“He’s lucky I didn’t cut him loose already,” Jim said. Then he muttered more to himself, “Why did I take up with a bunch ofHee Hawbanjo players?”
I was worrying that Ned might shoot Alex on purpose, workplace aggression given a weapon, but my attention caught—
Banjo players? “Ned plays pedal steel,” I said.
Jim prodded me past the office. “Honestly, I don’t even know what that is,” he said.
We had arrived at the doorway of the storeroom. Inside, my bandmates were untangling a nest of cords. Jim propped me up in front of him like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Hello, ladies,” he said.
The girls looked up. The shudder of shock and alarm that wentthrough the group sent another wave of revulsion through me. This was real. This was happening.
How would we get out of this? Alive, all of us.
All of us except—
The banjo player.
Jim pushed me into the room. I fell to my hands and knees and crawled toward the girls. Shanny and Suzy reached for me. Rooster’s wide eyes, scared. Lourey’s jaw was set in outrage.
“Ned, come on,” Jim barked down the hall behind him.
Take upwith banjo players, he’d said. He’d meant Ned, but—
The doorway filled again: Marisa, Sis, Oona holding on to Pascal. Lumpy Jim, bewildered. Then Quin. Quin scanned the room quickly, landing on me, before Ned gave him a shove from behind, digging the muzzle of the gun between the shoulder blades of Quin’s job-interview coat.
Quin fell forward but caught himself before tripping into us. He straightened up, turning slowly back to face Ned, his hands raised. “That’s no way to treat a firearm, Ned.”
“Get yourself one, and you can treat it how you like,” Ned said.
Jim was checking out the parameter of the room behind us, the toilet stall. “All of you, shut up.”
I still couldn’t tell which side of this Quin was on. Silent Jim treated him like one of the hostages, and Ned had a bead on him. But there was something off about Quin I couldn’t quite…
Then I realized—
“Where’s Alex?”
“I’m here,” a voice said from outside the door.
Alex had been left in the hallway. Ned snapped around and dragged Alex roughly into the room with his gun turned on him, point-blank. Side grip, gangster style, his eyes darting all around. I held my breath.
He’d lost track of Alex for a second. I’d seen it and so had his boss. Jim jerked his chin at Ned, directing him to lead Alex away.
“No!” I climbed to my feet, and Jim whirled on me.
Ned would make a mistake. He would do something wrong.
He’d already done it. He’d had help, and how had that turned out? They were short, now, a banjo player. A banjo player who’d told his sister his life was about to change, but instead, it had ended. A curly-haired guy in the alley, legless drunk, Marisa had thought, and his friend—
Hisfriendhad been trying to help him.
In the alley, where he had died.
I ignored the gun trained on me in Jim’s hand and looked at Ned.
“You?” I said. “Youkilled Joey?”
50
