Chapter Three
By the time Marty and Sonny arrived at the Garden, it was deserted. They showed their credentials to security and found their way to the backstage reception room, which looked as if a tornado had hit it. Empty bottles of booze littered the floor, and the tabletops were buried under a mountain of paper plates and plastic cups, as if the extra effort of dumping the items in a nearby trash can was too much to deal with. A few pieces of intimate women’s apparel dangled from the shade of a floor lamp next to a couch, whose rumpled cushions suggested that it had been used as a trampoline.
“Egads, what a mess,” Sonny said as he scanned the room, his lips curled up in utter distaste. “Did we serve food for humans or pigs?”
They began picking up the utensils from the table when a large security guard peeked his head into the room.
“Are you folks supposed to be back here?” he asked, in as non-threatening of a voice as one could expect from a security guard. He looked at Marty and then at Sonny, where his gaze lingered.
Sonny picked up right away on the eyes that had fallen on him and returned the gesture. Sauntering over toward the guard, Sonny flashed a flirtatious smile.
“We’re the caterers, just here to collect a few of our trays. My, is that a real gun?” He held out his hand, palm-side down, as if offering it to the security guard to kiss. “I’m Sonny, by the way. And you are?”
“Uh … Dwayne. And, yes, it is a real gun.” He sounded either rattled or aroused, Marty couldn’t tell which, and looked a little bashful as he took Sonny’s hand.
Sonny shot a quick glance over his shoulder and winked at Marty before escorting Dwayne out of the room.
“Thanks for the help,” Marty mumbled. She would have never imagined that the gay community was so vast, but everywhere they went, Sonny seemed to scope out a man who shared his sexual orientation and ended up joining him for a conversation, a drink, or a quickie in the closet, which was apparently what was happening right now. Sonny always made it a point to keep condoms and a tube of lubricant in his purse at all times, just in case. She was happy for Sonny that he could so easily pick up men, even though this wasn’t exactly the best time for a romantic interlude.
Oh, well, she thought. At least one of us should have a sex life. Lord knows I don’t.
Marty put in her earbuds and turned on her music as she got to work cleaning off the table, all by herself.
“Thanks, man. I owe you one,” Niko told the driver as he stepped out of the taxi by the rear entrance of the Garden. Before the car pulled away, the drummer already had a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. He took a deep draw and let the smoke drain out through his nostrils in a sigh of relief. It was his first cigarette in two hours.
So, this is Boston, Niko thought, taking in his surroundings. He’d given up trying to keep track of what city the band was in after the first few shows of the tour. Most of the time, he relied on Jarrod’s familiar announcement during the concert, the one where he said the same thing every night to get the crowd fired up, altering only the name of their location.
“Hello, Boston!” Jarrod had shouted into the mic after tonight’s opening song. The audience, just as it always did, roared back on cue. “Is everyone doing all right tonight? I can’t hear you!” Jarrod had the crowd eating out of his hand for the rest of the show.
Niko had his own routine during their performances. As soon as he sat down behind his drum kit, he slid on a pair of headphones that let him monitor his drumbeats and Steve’s bass lines, with the rest of the band streamed in at a lower volume. After counting off the tempo with a click-click-click of his drumsticks, he fired up the band’s engine room, his limbs propelling the rest of the group forward with power and effortless grace.
For Niko, drumming was cathartic. No matter what had gone wrong that day, he could pound out his frustrations onstage. But it was more than just a release. The music touched something so deep within him that his body went on autopilot, responding to his sonic environment without a thought, like some kind of primordial reflex. The beat of his drums was the one thing in the world that made complete sense to him, and for two hours every night, he gave himself over to the rhythms.
Niko’s drums had been his escape for as long as he could remember. With his father creating a tense home environment during his childhood in Minnesota, Niko would retreat to the safety and comfort of his bedroom. His sketchbook, pencil, and radio became his constant companions, and while he drew, he’d find himself connecting with the rhythms in the music that drifted from his radio speakers. After many late-night listening sessions, he started dreaming of becoming a drummer.
