Rock N Soul (29 page)

“He hardly ever goes out except to private parties,” Chris said. “And only to ones with very strict guest lists.”

“Well, I don’t know, then. We probably should have worked out a game plan before we came here.”

“Probably,” he said, then sighed. “Well, there’s nothing for it. You’ll have to break in to his house.”

I almost spit out the coffee I was drinking. “You want me to
break in
to his
house
?”

He shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal. “I know his security password,” he said. “It wouldn’t be breaking in so much as just going in uninvited. Which I did all the time.”

“You
knew
him, though,” I pointed out. “That’s different from some random stranger barging into his kitchen while he’s trying to fry up some bacon.”

“You’re not a random stranger,” Chris said. “You’re me.”

“Gee, thanks for making me nothing more than a vessel for your divine possession,” I deadpanned.

“Dude, if I could use you as a vessel, I totally would. That would make all of this way easier.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’d just spend all day boning random people and watching
The Meadow Larks
. Probably at the same time.”

He laughed. “Yeah, probably. At least until I got it out of my system.”

I started to say that he’d also probably shoot my body up with illegal substances, but that seemed mean after everything that had happened, so instead I went back to the problem at hand. “So you want me to just walk up into his house and tell him you’re haunting me.”

“Yeah, something like that,” Chris said, sticking his hands in his pockets and gazing out the window.

“And then relay you telling him how much you appreciate him.”

“And that I’m sorry I broke out of rehab when he put me in there.”

I blinked. “You broke out of rehab?”

Chris nodded, then paused and shook his head. “Yes and no. I checked myself in voluntarily because he interventioned me.”

“I’m not sure ‘interventioned’ is a word,” I said, “but okay.”

He rolled his eyes at me. “And then because I’d checked myself in, I could check myself out. So I did. After two days.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because I didn’t like it there.”

“You didn’t like it because you were a junkie and you were jonesing.” I waggled a finger at him for emphasis.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But it really sucked.”

“I’m sure it did. I’m also willing to bet that Eric was pretty pissed when he found out you’d bailed on it.”

He frowned. “Eric is a self-centered asshole. He didn’t care about me, he just wanted to make sure the band survived and he knew I wasn’t giving the music my full attention anymore. He should have booted me out and hired fucking Nathan Vale back then and saved us all a lot of grief.”

“Not that much grief,” I said. “Since you probably would have just ended up dying even sooner and then I wouldn’t have found you.”

Chris hesitated for a moment, eyeing me. “Would that be a bad thing?”

I shrugged. “My life is definitely more interesting with you in it. I mean, without you I wouldn’t be able to say I’d been held at gunpoint by a drug dealer in an LA florist shop. That would make the autobiography I might write someday a lot more boring.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You would have just married Gemma and had a couple of little Bostonian kids and never come to Los Angeles at all.”

“Dude, I wouldn’t have married Gemma. I wouldn’t have even
met
Gemma if it wasn’t for you.”

He flexed his fingers and followed the movements of his tendons with his eyes.

The silence got awkward, so I continued. “So . . . I’m breaking into a celebrity’s house, huh?”

He looked back up at me and offered a small smile. “Yeah, I guess that’s best.”

“You know his codes? You’re
sure
you know his codes?”

“I remember everything, dude. Of course I know his codes.”

“You knew what they were a month ago,” I pointed out. “Do you know for sure he hasn’t changed them?”

“If he’s changed them, I might move on out of pure shock,” he said. “Eric never changes his codes. Never. He still has the same PIN for his bank account that he did when he opened up his junior saver savings account in fourth grade.” He smiled at me. “And his PIN is the same as his security passcode for his house. And the safe in his bedroom. And his safety deposit box at the bank. And his locker code for the gym. Basically if you know Eric’s first dog’s birthdate, you can clean the man out.”

I laughed. “He uses his dog’s birthdate as his personal code?”

“He loved that dog,” Chris said, still smiling. “Said when it died, that was the worst day of his life.” He paused for a moment, his smile slipping a little. “It probably still is.”

Awkward. I reached out to pat his hand before I remembered I couldn’t. “I’m sure he misses you. I mean, you guys were best friends.”

“He hated me,” Chris said, kind of scary-softly. “He wouldn’t answer my phone calls and he wouldn’t even look at me unless he absolutely had to. He’d bail on interviews if I was going to be there. He . . .” His voice broke, then he cleared his throat and repeated himself. “He hated me.”

I considered arguing with him, but that seemed to be pretty good evidence of the whole hatred thing. So instead I went into damage-control mode. “There at the end, maybe. But you know . . . people who are as close as you and Eric used to be . . . they can fix things. If you had that much, you know, love-or-whatever there between you before things went downhill, there’s hope to fix it.”

He was silent for a minute. “Maybe it’s too late. Maybe it’s stupid to want to talk to him.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s not stupid. I mean, maybe it’s really not going to change or fix anything. Maybe he’s just an ass and won’t accept your apology. But you have to try it, for you. You can’t move on without at least attempting to make things right.”

“Will you eat some ice cream for me and let me complain about it if he doesn’t want to listen?” he asked, smiling once more, just a little.

I rolled my eyes but smiled back. “Sure. We’ll go on a double date with Ben and Jerry.”

“So . . .” He stood, taking his time getting out of his chair and straightening up. “I guess we should go now?”

I sighed and stood too. “Maybe I’ll change all my PIN codes to today’s date. To commemorate the first time I was ever arrested.”

Chris scoffed. “You’re not going to get arrested.”

“I just always thought that the first time I had gay sex would be because of something like last night, not because
prison
.” I grinned at him.

