Beneath the Stain - Part 5 (3 page)

Mackey shrugged. “We gotta make it work with each other,” he said, thinking about Trav. “I could always stand to be nicer.”

Kell ruffled his hair in acknowledgment and left Mackey to watch his show in peace.

T
RAV
’
S
FLIGHT
got held up, and Mackey was
not
in a good mood as he did the sound check in the stadium. In his head he knew Trav would be there in time for the performance, and Debra had overseen the equipment and getting them all on the damned plane, but in his heart he knew that he was going to perform for the first time since Gerry’d been there, and that he was used to his Xanax and pot before the performance and his vodka afterward.

He’d been counting on Trav instead.

Oh, and his tattoo itched like a motherfucker.

Blake had seen him trying hard not to scratch the still raw ink when they were on the plane, and offered him a little tube of painkilling ointment to go on it.

Mackey hadn’t even bothered to go to the bathroom to put it on, just lifted his shirt and greased that shit up right there in his seat, blessing Blake’s name the whole time.

“Looks sort of cool,” he said, liking the glossiness. “I should do this before I go up on stage. We can all show them off.”

Stevie and Jefferson had gotten theirs on opposite biceps (which were getting bigger on both of them with the gym in the downstairs and all), and Kell had gotten his on his stomach. Shelia had offered to get hers on her ass, which was really sweet, but Mackey told her that was up to her. Maybe she wanted to get something with just Stevie and Jefferson, right? She’d looked sad, and said she felt like she was little sister to the whole band, and Mackey felt like shit.

“Okay, then, darlin’—but maybe more a tramp stamp than an ass pass, okay? That way everyone can see it. Your ass is sort of members-only, right?”

She grinned and kissed his cheek, and he felt a little better. Okay. Only an asshole sometimes. Maybe he could make it through Oakland without Trav after all.

So even Shelia had a tattoo she could grease up. That would be cool—not subtle, really, but then, The Red Hot Chili Peppers wearing tube socks on their penises hadn’t been subtle.
Memorable
, yes, but subtle? Not so much.

So the family tattoo thing was nice, and so was Blake’s offer of ointment, but even with the numbing on his stomach, Mackey was still a raging red-hot bitch monster when they arrived at the stadium, and the sound check was getting on one snarled nerve at a time.

“Okay, y’all,” he snapped at the roadie getting under his feet and trying to coil the microphone cord, “I get that the equipment should be different. You keep telling me I shouldn’t have cords on my mics. But that’s not the equipment we got right now, and we gotta make do with what’s here. Anybody got any idea how I’m supposed to deal with you guys running under my feet like monkeys for the whole fucking set?”

“How about you move right and we move to your left?” said a rather timid voice.

Mackey glared over the heads at all the borrowed trouble Tailpipe Productions had apparently hired for this gig.

It was a girl. A
pretty
girl, not that she was trying to be. She had a strawberry-brown braid down to her waist, with lots of curls frizzing out of it and little sweaty ringlets around a heart-shaped face. Unlike Shelia, she wasn’t twig thin—no. She wasn’t fat either, just not willowy. Sturdy and soft, round in the right places. In a way, sort of a girl version of Trav, right down to the redheaded brown of her eyes.

She was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt like the other roadies, but they were all looking at her like she’d sprouted breasts.

Probably because she was the only girl.

“I move right and you all move to my left,” he said, at first ready to rip her a new one. And then it hit him. “That’s fuckin’
genius
,
darlin’—no fuckin’ lie. You all hear that? If I’m going left, I will
expect
you on my right. If I’m going right, I will
expect
you on my left. None of this dodging around the back or ducking under the front bullshit. I will
expect
you there and leave you the fuck alone to do your jobs. Now I’ll bitch at Trav to get us some new equipment, but right now, this is a fair solution. You all with me?”

He saw some numb nods and some resentful looks at the girl, but Mackey was satisfied. Emergency choreography at its best, right up until he tripped on the tall skinny guy with the blond hair for the six thousandth time.