When he started beating out rhythms on everything in the house with whatever he could hold in his hands, his oldest sister, Anna, tried to preserve the family’s sanity by buying him a pair of drumsticks for his tenth birthday and encouraging him to pound on some old LP covers in his bedroom. When he entered sixth grade, he joined the school’s concert band and spent every spare moment practicing, perfecting every paradiddle and ratamacue. Although he still liked drawing and enjoyed expressing his creativity in his art classes, playing the drums had become his passion.
A few years after finishing high school and settling into a low-paying, back-breaking job, Niko saw a drum set calling to him from the front window of a Duluth consignment shop. Never having lost his love for music, he scraped together his pennies and made weekly payments on the kit until he could call it his own. It was old and well used, and he had no idea what he was going to do with it, other than keep himself in practice and maybe find a bar band he could play with on the weekends. But it was all his, paid for in full from the sweat of his own brow. And it went with him when he packed up for Southern California on his twenty-first birthday.
On this night, those carefree days seemed like a lifetime ago. There were no crazed stalker fans to worry about, and there was no freakish vegetarian health food to deal with backstage.
Niko didn’t care for all the trappings of fame. Not anymore. When the crowds went home and the band headed backstage, Niko didn’t feel any urge to indulge himself in drugs, booze, or groupies. That thrill had long ago worn off. Nowadays, all he wanted was a cigarette and something greasy to eat. And since there’d been nothing even resembling a burger backstage after tonight’s show, he’d needed to get the hell out of there, away from the partygoers and far, far away from his psycho fan’s roses.
In his eagerness to escape for the evening, he’d forgotten all about his stage makeup. Not that it fazed the cabbie who’d swung by to pick him up at around one thirty in the morning. All night the driver had been dropping off and picking up fans who had their faces painted up to look like ghoulish skulls. They were imitating The Walking Dead whose onstage trademarks were their gothic black clothes and their skeletal makeup.
Most people probably had no idea what Niko, Steve, and Tony looked like, sort of like KISS before they unmasked themselves. Jarrod did the interviews and represented the band at most of the awards shows, so his face was the only one most fans would recognize. That was just fine with Niko, who cherished his anonymity.
Niko was usually the frugal one in the band. Growing up poor will do that to you. But on a night when he just needed to get away and de-stress, he’d told the cabbie to let the meter run and keep driving. After a quick stop at a McDonald’s drive-through, where Niko ordered himself a Quarter Pounder and fries, the drummer was treated to a sightseeing tour of Boston over the next couple of hours.
Once he’d polished off his late-night meal, he popped in his earbuds, sank down into the seat, and pounded on his imaginary drums as the intricate sounds of Yes, King Crimson, and Dream Theater unfolded into his head. When things had gotten tough at home, young Niko had found an escape in the rich sonic tapestries and imaginative storylines that those bands served up in their elaborate compositions. And that’s what he wanted to do tonight, get lost in his music and forget about things for a little while.
His only interruption had been a text message from Jarrod, about an hour after Niko had left the Garden.
Dude, U OK? Where R U?
Niko typed back: Don’t call me that. I’m fine. Got my burger. Just riding around. Later.
After two hours in the cab, Niko had started to feel a familiar craving for a smoke. But before he could put his lighter to the cigarette he’d clamped between his lips, he heard the cabbie rapping on the plastic divider between the front and back seats. Glancing up, he saw the driver pointing to the “No Smoking” sign posted above the rates on the window. Niko let out a weary sigh, looked at the clock on his iPhone, and pulled out his earbuds.
“Can you just take me back where we started?” he’d asked the driver.
Now his belly was full of comfort food and his nerves were satiated with their nicotine fix. Maybe this night won’t be a total waste, he thought as he stood outside the Garden, relaxing into the silence and the cool, refreshing air of the mid-May Boston night. He took a final drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt to the ground, stamping out the embers with his boot.
He’d expected to find his bandmates still at the auditorium, but on his return, he saw that the band’s limo was gone. Having no idea how to get to their hotel, he tapped out a quick text message to Jarrod and walked through the rear door of the arena, to see whether anyone else might still be around.
