They finally made it back to their section, and Andre nodded to the guard who was stationed outside the QAR bus. He remembered reading that Devon Bailey had once had an obsessed fan invade his hotel room, and since Devon had married a bodyguard, the band no doubt took security very seriously. He wondered idly if by this time next year, the F-Holes would have reached that tipping point of popularity that made such measures necessary.
“Oh, lord, I didn’t realize how hot I was until just now.” Dmitri moaned as a rush of cold air flowed out of their bus when he opened the door with his remote. “Bliss!”
“Geez, get inside before you let it all out,” Andre said, poking him in the shoulder with the hand that wasn’t holding the pizzas. Laughing, Dmitri went up the steps, and Andre followed close behind, hitting the button to close the door behind them. He had to acknowledge that Dmitri was right; the temperature inside the bus felt almost frosty in comparison to outside, especially after their performance.
Dmitri dumped the six-pack on the dinette table, then stepped aside to grab plates and silverware from the tiny kitchen. “Suddenly I’m absolutely starving.”
“Me, too!”
They fell to ravenously. The pizza and beer tasted like ambrosia, and Andre was glad they’d opted for an extra pizza, since by the time he’d wolfed down one slice, he was pretty sure he could eat an entire pie by himself.
Dmitri stopped with his second piece halfway to his mouth as someone knocked on the door of the bus. “Shit. What do you want to bet Luka forgot his key fobagain.”
“No bets,” Andre shrugged. “I actually think Kit hides it to drive him and us all nuts. It’s your turn to open it.”
Grumbling, Dmitri dropped his pizza back on the plate. He picked up a napkin to wipe his hands as he rose and headed past Andre toward the front, grumbling under his breath. “I’ll be damned if I’m sharing our pizza.” His voice rose, and Andre heard him hit the door button. “Dammit, Luka, you need to?—”
Dmitri’s voice cut off suddenly, and Andre frowned as he turned to look over his shoulder. To his shock, he saw Dmitri raise his hands, stepping back from the door as a dark-clad figure moved up the stairs. There was a hiss as the intruder hit the button again, sealing them all inside.
“Stay still,” the man growled, mounting the steps slowly. “No one needs to get hurt.”
“Trust me, I don’t want to get hurt,” Dmitri stated, his voice surprisingly calm. “Look, we don’t have much money on the bus….”
“Shut up!”
The guy was wearing a hoodie, and Andre, awkwardly looking back over his shoulder, didn’t have a good angle to see if the guy was armed, but he had to assume so from the way Dmitri immediately went silent.
The intruder made a motion for Dmitri to back up further, which he did, past the driver’s area, and then turned to back up past the seats that made up the small living area. Then the guy turned toward them, and Andre felt his gut clench as he saw the man’s face. A face he’d hoped he’d never see again.
Ray Kramer.
A nasty smile curved Ray’s lips as he saw the recognition on Andre’s face. “Hello, D-Bag. Since you weren’t polite enough to answer my very civilized letters, it became necessary to pay you a personal visit.”
“Ray,” Andre said the name flatly, cursing himself for having blown off the threat from months ago as a hoax. Now he just had to figure out how to handle it.
“Oh, so you do remember!” Ray’s tone was mocking. “And here I thought you had forgotten all about me and didn’t take my polite requests for your assistance seriously. Now I have to get nasty, but that’s your fault.”
Dmitri’s entire body jerked as he took another step back, and then he turned to look at Andre in shock. As Dmitri shifted, Andre caught sight of a gleam of metal in one of Ray’s hands. A knife. A real pigsticker, long enough to go through a body and come out the other side, not the little three-inch toys they’d carried as kids for self-defense.
Even though his heart was pounding, a strange calm seemed to settle over Andre. He’d been in standoffs often enough, faced down bullies who were determined to take what they wanted. The situation was eerily familiar, though once Ray would have been on Andre’s side, rather than be the menace Andre was facing down. But the who and why of the situation weren’t really important. Whatever happened, he had to make sure that Ray didn’t hurt Dmitri. That was all that mattered.
He raised his hands, and then he shifted on the bench seat so that he could look at Ray more directly. Whatever Ray wanted, Andre would give him as long as he went away.
“Actually, I only got one letter, months ago,” Andre replied, keeping his tone even. Had Ray sent more, and he’d missed them? He cursed himself as an idiot for dismissing that first one; obviously, he should have paid closer attention, but recriminations wouldn’t do a damned thing to get them out of this situation. “It sounded like a joke.”
“Ten grand is ajoke?” Ray snarled. “Well, it ain’t, not to me. Ten grand would have gotten me out of a real bind. It was little enough for afriendto ask for from the big man rockstar. I bet you spend more than that on booze and blow in a month. But the price has gone up. Now I want fifty.”
“Or what?” Andre rose to his feet slowly and carefully, keeping an eye on the knife. He couldn’t make any sudden moves, but he needed to be able to react if things went to shit. In the meantime, he needed to keep Ray talking. If he was talking, he wasn’t stabbing. “Or you’ll tell everyone I went to juvie? That we used to steal food because we never had enough to eat and roll drunks for whatever money we could get? That we stole cars for chop shops so that our mothers could pay the slumlords, so our siblings wouldn’t be homeless? That was almost a decade ago, and no one will care.” Not long ago, he hadn’t wanted any of that known, because it would have given Sibila the ammunition to take his son away from him. He’d been ashamed, fearing that he could lose everything. But now, faced with the sins of his past, he realized they didn’t have the power over his life that he’d given them in his mind. Ray was trying to bully him in the same way Sibila had, and he was sick of being a victim.
Ray flushed with anger. “They’ll care when I tell them you killed old Mr. Kingman when you robbed his store.”
Andre stopped, frowning in confusion. “You know that wasn’t me. I don’t think they ever caught the perp….” His voice trailed off, and his eyes went wide as he suddenly understood where this was going.
The old man who owned the corner store just outside of their neighborhood hadn’t been popular with anyone, and he was known to keep a shotgun under the counter, so the neighborhood punks tended to leave him alone. All except for Ray’s older brother, whose name Andre couldn’t even remember. But hedidremember Ray claiming that the old man was going to pay for having shot his brother and gotten him sent to prison for attempting to rob him. Six months later, Mr. Kingman had been dead, stabbed multiple times and left to expire in a puddle of his own blood before he could get to his gun.
“It was you, wasn’t it?Youkilled him because of your brother.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll swear it was you!” Ray snarled. “Just give me the money, and it all goes away. You’ll never see me again.” Desperation crept into his tone as he read the disbelief on Andre’s face. “Look, I owe some guys. Really bad guys, the kind that dump you into the harbor wrapped in chains. I swear I’ll disappear and never say a word. Just give me the money!”