With a snarl, he hurled his
broken
microphone stand off the stage. “What in the actual
fuck
are you doing here?” he hollered, the clatter of the mic stand punctuating the ring of his voice. “Where’s the girl? She knows what she’s doing, get her the fuck up here!”

“She’s not certified—” the guy whined.

Mackey almost smacked his subservient little face. “I could give a
damn
if she’s certified. Give her a fucking field promotion, but get her ass up here before I
kick
your ass down! Oh! And I will write an actual check and double it for the first person who can get me a mic stand that
actually fucking stands
!”

“Well if you’d quit throwing them off the stage, they wouldn’t break,” said the girl, clambering up on the stage with more nerves than grace.

Mackey was about to rip her head off, and then he realized what she’d just done had been sort of why he called her up in the first place.

“This is true,” he said, conceding the point. “But that one had it coming.”

“I’ll try to scrounge up one that’ll behave,” she said earnestly, and some of the tension that had been squeezing Mackey’s head since they’d arrived relaxed a little.

“I’ll take that as a personal favor,” he grudged. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Briony,” she muttered, wrapping the cords around at the foot of the stage while she talked.

“Briony, you are my personal tech for the evening, you got that? If anyone needs to say something to me, they say it through you. You are, hands down, the one person not in the band that is not pissing me off right now, and if you could do that for me, I may let the rest of humanity live.”

She got to her feet and dusted off her knees, grimacing. “You’re sort of an asshole, has anyone told you that?”

Oh God. Mackey
loved
this girl. “Yeah,” he said, nodding and smiling. “But the folks I love best don’t give a fuck.”

“You don’t treat me like I’m stupid, I might not give a fuck either,” she said, smiling back a little, like she was amused to find herself talking to him like this.

“I can do that. Anything else?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Stop putting the mics in your mouth. That primal scream thing you do sounds real fucking spiffy on your CD, but we don’t got the equipment for it here. I mean, I know they
make
equipment that’ll take that, but this shit is gonna short out, zap your brain through your skull, and fucking kill you!” She nodded earnestly with that, and he almost wept.

He’d been waiting for this kid his entire fucking life.

“Heard and understood,” he said, staring. “
Debra
! Did you hear that?”

“Yeah, Mackey,” she said, bustling up to the stage. Trav hadn’t seen their touring equipment yet, the amps and such they needed to project in a large venue—this was supposed to be a trial run, and Mackey wondered sadly if this hadn’t been one of the things Gerry had let slide.

“You make sure Trav gets a list of shit goin’ on here. I wasn’t in a great place the last time we had this shit out—looks like a lot of it is sort of fucked-up. I’m gonna run through the playlist with the guys and the light effects with….” Mackey looked around for Lester and Keith, the two guys Gerry had hired to do effects. Again, Mackey knew their names, they warned him when something cool was coming up, and that was about it, and while Mackey had a whole list of shit he’d wanted to change and work up in the month after Christmas and before the tour, right now they were just running through the songs in public. Maybe. “Where in the fuck are my light and sound engineers?”

He looked at Briony like maybe she had the answer, and from the way she blushed and looked away, maybe she
did
have the answer but just didn’t want to tell
Mackey
.

“They’re either fucking each other or doing blow,” he said flatly. They’d been a little twitchy, but then, people got twitchy around Mackey when he was trying to set up a show. He had no idea why.

“Or getting blown and doing fuck,” Briony said with a grimace. “But yeah. You started ranting and they took off.”

Mackey took ten deep breaths, closed his eyes, and pictured his room. Not Trav’s room, where all the sex and magic happened, but his room, where he’d been sleeping since Trav had been gone. When he was alone, he curled up in the dark space between the beds, crumpled into a little ball, where all he could feel was the peace and the music in his own head. He took ten deep breaths in that space, then ten more, and when he opened his eyes, Briony and Debra were looking at him patiently, and he thought maybe he could take homicide off the table for today.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said with exaggerated patience. “We’re gonna bump ourselves up in the rotation. The guys before us have pretty spiffy lights and sound. Right now we couldn’t find our asses with both hands and a forklift in that department—we don’t want to let the audience down. We’re going to do the first number absolutely bare. All the lights—
all the fucking lights—
and we’re gonna come ripping out of the fuckin’ gate with ‘Tattoo’ and destroy them, does everybody got me?”

