Sprayed Stiff

by Laura Bradley

  “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.

  Fifteen

  RICK UGARTE, 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?

  When Scythe got settled at the door and shot me a glare, I thought I should probably be more worried about him shooting me than the Austin police.

  Uh-oh.

  “Reyn, what the hell did you think you were doing coming here?”

  “Um…” I tried a weak smile, then let it fade when he frowned deeper. “Trying to help you?”

  “How does this help me, Reyn?” He blew out a sigh. He ran his free hand through his trailer-park-trash haircut. He only did that when he was extremely perturbed. This situation qualified as upsetting, I guess, but only by accident.

  “I found Lexa’s boyfriend. Isn’t that helpful?”

  “And lost him again, I see.” He waved his arm in the direction of the fled pair. “You could have called me with the information. Instead, I had to figure out you were keeping something from me, and spend my whole night following you and your gang of goobers—”

  “Sorry to put you out,” I said sulkily. He’d probably had to break a hot date with Zena. He was dressed to the nines, in perfectly broken-in Wranglers, a hand-tooled leather belt, and a starched white shirt. A few golden chest hairs sprang out around the badge near his throat.

  “You’ll be sorry for more than that, believe me.”

  My gratitude that he’d saved me from DD’s clutches and worse was quickly dissipating. I looked across the Smith & Wesson at him with my most powerful glare. “You don’t scare me.”

  “Whu-hoo,” the band members chanted from the wall.

  Rick looked nervous, like he was afraid that Scythe and I would start shooting each other and he’d be caught in the cross fire. He shifted from foot to foot and implored me with a look. I stuck my tongue out at him.

  “I ought to scare you,” Scythe shot across the room.

  “Whoa-ho,” the Roadkill chanted, an octave lower.

  “Shut up,” Scythe ordered. “You idiots are in big trouble. Don’t make it worse.”

  “Why should I be scared of you?” I was a little scared right now, truth be told, but hell if I was going to show it. I jutted my chin a little for effect.

  “I’m going to throw you in jail again.”

  “For what?”

  “Cradle robbing.
” The muscles along his jaw rippled as he ground his teeth. “I’m not sure your date is of age.”

  “Very funny. Jon isn’t my date. Besides, he’s only seven years younger than I am. I guess you think I’m younger than I really am. I suppose I could take your comment as a compliment.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Come on, Scythe. Jon is my friend. He’s a good boy. He’s been working too hard at getting the salons back on track. He needs to get out and find a nice girl.”

  “Looks like he found one. An old girl, that is.”

  “Ooo-hoo,” the Wretched bunch whistled.

  “Look, Jon and I are like sister and brother—or, to be more accurate, I feel like his aunt.” I don’t know why I was explaining this, but a point was a point and I hated not to make mine. “I’d be his mother’s much, much younger sister, of course.”

  “Some guys are into that whole Oedipus thing. He looks like he’s one of them. He’s got a thing for you.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. He’s not attracted to me, and I am certainly not attracted to him!”

  For the first time, I noticed a couple of heads bobbing behind Scythe. How long had they been there? The whole adrenaline-tunnel-vision deal was lasting a little bit too long for my taste. Was it the police? Jon’s face appeared behind Scythe’s right shoulder. He looked like he was going to cry. Damn. Tessa’s face appeared at Scythe’s left shoulder. She looked like she was going to kill me. Double damn.

  A boom rattled through the room as a door from the alley busted open. “Police. Everybody freeze.”

  Thank God. Saved by the fuzz. Maybe they really would throw me back in jail.

  Considering what awaited me with my friends, it was probably a safer place to be.

  Sixteen

  “YOU SHOULDN’T ARGUE so much with your copper boyfriend,” Gore advised as he was being led past me to the paddy wagon in handcuffs. “Guys don’t like a chick with a mouth and an attitude.”

  “Yeah, man.” Guts nodded behind him. He started crooning, “Men just like a soft body and a warm—”