When he stepped inside, he heard only a single sound. A soft, sweet female voice, humming a happy tune from the reception room.
Niko froze on the spot. He had a sudden flashback to his early childhood, when his mother would sing him to sleep at night with her golden, soothing voice. That was one of Niko’s fondest memories of the mother who was taken from him too soon in life.
After he’d lost her, he took similar comfort from his sister Maggie, who had the same ability to settle his nerves with the calm warmth of her voice. Even as an adult, Niko had found that when he called Maggie on one of his many sleepless evenings, just listening to her talk had often been enough to help him relax into a good night’s rest.
Feeling a familiar tightness growing in his chest, Niko shook his head hard, as if to rattle out the cobwebs. He opened his eyes and forced himself to push the thoughts away.
Who was the owner of this mesmerizing voice? It was beautiful and perfect to his ears, like the pealing of church bells on a frosty Christmas morning. Just listening to it shot a tingle down the length of his spine.
He had to see for himself. His pulse quickened as he entered the reception room and spotted the source of the heavenly sound.
A woman was cleaning off the table where the vegetarian food had been spread out earlier in the evening. She had her back turned to him. Piled high atop her head was a mess of dark black hair, which stood in sharp contrast to the creamy pale skin of her neck, glistening with perspiration under the lights. A bright pink cardigan sweater hung down across the thighs of her jeans, and when she leaned forward to fetch a tray from the center of the table, he could see that she was nothing like the usual stick-figure bimbos he always saw parading around backstage after the band’s shows.
Steve and Tony liked to razz Niko for liking what they called the “chubby chicks,” but he just thought women should look soft and curvaceous — like women, not like prepubescent boys, with no waist and no hips. Today’s standards of female beauty sometimes made him feel as if society was turning gay.
“Uh, hello?” Niko said under his breath, trying not to startle the woman. But she kept humming and working.
He cleared his throat. Still nothing.
As the woman turned her head a little to one side, he saw a white earbud stuck in her ear. She was humming along to whatever tune was streaming out of her earbuds and had no idea anybody was standing behind her.
But Niko wouldn’t be deterred. He took a few cautious steps closer, determined to see the face of the woman with the angelic voice and the shapely backside.
Marty put the last of the trays and bowls in a pile and worked on gathering up the utensils. She was almost done, and there was still no sign of Sonny. If she had to go looking for him, she could only hope that he and Dwayne would be finished with whatever it was they were doing. She didn’t relish the thought of having to wander around the arena, not only because she didn’t want to walk in on anything even remotely sexual, but also because it was three thirty in the morning, and the whole place was shrouded in an eerie, unsettling quiet.
The room she was working in was itself a little creepy, no, make that a lot creepy, with the posters of The Walking Dead plastered all over the walls. The quartet stared out at her from every corner, dressed entirely in black, their faces painted up with skeletal features. Every time she turned her head, there was another ominous-looking skull face with its eyes fixed on her.
Marty picked up the pace of her work, eager to get back to the hotel. She tried to focus on the music in her earbuds, but it wasn’t doing much good. This room was giving her a serious case of the willies.
Even worse for her frazzled nerves, she’d have to come back and do this twice more. The Walking Dead were playing at the Garden for three consecutive nights, so when she got the offer to cater the shows, she decided to close her bakery in Portsmouth for a long weekend and spend Thursday through Saturday in Boston. A friend of hers from culinary school was out of town for the weekend and let Marty use her bakery, which was just a few blocks from the auditorium, as a food-prep home base.
The third concert was Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, she and Sonny would pile into the Pink Bug of Doom and head back home. The Walking Dead would walk on to their next concert destination, and Marty would be thousands of dollars richer for the experience. That part made all of the creepiness a little easier to take, even if the only thing she could think about at the moment was packing up and getting out. Having all these eyes on her made her feel as if she was being watched.
Or was it more than the posters making her feel that way? Something didn’t feel right, and she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Get a grip, Marty, she thought as she shook her head. You’re just being paranoid.