“You’re so dramatic,” Chris said, rolling his eyes. “The worst that will happen is he’ll throw you out of his house.”

“And call the FBI.”

“Not unless you really piss him off,” Chris said.

“Well.” I took a deep breath. “I guess now is as good a time as any.”

“We’re going now?” he asked, his voice a little weaker than before.

I nodded. “That’s what you just said. We should go now.”

“I know,” he said. “I just . . . This is kind of a huge deal for me.”

I dumped my plate into the trash receptacle and stretched, then started walking toward the hotel entrance. “You’ll feel better once you’ve talked to him, though.”

“Or worse,” Chris muttered, then spoke louder. “You should know that a lot of my conversations with Eric tend to end in tears or yelling. Or both.”

“Was it always like that?”

“No.” He stopped walking, and I faced him.

“So . . . are you sure you’re ready for this?” I asked after a moment.

He fixed his eyes on the dingy orange carpet of the deserted hotel foyer. “No. Maybe I shouldn’t.”

“If it’s this terrifying to you, then that probably means you need to do it,” I pointed out. “If you want to move on and all, I mean.”

“Do I?” he asked, then lifted his gaze to mine.

I looked away immediately. “I’m pretty sure that’s what ghosts are supposed to do, dude.”

“But I thought maybe . . .”

I knew what he meant, obviously, but I wasn’t sure I could handle a conversation about it yet. But he hadn’t finished his sentence, and so I offered a compromise. “Well, you’ll still have to talk to your sister. So this isn’t all, you know?”

“Do you think—?”

“What’s his address?” I interrupted, a little desperately. We’d said plenty of things last night, and I really didn’t want to add more to the processing pile just yet.

Chris sighed, letting his shoulders sag. “You wrote it down.”

I nodded and pulled the scrap of paper out of my pocket, then turned around and started walking briskly again. “Do you think we could go to Death Valley after we talk to him? I have a couple of days left to kill and I’ve always wanted to go.”

Chris didn’t say anything for several seconds, then sighed. “It’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Death Valley.”

“I know.” My voice was a little too bright and filled with the pathetic stench of overcompensation, but I couldn’t seem to tone it down. “But who knows if I’ll ever be this close to it again? I should go while I can, right?”

“You don’t have a car,” he pointed out.

I stepped out of the hotel and headed for the nearest intersection, where I figured I should be able to find a cab. “Maybe I could rent one. Or get a bus.”

“You don’t have enough money for that,” Chris said. “You know . . . Eric probably still has my car. I left it at his house when we went on tour, and I can’t imagine he would have ditched it after I died.”

I glanced over at him and raised an eyebrow as I put in my phone earpiece for the cab driver’s benefit. “You want me to drive your car to Death Valley.”

Chris shrugged. “If he believes us, he’ll loan it to you.”

“What kind of car is it?” I asked. “Oh God, is it a Maserati? I’ve always wanted to drive a Maserati.”

“You just want to drive one because of the song,” he accused, but he was smiling a little bit again.

“Yeah, mostly,” I said. “But I swear I won’t do 185 in it. I need my license.”

Chris laughed. “You don’t need your license. I don’t even know for sure that you
have
a license. You take the subway everywhere.”

“I have a license,” I assured him. “It’s been like a year and a half since I’ve driven, but it’s still valid and everything.”

He shook his head. “I’m not letting you drive my Mas if you haven’t even driven a golf cart in over a year.”

“I can still drive,” I began, then paused. “Wait. You actually have a Maserati?”

He dimple-smiled at me and shrugged. “I had money. I spent a lot of it.”

“Does it really do 185? I mean, really?”

He laughed again. “It does a hell of a lot more than that, actually. Not that I would know from experience driving out in the desert in the middle of the night or anything.” He gave me an exaggerated shifty-eyed innocent look and grinned.

“Dude,” I said. “
Dude
.”

“Now you have even more incentive to convince him we’re for real,” he said, still grinning.

We took a taxi to Eric’s neighborhood, then just walked up to the gate and casually punched in the key code like this was just an everyday thing and not a B&E on a celebrity home. I caught myself wishing it hadn’t been so easy, wishing that we’d had to give up so we could just go back to the hotel and . . . do whatever it was we did now. Painting our toenails and talking about feelings, probably. Or, more accurately, awkwardly watching bad reality TV and pointedly
not
talking about feelings.

Not that there were feelings. No sirree Bob. No feelings.

And then it was just a short walk across a paved courtyard and the same key code on the front door, and we were in.

Chris stopped just inside and looked around.

“Has it changed?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“No,” Chris murmured. “Not really.”

I gave him a second to get his game face back on, then I cleared my throat. “So . . . where should I go?”

“He’s upstairs,” Chris said, staring up at the ceiling.

“How do you know?” It wasn’t like there was music or loud talking or anything, so I wasn’t sure if he really
knew
or if he was just making shit up.

Chris took a really long time to drag his gaze away from the ceiling. “What time is it?”

I pulled out my phone. “Nine fifteen,” I said, holding it out to show him. He didn’t look, and after a couple of seconds I put the phone back in my pocket.

He didn’t speak, so I continued. “Why does it matter what time it is?”

“He sleeps until nine thirty every morning unless there’s a reason to get up earlier,” Chris said quietly. “His keys are on the table over there,” he pointed to a small marble-top table by the door, “so he’s not gone. So he’s upstairs. Asleep. For fifteen more minutes.”

“Jesus, dude, you know his patterns super well,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper even though there was no way Eric could hear me from all the way upstairs anyway.

Chris shrugged. “He’s been pretty much the only person who gave a shit about me since mom got sick,” he said, finally forcing his eyes down from the ceiling. “I just filed the information away.”