Opening Act (32 page)

By this time, Zee had stopped laughing and was looking into Lockwood's face in confusion—not a
bad
confusion, by any means—a kind of dizzy,
happy
confusion. She wondered what Lockwood would do next and was surprised to find herself open to several interesting possibilities…

…When all of a sudden Trina Kutsch burst back into the apartment, her arms raised in triumph, followed by the other members of Overlords and a few hangers-on.

“Braithwaite and Maple have been
planked!
” she crowed. “This is why they call me Kid Daredevil!”

“Jesus, Trina,” said Jimmy, plopping down before the TV and turning it on. “No one calls you Kid Daredevil.”

Lockwood released Zee, who took a moment to compose herself. “Where's your amp?” Lockwood asked.

Baby ran his hand through his hair and frowned. “Wrecked, man,” he said. “Plowed over by an eighteen-wheeler.”

“Kid Daredevil having escaped in the
nick
of time,” called Trina from the kitchen, where she had her head in the fridge.

“No one calls you Kid Daredevil,”
said Baby and Jimmy in perfect synch.

“Well,” Lockwood said, “at least it was an old one.”

“Yeah,” Baby said, falling into the beanbag chair, “but I still
used
it…”

Zee gathered up her purse. “I should get going. Lunch hour's nearly up.”

Lockwood walked her to the door. “You can come back later, after you get off work. We'll still be here, just hanging.”

She smiled, slipping her purse strap over her shoulder. “Thanks, but like I said, I'm usually pretty wiped out at the end of the day. I only have enough energy to go home and collapse.”

He scowled. “Seriously? What do you do about dinner?”

“Skip it, usually. Too tired to cook.”

He looked momentarily uncertain, then said, “How about…how about if when you collapse tonight, it's into a chair at some swanky Italian restaurant? My treat.”

When Trina exited the kitchen, bearing an armload of cold beers, she found Lockwood standing by the front door, a dopey grin on his face.

“Man, you should'a' been there,” she said, handing him one of the beers. “It was fucking
crazy
. That truck just
exploded
into the orange crate and the amp, man. And I was, like, already on the meridian pumping my fists. You really, really messed up by sittin' it out, dude.”

Lockwood popped open the beer, raised it to salute her, and said, “Actually, I really, really did just the opposite.”

CHAPTER 17

Shay was learning that there were different ways to be a prisoner.

Take New York. When he'd been held captive there in Halbert Hasque's east side apartment with its magnificent view of Central Park, he'd been utterly miserable. The only time he could be on his own recognizance, going where he wanted and doing whatever he liked, was when Pernita was busy elsewhere. Whenever she'd leave the apartment for a hair appointment, or a shopping spree, or a lunch date, or whatever, Shay would watch out the window till she exited the building, got into a cab, and zipped away; then he'd let out a whoop of exhilaration and head out himself. And for a few glorious hours he'd be alone—
alone
—on the streets of Manhattan and be his own goddamn master.

Then Pernita would return, and once again he'd find himself utterly under her thumb, told where to go and how to dress and whom to talk to and when to sit down and when to take a piss.

But damn. Looking back? He hadn't realized how good he'd had it.

Here, in Halbert Hasque's mansion in Holmby Hills, he was much more a prisoner than he ever was in New York. And this was despite Pernita almost never being around during the day. She got up every morning, complaining of all the
plans
she had, and of the seven thousand best, most intimate friends she
had
to see while they were in town or
God
only knew the consequences, and then she was basically gone. So in theory, Shay was freer than ever. Except…to do what?

In New York, all he had to do was step out onto the pavement, and the world of Halbert and Pernita Hasque would already be behind him. He could take four steps, buy a hot pretzel from a street vendor, chat up a girl or two. In a few more steps, he'd be at the subway, and any place on the island was just minutes away.

When he stepped out the door of the Hasque mansion here in LA, there was nothing but blue sky, green lawn, and black asphalt driveway for as far as his eyes could see. Once, feeling adventurous, he'd trekked all the way down to the boulevard beyond the driveway's gate (he'd had to shimmy over the wall because he didn't have the code to punch into the gate's keypad), but there had been no cab there waiting to whisk him to some new adventure. Certainly no subway.

In fact, there'd been nothing in any direction. Just houses the size of battleships and acres and acres of the crispest landscaping imaginable. He tried going it on foot to see where it took him, but where it took him was someplace so utterly like everything he'd seen everywhere else he'd been that he'd had to admit he was hopelessly lost and called Pernita to come and fetch him.

It didn't take long for her to reach him, either, because she was already out in her car. She'd come home, found him gone, and the housekeeper and gardener had both told her he'd done a runner. Shay then realized, too, that unlike New York, here the prison had extra guards. They posed as household staff, but as far as he was concerned, their real function was to watch him and report on his movements.

“I don't understand why you feel so
compelled
to leave,” Pernita had complained as she drove him home. She reminded him of her father's swimming pool, his billiards room, his bowling alley, and his two separate home theaters with high-res monitors and DVD libraries of every film and TV show produced since the dawn of man.

“If it's such a goddamn paradise,” Shay had said, “how come
you
never spend more than ninety minutes at a time there? Short of sleeping, I mean.”

She always had a million excuses. Then he'd ask why he couldn't just have a car of his own; he'd even pay to rent one. And she'd say, Don't be silly, you can have
this
one when I'm not using it. And he'd say, When the hell
aren't
you using it? And sometimes when she seemed to sense his desperation reaching a certain pitch she'd say, Oh, you can have it tomorrow, and he'd say, Really, and she'd say, Of course. He'd make plans for everything he was going to do the next day, but then that day would dawn and just as he was getting ready to leave, Pernita would remember some
hugely
important errand she had to run and would he mind
terribly
if she came with him? And that would be that. He'd escape the house, but only for the smaller prison of the car.

