Rock N Soul (2 page)

The steak was done when I got there, but it took the kitchen staff a few minutes to wash and plate the grapes, and Richard’s hovering and hand-wringing made it seem like the longest few minutes of all our lives. To make matters worse, by the time I finally got the room service cart wheeled out of the kitchen and down to the service elevator, my phone was buzzing like an angry hornet for the tenth time since I’d made it back to the hotel, and I knew who was calling. I considered just ignoring it, but I had a few seconds while I waited for the elevator and then while it took me up to the top floor of the hotel, so I decided I might as well answer.

Besides, Carmen and I had been together for almost a year, and even though she could be incredibly high maintenance and a class-A jerk when she was mad at me—which seemed like always, these days—I wanted to keep her happy. After all, if I was nice to her now
and
showed up with a Chris Raiden autograph when I got home tonight, the sky was the limit as far as the sex-having went. So I pulled my phone out of my pocket and answered.

“Hey, babe,” I said, pushing the Up button on the elevator and tapping my foot while I waited for the doors to open.

“Have you seen him?” she asked in the sweetest voice ever.

I bit back a sigh. “Not yet.”

“It’s been over an hour since he called for room service,” she pointed out, as if I didn’t know that. As if Richard’s increasingly frantic texts during my grape adventure hadn’t been keeping me up-to-date on the subject. As if I don’t know how to read a fucking clock.

“Thanks. I’m aware of that.” I leaned against the wall by the elevator and pinched the bridge of my nose.

She
hmmph
ed loud enough for me to hear through the phone. “And you expect me to believe you haven’t seen him yet?”

“I wasn’t in the lobby when he came in,” I told her, pinching harder like that would make the conversation end faster. “Mark took his bags up. And you know I’ve been out grape-hunting for the last hour. So no. I haven’t seen him.”

“Tyler—”

“I told you I’d call after I saw him, okay?” I was being sort of bitchy by interrupting, but there were only two floors to go and I needed to hurry this thing along. “I’m working. Let me work.”

The sweetness disappeared and there it was, the hard-edged bitchy voice that I’d gotten used to hearing lately. “I
am
letting you work, Tyler. You told me not to come down there, and I didn’t. So
excuse me
for wanting to know how it was going.”

The elevator doors picked that moment to open, so I pushed the cart inside and hit the button for the penthouse while I willed myself to be nice instead of snapping at her. “I found the grapes,” I said, trying to make it into a peace offering. “Had to go all the way to fucking Beacon Hill to find some, but I got the stupid grapes.”

“Good,” she said, still bitchy but a little brighter.
Good work, Tyler.
“Are you sure they’re seedless?”

“I’m sure. I’m not getting fired because I served a seed to Chris fucking Raiden.” Rolling my eyes, I muttered “douche bag” under my breath, then tucked the phone against my shoulder while I heaved the cart out of the elevator and into the hallway in front of the penthouse suite. “I gotta go. I’m about to knock on the door.”

“Put me in your pocket?” she begged, back to sweetness and light, and I sighed.

“Fine.” I started to slip the phone into my pocket, then put it back up to my ear. “But you have to shut up so he doesn’t hear you, got it?”

“Promise,” she purred, and I rolled my eyes again and dropped the phone into my suit pocket without ending the call.

I took a second to straighten my suit, and then knocked on the door. “Room service,” I called through the heavy wood, then stepped back to wait. And wait. And wait. I tapped my foot on the carpet and knocked again, yelling a little louder this time.

Still nothing. Typical. Rich fucks always thought they were so much more
important
than a working-class bellboy, which seemed to mean that they got their rocks off on making me wait in the hallway while they finished filing their nails or whatever. And rock stars were even worse, always wanting weird shit like red seedless California grapes even when they weren’t in season and making me run around Boston in the middle of the fucking night trying to find a twenty-four-hour fruit store.

I mean, I assumed so. This was the first rock star I’d done room service for. But the fact that this guy actually
had
demanded weird shit seemed like good evidence for the generalization.

“Mr. Raiden?” I yelled through the door, in case he was having hearing problems from the concert he’d just come from. “
Room service
.”

After a couple of minutes had passed, I sighed and pulled out my master key card. “I’m coming in, sir,” I called, wrinkling my nose at the
sir
but not wanting to offend a celebrity and lose my job. When there was still no response, I swiped my key card and let myself in.

Chris Raiden was passed out on the floor beside the bed, a pool of vomit in front of his face. I wrinkled my nose at the sight—leave it to a rock star to order a fucking rare steak and grapes and then waste my hard work by puking all over himself before passing out—and went over to him, then toed him with the tip of my shoe. “Mr. Raiden.”

He didn’t so much as twitch, so I sighed super hard and knelt beside him, calling his name again. No response.

He was so still, lying there on the carpet. His legs were twisted, like he’d fallen to the floor. His skin was pale and washed out, his eyeliner smudged everywhere. There was a trickle of blood smeared all down his arm, most likely from where he’d stuck himself with a needle. But most importantly, he wasn’t breathing.

“Oh,
shit
.” I pressed my fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse, and didn’t find one. “
Shit
,” I said, louder this time, and scrambled to my feet.

Carmen was shrieking from my pocket, and I pulled the phone out and pressed it to my ear. “Shit, Carmen, I think he’s dead. I think he’s
dead
. What the fuck do I do?”

