Documentary (28 page)

Momentarily ignoring how compromising the situation already was, Dylan swiveled one of her legs over so she was straddling his lap, her knees and folded legs flanking his thighs. She hugged his face into her shoulder. “I’m sorry tonight got so messed up.”

“Eh. I got to punch Chase without going to jail, and it’s not
so
bad right now,” he murmured, chuckling. “And I’m glad you’re staying. I was ready for you to ask us to drop you off at the nearest bus station.”

“Nope. Not leaving. And you know I’m here for you
, too, right?” she asked.

“Thanks. I guess you owed me one,” he said, and it saddened her that he thought she was there with him as a favor. She pulled back and shook her head. She cupped his face and tilted it toward hers, wishing for the gloom in his eyes to disappear.

“No, I’m here because I’m your friend,” she reassured him, which conflicted immediately with her desire to kiss his lips. They were right there, making hers ache like crazy
.
Her feelings for him weren’t lessening, they were getting stronger, and it was getting harder to sell this friendship idea to herself.

“Look,” he began, “About what happened in the dressing room earlier…”

“It’s okay, Kai. We had a moment. No big. We were speaking in hypotheticals,” she said, shrugging. His lips transitioned to a devilish grin.

“Oh yeah? Then what was your
hypothetical
response to what I said?” The bus came to a stop and she left him only with silence and a smile. Once inside her hotel room, Dylan fell asleep almost immediately, worn out from the night’s events, but she drifted off with pleasant thoughts of Kai and how his face had lit up when she gave him the picture. She awoke to a breaking dawn, filled with nausea and anxiety about the day ahead with the video’s release. Feeling a weight pressing down on her chest, she picked up her cell phone.

“First video goes up today, Mac. The entire world is going to see it, and I’m so scared. I hate being scared. You were never scared, which makes me feel so dumb. I make a big deal out of trivial things. I wish I had your courage.”
Dylan shuddered as a warm tear raced down her cheek when she finished typing. She would’ve done anything to hear his comforting voice in that instant. She looked at the black number five on her wrist.
He didn’t get them. You’re getting what you want. You have no right to be afraid. You have no right to feel the other thing you’re feeling either…about Kai. You’re not even being honest with him. And that’s not why you’re here in the first place.
Dylan sighed and sent the message to “drafts.” 

After a shower, she packed up her th
ings in preparation for the day then opened her laptop.  The subject line of her morning email from Nina was all she needed to know that the video was live, but a thought from last night was already snatching away her attention. Chase Bunyan had said something that was bothering her. He had said that Leko was in the alley the night of the fight with Jeremy, but his name wasn’t in a single newspaper article she had come across about it. She was sure of this because the night Leko picked her up from LAX was the first time she had heard his name, and she knew she would’ve remembered “Meleko” from all the research she had done about Kai’s fight.

“
Your guard dog,”
Chase had said. “
Your guard dog.”
He had meant it in a derogatory manner, but Leko did indeed always take care of Kai; everyone knew this. Leko was there but had not come forward claiming to have witnessed the actual fight? Maybe he could have cleared up what really happened. So why not? What did Leko know? And would he even talk to her about it? Her interest was certainly piqued now. There was something much bigger going on and the thought left her unsettled. How much trouble was Kai
really
in?

Dylan re-read as many detailed articles about the fight as she could find online. Police reports were public records in California, and the official one about the incident was easy enough to locate on the Internet. She printed a copy down in the hotel’s business center and returned to her room to read the long narrative section below the procedural information. Kai had readily identified himself as the person responsible for the assault to the responding officers. He had stated that he had approached Jeremy at Club Victory about working on a music project together. Kai and Jeremy
went out into the alleyway to have a conversation, and shortly after, an argument ensued over songwriting ownership and royalties, leading to Kai striking Jeremy. He admitted wholly to starting the fight.

The part of the report that Dylan found the most interesting was the discussion on how many people were in the alley directly following the altercation. Kai denied Leko had been there, adding that he only noticed him standing with the group of people who had come out with the club security in the aftermath. Chase and Adam Scott disputed that version, and they said they had found both Leko and Kai outside with
an injured Jeremy. Leko had confirmed Kai’s statement to the police, and no one else was able to definitively place Leko in the alley when Chase and Adam said he was there
.

Dylan ran through the details over and over. Something still didn’t seem right.
The anonymous video didn’t place anyone except for Kai and Jeremy in the alley and… the person shooting the video! Duh!
A spiky chill rolled down Dylan’s back, and she jumped off the bed to a standing position. “Oh my God. It was Lek who shot the video. That would’ve placed him in the alley before Chase and Adam got out there. It had to be. He saw the fight. He saw it and he was there.” Her heart was racing at the revelation. It simultaneously made sense and didn’t. As always, when it came to Kai, the answers only led to more questions. Why would Leko record damning evidence of his best friend and then release it to the public? Leko was too loyal to Kai, and she had never seen him so much as cast a resentful glance his way. Leko was the closest to a blood relative Kai had in his life. Money? Kai would’ve given Leko any amount of money, and she didn’t doubt that.

There was no rational reason for Leko to betray Kai. Not money. Not jealousy. He had been so nice to Dylan
, too, but what if she was wrong about Leko’s kindness? And what if Kai had been wrong about him all these years? Her stomach gurgled with heat as she reached for her phone on the nightstand. She wanted to get a reading on his reaction to her questions about that night.  It was in the very early hours of the morning in Hawaii, but Leko was probably awake. She sighed, fearful of how the conversation would go as she tapped his name in her contacts.

“There’s my favorite girl,” Leko said when he answered. There was a woman’s voice in the background. “No, baby, it’s my grandma. Yeah, she always calls late.”

