by J. S. Bailey
“About what?”
“About wanting to kill me.”
“Oh, no. But the kid’s a ticking time bomb. I mean, he gets so mad when everyone picks on him—”
“Don’t act like you don’t do it to him, too.”
Sweat beaded up on Bobby’s scalp. Could he be blamed if Pablo went over the edge and lost it? If Mitchell was hurt as a partial result of Bobby’s stupidity, he didn’t think he’d ever be able to forgive himself.
Mitchell chewed on his lower lip. “So you want me to get them out of here.”
“That’s the idea. Pablo might hurt someone else, too.”
“This is crazy. You really think Pablo’s going to blow a fuse.”
I don’t know what to think. Bobby said, “I can see it in his eyes.” Which maybe kind of wasn’t entirely true, but he didn’t know how else to say it.
Someone rapped on the door, making Bobby jump. “Are you two done in there?” came Pablo’s voice. “Ears wants to play ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper.’”
Now that was a bad omen if Bobby had ever heard one. Don’t fear the reaper, Mitchell. Dying will only hurt for a minute.
“I think we need more cowbell,” Mitchell muttered before departing the spare room.
Bobby felt a subtle shift in the atmosphere when he and Mitchell reentered the living room behind Pablo, who had acquired one of the plastic cups and was sipping on it like he was trying to be cool. Natasha had suckered onto Ears’s face like an amorous leech, Aaron was intently adjusting his instrument’s strings, and Tyler stood at the kitchen counter opening bags of chips.
Mitchell walked straight toward the coffee table and picked up his cup of beer, worry etching lines into his face. “Guys, I don’t really feel very—”
Bobby’s eyes widened as another premonition hit him. “Don’t drink that!”
He didn’t know where the words came from. They had tumbled from his mouth without warning.
Six heads swiveled Bobby’s direction in unison.
Keeping his wide-eyed gaze fixed on Bobby, Mitchell lowered his cup to waist height and said, “Why not?”
“Because…it’s not yours?”
Mitchell turned the cup around. Tyler had written “MITCHELL” in permanent marker just below the rim. “Try again.”
Then Mitchell’s gaze flicked to Pablo, who had resumed his place on the couch. Pablo jerked his head up and said, “What are you looking at me for?”
“Did you put something in my cup?” Mitchell asked in a dangerously low voice.
Pablo’s cheeks turned red again. “Sure. Blame it on the guy who’s part Mexican. Racist pig.”
“This is a yes or no question.”
“Tyler’s the one who filled it. You think something’s in it, ask him.”
Tyler turned away from the counter, looking perplexed. “What would I have put in it?”
“I don’t know,” Mitchell said. “Ask Bob. He seems to know something I don’t.”
“I have to pee,” Natasha stated as she broke away from her boyfriend. She slunk catlike down the hallway and disappeared around the sharp bend leading to the bathroom.
Spots of color appeared on Tyler’s cheeks. “So Bobby,” he said. “What exactly do you think I put in my best friend’s beer?”
“I don’t know.” Bobby swallowed and tugged at the collar of his t-shirt. “Drugs?”
Before Bobby could stop him, Tyler plucked the cup out of Mitchell’s hand and downed it in a single swig. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull,” he said, “but the beer’s fiiiiiine.” He blinked a few times, then frowned. “Whassamatterwi…”
Tyler’s eyes rolled back into his head and he hit the floor with a thud that rattled the windows.
Oh, crap.
Bobby and Mitchell simultaneously rushed to either side of him, the latter letting out a stream of curses and looking like he was about to wet himself. Bobby felt for Tyler’s pulse with one hand and reached for his phone with the other. As he pressed the nine, Mitchell slapped the phone out of Bobby’s hand. “Are you nuts?” he shrieked, the scared-little-boy face rising to the surface once more. “If you call an ambulance, we’ll all be busted!”
Double crap. “Then how in the world are we going to help him?”
Mitchell glanced down at his fallen friend and bit his lip. “I don’t know. We can stick him in my room and let him sleep it off.”
