Curling up with Mevi in his arms, he held him tightly against him. “I’m so proud of you, boy,” he said, nuzzling the top of his head. “You’ve done so well.”
“I wish you could be there tomorrow.”
“You don’t need me. Just remember, don’t drink from any opened water bottles if they’ve been out of your hand, and be careful what you eat. I wish I could be there but I can’t put these sessions off and I have to finish these reports. I’ll be there tomorrow night for the concert. You’ll do great. I have faith in you.”
Doyle found Mevi’s right wrist and kissed it. “Make sure you have your marker with you. If you need to, go into the bathroom and trace your marks and think about me. You need to be able to do this for me, buddy. I can’t do my job unless I know you’ll try your hardest.”
“I will, Sir.”
“That’s my good boy.”
Eventually, Mevi finally drifted off to sleep in his arms, leaving Doyle lying there and hoping he wasn’t wrong, that Mevi could do it.
And that he’d be on his guard against Erique. Doyle would make sure to talk to Clark that night, alone, to see if they could kick Erique off the tour sooner, now that Mevi had proven himself.
Because at least in that way, Doyle had full confidence in Mevi, that he’d be able to hold on to his sobriety.
Chapter Twenty
The next morning, after breakfast, they all headed over to the venue, arriving there a little after eight in the morning. Mevi hated leaving Doyle behind, but he had his marker in his back pocket and tried to focus on that.
Mevi also finally found his nerve to tell them about the new songs, and when they reached their dressing room area, he showed the sheet music to them.
“I want to play these tonight.” While they studied the songs, Mevi nervously stared at his bandmates.
It was Erique who finally turned first and spoke. “You want us to play this stuff tonight cold?”
“I’m playing lead guitar,” he said, fighting the urge to punch the guy. “These will be acoustic. Tell the crowd it’s a special trial run, hint it’s for a new album. We’re recording tonight anyway. It can be on the concert album. Tell them that they’re getting a treat. Three songs, that’s all I’m asking. We can fit it in, and people won’t be bitching we did nothing but play the old classics.” He glared at Erique. “If you can’t follow along, well, my acoustic will be fine. It’s okay.”
Bonnie walked over to him, staring up into his eyes. “What’s going on, Mevi?”
“I want to do this.” He dropped his voice, even though he knew Erique knew about Mevi’s battle with sobriety at this point. He just hadn’t been told the details.
“Look, I’m sober. I worked my ass off.”
He raised his voice and, skipping Erique, met his bandmates’ gazes in turn. “I’ve been fucked over, fell down, nearly gave up, and yet I’m here. I won’t let you guys down this tour. You know me, I’ve never fucked a tour. Never missed a goddamned show unless we all missed it because of a flight or something. How many times have I been sick or something and got out there and put on a good show for the crowd? Yes, I fucked up. I’m not going to say I’m magically healed, but I know where I fucked up and I will not repeat it. I’ll keep working my ass off. All I want to do is one fucking acoustic set near the end, before the closing medley. I want to see how the audience responds.”
Actually, he wanted to do it for Doyle, an “I love you” to him, since the songs were about him anyway.
But he couldn’t tell the others that. Not yet, anyway.
“But you’re already doing an acoustic solo number for the close,” Erique protested, his tone borderline whiny.
Mevi turned on him. “Listen, Wannabeme, nobody has ever fucking heard of you. They aren’t here to listen to you. They’re here for Mevi and Portnoy’s Oyster. I can hook up my goddamned iPad and play studio tracks in place of you and not get attitude from it. So shut the fuck up.”
Erique turned on the others. “You gonna let him talk to me like that?”
Garth snorted. “Yeah. Because he’s absolutely right. Only reason you’re here in the first place is because you roofied Pasch, blew him, took pictures of it, and threatened to go to his ex with them if he didn’t get you an in with us.”
Pasch’s face turned red but he didn’t say anything.
And that was the first Mevi had heard of that. But it certainly explained what Doyle had witnessed and the seeming underlying thread of animosity from Pasch over the past week for a guy he supposedly vouched for to get him in.
