Man Made Murder (Blood Road Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  “I gotta piss,” Ted said, tossing the towel on his shoulder.

  “Watch the sway as we pull out,” Dean said. “We’re not far enough along the tour yet to have piss all over the floor.”

  “That’s tomorrow, right?” Teddy said with a quick grin before he sucked in his gut and squeezed through the doorway.

  Dean heard Shawn saying, “Dean back there?” to Ted, and Ted saying, “Yeah,” before the click of the bathroom door came. The “yeah” didn’t stop Shawn from showing up in the doorway to check. Behind him, the front lounge was bright—almost cheery. The promise of a new tour about to start.

  The bunkroom had no windows, just banks of sleeping berths on either side, coarse burgundy curtains drawn across them. From where Dean stood, looking out toward the front lounge was like looking out from the throat of a cave.

  The bus vibrated under his feet. The door at the front squeaked shut. The sound of the engine changed, and Dean put a hand against a bunk as the bus started forward.

  The movement made Shawn look back over his shoulder. When he turned his attention back to Dean, he said, almost quietly, “Thirty-nine.”

  “Thirty-nine what?”

  “‘Can’t Win for Dyin’’ charted at thirty-nine.”

  Okay. Well, that wasn’t the end of the world. They’d had singles pop up and sink back just as quickly before. “Probably be seventy-two next week.” He dropped what was left of his cigarette into his coffee.

  “Yeah.”

  Even so, there was that pull—that hope, turning like something dark and shiny deep inside Dean. “The Fix Is In” had made it to five and held for a couple weeks before sinking like a corpse in concrete boots. “Boiler Room” had popped to number two a couple years back.

  Their first and only real hit—ironically titled “Hit Me”—had climbed to number one in December ’73. Through the magic of engineering, production, and record label coercion, it had hit the airwaves sounding nothing like what the band had intended. Whether it made it because it was a fluke—the exact right song at the exact right time—or because the label really did know better than the band, they hadn’t been able to touch the success of “Hit Me” since.

  The last thing they’d wanted was to write “Hit Me” over and fucking over. That had been the start of their struggle against the label.

  At this point, even if they did write “Hit Me” again, it wouldn’t help: five years was a whole generation in music.

  And that was another thing: they still weren’t putting out the music they wanted to—their music—despite the battles against the producers High Class pushed on them, despite the confrontations—er business meetings—with High Class execs, and no thanks to the way their own manager—not Mike, who handled their tours, but Gary, who handled their careers—always came back to them with “just give a little on this one.”

  We’ll get you what you want, but you have to give some too. It’s a partnership.

  They had one album they hadn’t “given” on: Mercy. They’d produced it themselves, and it was the best work they’d ever done: rough and raw, honest and broken with a thread of hope running through even the darkest parts. Each song was like a cracked-open chest, a beating heart trying to survive the worst possible conditions—and High Class called it “not ready for the market.” “A little amateurish, to be honest.”

  Which had almost gotten an exec a “little” punched in the teeth.

  That album was gone. Property of High Class Records, who’d buried it in a vault. That album was gone, and they had to get the fuck out of High Class before their souls got buried too.

  “It’ll drop off the list,” Dean said about their latest single’s charting, because like the others it was a Frankenstein monster of the band fighting to keep their sound, and the record label steamrolling it flat, and that just didn’t stick for audiences. “How’s Evie?” he said to change the subject.

  “Pregnant.”

  “And since you guys broke up last winter, she was just calling to invite you to the baby shower?”

  Shawn crossed his arms, his shoulder pressed against the doorjamb.

  “Shit,” Dean said. “Really?”

  “We fooled around in August. But she was seeing someone else. So.”

  “Great.”

  “So it might be, it might not be. Are you coming up front?” Shawn asked.

  “Nah. I’m gonna catch a nap.” He cupped his hand over the bandage at his neck. “It was a long fucking night.”

  “I’m still waiting for you to tell me about it.”

  “I’m too busy tryin’ to forget it.”

  4.

  * * *

  That night at the high school, after the creep who’d come up the steps had disappeared, Carl had watched Sophie stand up there alone, like a ballerina in a music box, turning her head at every car that passed.

  Certain it was just a matter of time before Soph gave up on her date, he’d turned on the radio. The pop station she liked blared through the speakers. He turned the knob until he found the middle of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” then stretched his legs and pushed his palms against the ceiling. He had Stephen King’s Carrie on the passenger seat floor, snagged from Sophie. He wasn’t sure how much he was into the plight of a high-school girl getting her first period—or how comfortable he was with the idea Soph had read it—but it was something to do. He scooped it up and creased it open to the page he’d dog-eared.

  He didn’t mind sitting in the car, really. He’d had the Cougar for all of a month, brand new off the showroom floor. Maybe not the best way to spend part of the money he’d inherited after the wreck that killed their parents—his aunt and uncle had certainly argued against it—but he’d stashed a good bit away for college expenses too.

  Besides, it only seemed fair he got something good out of losing his parents. All Soph had gotten—until her eighteenth birthday—was him, and a sewing-room-turned-bedroom at their aunt and uncle’s house, a house that was out of district, so he had an extra excuse for the car: he’d needed something reliable to run Soph to school in, so she could keep going to the same one, not have her life turned any more upside down than it already was.