Occasionally he broke down and accused her of trying to control him. Which led her to call him ungrateful and selfish and to cry, which was the big gun in her arsenal, the one she pulled out every time she felt backed into a corner. In fact, Shay was completely unmoved by her tears, but he let her believe the opposite. Better to save his implacability for a time when revealing it would score him an actual point.

But he didn't know if he had the strength of will to wait that long. As the busyness of the first few days of his stay receded—days filled with image consultants and hair stylists and wardrobe fittings—the flurry of activity was replaced by…nothing at all. Oh, the nights were always filled with some event or other, where Pernita trotted him out like a trained seal to smile and bark and clap his fins for the amusement of the crowd. But the days? The days passed in a manner he could only call glacial.

He'd already exhausted every entertainment the house had to offer. Always an excellent bowler, he'd managed a perfect game on his third day in Halbert's private alley, and after that there didn't seem much point. He'd watched the entire run of
M*A*S*H
on DVD and was still too emotionally involved in that experience to want to move on to something else. He'd had to abandon the pool when his skin burned and then started to peel. (Pernita had been furious at that and called in an emergency dermatologist to buff away all the dead skin and to refresh and tone what was underneath, as there was a big party that night
with cameras
, she'd said, he couldn't go there looking like his head was emerging from a cocoon.) Finally, he'd had to give up honing his billiard skills after he accidentally ripped a hole in the green felt of Hasque's pool table. In fact, he'd hung up his cue, turned out the light, and skulked guiltily away, hoping it would be several weeks before anyone noticed, by which time it would be harder to connect the crime with him.

The only thing left for him, then, was to eat. And Halbert Hasque's kitchen was better stocked than any he'd ever known—which was crazy, considering that Halbert himself was almost never there. What happened to all that fresh produce brought in three times a week when there was no one here to eat it? The mind boggled.

But then one night, when he was changing into an incredibly expensive Dolce & Gabbana suit for an appearance at some music awards pre-show party (“where there will be
cameras
,” Pernita had again told him urgently, as if she ever brought him any place where there weren't any), he found he couldn't zip the fly. He dropped a few f-bombs trying to manage it, and Pernita flew over to see what the trouble was because for
God's
sake they were
already
running late. She exploded into affronted horror when she realized Shay had put on just enough weight to turn the Dolce & Gabbana suit into a hugely expensive hanger decoration.

After that, she ordered all the food out of the house except what she prescribed for him, which was all locally grown and organic, and on any given day filled about a third of one shelf of the house's commercial-grade refrigerator. Seriously, Shay was convinced he could hear his echo when he spoke into that vast, chilly emptiness. Pernita also rustled up a personal trainer to come in every morning and aggressively banish the unwelcome fat with extended sessions in the Hasque mansion weight room. Under ordinary circumstances that would have been the purest torment for Shay, but now, what the hell, it was something to do for two hours out of twenty-four. And at the end of his sixteen-day junket in la-la land, he had to admit he
was
looking pretty ripped.

He'd tried to fight the boredom by working on musical ideas. He'd asked Pernita if she could rent a piano for him during his stay, which was a huge concession for him. Up until then it had been a point of pride that he never asked her for anything, ever, and it was telling that on this one occasion when he did, the answer was no. “You don't need to be a musical genius,” she said with a dismissive smirk. “You're a front man. You need to sing like an angel and look like a devil. And make everyone in the whole goddamn world know it.”

He tried using a keyboard app on his laptop, but it wasn't the same as running his fingers over actual keys, so he eventually gave up the effort.

And then there was nothing left but Facebook. (Facebook and web porn, but he suspected Pernita of keeping tabs on his Internet history, so he was almost monastically sparing with the latter.) He would spend marathon sessions checking all his friends' personal pages to see what they were doing with their actual human lives in the actual real world where he used to live before it spat him out onto Mount Olympus. One day at the end of his stay, he sat down to begin one of these sessions, and a sudden urge struck him. He did something he almost never bothered doing: he checked the Overlords of Loneliness fan page.

And damn if he wasn't impressed. The last time he'd looked, just after the tour began, they'd had 275 fans, which he'd thought was phenomenal. Now they were at 8,011. He had to hand it to Pernita: she was really honest-to-God doing her job. She might kill him in the process, but she was getting the results she'd promised. He clicked on the list of people who had liked the page, wondering whether they were predominately male or female, black or white, young or old—any demographic trend at all. It wasn't that he wildly cared; he was just mildly curious and epically bored.

He skimmed down the list of Rita Dovermans and Nicholas Jelniks and Lakota Stains, and the pint-size profile pictures all sort of began to blend together, so that they meant exactly nothing.

And then he saw it.

Right there in the middle of that long roll call of Overlords Facebook fans.

William Blake.

William Blake, with the same profile picture of an especially buff-looking painted angel.

No. Fucking. Way.
was his first reaction. It was simply too bonkers to think that after everything had gone so wrong between them, Loni would actually Like his band's page.

Ah, but then she'd blocked him, right? So she'd be assuming he'd never find out.

So why
was
he finding out? If she'd blocked him, William Blake should be completely and utterly invisible to him, wherever he—or rather, she—went on Facebook.

And that's when he realized the crazy, wonderful thing that had happened. Pernita had made him open a second account, under an assumed name, so that he could go around Facebook incognito,
talking up Overlords and urging everyone to buy
Grief Bacon
. Pernita had several such accounts herself and was tired of doing all the hard work on her own.