“Call an ambulance, you dumbass!” she yelled through the tinny speaker, and I stumbled my way over to the room phone and picked it up, dialing the front desk.

“Reception, Anthony speaking.”

“Anthony,” I said, a little bit of a whimper to my voice. “It’s Tyler. I’m in Chris Raiden’s room and I think he’s dead and I need you to call an ambulance.
Now
.”

“Shit,” Anthony said. “Okay, okay, I’m calling.” He hung up with a loud, resounding
click
and I raised my own phone back to my ear with a shaking hand.

“Carmen.” I eyed the corpse on the floor a few feet from me. “Holy fuck. He’s dead.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then she took a deep breath and said, “You know this is all your fault.”

I blinked a few times. “What?”

“You killed him,” she said, her voice rising in pitch and volume. “If you hadn’t taken so long to find the fucking grapes, he’d be alive.”

“What?” I asked again, straining to hear her through ears that seemed to be filling with cotton. The edges of my vision constricted in on me as I stared at Chris’s body. “What’re you talking about?”

But she just kept
yelling
, and after a few seconds I let the phone fall to the floor as I looked down at the corpse of rock star Christopher Raiden and tried to figure out what I was supposed to do from here.

“No,” I said. It seemed like a good response given the circumstances.

Richard crossed his arms and did a twitching-jaw thing at me. “You don’t get to say no, Tyler. It’s your job.”

I eyed him, trying to figure out how much of a bitch-face I could give him before I crossed a line and got fired.

So far today he’d been mostly smiling and friendly despite his current hostile stance, but just to be safe I only dialed up my bitch-face to about seventy-five percent of its capacity. “Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a physicist,” I said. Richard’s mouth opened slightly, and he stared blankly at me. “I’m a bellboy,” I explained, “not a maid.”

“Mr. Kingston wants his room cleaned,” Richard said, tightening his crossed arms and twitching his jaw even harder.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s housekeeping’s job.”

Richard let his arms fall to his sides, then shrugged. “He doesn’t trust foreigners with his stuff.”

“Okay, first off, that makes Mr. Kingston a douche. But second off, that pretty much just rules out Malika. Make the others do it.”

Richard hesitated. “He says they’re all foreigners.”

I blinked. “Natalie was born in, like, Iowa.”

“I know. Still. He says she’s foreign.”

“You can’t
get
more corn-fed American than Iowa. And she doesn’t even
look
foreign.” Which was true. Natalie was gorgeous, a platinum blonde with bright-blue eyes who stood about five eight, with five feet of that being pure leg. I’d tried to hit on her once. It hadn’t gone well.

“He thinks she’s Scandinavian, and Scandinavians are raging thieves.” He rolled his eyes. “According to him, anyway.”

I stared at him for several seconds. “You’re kidding me.”

“I promise you I’m not.” Richard looked
almost
sympathetic to my plight. “But he’s a good tipper, so just go swab out his toilet and throw some new sheets on the bed and stop your complaining.”

“I want security to give me a full, televised pat down after I get done.” I crossed
my
arms. “I’m not going to jail because Mr. Kingston thinks I stole his gold-spun butt floss.”

“Just go clean the room, Tyler.” And then he turned around and walked into his office and shut the door.

I stood there eying the closed door for a moment while I regrouped, then headed to the lobby to see if any guests needed help before I had to go up to the stupid penthouse. I could do this. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been back up to the room since Chris died in it—it’s the biggest room in the hotel and the people who stay there are usually VIPs, so excellent bellboy service is something they expect—but this was going to be the first time I’d been farther inside than just past the doorway. And even then, I’d made a point not to look deeper into the room, and especially not at the spot on the floor where I found him.

I’m not ashamed to say I’d had nightmares about it, at first. I’d woken up in cold sweats in the middle of the night and grabbed at Carmen for comfort, only to realize that she wasn’t there anymore. And honestly, even if she had been, she would have just rolled away from me and said, “Fuck, Tyler, I’m trying to sleep.” She’d never been much of a cuddler except on special occasions, and even less so there at the end of the relationship.

But anyway, the nightmares were weird, because he never got up and came at me like a killer zombie or anything. Most of the time in the dreams I just stood still and stared at his corpse, with its shallow glassy eyes pointed at the floor beside it, until my skin started to crawl, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t move for anything in the world. The sight of him had been burned into my mind when I found his body, and now my stupid subconscious kept making sure that I couldn’t forget a single gory little detail.

But I am a grown man and I am not a coward, so I decided to stop being a baby about it and go clean the stupid room. Chris’s body wasn’t going to be there. It had been hauled off in a body bag and buried somewhere in New York state, which seemed weird since I’d read the band biography and as far as I could remember, Chris had never lived there. Maybe he had family in the area or something. Who knows.

Time was passing, though, and I definitely wanted to be done and out of the room long before Mr. Kingston came back from wherever he had gone and decided that my blond hair meant that I was Scandinavian too. So I left the empty lobby and walked very briskly to housekeeping and took a cart into the service elevator.

I had to remind myself to breathe a few times on the way up to the room. It helped to know that I, of all people, was sure that he was dead. Really dead. So his body wasn’t going to be there when I opened the door. The nightmares weren’t real, and I had to face them one of these days. It might as well be today.