“What?” Bonnie and Troy said, both seeming as shocked as Mevi felt.
Mevi stared at Pasch, his jaw gaping. “Seriously? You let a guy who’s blackmailing you and who drugged you onto the fucking tour? And you didn’t bother to tell the rest of us?”
“You’re not the one he’s threatening to sic TMZ on,” Pasch muttered. “My ex is going to claim I was cheating on her and try to screw me on custody, okay?”
“I didn’t think you were bi.”
“I’m not. Yeah, I’ve been blown by guys a couple of times when I was single and horny and lonely and we had eager groupies wanting to, but the date-stamp on the video was while we were still married. Even though we were separated. Man, she will fuck me over with my daughter, and you know I can’t lose visitation with her. She’s all I give a shit about in this world. I don’t want her Googling her daddy when she’s older and finding a sex tape of me, or her friends seeing it and giving her a hard time.”
Now Mevi didn’t give a shit what Erique heard. “He roofied you. That’s rape. He needs to be reported to the cops.”
“I don’t fucking care, dude. I won’t put my kid through that. Like they’re going to listen to a guy. I’ll get laughed out of there and you know it, and that shit will be all over the goddamned news.”
Erique stood there, arms crossed, a smug smirk on his face.
Mevi strode over to the door and stuck his head out, located Clark, and waved him in. “What’s Tilly’s number?” He’d forgotten to program it into his latest phone.
“Huh?”
“Tilly. Get her on the phone.”
Clark seemed a little slow on the uptake. “You’re talking…Tilly Tilly?”
“Yeah. That Tilly. You know who I’m talking about.” He held his hand out for Clark’s phone after the man pulled up a contact and hit call.
Mevi took it and walked over to the corner of the room, plugging his left ear with his finger while holding the phone up to his right.
She answered. “Hey, Clark. What’s up? Man, it’s freaking early.”
“This isn’t Clark. This is Mevi.”
There was a pause before she replied, her tone concerned. “Mevi? Why are you calling from Clark’s phone? Is Doyle okay?”
Mevi walked out of the room and into the hallway. “He’s fine. How fast can you get to Chicago?”
“Um…oookaaay. Here’s a dumb question. Why?”
“You’re a friend of Doyle’s, right? He trusts you that means I trust you.”
“Seriously? You damn well know he’s a friend. I consider you a friend now, too, kiddo. What’s going on? Where’s Doyle?”
He struggled not to get subbie at her Domme tone. “He’s at the hotel and working with clients on the phone and I promised not to interrupt him. I’m at the venue for practice and sound checks. I need you here.”
“Okay. This is, again, a stupid question. Why?”
He sidestepped into a handicapped accessible bathroom just off the main hallway, where he locked himself in. He gave her what info he knew, what they suspected, including Erique’s name and particulars. When he finished, he followed up with, “I need a personal-attack Tilly to blow this guy out of the water in your very special way, and I can’t call the cops into it. Help. Please?”
She audibly sighed. “While I sympathize with you, I can’t work for you full-time.”
“I only need help with this. Now. Help us get rid of him in a
way that means he can’t get revenge.”
“Why not ask Doyle to go Dom on his ass for you?”
“He’s not in the entertainment business, for starters, and I don’t want to expose him professionally.”
He detailed his ideas but told her she was free to…improvise.
She sighed again. “Fine. Far be it from me to derail the karma train when it looks like I’m the engineer. But you tell Doyle he owes me letting me take a few whacks at your ass at some more appropriate time. Hold on.”
She left the line for a moment before coming back, and he heard keys tapping. “I’m not familiar with Chicago. Where am I flying into, and how the hell do I get to where I need to be?”
He almost burst into relieved tears. “I’ll send a driver to pick you up. They’ll hold up a sign and have your full access credentials. I’ll have Erique moved to another hotel. The driver will take you there first and then bring you back here later.” She booked the flight and he gave her his personal cell number. It buzzed in his hand a moment later and when he checked, he found the text from her with flight information. “Got it.”
