Bent coughed beside him. “You’re with the wrong crowd if you don’t want judgment.”
He extended his arm and opened his grip. With a give-me gesture, he sealed his fate. Spike leaned across the aisle and handed Baby over into his waiting hand.
“First of all,” he said with a smirk, “Baby needs some tuning.”
Smiley, who faced forward and snapped pictures outside, turned to Forest. “Told ya,” he said.
“Baby sounded just fine to me,” Spike said, leaning back and crossing his arms.
Taking a quick moment, Ryker stroked the guitar, plucked at the strings, and tilted his head down, placing his ear close to feel the vibrations. A few small tweaks of the tuners, and he sat back, satisfied. “There, all better now.”
Spike glared at Smiley, reached into his front pocket, and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. He wadded it into a ball and tossed it the few rows to the front of the bus.
Smiley caught it in his fist. “Haven’t lost one yet,” he said with a snicker. “Twenty on the boy,” he said.
“Met and matched,” Spike said and then twisted back around. “You going to stroke her all day or play her?”
“Just letting that song play in my head,” Ryker said, and he was doing exactly that. Closing his eyes, he listened for the song, traveling the landscape of the composition in his mind. There it was—that first soulful note. He grabbed it and let the song play forward. His fingers hit the strings, leading the way.
Everything around him dissolved in that moment. For the first quarter of the song, he played true to every note, every chord, every heart pounding rise and fall, but then he had to improvise, fitting in chords to fill the gaps in his memory. With his right ear cocked forward, the faintest curl of a smile lifted the corner of his mouth.
His fingers danced up and down the frets, plucking and strumming the soul of the song, coaxing it forward from his memory. When he came to a place of uncertainty, he filled in the measures, adapting the sounds to fill in, making it up on the spot. Hopefully, no one would notice.
He jammed out the earth-shattering ending, letting the notes hang in the air, reverberating with pain, heartache, and revenge. As the music came to an end, he opened his eyes.
“How was that?” he asked.
Spike’s mouth hung open, unhinged and gaping.
Bent remained silent, his head bowed, hands clasped in his lap. “Damn, but that was…”
“Oh, I know,” Ryker said with a shrug. “I messed up a couple of places.” He couldn’t fool them, but he’d had to keep playing. Stopping would have only proven Spike right and him wrong. Two things in Ryker’s life were a given. One, he never backed down from a challenge. That was why he was certain Tia would be in his bed later that night. Two, there wasn’t a challenge he’d ever failed to meet once he set his mind to it.
“Fuuuuck!” A low whistle split the air behind him. “What the hell was that?” Ash had risen from his nap and seemed none too pleased.
Ryker quickly handed the guitar to Spike. “It was nothing,” he said. “Just goofing off.”
Bash twisted fully around in his seat. “There was a little more than simple goofing off going on.”
“Hey, look, didn’t mean anything by it. Just filled in the gaps and improvised on a couple of the—”
“Improvised my ass,” Ash called out. He pointed to his fellow band members. “Now, tell me one of you asswipes was recording that.”
Recording? Why would Ash care?Ryker felt two inches high, mortified for daring to alter one note of their song. Damn his competitive streak. He should’ve stopped playing, but no, he’d had to show off, and he had loved every second of it.
Ash glared at Bash, Spike, Noodles, and finally Bent. “Seriously? Not a single one of you thought,Oh hell, maybe we should record this?” His strong hand came down on Ryker’s shoulder. “I don’t know what that was, but you took our song and—”
“I didn’t mean to overstep,” Ryker said with apology.
“Overstep? Hell, you took spots that have been bugging me for weeks,” Ash said, “and hammered out the damn wrinkles. I reallywish someone had recorded that. Do you think you could do it again? Play it the same way?”
He shrugged. “Maybe?” There was about a fifty-fifty chance. His retention for songs played to him was different than the music he created on the fly. Yet another reason his band never made it big. Hell, they’d barely been mediocre. Ryker could play, as could the rest of his band, but the new music he’d created fizzled. It’d failed because he never wrote anything down. He couldn’t. No one had ever taught him to sight-read.
Forest rose from his seat and extended his hand. “Pay up,” he growled. “Ash has risen from the dead.”
Ryker glanced forward just as the Humvee in front of the bus lifted into the air. Fire licked its underbelly. A billowing cloud of black and gray smoke devoured it. The concussive blast shook the bus. The driver stomped on the brakes, catapulting Forest forward. They swerved sideways. Brakes squealed. Tires crunched on the deteriorating road surface. Forest landed with a thud, shaking his head. A secondary blast lifted the right front tire of the bus.
The bus canted sideways as the driver attempted to regain control, but they pitched over the edge of the roadside. There was enough of a dip to send the bus rolling like a sausage. People and bags tumbled about, slapping into and against one another until all movement stopped. Ryker’s entire world blacked out.
