On Tour (2 page)

"Amen, brother," I muttered.

"Watcha drinking? Can't pay you, but I can buy you a drink."

"A nice dry martini." I leaned down and pulled my guitar out of its case.

"There's the wench!" came a shout from the doorway. Three young guys dressed to the nines entered the bar.

I strummed a few notes and sighed heavily. I was being haunted by pirates the way some people are haunted by ghosts. The three stumbled up to the bar. One banged on the bar top and demanded rum.

Eli turned around with a glare. "Outta rum. Had pirates in here last night 'til four in the morning. I'm not in the mood for pirates." He put his big, bejeweled hands on the bar and stared down at the three guys. I was really starting to like Eli.

They seemed to consider getting into a tussle with Vegas Elvis and thought better. I was a little disappointed. It would've been satisfying to watch Eli karate chop those stupid hats off their heads. They ordered beers and drifted off to a table.

Eli shook his head. "Damned pirates."

I smiled and picked out the chords to a beachy Jack Johnson tune.

Eli nodded in appreciation. "Nice."

I finished my song to a smattering of applause and then a chorus of, "Rum Song, Rum Song!" broke out at the pirate table.

No chance in hell. "Never heard of it. But how about 'Free Bird?'"

Eli chuckled, getting my joke. Calls to play "Free Bird" were the bane of live musicians everywhere.

"How about some rock 'n' roll?" Eli suggested.

I took a sip of my martini. "Whatcha got in mind?" If he said "Jail House Rock" I was going to start searching for the cameras.

"Real rock 'n' roll. Not that crap everyone's playing now," he challenged.

"Done," I said with a grin and launched into Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath."

Eli pounded on the bar to the beat of the song. The pirates lost interest and left.

I finished a set, found the bathroom, and was sipping on my second martini when a tall, dark, handsome man dressed in an olive colored silk shirt and crisp linen pants sat down on the stool next to me. The bar had filled up as happy hour neared. The rum shipment had arrived, and pirates sat drinking rum punch and discussing the start of the Pirate-Head party.

"How'd you find me?" I asked, not looking over at him.

"Would you believe I just kept asking people if they'd seen a really tall blonde with a guitar wandering the streets?"

I snorted and took a swig of my drink. I looked into the mirror behind the bar and locked eyes with Andre, my former boyfriend and current bodyguard. "More likely you have a GPS tracker on me." But I couldn't figure out where. No purse, no phone. I was lucky I'd been wearing shoes when I left.

"You can't just take off like that," he admonished. "It's dangerous."

I waved my hand around the room. "Not one person knows who I am. Not one. Hey, Eli, do I look familiar to you?"

Andre stared at Eli as Eli considered my question. "He sure looks like—" Andre whispered.

"I know," I replied. Then I said more loudly, "Eli, meet Andre."

Andre shook Eli's hand and glanced over at me, saying under his breath, "You know how to pick 'em."

"This your boyfriend?" Eli asked.

"He's my bodyguard. I'm so famous I need a bodyguard, and yet you have no idea who I am." I laughed and gave a little hiccup. Whew! That second martini was hitting me like a freight train.

"You do look familiar," Eli drawled finally in answer to my question.

I grabbed a hat off the nearest pirate and opened my guitar case. "How about now?" I asked as I launched into "The Rum Song." I was unsteady on my feet, and I'm not sure my rendition was all that great, but it got the pirates all riled up.

"Did you have to do that?" Andre asked, getting to his feet. The bar was teeming with pirates and tourists.

I heard, "It's Diana!" a few seconds before my field of vision narrowed into a dark tunnel. I glanced at my half-finished martini on the bar. What the heck?

I stumbled as I bent over to put my guitar back in its case. The last thing I saw was Andre reaching out to catch me as I plunged into murky darkness.

I opened my eyes to see Andre and my sister staring down at me. Ashley gasped and cried, "Thank the Lord!"

I heard Roger from somewhere beyond my field of vision. "Told you she just needed to sleep it off."

I tried to sit up, but my head exploded in pain. "What happened?" I croaked.

"You drank too much and passed out again!" Ashley chided.