But the feeling wouldn’t go away. One thing she shared with her mother was a heightened intuition, and whenever Marty couldn’t chalk up her uneasiness to an overactive imagination, her sixth sense would kick in and put her on high alert. She often felt a strong sense of forewarning just before something life-altering was going to happen, and she was having one of those feelings right now. Her skin was crawling with apprehension.
Marty stopped what she was doing and stood still for a long moment. With a slow, cautious move, she reached her hands up to remove her earbuds. She needed full use of all her senses to figure out what was going on.
That was when it hit her. In the quiet of the room, she heard a footstep behind her. Fear stiffened her body and made the hair on her neck stand on end. She was hoping it was just Sonny playing a trick on her. But as she swung around, she saw something more terrifying than she ever could have imagined. One of the men in the posters had come to life and was moving right toward her, reaching out as if intending to touch her. She was standing face-to-face with a groupie from hell.
The room erupted in an ear-splitting shriek that echoed through the empty building. Marty was so horrified, she had only a vague sense that the scream had come from her own mouth.
Unable to think and paralyzed with fear, her instincts took over. In a flash, her unconscious mind unearthed the self-defense classes she’d taken years ago, and before Groupie From Hell could react, she stomped on his foot, cocked back her arm, and swung at his face with all of her might. The man spun a hundred and eighty degrees from the blow, teetered backwards, and whacked his head against the edge of the table before his body crumpled to the floor.
Marty’s heart was lodged in her nasal cavity from the shock. After looking down at the seemingly lifeless body on the floor in front of her, she screamed again and ran to find Sonny.
As soon as she swung open the door, she ran full into a wall of a man. Dwayne stood in front of her, shirt untucked and gun drawn. He looked out of breath, whether from running to the reception room or from something else was anyone’s guess, and his hair was ruffled. After reaching out to brace her arms so that she didn’t fall backwards from their impact, he backed her up and stepped through the doorway.
“What’s going on?” he asked with urgency.
Marty couldn’t find her voice. She pointed a shaking finger toward the man on the floor behind her, while little whimpering noises came from her gaping mouth.
A moment later, Sonny came barreling into the room, looking even more disheveled than Dwayne. His lipstick was gone, and he adjusted his belt with as much delicacy as he could manage, but his sprayed-down hair had remained perfectly in place. Marty flung herself into the embrace of his arms and fought to keep her churning stomach under control.
“What happened, honey?” he asked. “We were just looking at Dwayne’s … um, gun when we heard you scream.”
Marty turned and pointed again to the unconscious man. She swallowed hard and spoke, her voice trembling: “He came up to me … I screamed … oh, my gosh, Sonny, I hit him. He hit his head when he went down. I hope he isn’t hurt.”
Sonny felt this was no time for a scolding, but he couldn’t help himself. “You hope he isn’t hurt? What is wrong with you, Martini? The man attacked you and you’re worried you might have hurt him? You could have been killed, or worse. Who knows what he would have done if you hadn’t had the fortitude to knock him out?” Sonny ran his hands up and down Marty’s arms, trying to soothe her and soften the blow of his mini-lecture.
“You say he attacked you?” Dwayne asked from his position over the prone body.
Marty and Sonny made their way over to the scene of the crime, and Marty did her best to explain. “No … I, I don’t know … he was reaching for me, and he scared the shit out of me.” Her hands flew up to cover her mouth. “Oh, sorry,” she said as her cheeks turned bright red. Even though Marty was raised in an open-minded home, coarse language had never set well with her. But every now and then, she’d let something slip out of her mouth in peak emotional moments. Like this one.
Dwayne ignored her peculiar attack of modesty. “So, he did or did not attack you?” he asked again, in what Marty assumed to be his official security guard voice.
“She said she didn’t know, Dwayne honey,” Sonny said. “Didn’t you hear her? Whatever he did, though, he did scare her, and for that he deserved to get his lights knocked out. And look at him. Who dresses up like that in May?”