“How do you know whatever was in there won’t kill him?”
Mitchell cursed again. “We’ll just have to see what happens. No way am I going to have cops here to screw things up for us. My parents’ll kill me.”
Bobby doubted this. Mr. and Mrs. Sand would have to be denser than a couple of cinder blocks to be unaware of their son’s illegal activities here in their former home. Although if Mitchell was arrested for hosting a party that involved underage drinking, it would look bad on his parents’ part. So maybe they would kill him.
Mitchell looked up. “Yo. Is anybody going to help me move him? Where the hell is Ears?”
Aaron, who stood near the couch, just shrugged. “I don’t know. I think maybe he went out to the car.”
“He was just in here a second ago! Aaron, get over here and help me. Bob, you grab a foot. Aaron?”
“Hang on,” Bobby said, suddenly feeling sick. “I want to make sure he’s still okay.” He hadn’t been able to detect Tyler’s pulse the first time because Mitchell had distracted him by knocking away the phone. He held his fingers to Tyler’s wrist and felt a reassuring flutter. “All right. Let’s move him.” He grabbed Tyler’s left foot, but Aaron hadn’t budged.
“Hello?” Mitchell said, anger coloring his voice. “Bob’s got about as much strength in his arms as a wet noodle. Maybe haul yourself over here and help?”
Aaron shrugged again. “I don’t see why we can’t just leave him there. It’s not like he’ll hurt himself.”
A vein began throbbing in Mitchell’s temple. “How would you like to wake up on the floor? Come on.”
“I’ve done it before and it didn’t hurt anything. What are you so worked up about?”
Mitchell’s voice rose to a shout. “Maybe I’d like to know who the genius was who decided to spike my drink with…with whatever this is! That was my drink! That should be me on the floor! Pablo!” Pablo jerked his head toward him. “Why did you want to knock me out?”
“Why does everyone always blame me?” Pablo wailed, sounding remarkably like a toddler who had just been awakened from his nap. “I bet if I was completely white you wouldn’t blame me for everything.”
Bobby’s head was starting to pound. He had envisioned Mitchell lying facedown in a pool of blood. That meant tonight’s ordeal was likely far from over.
“Bob,” Mitchell said. “Go bring a pillow and blanket out of my room. We can at least make Tyler a little more comfortable for when he wakes up, which had better be soon.” He glared at Pablo and Aaron, both of whom appeared entirely unaffected by Tyler’s collapse.
A fresh wave of anxiety surged through Bobby’s veins, making them feel charged with electricity. He rushed down the hallway and turned right when it made a sharp, 90-degree turn.
And promptly stopped in his tracks.
Natasha had said she needed to use the commode in somewhat less refined terms, yet the bathroom door sat wide open and the light was out. The door to the master bedroom, however, was closed, and Bobby could hear muffled thumps sounding from beyond it. Had Natasha and Ears planned some sort of romantic rendezvous in Mitchell’s bedroom? Some people had no tact.
A louder thump issued from the bedroom, followed by a curse. Against his better judgment, Bobby pressed his ear against the door and listened.
“—is too heavy!” Another curse. “I don’t care if you thought it was a bad idea to get this done tonight. We’re getting it done, and we’re getting it done now.”
The voice belonged to Natasha. Since Ears had vanished during Tyler’s collapse, did that mean that’s who she was talki
ng to? Just what was going on?
Sensing it would be poor judgment to barge in on whatever the couple was doing even if it wasn’t romantic, Bobby crept into the adjacent room where Mitchell stored most of his band equipment and quietly latched the door. Keeping the light off, he meandered around stacks of song books, old amplifiers, and a couple of broken guitars before reaching the window, which looked out onto the back yard and the row of houses on Emerson Avenue to the north.
Someone was out there. Human shadows cast by porch lights splayed across the grass. Bobby counted two—no, three—of them. One dark figure broke away and retreated past the garage and shed into the yard directly behind Mitchell’s. It looked like the man was carrying something heavy. A box?
