Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (3 page)

The worst part was
that I didn’t even know what to say. I thought about bringing up how I knew
Jason used to whack off to Tina Frame’s picture in the yearbook, but I didn’t
have it in me. I was too mentally fried. I just sat there shaking my head like
some prudish idiot.

“
Ashleeeey
!”
Morgan’s arms suddenly wrapped around me from behind, almost
knocking me off my barstool.

I stood and hugged her
back, spilling my drink. “Where the hell have you been?”

Morgan was already
completely tanked. She gave me a big, whiskey-tainted kiss on the cheek. It was
weird how happy I was to see her. For a moment I almost started to cry.

“
You
 and 
me
,”
Morgan said, shaking her hips with each word in a little drunken dance, “are
going 
to
…”—she held up the
back of her wrist, stamped with a green 
T
—“the Bryce Tripp concert!”

Jason scoffed. “Bryce Tripp’s
a fucking faggot.”

“And we’re leaving
these two 
losers—”
Morgan
traced a circle in the air, then pointed at Jason’s and Shawn’s faces “—right
here in the fucking
lame-ass
 beer
garden.”

Morgan displayed her
stamped wrist again,
then
tilted her head coyly, held
out her tongue, and, like an inebriated pole dancer, gave her wrist a long,
sexy lick.

Jason glanced at
Shawn.

Morgan grabbed my
wrist and pressed it against hers, transferring the green 
T
 concert stamp. We used to do this
same thing years ago so one of us could sneak into the movie theater for free.

Before I could finish
the last of my drink, Morgan was pulling me away. I didn’t even so much as wave
to Shawn before leaving him there.

On the way through the
carnival, Morgan hung on my shoulder and whispered, “I’ve been sleeping with
Jason.” She made a gagging sound. “Gross, huh? I know, I know.”

“Morgan!” I was
surprised. She had a great body, but I’d always been the one with the more or less
cute face. She was always trying to prove that she was attractive by sleeping
with one guy or another, but I hadn’t expected she’d stoop so low as to sleep
with
Jason
. “Why him?”

“It’s okay, Ash,” she
said. “Because I’m already cheating on him!” Morgan snorted a laugh. “Don’t
tell him! It’s way more fun cheating on him than it is sleeping with him!”

I couldn’t help but
laugh with her.

“You’re fucking
crazy,” I said. But hearing about her antics was making me feel a little
better.

As we passed the
Tilt-A-Whirl, I whispered, “So who are you cheating on him with, then?”

She held a finger to
her lips. “
Shhhhh
.
Not saying.”

“Who? Tell me.”

“Not saying!”

Morgan bounded ahead.
I had no idea who her mystery guy was, but, since she wouldn’t tell me, I
worried it might be someone married. Knowing Morgan, though, I’d find out one
way or another before too long. She never kept a secret.

She was already
through the concert gates, waving at me to follow her in.

Suddenly I pictured
the body in the locker room again. I’d managed to forget about it for a little
while, but now the image of its mouth hanging open came back to me. I’d kept
glimpsing its teeth while helping Ian carry it.

Even without that
memory threatening my resolve, it was hard to work up enough nerve to sneak
into the concert. We weren’t kids anymore, and I’d be mortified if I got caught
now, as an adult—especially tonight. I even knew the woman collecting
tickets and checking stamps. Her husband was one of the truckers at the company
I worked for.

Morgan gave me a shrug
from the other side of the gate. Then she impatiently waved me in again.

“Hurry up!” she
yelled.

I stepped forward,
trying to keep as far from the counter as possible, holding up my wrist with
its faint green 
T
. I’d never
been as good as Morgan at playing things cool.

Of course, the woman
collecting tickets recognized me.

“Ashley! Hi! I thought
you weren’t going to the concert?”

“Hey, Helen,” I smiled
nervously. She already suspected me, I could tell. “Well, my friend bought me a
ticket,” I said awkwardly. “We came in earlier? I just went out for a sec to
say hi to my niece.”

I had no idea where
these lies were coming from or how believable they were.

“Well, let’s see that
stamp of yours.”

