Time Out (12 page)

“Warren wouldn’t stop giving me shit until I agreed to watch the concert from here,” she huffed, but secretly I think she liked him fussing over her.   

“Just like old times,” Riley turned in his swivel chair to grin up at us from his place next to the computerized keyboard which controlled the lights for the show. 

“I just wish it was under better circumstances,” I sighed, causing Riley to take a sideway glance down at the crowd below.

“Do you think he’s out there?” Lizzie asked, no louder than a whisper. “Trying to figure out another way to create a bomb or smuggle one in?”

“Yeah, I do,” Riley confessed, sending a shiver down my back from knowing that someone with that mentality was in the crowd below. 

“But what I don’t understand,” Riley continued. “Is why someone would go to all that trouble…broken up bits of C.D. cases and a shattered mirror…and then not follow through with it?”

“I guess to send a message,” I remembered what Harlow had said last night.

“But wouldn’t it have been an even bigger message to just let the thing blow up?” he countered. “You know Cyrus would have jumped at the opportunity.”

“Maybe they have something bigger planned,” the words were out of my mouth before I could even realize what I was saying. Everyone paused, as we stared at each other.

“That’s exactly why,” Riley murmured with another glance down at the sea of faces, causing Lizzie to openly shudder. “You guys are seriously starting to kill my buzz.”

Fortunately for Lizzie, Rob Harlow came down the ladder next; completely shifting our mood.

“Hey guys,” he flashed a grin our way before taking a seat next to Riley. “What brings you guys back here so soon?” he
joked,
and I could tell he was trying to make an effort to be nice to us because we were Riley’s friends, which I thought was absolutely adorable.

“I don’t know, I guess someone made a faulty ‘bottle of gravel?’” I said sarcastically.

“I know
,
can you believe that Vance guy?” Harlow scoffed. “Faulty bottle my—whoever did that knew what they were doing.”

We all took a collective pause, before Harlow reached for his headset.   

“At least security’s aware of the problem now. You ready to do this,
Riri
?” he slapped Riley’s back and brought everyone’s focus back to the concert. Harlow put on his head piece and both guys turned back around to face the stage again. 

“
Riri
?”
Lizzie mouthed, causing us to beam at each other before we had to look away again.   

No one would have guessed that the two of them had feelings for each other, if you didn’t know any better, because they were both appropriate about it, and probably the last two people who would try to shove their relationship in other peoples’ faces.

Still, it was the little gestures that made me smile, like Rob placing a hand on Riley’s back as he moved the spotlight around or how their legs brushed against each other underneath the lighting equipment board as they worked side by side. Harlow was the obvious mentor, teacher-type figure in the relationship, trying to educate Riley - who was the listening and diligent student. 

At times throughout the night, Harlow and Riley would share a laugh over something private, and then at other times they were deeply discussing something related to the show. I had never seen Riley so comfortable with someone other than me before. They were just as in love with each other as Hawkins and I were. 

“And teacher—there are things that I still have to learn,” Lizzie sang, causing me to shoot her a look, but she just gave me a little shrug like she couldn’t help herself, and then stopped. Thankfully, neither one of them had overheard Lizzie serenading them a George Michael song.

In fact, I’m not even sure they noticed that we were still there after a while. They were in their own little world so I wasn’t surprised at all when Riley gave me a little wink at the end of the show and followed after Harlow up the ladder off the platform. 

Chapter
Six

             
The next day I woke up in the hotel room determined to do some sightseeing while in Chicago. I wanted to visit Sears Tower and the Navy Pier, which had rides, gardens, and restaurants from what I could tell by
Googling
it. I didn’t know why, but I always seemed to be the only one who wanted to do something other than going from concert to concert night after night. Nevertheless, I needed a change, or I thought that I was going to claw my eyes out from boredom.

I managed to wrangle up Lizzie, who seemed dead to the world at that hour in the morning, and Riley, who knew that I wouldn’t stop hounding him until I went on at least one sightseeing trip for that leg of the tour.

Hawkins mumbled something about giving the keys to the Chevrolet Van to Ted, his bus driver, before kissing me goodbye and rolling over in the bed again. I didn’t bother Hawkins into going with us since he was the only one who really had a job to do today. I did feel guilty about waking Ted at this hour though when we could have easily just gone alone, but after the bomb scare Hawkins was adamant that we needed to be escorted around.

I knocked on Ted’s hotel door, feeling even guiltier when he came to the door almost as dead to the world as Lizzie was, who at the moment, was snoozing against the wall. The side of Ted’s short pepper salt colored hair was sticking up, and he looked back at us through narrowed, sleepy eyes before groaning, “Yes?”

“I’m sorry to wake you, Ted,” I sighed, thinking that I wasn’t going to put this poor man through this. We could find the Navy Pier on our own. “Hawkins said that you have the keys to the van?”

“Van?” he seemed to ask himself and then nodded.
“Oh yeah.”

“Do you know where they are? We wanted to head out to the Navy Pier.”

“Yeah umm,” he scratched the side of his head and mumbled, “Let me get ready.”

“No, I’m sure we’ll be fine,” I assured him.

“No, I don’t want you kids to get lost. Besides, I promised Hawkins. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” I was just about to insist that we would be okay on our own, but Ted had already shut the hotel door.

“Well—I feel like crap.” I turned to Riley. “Should we still go?”

