They’d moved her from the town house and stashed her in a narrow, windowless room with a black-and-white-checkerboard floor. Exposed pipes crisscrossed the low ceiling. The hodgepodge of ramshackle furniture made her wonder if it was a storage room. She ran her fingers across the writing on the wall beside the cracked bathroom mirror, realizing where she was.
The Griefers—2/22/34 D., Louie, Gin
The Keanu Reeves Experience—8/3/39
Doof Warriors—11/15/37
It went on and on like that over all the walls, thick swirls of primordial graffiti—band names, autographs, cryptic messages in a thousand different inks and hands. Crude doodles drawn by bored musicians waiting to go on stage. Con had a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of bands, but only recognized a few of the names on the walls. Still, she knew them even if she didn’t know them—jaded, tired, sick of the grind, sick of each other. Ten hours in a van before loading onto another cramped stage with substandard electrics, then penned down here until it was time to play for a semi-hostile crowd of thirty inebriated strangers. The walls were a memorial to the thousands of forgotten bands that never quite made it. She could guess the kind of club she was in—small, sketchy, a hole-in-the-wall with more fire code violations than beers on tap.
The irony wasn’t lost on her that she was being held prisoner in some dingy basement greenroom. Her captors weren’t fans looking for a command performance, though.
Pressing her ear to the locked door, she heard the muffled sounds of voices and music. She pounded on it until her fist ached, but no one came. The door appeared to be the one sturdily made thing about the room. She slumped back down on the couch to wait. It gave her a chance to go back to the ill-timed question that had popped into her head in the garage—what were the Children of Adam doing at that town house? Because they hadn’t followed her there. They’d been every bit as surprised to see her as she’d been to see them. And the burly one had come in through the house to open the garage, which meant either the house had recognized him or he’d had a key. Con rubbed her face in frustration. She didn’t like it, but the town house tied her original to both the Children of Adam and to Pockmark and his team. What she didn’t know was how, but she knew there wouldn’t be an answer she was going to like a whole lot.
From the other side of the door, she heard a growing commotion. Con rushed back to the door. Pounding feet were coming this way. Men arguing. Not quite at blows, but from the way their voices were pitched, the promise of violence was in the air. Then one voice, a clarion baritone, rose above them all.
“Where is she?”
Everyone else fell silent.
“Where?” the voice demanded.
If someone answered, Con didn’t hear it, but a key turning in the lock caused her to back away from the door. The older man at the garage, the one called John, opened it. He looked none too happy, as if he’d gone to the dentist for a cleaning but stayed for a root canal. Behind him, men lined the walls of a narrow, gloomy hallway that ended in a narrow, gloomy staircase. She couldn’t make out their faces, but their anger, raw and blistering, was like staring into an open furnace.
A white man in a three-piece suit stepped into the gap in the doorway. He stood toe to toe with John if not eye to eye. Nearly a foot shorter, he still managed somehow to loom over John, who seemed to shrink back.
“Wait upstairs,” the man in the suit said.
“Now come on. We found her.”
“You did, John. You did. But that’s not really the issue, is it? Was your chapter specifically told to stop doing jobs off the books?”
“Yeah,” John admitted grudgingly.
“Were you told personally, by me, to keep a low profile until things cooled off?”
John nodded and glared at Con as if his troubles were her doing.
“Yet you did it anyway. Well, now I have to clean it up. Take your boys and wait upstairs.”
Reluctantly, John and his followers tramped back up the stairs like moody teenagers whose parents had come home early and broken up the party. When they were gone, the man in the suit closed the door and made a slow, deliberate lap around the room like a lead singer prowling the stage while his band struck the opening chords. He didn’t look her way or even seem aware that he wasn’t alone. The fact that he was famous only made the performance that much more surreal. He pulled a chair up close to her and sat. From a pocket, he removed a small device the size of her pinky. He powered it up and placed it on the low coffee table that separated them. When the light blinked from red to green, he finally acknowledged her presence.