My heart was pounding.
This was so absurd. Someone had just died and here I was about to get caught
sneaking into a concert by some musician I didn’t even care about whose bus had
blocked my car in.

“I’m
gonna
be late!” I joked nervously.

Helen took my hand and
examined the stamp. This was it. I glanced around. What would she do? Call
security guards? I saw one guy standing at the entrance to the grandstands with
his arms folded. I was pretty sure he was already looking over at me.

“That’s what I thought,”
Helen declared, inspecting my stamp. “Ashley!” She frowned and clucked her
tongue. “You’ve almost worn your stamp off already! I can barely see it.
Here.
” She plunked her rubber stamp into the inkpad and
gave me a fresh 
T.
 
“Enjoy!”

As soon as I was
through the gate, Morgan grabbed my arm and hurried me toward the grandstands.

“You totally thought
fucking Helen Sandburg was going to arrest you or something, didn’t you!” She
laughed at me. “I saw the look on your face! You did! Always such a 
good kid
.” She squeezed my neck. “Ah,
that’s why I love you.”

I hated that Morgan
thought about me as someone with so little self-confidence, but it was true. I
let that asshole Jason treat me like shit. I let Shawn belittle me after I’d
just wiped his own vomit off his shoes. And now I was afraid sweet,
wouldn’t-accuse-a-fly-of-buzzing Helen Sandburg would turn me in to the cops.
It was a good thing Morgan loved me, however much of a pushover she thought I
was.

I
was
suddenly determined to get completely wasted
.

The concert was
packed. It was disorienting to see the rodeo grounds transformed into a music
venue and filled with so many people from out of town. I led Morgan all the way
to the standing-only area in front of the stage. We must have missed all the
opening acts because Bryce Tripp was already playing. He was sitting on a stool
wearing boots and a sleeveless shirt, looking like an underwear model with a
guitar and a cowboy hat. I thought he was even wearing makeup.

He was singing some
ballad that nobody seemed to know except for a small group of middle-aged women
I didn’t recognize. They were each holding up a cigarette lighter and swaying
idiotically.

Pretty much everybody
else was at least as drunk as they were, but more restless. A couple of guys I
recognized from Biggs, the next town over, started yelling at the stage.

“Hey dick-lick! Pick
it up, pretty boy! Too fucking slow!”

Bryce Tripp seemed to
get the hint. He called out to his backup band, slung on an electric guitar,
and started playing a much faster song. The only lyrics I could catch were
“beer” and “bullets.”

Half the crowd was
down in front of the stage dancing drunkenly. Morgan bought beers and managed
to pour a shot’s-worth of whiskey from a flask tucked into her purse into each.
“Boilermakers!” she yelled over the speakers.

I could tell already
that the concert wasn’t going to end well. There was just this feeling in the
air. There were too many guys who basically wanted to drink, drink more, and
then break whatever rule they could find. Halfway into his set, Bryce Tripp
slowed it down again, this time playing a crooning love song. A guy nearby took
the opportunity to slow dance with this girl I vaguely recognized from the beer
garden. He had his hands all over her, and then he started really grabbing her
ass. I was pretty sure she’d been with somebody else at the beer garden. It was
actually kind of weird how the guy wasn’t just grabbing her ass, but totally
reaching around and down between her legs. And she was just letting him go at it.

That’s when I got
knocked over.

Some guy had trampled
into me, fists swinging. As I fell, his elbow caught me behind the ear. I
spilled what was left of my second boilermaker and scraped my palm.

“Asshole!” Morgan
screamed and leaned down to help me.

I stood up just as the
guy who’d knocked me down—the same guy I’d seen with the girl in the beer
garden earlier—punched the guy she was dancing with squarely in the face.
Then yet another guy I’d never seen before pushed them both right back into us,
and we got knocked over again.

An all-out brawl broke
lose.

Morgan and I crawled
to the edge of the stage, and Bryce Tripp finally stopped playing. A security
guard took over the microphone while a handful of rent-a-cops tried to stop the
melee. I checked my palm, which was only barely bleeding, and my head. I felt
fine, but that may have had a lot to do with how drunk I was at that point.