“We’re already dressed and ready to go,” Riley sighed. “And who knows when you’ll get to see Chicago again?” He had a good point, which made me feel better about the situation. We managed to peel Lizzie off the wall before heading in the direction of the elevators.

It was an overcast day outside when we exited the hotel minutes later. The parking lot looked like a packed can of sardines with the large tour buses parked side by side. There wasn’t an available space open in the entire parking lot. I spotted the silver Chevrolet van parked by another similar van I knew that Warren let Gwyneth use to travel in. 

Judging by how tired Ted looked when we woke him, I knew we might be waiting by the van for a while, and it started to lightly rain, so we made a detour over to Hawkins’ purple tour bus. I thought we were going to have to jimmy the door open when we rounded the front of it but I was surprised to see that door was already half way open.

“That’s weird,” I mumbled to myself as I led the way up the steps to the bus. I knew that it would have been impossible for Ted to have already beaten us to the parking lot when we hadn’t even stopped to enjoy our complimentary breakfast.

The sound of our shuffling feet up the steps must have alerted whoever was upstairs because I heard the door to Hawkins’ bedroom door suddenly open. I came to an abrupt stop when my eyes locked with Robert Vance, who looked just as surprised as I was to see him on Hawkins’ tour bus.

“What are you doing here?” I couldn’t help but sound suspicious because Hawkins’ bus had become like our home away from home while on the road too. Vance rocked back on his heels like he was buying some time to come up with an explanation, and clapped his hands. 

“
Ahh
…we’ve been checking all the buses for security type purposes,” he finally said while pointing his finger up to the ceiling. “
It’s
typical protocol—making sure that nothing suspicious is on the buses.”  

“Joie,” Riley nudged me. “There’s Ted,” he nodded at the bus driver crossing the parking lot.

“Well now that you checked the bus,” I went to turn back around to face Vance again, but he was already on his way past me down the aisle. “You can leave….” I drifted off thinking what the heck?

“You guys have a nice day,” Vance called over his shoulder as he stepped off the bus and left.

“That was weird,” I murmured to Riley before turning to scan the bus. “What was he doing in Hawkins’ bedroom?”

“I don’t know,” Riley shrugged. “But let’s not keep Ted waiting any longer—

I wasn’t sure if I felt the explosion tremor up through my feet until it shook my legs or heard the sheer loud boom of it first, but it made all of us flinch and duck down. My eyes darted over in the direction of the sound before Riley’s golden brown eyes locked with mine.

“Ted,” he gasped in utter horror as we suddenly regained our composure and turned to flee back down the aisle in the direction of the where we heard the loud sound. Even Lizzie was wide awake now as we unloaded off the bus.

Riley took off with me on his heels, but he stopped midway to put an arm up to brace himself from the scolding hot vapors coming off of the Chevrolet Van, which was now engulfed in flames. The sight made my stomach drop as the gaseous smell of the explosion filled my nose. Riley took off again around the side of the van in an attempt to save the bus driver, but as I watched I saw Riley’s shoulders and head suddenly drop; I knew the man hadn’t survived the blast.

“That was meant for us,” Lizzie whispered beside me, confessing what my mind had not yet realized.     

I knew that I was someone who could remain calm even through the most difficult of times, like how I was with Cyrus on the highway so many weeks ago. I wasn’t sure if it was a survival skill that helped me handle these life and death situations I now found myself involved in, but often in these times I could think and feel much, much later. Except this time there wasn’t anything for my mind to think through, and it took something like being in Hawkins arms fifteen minutes later for the shock of what happened to dissipate and for the tears to finally come gushing out. Ted had been killed by a bomb that was meant for us. 

I watched the fire department extinguish the last of the bright flames that had licked every inch of the van until nothing but a blackened and burnt skeleton remained. I thought of Ted, the bus
driver, that
Hawkins had trusted enough to keep on the crew, which said a lot about how he felt about the man, especially when there was no real way of knowing who to trust anymore. But it wasn’t just Hawkins that liked the man, the horror of what had happened to Ted was evident on everyone’s face as most of the crew and the band watched on from across the parking lot and out of the way of the firemen.

“I woke him up,” I confessed to Hawkins as I looked at the empty shell of the van. “He’d still be sleeping right now if it wasn’t…for me.”

“Joie, this isn’t your fault,” he insisted and pulled me in closer to him.

He told me it wasn’t my fault, but as the day went on, I could tell that he was struggling to grasp what was happening in the world around him as he sat with his head in his hands on his bed. It wasn’t that long ago that Monroe, a member of Hawkins’ former crew, was murdered. His body had been planted in the garage of a hotel as a warning from a psychopathic stalker. Still, that stalker had been killed weeks ago and now Ted was dead too, and I wasn’t sure how well Hawkins was dealing with it. 

By concert time, he seemed shut off from the rest of the world; me included. I knew he was in a state of shock and I tried to give him his space to grieve, but he could barely make eye contact with me on our way off the bus and into the pavilion’s backstage. I went to give his hand a loving squeeze but he just patted it and didn’t respond.  

I was beginning to fear that he blamed me somehow for Ted’s death. If I hadn’t wanted to see the city, Ted would still be alive right now. Or maybe he blamed himself for insisting Ted drive us around the place as a precautionary measure. Whatever it was I expected the silence that followed him before the show to finally be over when we made our way
back
to the bus together.