Suckers (3 page)

“Any more whiskey?” Dan asked. Carey, their tour manager, was likely in bed too. That just left their errant drummer, plus Moss and Josh, and their sound guy, Greg.

“Hey,” Ray was saying as he fished through the contents of the minibar. “Where are you? Speak up. I can’t hear you.” He tossed Dan another airplane bottle. “Who else is still there? What about Greg? Okay, do me a favor. Tell everyone to grab a cab or get a ride from someone. Do not walk back to the hotel. And don’t take a ride if it means you have to walk three blocks to get to the car. Got it?”

Dan torqued the cap off and drank half of it down, closing his eyes as the warmth spread through his insides.

“Don’t even stand around outside waiting for the cab to show up if you call one. Watch from inside the door. I’m serious. This fucking bat or something attacked Dan and me. No, I’m not kidding. Yeah, we’re good. Just be safe, okay?”

At the club, surrounded by people, the only part of Dan that’d felt anything was his knuckles, their dull throb like a heartbeat—and him drinking beer to try to forget it. He closed his fist to feel it again. The memory of sheetrock buckling under it came visceral, right alongside the anger that had led him to do it.
You’ve got one job to do for two fucking hours—sit behind the fucking drum kit and play what you’re supposed to
when
you’re supposed to. Is that too much to fucking ask?

“Grab Jamie,” Ray was saying. “Make sure he gets in the car with you, whatever it takes. If he has to bring people back to the hotel with him, stuff them in too. Whatever it takes, just get his ass here. We can’t afford to lose our drummer with a few dates left. Yeah, call me when you all make it here. Thanks, man.” He hung up.

Dan said, “Moss?”

“Josh. Stick and Moss went back to the hotel as soon as they finished load out. Carey too. Since Moss isn’t answering, we’ll just hope he turned his ringer off before he turned in.”

“Yeah.” He looked at the plastic bottle of whiskey in his hand before closing his eyes and finishing it.

“You doing all right?” Ray asked.

“Yeah.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I’m okay. You?” He dropped his empty in the trash. Headlines scrolled across the bottom of CNN.

“What do you think it was?” Ray asked.

“The only thing I can think of is a bat.”

“I’m no expert, but…”

“Yeah.” Taking a seat on the end of his bed, he put his head in his hands.

Ray said, “I’m not going to be able to fucking sleep,” and Dan felt the same. What was going to do it—knowing where everyone was? The sun coming up? Getting drunk enough to pass out?

Ray cracked a mini of vodka. His phone rang. “Greg,” he said as he lifted it to his ear. “Yeah?”

Dan studied the pattern of the hotel carpet while Ray talked to their sound tech.

“Nah, we’re shook up, and Dan’s got a bruise on his cheek that’ll make him look tough on stage, but we’re fine.” He fumbled a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “Yeah, do me a favor—if Jamie’s still around, grab him by the collar and drag him along.” He listened for a minute, drawing smoke into his lungs, streaming it back out his nostrils. A half-smile—no humor, but a smile nonetheless—came onto his face. “Yeah, if you could do that, that’d be awesome. Thanks, man.” He tossed the phone on his own bed.

“What’s he gonna do?”

“Collar Jamie and drag him in the cab with the rest of them.”

“Nice.” At least their sound engineer was big enough to get it done. He could stick Jamie and Ray under each arm and run them up a field like footballs.

“Better him than me,” Ray said. “That’s not a job I’d want.” The smile had turned wry. Dan dropped back on the bed.

Ray unloaded his pockets—phone, wallet, lighter. He headed for the bed, the limp back—exaggerated now—his cigarette clamped between his teeth.

They’d had the tour all planned and budgeted out so that everyone got their own room when they had a hotel night. But legs got added, opportunities came up that they couldn’t afford but couldn’t resist—Kuala Lumpur, for instance—and at some point they always wound up cutting corners to make it work. It was that or get off the road. As exhausting as touring was, staying in one place was harder.