"But I only had one drink." My head swam, and my voice sounded whiney. Maybe it was two. "No, I wasn't drunk. Tell them, Andre."

Andre looked worried. "She definitely wasn't drunk when I got there."

"Don't try to protect her, Andre. This is becoming a problem, Diana."

Phil stepped into my line of sight. "How about when you almost fell off the stage last week? That fall could've killed you."

"I wasn't drunk. I hadn't had anything except iced tea before that show. I must've been fighting off the flu or something. Besides, you all saw that the heel to my boot was broken off. I'd like to see you try to walk down a staircase on a broken six-inch heel."

Phil made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat. His glossy hair was perfectly coiffed, his suit expensive and tailored.

Roger stepped forward. "Look, Diana, we're not trying to put a damper on your good time, but you have to admit this does seem to indicate you have a problem. What if Andre hadn't been there? You could've been hit by a bus."

"What is this, an intervention?" I asked sarcastically.

"Maybe it should be," Ashley shot back. I sent her a dirty look and craned my neck to look for Andre.

He was standing in front of my desk piled high with unanswered mail. "What are these, Ashley?" He pointed to the pile. I couldn't see much more from my angle.

Ashley walked over. "Those are the fan letters I opened today. She had weeks of them on the desk unopened. I put aside the nicest ones for Diana to see."

Ashley held up a standard size sheet of white paper. It had been layered with intricate paper shapes that gave depth to page. From this angle it looked like a picture of an empty stage. "Aren't they beautiful? This fan must be into scrapbooking. She's used like ten different techniques in just this one picture. I thought I'd save them all in one book for you." Ashley continued to prattle on about trying her own hand at scrapbooking without much success.

Andre took the paper from her and studied it more closely. He walked back over to the desk and grabbed another. I thought I saw a street scene with a car approaching an intersection.

Roger took a deep breath. "Okay, let's get back on track here. Diana, we have one more performance. Can you stay sober enough to do it?"

I gritted my teeth. "Are you kidding me? I've been sober for cripes' sake! Maybe somebody slipped something into my drink!" I blurted out.

Ashley stared at me. "Really, Diana? Isn't that a little far-fetched? Isn't it more likely you just lost count of how many drinks you had? Maybe you should just admit you have a problem."

I sank back into the pillow, too tired to argue.

"Oh, she definitely has a problem," Andre called from over by the desk.

"See, even Andre agrees with us," Roger said. Phil and Ashley nodded smugly in agreement.

I felt a niggling of concern. Andre always gave it to me straight. I turned my head painfully in his direction.

He walked over with a handful of the scrapbook pages. He laid them out across my lap. The paper was thick and creamy and covered with a collage of colored bits of paper, ribbons, buttons, and other odds and ends. The layers and shapes gave the picture a 3D appearance like the pop-up books I loved as a child. I frowned as a picture started to appear beneath the pretty colored paper. I gasped at the image below the seemingly empty stage. A boot with a broken heel lay on the stairs and a twisted body in black faded into the bottom of the page.

"Someone's trying to kill her."

*  *  *

There were three scrapbook pictures. Most alarming was that each picture seemed to depict an accident that had already taken place.

There was a page depicting the fall off the stage, another showing a heavy speaker falling from the scaffolding and crushing me (a near miss that had happened a week prior), and a third that depicted a scene from one of the narrow streets of Key West. At an intersection a car was stopped in front of a prone figure in the middle of the road.

The envelopes were all addressed with printer labels and had been sent to my PO Box. There was no return address, and they were postmarked approximately a week apart from different states.

"Look," I pointed to the postmarks. "These were all sent from towns we played in. What if someone on tour with us sent these?"

Ashley nodded. "Probably not a coincidence." Her voice was grim.

"This is just a crazy fan," Roger said for the tenth time.

I shook my head staring at the pictures again. "I can't believe you thought these were pretty Ashley."

Ashley was upset. "All I saw was the pretty paper and ornaments. Until you look at it up close, you can't really tell what it is."

I nodded. I could see that.

"Maybe it's just a joke," Phil said. "You know, a prank or something."