Dwayne made an anguished noise as he bent down over the body to take a closer look.
“What’s wrong?” Marty asked, dread filling her stomach.
“Members of the band wear stage makeup, like in all the posters you see here.” He sighed. “Ma’am, you just punched out the drummer, Niko Wulfersen.”
“Egads, what a mess,” Sonny said as he scanned the room, his lips curled up in utter distaste. “Did we serve food for humans or pigs?”
They began picking up the utensils from the table when a large security guard peeked his head into the room.
“Are you folks supposed to be back here?” he asked, in as non-threatening of a voice as one could expect from a security guard. He looked at Marty and then at Sonny, where his gaze lingered.
Sonny picked up right away on the eyes that had fallen on him and returned the gesture. Sauntering over toward the guard, Sonny flashed a flirtatious smile.
“We’re the caterers, just here to collect a few of our trays. My, is that a real gun?” He held out his hand, palm-side down, as if offering it to the security guard to kiss. “I’m Sonny, by the way. And you are?”
“Uh … Dwayne. And, yes, it is a real gun.” He sounded either rattled or aroused, Marty couldn’t tell which, and looked a little bashful as he took Sonny’s hand.
Sonny shot a quick glance over his shoulder and winked at Marty before escorting Dwayne out of the room.
“Thanks for the help,” Marty mumbled. She would have never imagined that the gay community was so vast, but everywhere they went, Sonny seemed to scope out a man who shared his sexual orientation and ended up joining him for a conversation, a drink, or a quickie in the closet, which was apparently what was happening right now. Sonny always made it a point to keep condoms and a tube of lubricant in his purse at all times, just in case. She was happy for Sonny that he could so easily pick up men, even though this wasn’t exactly the best time for a romantic interlude.
Oh, well, she thought. At least one of us should have a sex life. Lord knows I don’t.
Marty put in her earbuds and turned on her music as she got to work cleaning off the table, all by herself.
“Thanks, man. I owe you one,” Niko told the driver as he stepped out of the taxi by the rear entrance of the Garden. Before the car pulled away, the drummer already had a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. He took a deep draw and let the smoke drain out through his nostrils in a sigh of relief. It was his first cigarette in two hours.
So, this is Boston, Niko thought, taking in his surroundings. He’d given up trying to keep track of what city the band was in after the first few shows of the tour. Most of the time, he relied on Jarrod’s familiar announcement during the concert, the one where he said the same thing every night to get the crowd fired up, altering only the name of their location.
“Hello, Boston!” Jarrod had shouted into the mic after tonight’s opening song. The audience, just as it always did, roared back on cue. “Is everyone doing all right tonight? I can’t hear you!” Jarrod had the crowd eating out of his hand for the rest of the show.
Niko had his own routine during their performances. As soon as he sat down behind his drum kit, he slid on a pair of headphones that let him monitor his drumbeats and Steve’s bass lines, with the rest of the band streamed in at a lower volume. After counting off the tempo with a click-click-click of his drumsticks, he fired up the band’s engine room, his limbs propelling the rest of the group forward with power and effortless grace.
For Niko, drumming was cathartic. No matter what had gone wrong that day, he could pound out his frustrations onstage. But it was more than just a release. The music touched something so deep within him that his body went on autopilot, responding to his sonic environment without a thought, like some kind of primordial reflex. The beat of his drums was the one thing in the world that made complete sense to him, and for two hours every night, he gave himself over to the rhythms.
Niko’s drums had been his escape for as long as he could remember. With his father creating a tense home environment during his childhood in Minnesota, Niko would retreat to the safety and comfort of his bedroom. His sketchbook, pencil, and radio became his constant companions, and while he drew, he’d find himself connecting with the rhythms in the music that drifted from his radio speakers. After many late-night listening sessions, he started dreaming of becoming a drummer.
When he started beating out rhythms on everything in the house with whatever he could hold in his hands, his oldest sister, Anna, tried to preserve the family’s sanity by buying him a pair of drumsticks for his tenth birthday and encouraging him to pound on some old LP covers in his bedroom. When he entered sixth grade, he joined the school’s concert band and spent every spare moment practicing, perfecting every paradiddle and ratamacue. Although he still liked drawing and enjoyed expressing his creativity in his art classes, playing the drums had become his passion.