“Text me the hotel info as soon as you have it because I need to set up some plans. And you owe me, buddy. Plan on playing private kid-friendly birthday parties for the next several years.”
He laughed. “Ma’am, I’ll do whatever you ask.”
She hesitated. “You need to tell Doyle.”
“I will, but I promised I wouldn’t bother him. He’s doing phone sessions with clients. That’s why he’s there and not here yet. They’ll bring him over later, closer to show time.”
“I’m also acquainted with a little girl who’d probably love guitar lessons. Her name’s Laurel, and I might or might not have accidentally set her on course to becoming a super-villain by letting her watch the original Batman movie with me one too many times. Music might help channel her evil powers for good.”
He laughed. “Deal. You drive a hard bargain, ma’am.”
“So I’ve been told. Let me get packed and get out of here so I can make that flight. Lucky for you, Landry’s here in LA this week and can take care of KC. Neither of us had left for work yet.”
“You can bring the paperwork and stuff?”
“If that little shit doesn’t shit himself by the time I get done with him, then I’m losing my edge. Let me get off the phone.”
Mevi hung up and returned to the room, giving Clark his phone back. He showed him his phone, the text from Tilly, and arched an eyebrow.
“I need a driver there to pick her up with full-access crew credentials.”
Clark’s eyes widened. “No. Shit. Dude, do not put me on her bad side.”
“I didn’t. I negotiated. We’re cool. I’ll fill you in later, but we’re good friends.” He pointed at Erique. “You, on the other hand, are going to shut the fuck up. You signed an NDA, and you’re contracted only for the first five shows.” He turned back to Clark. “Get two guys from security and move the little shit’s shit to a different hotel.”
“What?” both Clark and Erique said.
“I don’t want him in the same hotel as the rest of us.” He glared at Pasch. “Unless you want him rooming with you?”
Pasch shot Erique an evil glare. “No. I don’t want him on the fucking tour, much less in the same room as me. And Garth wasn’t supposed to say anything to anyone about that, either. He promised.”
Garth shrugged. “Best it comes out now, before he tries shit with anyone else. I know damn well he didn’t think Mevi could pull it together. He had visions of himself fronting the band.”
Now Bonnie and Troy were both eyeing Erique. “Listen, you little shit,” Bonnie said. “I see anything about me show up on TMZ or anywhere else, I will sue your fucking ass so fast and bury you in so much paperwork that you’ll have to dig a mile up to reach the sewers. You will never work in the music industry again.”
Erique held his hands up. “Chill. I just wanted my shot. Watch what you say to me.”
“Get his phone,” Mevi said.
Before the guy could run, Clark blocked him while Troy and Pasch grabbed his arms. It was Bonnie who frisked him and found not one, but two phones.
“Well, look at this,” she said.
“You can’t take my fucking phones!”
“Au contraire,” Mevi said, smugly crossing his arms over his chest. “Clark?”
“One of the clauses in your contract states we can examine, at any time, any device in your possession or control or owned by you that could be used to record and/or store audio and/or video and/or data. And confiscate them if they contain proprietary information. That includes phones, cameras, computers, tablets, or any other device.”
“What?”
“Try 0721 as his passcode,” Pasch said. “That’s his birthdate. I saw him use that before.”
She did, and sure as shit, it worked.
And both phones used the same code.
“We don’t have time to deal with those right now,” Mevi wearily said. “We need to get to work. Tell the security guys to search his stuff and confiscate his laptop and tablet when they move him,” he told Clark. “And check for thumb drives or external hard drives.”
“What if he’s uploaded to the cloud, too?” Clark said.
“Confiscate all the devices until Tilly can take a look at them for us when she gets here.”
Clark frowned. “She’s not a tech person.”
“Her husbands run a huge IT company.”
“Oh. Duh. Heh. Good thinking.”
Erique looked murderous. “You assholes are going to pay for this.”