“I’m gonna take a leak,” Dan said, “then give sleep a try at least.”

A few minutes later he came back out, pulling his shirt over his head. Ray sat with his back against the headboard, his ankles crossed on top of the bedspread, an ashtray in his lap. He had the remote in his hand again. “Why is there never anything fucking on this time of night?”

Dan worked his boots off. He was exhausted all over again, his limbs heavy. He managed to get out of his shirt and jeans and crawl under the covers.

Ray turned off the lamp, still clicking through the channels. Smoke filled the air. It felt almost comfortable. Familiar. Dan rubbed the back of his neck, then let his hand rest on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and hoped sleep didn’t hold off for too long.

The roll-spark of a lighter, the sibilance of burning paper. A stifled cough, a clearing of the throat. The seals around the minibar’s door gave. A second later, a plastic cap skittered across the dresser top.

Ray dropped a boot on the floor, then the other. His phone trilled. He put it to his ear with a mumbled, “Yeah,” as he headed toward the bathroom.

Dan listened to him say, “Awesome. Good to hear,” as the door shut, then it was just murmurs.

He listened harder, but couldn’t make anything out. After a while, the toilet flushed, the door opened, the lighter did another rasp-spark. The TV clicked through channels. Dan’s thoughts stopped making sense, bleeding into each other, images rising before slipping into dark waters. He realized he was drifting off. He blinked in the bluish darkness. The TV was on, but he couldn’t make out what was playing.

The springs in the next bed complained softly as Ray shifted.

Dan turned over and buried his head under the blanket.

When he woke a few hours later, in the flickering glow of the muted TV, in a room smelling of stale cigarettes, Ray was asleep on his back, on top of the covers.

Dan knocked over an empty beer bottle on his way to the bathroom. On his way back, he made out another beer on the nightstand with what looked like a tiny bottle of vodka toppled against it. Ray’s cigarette pack lay on the floor, crumpled. Everything had a not-quite-real feel to it, like he was dreaming. He touched the drapes over the window. They felt real enough. He eased one aside, squinting out to see the sky, dark purple in the distance. Already the street below seemed less dead; a delivery truck rumbled by, followed by a car with a bike rack mounted to its roof.

He touched the glass.

He didn’t feel real, but the glass did—cool and smooth and hard against his fingertips.

Ray mumbled in his sleep. Dan looked over his shoulder. Then he crossed the room, came around Ray’s bed, and found the remote sticking out from under Ray’s hip.

When he eased it free, it seemed to buzz a little, both as a feeling against his fingers and a distant sound in his ears. This was the unreal feeling he’d been having since he’d woken: everything a little electrified yet at the same time indistinct. Even Ray was a little electrified. Dan’s fingernails vibrated where they’d brushed his side.

Thrumming.

He turned the TV off.

Somehow he managed to miss any turned-over bottles on his way around the bed. He climbed under the covers and lay in the dark—thrumming—until it was only semi-dark. And then not so dark at all.

And there he was, still thrumming.

A hand clamped Dan’s shoulder as he was about to shove his bag under the bus.

“Let’s see that rabid bat damage,” Moss said.

Dan pushed his bag inside before straightening.

Moss, a paramedic before he’d become their guitar tech, stepped closer and palpated the bruise on Dan’s cheekbone, making Dan’s eye twitch.

“Everything feel okay?” Moss asked.

“Feels fine—you know, for being hit in the face.”

“Did you see what hit you?”

“It was dark. Whatever it was was dark too. It latched on to my back.”

“Turn around.”

“Ray had to pry the fucking thing off.” Moss’s fingers sent a shiver down his neck.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what the fuck was going on.” He shrugged into his jacket as Josh hopped off the bus, grinning. “Bat boy.”

“Funny.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “You guys didn’t see anything on your way back?”

“Nope. The most vicious thing we came across was Jamie, when we told him we were taking him back to the hotel.”