A few years after finishing high school and settling into a low-paying, back-breaking job, Niko saw a drum set calling to him from the front window of a Duluth consignment shop. Never having lost his love for music, he scraped together his pennies and made weekly payments on the kit until he could call it his own. It was old and well used, and he had no idea what he was going to do with it, other than keep himself in practice and maybe find a bar band he could play with on the weekends. But it was all his, paid for in full from the sweat of his own brow. And it went with him when he packed up for Southern California on his twenty-first birthday.
On this night, those carefree days seemed like a lifetime ago. There were no crazed stalker fans to worry about, and there was no freakish vegetarian health food to deal with backstage.
Niko didn’t care for all the trappings of fame. Not anymore. When the crowds went home and the band headed backstage, Niko didn’t feel any urge to indulge himself in drugs, booze, or groupies. That thrill had long ago worn off. Nowadays, all he wanted was a cigarette and something greasy to eat. And since there’d been nothing even resembling a burger backstage after tonight’s show, he’d needed to get the hell out of there, away from the partygoers and far, far away from his psycho fan’s roses.
In his eagerness to escape for the evening, he’d forgotten all about his stage makeup. Not that it fazed the cabbie who’d swung by to pick him up at around one thirty in the morning. All night the driver had been dropping off and picking up fans who had their faces painted up to look like ghoulish skulls. They were imitating The Walking Dead whose onstage trademarks were their gothic black clothes and their skeletal makeup.
Most people probably had no idea what Niko, Steve, and Tony looked like, sort of like KISS before they unmasked themselves. Jarrod did the interviews and represented the band at most of the awards shows, so his face was the only one most fans would recognize. That was just fine with Niko, who cherished his anonymity.
Niko was usually the frugal one in the band. Growing up poor will do that to you. But on a night when he just needed to get away and de-stress, he’d told the cabbie to let the meter run and keep driving. After a quick stop at a McDonald’s drive-through, where Niko ordered himself a Quarter Pounder and fries, the drummer was treated to a sightseeing tour of Boston over the next couple of hours.
Once he’d polished off his late-night meal, he popped in his earbuds, sank down into the seat, and pounded on his imaginary drums as the intricate sounds of Yes, King Crimson, and Dream Theater unfolded into his head. When things had gotten tough at home, young Niko had found an escape in the rich sonic tapestries and imaginative storylines that those bands served up in their elaborate compositions. And that’s what he wanted to do tonight, get lost in his music and forget about things for a little while.
His only interruption had been a text message from Jarrod, about an hour after Niko had left the Garden.
Dude, U OK? Where R U?
Niko typed back: Don’t call me that. I’m fine. Got my burger. Just riding around. Later.
After two hours in the cab, Niko had started to feel a familiar craving for a smoke. But before he could put his lighter to the cigarette he’d clamped between his lips, he heard the cabbie rapping on the plastic divider between the front and back seats. Glancing up, he saw the driver pointing to the “No Smoking” sign posted above the rates on the window. Niko let out a weary sigh, looked at the clock on his iPhone, and pulled out his earbuds.
“Can you just take me back where we started?” he’d asked the driver.
Now his belly was full of comfort food and his nerves were satiated with their nicotine fix. Maybe this night won’t be a total waste, he thought as he stood outside the Garden, relaxing into the silence and the cool, refreshing air of the mid-May Boston night. He took a final drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt to the ground, stamping out the embers with his boot.
He’d expected to find his bandmates still at the auditorium, but on his return, he saw that the band’s limo was gone. Having no idea how to get to their hotel, he tapped out a quick text message to Jarrod and walked through the rear door of the arena, to see whether anyone else might still be around.
When he stepped inside, he heard only a single sound. A soft, sweet female voice, humming a happy tune from the reception room.