He looked around to the band, who were hanging on to his every word and trying not to look lost. It had been a while for them too, he realized, and they missed Trav as well. Gerry hadn’t made it to every performance—or even half of them—but Trav had been so good about easing all the fucking details, they hadn’t even missed him until he was gone.

“Good. And then after that we’re going dark and romantic—Briony, do you know the light and the sound board?”

“Not that well, boss,” she said apologetically, and he loved her even more for not trying to fake it.

“Then give me a couple of names of guys who can’t fuck up a wet dream—”

“What about Keith and Lester?” she asked, making sure.

“They are no longer on the fucking payroll,” he said grimly. “They weren’t that fucking good in the first place. Holy shit—all that time we spent sitting on our hands this last month, thinking this shit would be here when we came back to it. It is time to get our thumbs out of our fucking asses and act like we get paid.”

“Righteous, Mackey,” Kell muttered, and he heard some more murmurs of assent from his guys. Okay. They’d sold a fucktonna CDs on their last tour—they could either skate on their asses, using the old CDs for sleds, or they could fucking bring it. And while Mackey knew they were going to bring it musically, until this moment
right here
, he had not realized how much more to bringing it there was. Trav was good at helping them be their best, but Trav did not have the tattoo and he hadn’t come up from nothing. Mackey could love Trav for all he was worth, but the fact was, this band, these guys, they were a whole different entity, and the people who bought those CDs could either be their fans or their fuckers.

It was Mackey’s job to make sure they were fans, and that they stayed with him and the guys as long as they put out.

“’Kay, Briony—go pick your light and sound board guys. Debra, you start making a list of shit me and Trav hafta fix. Guys, we’ve got five minutes to go through the new playlist—and then make it the fuck so. Are we ready, all?”

“Fucking ready, Mackey!” That was in tandem—Mackey spared a minute to grin at them, suddenly so grateful for his brothers he could cry.

“Ready, pit crew?”

“Give me five, dickhead!” Briony yelped as she scrambled down from the stage toward the big-eyed group of roadies praying to be promoted.

“Awesome—let’s fucking get this road on the show!”

And with that he turned to his guys and started to fix what was wrong, adrenaline thundering through his veins as he looked at the clock. They had an hour and a half before the next band came in to claim this space. Fucking spiffy.

For the first time since Trav left, Mackey wasn’t thinking about Xanax, coke, or vodka. Good to know there was a cure.

T
HE
TEXTS
hit his pocket the minute the plane landed. One minute he was leaning back in his seat, closing his eyes while they began their descent and imagining what Mackey would look like stretched out in bed, thighs held up and spread wide while Travis swiped long, hard, and deep with his tongue. He was remembering the sounds Mackey made when Travis was inside him and imagining what sounds he’d make when he was pleasured slowly, like a love song, in that easy, dreamy, playful way a good rim job gave you. Mackey had just gotten to that rare moment when he relaxed, sighed, and begged sweetly because he trusted Trav wouldn’t deny him, when the plane touched down.

But work awaited, and Trav hit the On switch on his phone and straightened up in his seat, buttoning his coat. He took one breath, and then two, and then….

His phone exploded into so much chaos, Trav couldn’t believe it had been just sitting there in the airwaves, waiting to attack him.

He texted frenetically while he grabbed his suitcase and his laptop, and barely looked up as he walked down the aisle like the other sheep. Up the ramp, down the ramp, and around the maze of SFO, he navigated the clusterfuck that a simple festival performance had become.

Goddammit, Heath—you told me our tech crew was sound!

He had to. He’d taken Heath at his word and had poured his time into publicity, CD production, setting the schedule—and into getting his band to a place where they could perform. So, yeah, he’d spent his free time sleeping with Mackey Sanders, but he truthfully hadn’t done much of that.