  He, on the other hand, had gotten to head off to a dorm at college a month after the accident, a place where he could pretend for stretches at a time that life hadn’t changed at all—that he could pick up the phone and call mom and dad and tell them how things were going.

  As Carrie’s Billy Nolan rigged buckets of pig blood in a rafter in the school gym, Carl glanced toward the real-life one.

  Soph wasn’t on the steps.

  He’d folded the book closed around a finger and sat up. The place was deserted.

  Maybe she was using the restroom.

  Maybe the doofus who was supposed to be taking her to the game had finally showed.

  He stared holes into the gym doors, a heavy ball turning in the pit of his stomach, telling him she wasn’t in the restroom, and she wasn’t standing at the drink table while her date bought her a pop.

  He dropped the book on the passenger seat and stepped out of the car. Pushed the sky-blue door shut. The soles of his tennis shoes scuffed over the asphalt as he jogged to the gym, his gaze flicking between the doors and the empty sidewalk. By the time he got to the steps, she hadn’t popped out.

  The security lights made the concrete landing look like a stage, and the show felt over somehow. He checked over his shoulder as he climbed, making sure he hadn’t missed her.

  The game bled through the steel doors—a coach’s whistle, an opinion from the crowd, the closer murmur of voices in the foyer. He grasped the handle and pulled, and all of it got louder, brighter.

  A student behind a folding table just off to the side nudged his glasses up his nose, looking toward the door.

  “Hey,” Carl said. “Did you see a girl come through a few minutes ago?”

  “Nope.”

  “Sophie Delacroix, do you know her?”

  “Yeah,
she’s in my geometry class.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  He nudged his glasses again. “Nope.”

  Carl looked around. The foyer was crowded, kids who didn’t give a shit about the game but wanted someplace to be. The doors to the gym itself were propped open, giving Carl a view of the backs of people’s heads, the ones who hadn’t gone up into the bleachers.

  “Have you been here the whole time?” he asked the kid at the table.

  “Sure. I’d have seen anyone coming in. Gotta get their money.” He tapped a metal cashbox on the table. A roll of faded blue tickets sat next to it.

  Carl pushed back out the doors, a breeze lifting his hair, skittering a newspaper page across the sidewalk.

  No sign of Sophie.

  Swearing, he checked his watch. The game was probably half over. A forerunner of the panic that was going to overtake him when everyone started streaming out the doors and Soph wasn’t with them started revving inside him. He had to prevent that from happening. He had to find Soph, safe, before that happened.

  He yanked the door open and went back in. “Can I walk around and see if she’s here?”

  “If you pay your fifty cents, I don’t care what you do.”

  He pulled his wallet out and slapped a dollar bill down, heading for the gym floor as the kid called out, “You’re supposed to get a ticket.”

  The bleachers were packed. He scanned them as he skirted the game, looking for familiar faces. Looking for one familiar face in particular, small and framed with dark hair, a great smile lighting up her face when she wasn’t having her picture taken.

  When he got around to the far side, he pushed through another door, to the hallway with the restrooms. A girl was coming out of the ladies’. He asked if she’d seen Soph.

  She shook her head. “One of the stalls was closed, though.” With a shrug.

  Hope sprouted, tender green shoots of it. He paced the short hall, waiting, worry overtaking hope. A certainty sat in him, a lead weight he was trying to ignore. He wanted to claw his belly open just to get it out of him.

  At the door to the gym, he stared through the windows, checking the bleachers. Checking the gaggle of girls standing in front of them. Checking the guys laughing closer to the foyer.

  The restroom door opened. He swung around, coming to a short stop at the sight of a tall girl with blunt-cut blond hair. Stuffing a folding brush back into her purse, she looked up, startled at his sudden movement.

  “Was anyone else in there?” he said.

  “Not that I saw.” She snapped the purse closed.

  “Could you do me a favor and pop back in and check? I’m looking for my sister.”

  “Soph?”

  “Yeah.”

  With a shrug she turned back.

  He tapped his foot. He looked back through the window again. The girl said Soph’s name in the restroom, a question mark at the end of it. He wished he were three people, one to stay here and two to split up and check everywhere else.

  The girls’ room door opened.

  “It’s empty.”

  “Have you seen her at all?”

  “She was out front when I got here, waiting for Stephen.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “No, sorry.”

  He shouldered through the gym doors just as the team made a basket. Half the bleacher crowd jumped to their feet, cheering. He walked the sidelines, his head craned back. No Soph. No Soph. No Soph.

  He caught a girl in a pink sweater by the arm. Shelly. She’d been to their house, back when they’d lived in their house. “Hey.”

  “Hey, what are you doing back here?” Metal flashed when she spoke. Her cheeks dimpled.

  “Have you seen Soph?”

  “Hunh-uh.”

  He left her staring after him as he half-jogged back to the front doors.

  “That was quick,” the guy at the table said.

  “Seen her yet?” he asked.

  The kid shook his head.