When I looked up,
Morgan was talking to Bryce Tripp. I couldn’t believe it.

“Why’d you stop
playing?” she yelled out while the scuffle continued on, barely abated, behind
her.

I was sure Bryce Tripp
would just ignore her, but he actually smiled and said something. Neither of us
could make it out over the bullhorn.

“What?” Morgan
screamed. I hadn’t seen her this drunk in a long time.

Bryce Tripp smiled
again and shook his head. I couldn’t believe it, but he actually approached us
at the foot of the stage and knelt down to talk to us.

“They won’t let me
keep playing,” he said. “It’s actually in my contract.”

He had piercing, icy-blue
eyes. I honestly don’t think I’d ever seen anyone better looking that close in
person.

“You know,” he added,
and shrugged, “the ‘safety of the performer at risk’ and all that.”

Morgan was in full
flirt mode. “So you always do what 
they
 tell
you to do?”

She had this weird
ability to flirt without making a total ass of
herself
,
no matter how drunk she was.

Bryce Tripp laughed.
He was even cuter with a full grin. I actually felt a wave of attraction pass
over me as he spoke.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I
usually do pretty much what they tell me.”

Morgan put on a pout
and pretended like she’d lost interest. “Well, that’s a shame.”

“No, not really,”
Bryce Tripp shot back, still grinning. “I get paid all the same. This is my
third brawl in two months. Just means I get the night off, which is fine by
me.”

He stood, reached into
his pocket, and pulled out a stack of what looked like business cards.

“Couple of backstage
passes,” he said, handing one to Morgan and one to me. “Looks like I’m free for
the evening. Why don’t you come on over and say hello?”

Then he gave us a friendly
wave and walked away.

As soon as he’d left
the stage, Morgan clutched her pass and screamed. “Oh my fucking God! How do we
get back there?”

We looked around and
saw a little security gate beside the stage. It seemed to be the only way in.

By then the brawl had
shifted toward the grandstands and we were able to make our move. We had to
avoid an inebriated trucker pinned to the ground by a couple of security cops,
but we managed to race to the side of the stage without getting knocked over
again.

I couldn’t stop
laughing. I hadn’t forgotten the body, but I was so drunk by now, I didn’t even
care that someone had just died.

A little, panicky
security guard was the only person manning the backstage gate. He was so
focused on the brawl, standing on his toes and yelling into his cellphone, that
he just waved us in without even really looking at our passes. He was probably
used to letting girls with passes backstage.

The area behind the
stage was strangely empty. There were couches set up outside, and a cold-cut
buffet, and coolers of what I assumed to be beer, but no one was around. Bryce
Tripp’s trailer—the same one that had blocked my car—was now pulled
up alongside this sitting area.

But Bryce Tripp himself
was nowhere to be seen.

Morgan grabbed a beer
from a cooler and sat on the couch to wait.

Just then a guy came
out of the trailer. He was dressed in tapered jeans and a fitted shirt and
looked ready for an L.A. nightclub.

He lowered his
sunglasses, and it was only then that I realized it was Bryce Tripp, the same
guy who’d just been singing
twangy
country songs in a
Stetson cowboy hat.

“How do you like my
disguise?” he asked.

“I can’t say it’s an
improvement,” Morgan said.

He folded his glasses
and stashed them in his vest pocket.

“So where are we
going?” he asked, ignoring Morgan’s comment. “If I’m going to buy you drinks,
you two have to lead the way. I’ve never been here before. Where are we,
anyway? Muldoon? Is that what it’s called?”

“Muldoon,” I confirmed
stupidly.

Morgan laughed. “Which
means there’s only one place to go! Come on.”

* * *

The
Buckshot Saloon is the single establishment with a full bar in Muldoon. During
fair time it never closes, and it’s basically standing room only, twenty-four hours
a day, all weekend.

I didn’t think anyone
recognized Bryce Tripp when we came in. He turned the head of just about every
girl he passed when we made our way inside, and at least a dozen half-
sozzled
guys sized him up, but he looked so different out of
his western clothes that no one realized he was the same guy on all the concert
posters. Everyone figured he was just someone’s out-of-towner friend; some
pretty boy from the city.