Dylan couldn’t help laughing in her nervousness.  She loved Leko as a friend, which made what she suspected all the worse. “Lek? You there?”

“Hey, baby girl, sorry. You all right? What’s going on? Kai texted me about the fight. Shit is already all over the Internet.
He said Chase hurt you. What happened?”

“I’m okay, Lek.”
Her throat went dry as she sat down. “Are you able to talk? I want to ask you something.” And then her brain went into overdrive. “Lek, I just want to hear your side of the story. Whatever it is. It doesn’t matter how bad it is. We all make mistakes, and I’ll help you however I can. No judgment from me. I don’t want you and Kai—”

“Whoa. Slow down. What’s going on?” Leko’s voice, audibly low and full of concern, sliced right through hers. “You know something about me that I don’t?”

Dylan puffed out a breath. “Were you the one who filmed Kai in the alley that night?” Her voice was so small and quiet she was unsure Leko had heard her, and with a prolonged pause, he left her to simmer anxiously. “Lek?”

He muttered unintelligibly. “Shit…
I told Kai it was just a matter of time before someone figured it out.”

             
Her heart crash-landed in her stomach, and her thoughts went dead. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Lek, Kai
knows
you were filming him? Did he ask you to put it out?”

             
“How’d you find out?” Leko asked.

             
“Last night, Chase Bunyan mentioned that you were in the alley.”

             
“He’s
still
pushing that story. No one listens to it, which is kinda funny ‘cause it’s the truth.” Leko sighed. “Dylan, if I tell you what happened that night, you gotta promise it stays between us. No writing about it. We lied to the police that night, okay?” he said with urgency. “Then we lied in sworn statements, and that’s—”

             
“Perjury. I get it, Lek. I won’t say anything,” she promised.

“I also know Kai asked you to stop looking into this,” Leko said. “He tells me almost everything, you know.”

              “Everything?” she asked, mortified, reflecting on their bus moment. She was starting to put Leko in a big brother role, maybe out of necessity and maybe just out of routine, and she didn’t want him to know details about her like that.

              “Especially the good stuff, baby girl, especially the good stuff.” Leko punctuated the words with a suggestive laugh that faded into his serious tone. “Anyway, Kai came up to me at Club Victory, and I could tell that something was bothering him. He said he needed for me to secretly get a recording for him. He gave me a phone I had never seen before and asked me to go out to the alley in the next ten minutes through that side door. Not everybody has access to that door, just the people in the premium VIP section, aka celebrities and their friends. There’s no smoking in the club, so sometimes people go out there for a quick cigarette or if they need to talk or make a phone call.

“They
always have these crates and empty boxes stacked up everywhere and some recycling containers. The alley is fenced and boarded up on both ends, but there’s another connected, short, narrow alleyway that runs off to a brick dead end, right in the middle. So it’s, like, a T-shape. He asked me to hide right around the corner, in that narrow alleyway and to film him for a little bit when he came out the side door, then toss the phone in one of the crates right there, while it was still recording, and then to just hang back in that alleyway until he came and got me. He said he would explain everything after.

“
I was talking to this girl and lost track of time. When I finally got out there, I didn’t see Kai, but I heard noises down the alley, and I started filming, and moving toward it really quietly. Something didn’t look right. If you listen to the video online really carefully, you can hear me whispering the word ‘shit.’” Leko exhaled a sigh and got quiet for a moment. “Kai was hitting Jeremy, and Jeremy wasn’t hitting back as much, and then not at all, so I stopped ‘cause why the fuck would Kai want to film that? He’s not the publicity stunt type. And Kai really doesn’t fight anymore unless he’s defending himself or somebody else, so I knew something was up.” That was true. Dylan had seen it with her own eyes.

“
Kai was freaking ‘cause Jeremy wasn’t moving, but he was just knocked out cold. Chase and Adam came out, we exchanged words, and I gave Kai the phone. He told me to get out of there. My record is a little shaky, and he didn’t want me in any more shit. I think Adam went back in or something. I went back to the club door, and I was about to go back in, but then it opened. So I hid behind the open door, and a crowd of people came out. I just blended in with them. The security cameras in the club don’t film anyone who’s willing to drop a few hundred on some bottles of liquor, so there was no proof I went out there, anyway. Like a week later, the video showed up online.”

“He didn’t tell you why he wanted you to record him?” Dylan asked, completely confused as her pulse pumped fiercely. She looked up at the door when someone knocked before glancing at the bedside clock. They were still an hour and a half away from
departure time, and she knew she had hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign the night before. “Hold on, Lek.” She blocked the microphone with her palm. “Who is it?”

“Zave!”

“Hey, Lek. I’m back but I gotta go soon.” Dylan walked toward the hotel room door.

“He never told me why ‘cause things obviously went wrong,
but I know he didn’t want it to get out. I still don’t know how it did. And he wasn’t mad at me, but he was disappointed at something when he checked out what I filmed. I fucked it up. Whatever he was trying to do, I fucked it up.” He released another deep sigh. “You really can’t tell anybody about that and, Dylan, unless you’re really trying to help him, please back off this.”

“
I promise you I’m
only
trying to help,” she said with urgency. “Can I ask you one last question? Do you think it was really about music?”

“
Honestly?
Hell no
.”

“
All right. Bye, Lek.”

“
Bye, babe.” Dylan didn’t know what to think now, but she knew that this mess was bigger than anyone really knew if it warranted lying to the police. She didn’t like the thought of Kai being in some sort of hole that he couldn’t pull himself out of. He was a good guy—she felt that at her core—and it went beyond any clouding by her attraction to him and their friendship. She pulled the door open and fixed a big smile for Xavier. “Hey! Sorry about that,” she said.