I raised my eyebrows. "The one of the intersection has 'Death to Diana' spelled out among the pretty pink flowers."

Andre had been on the phone for nearly an hour. I was drinking black coffee and starting to feel a little better. I sat up and scooted over to the edge of the couch. My head was ringing, but the nausea had passed.

Andre put down the phone and came over. "I have a nurse coming to draw blood. I'm pretty sure someone slipped a roofie in your drink. I'd have rather done all this at the hospital, but those two were worried about starting a riot." Andre nodded at Roger and Phil.

"I also want you to be somewhere that's secured with our people. It would be tough at the hospital. The local police are sending over a detective to take our statements and look over the threats."

I nodded. "Did Mark call while I was asleep?"

"No. I tried to call him, but wasn't able to get through. I left him a voice mail. He was still a day's sail away when you spoke to him last night. There's nothing he can do for us except worry at this point."

"I can't believe someone's threatening to kill me." I stared glumly off at the clear blue sky and sparkling ocean. "And in such a weird way!"

"Yeah, I've seen threatening letters made from magazine clippings and newspapers, but I've never seen this scrapbook technique. Leave it to you to have Martha Stewart for a stalker." He gave me a grin and patted my hand.

I pointed to the picture of the stage. Andre had carefully placed each page in a large Ziploc bag. "That means someone sawed my boot heel off, and the spilled drink could've been my iced tea. Maybe it was drugged too. It's someone close to us!" I gasped.

"There were a hundred roadies and assistants running around that stage. Our scrapbooker could have snuck in during the chaos and tampered with your shoe and drink. They were both in your dressing room, right?"

I nodded, my mind racing. "So someone has been watching this place, just waiting for me to leave? With a roofie in his pocket?"

"Appears that way." Andre's matter-of-fact answer left me cold. I'd been caught up in some sticky situations before, but I'd never felt like this—stalked, hunted. I might as well be wearing a big bull's eye on my back.

"And when I took off, he followed me to that bar, waited for me to go to the bathroom, and then slipped something in my second drink. I guess he wasn't expecting you to show up and rescue me." I smiled. "How'd you get me home anyway?"

"He showed up here with your guitar in one hand and you slung over the other shoulder," Ashley snickered.

I glared at her.

"Well, it was funny until we found out someone is trying to kill you." She made a sad face.

A thought occurred to me. "Maybe they have a security system at the bar with cameras. Did you check with Eli?"

Andre shook his head. "Called him first thing. They don't have a camera system, but he did serve a fellow a beer near your side of the bar when you were in the bathroom. He said he remembered the guy because he wasn't dressed like a pirate. He had on a Braves baseball hat, and when Eli made a comment about the Braves, the guy didn't seem to have a clue what he was talking about."

"Any other descriptors?"

"Short brown hair, tan, slim build, late twenties, lots of tattoos."

"And into scrapbooking?" I asked. "That just doesn't fit. I think it's more plausible there are at least two people working this. Someone infiltrating and setting up the accidents and another person making the scrapbook pages."

Andre shook his head in wonder.

"No offense—but wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to just shoot her?" Ashley asked.

I glared at her. "Thanks for that pleasant thought!"

Andre held up a hand. "She's right. This looks like a classic stalker case, but something just doesn't add up. If this person is a maniac, then they're highly skilled at this. They're smart enough to set up these elaborate accidents." Andre sighed.

"Maybe they're just trying to scare me," I suggested.

"That would explain the kooky scrapbook pages," Andre nodded.

We lapsed into silence. Phil and Roger were across the room with their heads bent over a laptop. Not a good sign. Why was this happening to me? I didn't go out of my way to piss people off. I liked to think of myself as a nice person. Evidently, someone out there didn't agree.

I groaned thinking about what Mark would say. It wasn't exactly easy to be my boyfriend. It was completely not my fault, but things had a history of going wrong on a regular basis in my life. Mark had rolled with the punches for the most part. We'd met under some pretty strange circumstances, and I'm sad to say not much had changed over the last six months.

Ashley handed me a glass of water and patted my shoulder. "Hey, look on the bright side, Sis. You've got a stalker. You're now officially a rock star."