Clark smiled. “Right now, I could kick you off the tour and penalize you, including making you pay for your own lodgings and transportation. And sue you. And have your ass thrown in jail. Consider yourself lucky.”
“No,” Mevi said. “We’re going to let her deal with him. Get two security guys on him. Make them sit on him today, don’t let him leave the room, and have the driver take her there when she flies in. Oh, and search his stuff for drugs. Hold on to any you find and give them to her, too, when she arrives.”
Mevi leaned in close, so he could whisper to Clark. “When Tilly gets here, she’s going to have a ‘talk’ with him and have him sign some papers and he’ll be gone. Period.”
“I’m on it.” He took the phones from Bonnie and left the room.
Pasch and Troy released him. “You fuckers are going to be sooo sorry.”
Mevi smiled. “Oooh, buddy, you keep thinking that. You have no idea of the world of hurt you’re in.” He leaned in. “Never fuck with me, kid. You fuck with me, you’re fucking with the very best.”
Clark returned with two of their beefiest security guys, and they hustled Erique out of the room, Clark following.
Once it was just the five of them, Mevi pointed at the sheet music. “Now, back to that.”
“Hold up,” Bonnie said. “What’s going on? Who’s coming to deal with him?”
He smiled. “Don’t ask too many questions. You haven’t met her yet, you haven’t had the chance.” He hooked a thumb at the door Erique and the security guys had left through. “And he’s damn sure going to wish he never had.”
* * * *
The others agreed to let Mevi perform the new acoustic set, especially in light of the recent developments. There in the dressing room, Mevi grabbed his practice acoustic guitar and played the songs for them.
At the end, he stared at them. “Well?”
The others exchanged looks and Mevi’s heart fell.
Bonnie finally spoke. “Dude,” she softly said. “Those have to go on the new album.”
Relief filled him. “You like them?”
“Yeah, but I mean like that. We engineer those, it’ll ruin them.”
Troy, who’d sat on one of the sofas to listen, slowly nodded. “Yeah. That was…that was amazing. I haven’t heard you crank out stuff like that since Plazooka.”
That had been their second albu
m, which had gone triple platinum, and to this day still brought them decent royalties.
Even Pasch sat forward. “Why didn’t you play those for us at rehearsals this week?”
“They’re…personal.”
“Those usually are the best ones,” Bonnie said. “But they have to go on the next studio album. Even you doing them solo. I don’t know if we can improve them. Maybe a little bit of vocal harmony, record backtracks of you or something. But those are fantastic. We could always do a more engineered version to go with it, but those acoustic versions are what will go top ten.”
Everyone nodded.
“Okay, but we produce the next studio album ourselves,” Mevi insisted. “This isn’t like when we first started. We can do this. We have the skills, and we can afford to do it ourselves. We can call it an unplugged album or something.”
“I like that,” Garth said. “Back to our roots.”
Bonnie smiled. “Remember that dive in Pasadena? We played there three weeks and we thought they were going to stiff us and they finally paid up when Mevi threatened to take a shotgun to him.”
“I didn’t even have a shotgun,” he said. “It was a baseball bat in a soft guitar case and a sound effect on Tom’s phone.”
“Yeah, but the son of a bitch paid us,” Garth said. “Man, you had a fucking set of balls.”
“I was scared shitless. If Tom hadn’t been with me, I would have chickened out.”
Bonnie rested a hand on his shoulder. “You were taking care of us back then.”
He rested his hand over hers. “I wish I’d listened to you guys when you tried to take care of me and warn me to keep a close eye on David before he fucked me over. But when Tom died…” He met her gaze. “I kind of lost my will to struggle against stuff, you know? I know he was your brother, and I don’t have a right to be more torn up over losing him than you are, but I’m no dummy. We owe a lot to him and what he did for us.”
She pulled him in for a tearful hug. “I know, Mevi. He loved you, too.”
“What’s that little fucker going to do to me?” Pasch sounded forlorn. “I can’t lose my kid, man.”