Niko froze on the spot. He had a sudden flashback to his early childhood, when his mother would sing him to sleep at night with her golden, soothing voice. That was one of Niko’s fondest memories of the mother who was taken from him too soon in life.
After he’d lost her, he took similar comfort from his sister Maggie, who had the same ability to settle his nerves with the calm warmth of her voice. Even as an adult, Niko had found that when he called Maggie on one of his many sleepless evenings, just listening to her talk had often been enough to help him relax into a good night’s rest.
Feeling a familiar tightness growing in his chest, Niko shook his head hard, as if to rattle out the cobwebs. He opened his eyes and forced himself to push the thoughts away.
Who was the owner of this mesmerizing voice? It was beautiful and perfect to his ears, like the pealing of church bells on a frosty Christmas morning. Just listening to it shot a tingle down the length of his spine.
He had to see for himself. His pulse quickened as he entered the reception room and spotted the source of the heavenly sound.
A woman was cleaning off the table where the vegetarian food had been spread out earlier in the evening. She had her back turned to him. Piled high atop her head was a mess of dark black hair, which stood in sharp contrast to the creamy pale skin of her neck, glistening with perspiration under the lights. A bright pink cardigan sweater hung down across the thighs of her jeans, and when she leaned forward to fetch a tray from the center of the table, he could see that she was nothing like the usual stick-figure bimbos he always saw parading around backstage after the band’s shows.
Steve and Tony liked to razz Niko for liking what they called the “chubby chicks,” but he just thought women should look soft and curvaceous — like women, not like prepubescent boys, with no waist and no hips. Today’s standards of female beauty sometimes made him feel as if society was turning gay.
“Uh, hello?” Niko said under his breath, trying not to startle the woman. But she kept humming and working.
He cleared his throat. Still nothing.
As the woman turned her head a little to one side, he saw a white earbud stuck in her ear. She was humming along to whatever tune was streaming out of her earbuds and had no idea anybody was standing behind her.
But Niko wouldn’t be deterred. He took a few cautious steps closer, determined to see the face of the woman with the angelic voice and the shapely backside.
Marty put the last of the trays and bowls in a pile and worked on gathering up the utensils. She was almost done, and there was still no sign of Sonny. If she had to go looking for him, she could only hope that he and Dwayne would be finished with whatever it was they were doing. She didn’t relish the thought of having to wander around the arena, not only because she didn’t want to walk in on anything even remotely sexual, but also because it was three thirty in the morning, and the whole place was shrouded in an eerie, unsettling quiet.
The room she was working in was itself a little creepy, no, make that a lot creepy, with the posters of The Walking Dead plastered all over the walls. The quartet stared out at her from every corner, dressed entirely in black, their faces painted up with skeletal features. Every time she turned her head, there was another ominous-looking skull face with its eyes fixed on her.
Marty picked up the pace of her work, eager to get back to the hotel. She tried to focus on the music in her earbuds, but it wasn’t doing much good. This room was giving her a serious case of the willies.
Even worse for her frazzled nerves, she’d have to come back and do this twice more. The Walking Dead were playing at the Garden for three consecutive nights, so when she got the offer to cater the shows, she decided to close her bakery in Portsmouth for a long weekend and spend Thursday through Saturday in Boston. A friend of hers from culinary school was out of town for the weekend and let Marty use her bakery, which was just a few blocks from the auditorium, as a food-prep home base.
The third concert was Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, she and Sonny would pile into the Pink Bug of Doom and head back home. The Walking Dead would walk on to their next concert destination, and Marty would be thousands of dollars richer for the experience. That part made all of the creepiness a little easier to take, even if the only thing she could think about at the moment was packing up and getting out. Having all these eyes on her made her feel as if she was being watched.
Or was it more than the posters making her feel that way? Something didn’t feel right, and she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Get a grip, Marty, she thought as she shook her head. You’re just being paranoid.
But the feeling wouldn’t go away. One thing she shared with her mother was a heightened intuition, and whenever Marty couldn’t chalk up her uneasiness to an overactive imagination, her sixth sense would kick in and put her on high alert. She often felt a strong sense of forewarning just before something life-altering was going to happen, and she was having one of those feelings right now. Her skin was crawling with apprehension.