Another thump from the next room made Bobby twitch. He was surprised Mitchell hadn’t come looking for him yet since it didn’t normally take that long to retrieve a blanket and pillow. Praying that no one would notice him, Bobby unlatched the window and slid it upward, then crouched down so only his head stuck above the windowsill.
Ears and a man Bobby recognized as Perry, his brother, stood outside receiving items that were being passed through the master bedroom’s window, presumably by Natasha.
A conversation from last week immediately flitted into Bobby’s head.
He and the rest of the gang had been hanging out in Mitchell’s living room for the usual Sunday night jam session, though the atmosphere was somehow heavier and more somber than normal.
“Well,” Mitchell said with a long face, “my great-grandpa finally died.”
“Sorry, man,” Tyler had said. “That really sucks.”
“Naw, it’s okay. He was like a hundred years old. But you know what’s cool? He left me his entire collection of coins.”
“Since when have you been interested in coins?”
“Since I found out the whole bunch is worth about fifty grand. Here, I’ll show you.” Mitchell had disappeared down the hallway and returned a minute later with a cardboard box full of coin folders. “This is only one box,” he said, pulling out one of the folders and fanning it open to display its shiny silver contents.
“Really?” Ears said. “I never would have been able to count that high.”
“It’s one box out of thirty. Some of these bad boys are two hundred years old. Cool, huh?” Mitchell shut the folder and stuffed it away with the others.
“You said fifty grand.” Ears was suddenly eyeing the box with unusual interest.
“Yeah, and you can back off right now.” Mitchell flashed him a grin and then took the box back to his room. The conversation had turned to more musical matters, the coin collection all but forgotten.
In the present, Bobby watched as the dark figure returned empty handed from the other house. He would have bet every dollar he’d ever earned that Ears and Natasha had hatched a plan to steal the vast collection of coins out from under Mitchell’s nose. The plan was stupid, of course, since anyone looking out their back window would have seen them transferring heavy boxes out of the house, but none of Mitchell’s gang was particularly bright.
As Bobby reached for his phone to call the police, his breath left his lungs as a wave of terror hit him.
He had to get to the living room.
Now.
Throwing all caution to the wind, Bobby turned, stumbled over a pile of books, and raced out the door into the hallway.
He screeched to a halt when hallway turned into living room.
Aaron and Pablo were each holding a gun. Bobby didn’t know much about guns except for the facts that they contained bullets and often resulted in a bleeding body, which concerned him since both guns were currently pointed at Mitchell, who held his arms up in the air and was shaking like a palsied leaf.
Pablo immediately swung his gun away from Mitchell and pointed it at Bobby. His dark eyes were cold, and he smiled. “You might win at dueling Stratocasters,” he said, “but I win at this.”
It was all Bobby could do not to wet himself. “Put the guns down,” he said, his voice coming out in a rather un-manly squeak.
“No,” Pablo and Aaron said in unison.
“You won’t kill me,” Mitchell said without much confidence. “They’ll send you to jail.”
Pablo laughed. “Not if they don’t catch us. Fifty grand is a lot of money. We can go anywhere we want, and no one will find us.”
“Fifty grand?”
“Ears and Natasha are in the back stealing your grandpa’s coin collection,” Bobby said, wishing that Pablo would train the barrel at something that wasn’t his face or any other part of him. “Guys, come on. You don’t want to do this.”
“My coin collection?” Mitchell spluttered. “You’re stealing my coin collection? Are you stupid?”
“You should have kept your mouth shut about it,” Aaron said.
“Dude, fifty grand split four ways is $12,500! You won’t last a year on that.”
“We’re splitting it seven ways, not four,” Pablo said proudly. “Ears brought some of his…wait a minute.” He frowned and turned to Aaron. “How much is that?”
If the situation hadn’t been so serious, Bobby would have laughed at the sudden confusion on Pablo’s face. “I know it’s less than ten thousand a piece,” Bobby said, his nerves wound too taut to make an exact calculation. “Didn’t you even think about that when you planned this?”