  Carl pushed out into the cool air again, the door swinging shut behind him.

  No Soph.

  No Soph, no Soph, no Soph.

  They found her the morning after the basketball game, in a dumpster behind the Furr’s grocery store, three miles from the school.

  Whoever’d done it, they’d said, at least he hadn’t “violated” her.

  No, he’d just cut her throat open from ear to ear.

  Not exactly a consolation.

  As the afternoon deepened, an Olds Cutlass, its blue paint dulled by dirt, turned into the lot behind the bar, the sun orange in its rear window. Carl watched it pull to a stop by the wooden steps. The door swung open, and a man stepped out—early thirties maybe, and so thin his denim jacket and the tee shirt underneath looked like they were walking around on a hanger. His beat-up canvas tennis shoes knocked up dust as he turned to lock the car. His hair was stick straight, a lock of it tucked behind his ear. He mounted the steps slow, fishing a different key from his ring.

  Carl glanced around, everyone going on about their business.

  The guy fitted the key into the knob lock, turned it, wiggled it back out, went for another key, the deadbolt lock. As he stuffed his key ring into his jeans pockets, he pulled open the back door.

  It swung shut behind him.

  Carl squeezed the hot steering wheel, working out what to do.

  Shit or get off the pot.

  Pull the trigger or drag his ass back home and get on with his sorry life.

  Except he didn’t have a life. He had a roommate who liked slasher movies and an academic suspension from school because he spent more time poring over P.I. reports and newspaper clippings than textbooks.

  He popped the Cougar’s door open. Got to his feet, to the complaint and then relief of his knees. He glanced up the street one more time, checking the convenience store window to see if anyone was looking out. No one paid him any attention. He crawled back in the car to get the gun and his windbreaker, situating them both before he pulled back out. He shut the Cougar up, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and headed across the street, head down, feet moving fast. Asphalt to concrete to dirt. He tugged a hand out to grasp the wooden handrail at the back of the bar and just about jumped up the bar’s back steps.

  At the top, with his hand on the knob, he took another look around before pulling on the door, fully expecting it not to give.

  It swung open.

  He poked his head into a dim hallway with a scuffed wooden floor, its finish worn to bare wood in places. Motes of dust hung in the sunlight coming in around him. At the end of the sun’s reach, shadows crowded until the hall opened up to the main room, where yellow lighting made the tables and barstools look like something out of an old photograph.

  Someone was moving around up there, a lonesome sound, the scuff of rubber soles on wood, the scrape of cardboard being set down or lifted up.

  Carl stepped inside and held the door as it fell quietly closed.

  To either side sat unmarked doors. He took a step and put his ear to one. Then, just as quietly, moved across to listen at the other.

  Glass clinked up ahead. Water ran.

  His hand was on the gun at his back. His muscles itched to draw it out, but not yet. He glanced up the hall before putting his hand on a knob.

  Holding his breath, he eased it open, just a crack at first, darkness spilling across his toes. He pushed it wider, blind to what was inside. He risked taking his hand off the gun to feel for a light switch.

  It snapped on, the switch loud and the bulbs dim, two 40-watters in a ceiling fixture under a shade glazed with age. Boxes sat stacked against the walls, familiar liquor company names printed along their sides. A trio of metal folding chairs sat in the middle around a table with a scarred top, drink rings worn into its wood.

  Rather than risk the loud snap of turning the light out, he just eased the door shut.

  Water was still running in the main room.

  He reached for the doo
r across the hall. Held his breath as he opened it. Reached for the light switch right away, moving it slowly this time, hoping to muffle the snap.

  It clicked, and he jerked his head toward the front, then right back to the room, where a big steel desk sat loaded with papers. A couch that had seen better days had been pushed against the wall, with hardly space between it and the desk to roll the chair out.

  What he needed was a basement door, or access to the attic. The ceiling in this room was plaster, stained yellow with tobacco. No trap doors in it.

  As he eased the door closed, a “Help you?” jolted him back a step. His hand still gripped the knob. The door clapped against its frame.

  “Uh, I was looking for a restroom?”

  “We’re closed.”

  “Sorry. It’s just that…it’s kind of an emergency. Promise I won’t take up any of your time, I’ve just—I’ve really gotta…”

  The wiry guy had a draught glass in his hand. He pushed a bar towel into it as he eyed Carl. “Said we’re closed.” He lifted the glass toward the street. “There’re some places up the way.”

  Carl’s stomach clenched, making him think he really did have an emergency on the way. He opened his mouth, his mind blank. Desperate. “This a biker bar?” rushed out. “I saw a bunch of bikes out front. Some nice ones.”

  The guy didn’t answer.

  “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone in here, though. The bikes wouldn’t happen to be for sale, would they?”

  “Weren’t you about to shit yourself?”

  Yes. Right about then, yes he was.

  “Sorry. I’ll come back later.” He started toward the door, stopped. “When do you open?”

  “Private bar. No membership, no entrance.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He put his hand against the door. Turned his head again. “There’s a Triumph out there…I’d be especially interested in that.”

  “Get the fuck out.” The guy dropped his hands to his sides, one with the towel, the other with the glass.