Marty stopped what she was doing and stood still for a long moment. With a slow, cautious move, she reached her hands up to remove her earbuds. She needed full use of all her senses to figure out what was going on.
That was when it hit her. In the quiet of the room, she heard a footstep behind her. Fear stiffened her body and made the hair on her neck stand on end. She was hoping it was just Sonny playing a trick on her. But as she swung around, she saw something more terrifying than she ever could have imagined. One of the men in the posters had come to life and was moving right toward her, reaching out as if intending to touch her. She was standing face-to-face with a groupie from hell.
The room erupted in an ear-splitting shriek that echoed through the empty building. Marty was so horrified, she had only a vague sense that the scream had come from her own mouth.
Unable to think and paralyzed with fear, her instincts took over. In a flash, her unconscious mind unearthed the self-defense classes she’d taken years ago, and before Groupie From Hell could react, she stomped on his foot, cocked back her arm, and swung at his face with all of her might. The man spun a hundred and eighty degrees from the blow, teetered backwards, and whacked his head against the edge of the table before his body crumpled to the floor.
Marty’s heart was lodged in her nasal cavity from the shock. After looking down at the seemingly lifeless body on the floor in front of her, she screamed again and ran to find Sonny.
As soon as she swung open the door, she ran full into a wall of a man. Dwayne stood in front of her, shirt untucked and gun drawn. He looked out of breath, whether from running to the reception room or from something else was anyone’s guess, and his hair was ruffled. After reaching out to brace her arms so that she didn’t fall backwards from their impact, he backed her up and stepped through the doorway.
“What’s going on?” he asked with urgency.
Marty couldn’t find her voice. She pointed a shaking finger toward the man on the floor behind her, while little whimpering noises came from her gaping mouth.
A moment later, Sonny came barreling into the room, looking even more disheveled than Dwayne. His lipstick was gone, and he adjusted his belt with as much delicacy as he could manage, but his sprayed-down hair had remained perfectly in place. Marty flung herself into the embrace of his arms and fought to keep her churning stomach under control.
“What happened, honey?” he asked. “We were just looking at Dwayne’s … um, gun when we heard you scream.”
Marty turned and pointed again to the unconscious man. She swallowed hard and spoke, her voice trembling: “He came up to me … I screamed … oh, my gosh, Sonny, I hit him. He hit his head when he went down. I hope he isn’t hurt.”
Sonny felt this was no time for a scolding, but he couldn’t help himself. “You hope he isn’t hurt? What is wrong with you, Martini? The man attacked you and you’re worried you might have hurt him? You could have been killed, or worse. Who knows what he would have done if you hadn’t had the fortitude to knock him out?” Sonny ran his hands up and down Marty’s arms, trying to soothe her and soften the blow of his mini-lecture.
“You say he attacked you?” Dwayne asked from his position over the prone body.
Marty and Sonny made their way over to the scene of the crime, and Marty did her best to explain. “No … I, I don’t know … he was reaching for me, and he scared the shit out of me.” Her hands flew up to cover her mouth. “Oh, sorry,” she said as her cheeks turned bright red. Even though Marty was raised in an open-minded home, coarse language had never set well with her. But every now and then, she’d let something slip out of her mouth in peak emotional moments. Like this one.
Dwayne ignored her peculiar attack of modesty. “So, he did or did not attack you?” he asked again, in what Marty assumed to be his official security guard voice.
“She said she didn’t know, Dwayne honey,” Sonny said. “Didn’t you hear her? Whatever he did, though, he did scare her, and for that he deserved to get his lights knocked out. And look at him. Who dresses up like that in May?”
Dwayne made an anguished noise as he bent down over the body to take a closer look.
“What’s wrong?” Marty asked, dread filling her stomach.
“Members of the band wear stage makeup, like in all the posters you see here.” He sighed. “Ma’am, you just punched out the drummer, Niko Wulfersen.”
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