her sunglasses off and placed them on the table.
“I think you are just horny today.”
“I’m horny every day I’m with you.”
“You’re insatiable, my love. Let’s go to lunch,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
“Yeah, my belly is rumbling,” he said and took her slim hand in his. “Back in the day we used to eat what’s called a ketchup sandwich. That’s where you put some ketchup from a little packet, on a piece of bread, and call it lunch. Sometimes we’d pool our change and buy a pack of bologna. You’d have thought we lived like kings when we could afford some lunch meat.”
“Maybe you are the one who is full of baloney.”
Michael chuckled at her joke. “It wasn’t so bad. We were on the road all the time back then. Playing little gigs, hoping to get noticed.”
“Then you got noticed in a big way,” she said.
Michael nodded but looked away. She was right. They had been noticed in a big way, but not by the right people. No. They’d been noticed by a different kind of agent. The sort who promised the moon, gave it to you, but kicked you in the balls for the rest of your life.
Damaged Page 3