“How bad’d he take it?”

“Put it this way,” Josh said. “It was a good thing I had my jacket with me. We bundled him in it so he’d stop trying to scratch us and got into some chicks’ car. Me and Greg stuffed ourselves in after him and made the chicks drive us here. When we told him we were dragging him inside by the shorthairs if we had to, he said fuck it and invited them up to his room. That was the last I saw of him.”

Dan glanced toward the hotel. “How much you want to bet he didn’t stay at the hotel after you guys took off to your own rooms?”

The door opened. Ray strolled out, placing a cigarette between his lips as a breeze lifted his hair.

“Well, we did what we could,” Josh said.

“That’s all you can do.” He nodded at Ray. “Seen our methhead this morning?”

“Yep.” Smoke streamed from his nostrils. “He’s a little worse for wear, but I’d blame it on a night on pills more than freaky creature attacks.” He flipped the collar of his jacket up. “He should be down soon.”

As the others got ready to go, Dan stared toward the alley they’d run out of last night. It looked nothing but dingy in the late-morning light. A moving van bounced past its entrance.

By the time Jamie sauntered out, Ray was at the end of his second cigarette, getting in as much nicotine as he could before climbing on the bus where, for the sake of the nonsmokers, smoking wasn’t allowed. Jamie had a cigarette going too, half smoked, no concern for whether or not he should be smoking down the hallways of the hotel. He took a drag as he stopped to look at Dan. As smoke curled out his nostrils, he said, “I heard what happened. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’ll live. Ready to get out of here, though.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” He clapped Dan on the back and headed for the bus.

No matter how well they tried to air it out, the bus always smelled like farts and old socks. Dan had a theory that socks crawled behind the panels to die, which was why they never managed to end a tour with more than six socks between the eight of them.

When Dan came up the steps, coffee was already going in the galley, covering the staleness with a richer smell that made Dan’s stomach growl and tighten at the same time.

Stick yawned with his hands braced on the edge of the counter, watching the pot fill, his mouth still open when he turned his head and caught sight of Dan’s face. “Shit. Who’d you get in a fight with?”

“A creature of the night,” Dan said. “Feeling any better?”

“A hooker hit you?”

Dan laughed. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“Man, that’s rough. Were you trying to gyp her?”

Dan patted his shoulder as he passed by. “Something like that.”

“You can’t gyp the ladies, man.”

He headed for the back lounge, where he found Jamie and Greg sprawled on the wrap-around couch, the TV blaring cartoons.

“Get any sleep?” Dan asked.

“Shit,” Greg said, while Jamie said, “I passed out for a while. Does that count?”

Dan gave a shrug. His fingers found their way into the front pockets of his jeans. He slouched down to make more room for them.

“I think I threw up on Josh’s coat,” Jamie said.

“He didn’t mention it,” Dan said.

“Maybe it wasn’t his, then. In which case…” He sat back and rubbed an eye with two knuckles. “I’m glad I was up and out before the girls I was with woke up.”

“They’re still in your room?”

“Yeah.”

Dan closed his eyes and let his head fall back. All he could do was hope they didn’t charge a huge breakfast to the room and steal the lamps.

No, he could do more than hope. He got to his feet and strode back off the bus, looking for their tour manager. He found him at the front desk, getting receipts.

“Ouch,” Carey said, seeing his cheek.

Dan dismissed it. Talking about the ‘bat’ was getting tiring. “Jamie left some girls up in his room.”

Carey sighed. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks.” The money would come out of Jamie’s end if they trashed the place, but it never seemed to work out that Jamie was the only one his shit flew back on. It tended to splatter everyone in the vicinity.

“Hey,” Carey said as Dan started away.

He turned.

“It was really a bat that hit you?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Oh, but don’t come stumbling in here in the middle of the night after getting smacked by something around the corner, ’cause the desk clerks disappear like roaches when a light comes on.”