“We didn’t plan this,” Pablo said. “Ears and Natasha did.”
“Right. And how do you know they aren’t going to leave without you and keep the fifty grand for themselves?”
Pablo lowered the gun, frowning, and a muscle in Aaron’s cheek twitched. “You go check on them,” Aaron said. “I’ll make sure these two don’t go anywhere.”
Pablo nodded and darted out of the room.
“Aaron,” Mitchell said with a few more ounces of confidence in his voice, “why would you even go along with this? Don’t you care about the band?”
“You act like it’s the only one there is. We can start a new band somewhere else. One that doesn’t have a stupid name like Indigo Apes.”
“Not if you’re in—”
The sound of a gunshot followed by an inhuman scream from the back of the house cut Mitchell off midsentence. Bobby felt the blood drain out of his face. Please, God, no.
Aaron swore. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” Then he took off in the direction of the scream.
Bobby and Mitchell looked at each other, then down at the floor where Tyler twitched a couple of times and let out a low moan. Frantic shouting issued from Mitchell’s bedroom. Bobby prayed that whoever had been shot wasn’t dead.
A smart phone appeared in Mitchell’s hand. “Screw underage drinking,” he muttered. “I’m calling the cops anyway.” Before he punched in the number, he paused and stared Bobby right in the eye, his face pale and lined. “Get out of here.”
“What?”
“Take your guitar and scram. You weren’t part of this.”
“But I’m a witness! Shouldn’t I—”
“Get out!” Now Mitchell was shouting. “Just go, okay? Unless you’d like to end up in the slammer with the rest of us.”
Bobby gritted his teeth. Mitchell was right. Bobby had done absolutely nothing wrong but would be taken in for questioning anyway once Salt Lake City’s finest arrived. “Fine,” he said as he reached for his guitar case. “I’ll go.”
Mitchell didn’t answer. He was already punching in numbers and standing guard over his unconscious friend as if to protect him in case the fight moved up here.
BOBBY paced his apartment, restless. He wished he knew what had happened in Mitchell’s bedroom when Pablo fired his gun, though he may have been better off not knowing.
He wished he knew if Mitchell himself was still alive. How was he to know for certain that Pablo and Aaron didn’t come back to the living room to put a bullet in Mitchell’s head after Bobby skipped out? His premonitions did not warn him about every misfortune.
At least he’d done what he could. If not for Bobby’s forewarning, Mitchell could very well have been drugged and shot right away; and since neither Bobby nor Tyler were in on the plot, they would have met the same fate as Mitchell.
Ah, premonitions. Gotta love ‘em.
Bobby went to the fridge and cracked open a new Sprite. Tonight’s ordeal had to have been a sign that now was the time to move on from this place. He would miss Utah and its scenery, but scenery existed in other places, too. Besides, he’d always had quite a bit of wanderlust running through his veins. There were a thousand places he wanted to experience before he died. Places he would never even glimpse if he settled down and grew old among Utah’s rugged mountains.
But where would he go? Alaska? Arizona? Colorado? California?
He planted his rear on the edge of his bed and slumped his shoulders. Lord, he couldn’t even make a decision. Maybe he should just slink back to Ohio and show everyone what a failure he was before spending the rest of his life flipping burgers in a local dive.
He let his gaze travel across his bedroom to the small bookshelf stacked with compact discs and a few old records he’d collected. Wedged among them was a tattered road atlas he’d had since he was a kid. His pulse quickened. Could it really be that simple?
Some CDs fell out of the shelf when he tugged out the atlas. Leaving them where they lay, he sat down cross-legged and opened the atlas at random to the page dedicated to Kansas.
Strike One. Kansas had tornados.
He closed his eyes, riffled back and forth blindly through the pages, and stabbed a finger at one that felt right to him.
He cracked open one lid and found himself looking at a map of a state he had never been to. He leaned closer and made note of the town to which his finger pointed.
Autumn Ridge, Oregon. Sounded like a nice place.
He reached for a suitcase he’d shoved under the bed and started packing it.