“All you had to do was tell everyone that I stole those songs.”
Aish looked at him sharply. In the text John had sent him that horrible morning, the text Aish had found after Devonte pounded on his door, he’d asked Aish to tell the world. Begged to let him correct his mistake and take the blame away from Aish. Steamrolled with guilt, Aish had kept the message for a month, then deleted it.
He’d been the asshole trying to preserve his best friend’s legacy.
“And you, you stupid fuck, you couldn’t even get that right.” John shook his head then motioned with his gun.
Aish lifted his chin.
John smiled wider. “Turn around. Keep walking. You stop again and I’m shooting off pieces. I’ll start with those famous, guitar-strumming fingers.”
Aish grimaced, but turned, walked. Even with his back to a gun, it was easier than facing John’s smug smile and his effortless words of violence.
John straightened his headlamp and cast it into the impenetrable blackness in front of Aish.
He’d go slow. He’d buy time. Someone had to notice he was missing by now. Someone had to be looking for him. Sofia knew these tunnels.
Would she care to look?
“If you’d done the only thing I’d asked you to do, we wouldn’t be here.” John’s voice bounced around him. “You tell everyone that I did the stealing, that I felt so guilty I killed myself...how many bands are going to sue us when we’ve got a sob story like that? The public feels sorry for us, the label pays a couple of little settlements, and our slate is wiped clean.
“But you had to be a pussy. You wouldn’t spill it when I started the rumor that you were involved with my death, you didn’t tell that guy at the festival. That’s what I paid for him to get on tape.” John’s audible frustration had Aish hyperaware of the gun. “If I couldn’t get you to open your mouth, we were going to get big-time sued, or worse, the label was gonna drop us, and then what? I can’t have the John Hamilton estate coffers getting lean.”
Aish moved to spin around, but he was sore, drugged, lumbering and John punched him, hard and sharp, in the kidney.
“Fuck!” Aish shouted, almost going to his knees, before stabilizing himself. Body vibrating with pain, he groaned, “That’s what this is about?”
John’s parents, a COO for a small LA company and a middle school teacher, had been surprised when they were told his fortune would go into an estate that would benefit a variety of charities. Grief-stricken and financially comfortable, they hadn’t fought it or sought more information. Aish, too, hadn’t thought about where the royalties from their songs—all credited to Hamilton/Salinger and split fifty-fifty—would go. No one had followed up to investigate who the executor was. Or whether any of those charities had seen a dime.
“This whole fucking thing is about money,” Aish spat.
John grabbed him by his hair and breathed stale breath against his face.
“You’re such a spoiled little shit,” John said, shaking him, and the pull on his hair had tears coming to Aish’s eyes. “It’s not about money. It’s about millions. It’s about keeping my investment in the glorious Aish Salinger. I’ve enjoyed the ride on your coattails and you’re not going to take that from me just because I stole a couple of songs.”
The whole simple, senseless explanation echoed off the kingdom’s primordial stone.
He shoved Aish forward.
Aish couldn’t run, couldn’t fight back. All he could do was keep him talking.
Slow him down. Someone will come. Sofia will come. If he died down here, the chance to make things right for Sofia died, too. Her reputation, her winery, and her efforts to save her kingdom would wither right along with his corpse.
He worked hard to calm his breathing. “So...you fake a suicide, keep me making music, and live off the royalties on the beach in Cabo?”
John huffed. “Something like that.”
“How long have you hated me, John?”
That got a pleased chuckle out of him.
“For a real long time, Aish. A real long time.”
Aish thought of the girls who asked John to vouch for them and the smaller trophies John would put next to Aish’s big ones and the backup vocals and the bass playing.
And then he thought of Sofia and any guilt evaporated.
“What are you doing here?”
Their words had taken on a hollow quality, losing their echo, and Aish saw, ahead of them, the tunnel widening.
“I needed to keep an eye on my boy, didn’t I?” John answered. “Make sure you didn’t fuck it all up and turn the public against us? I told those old guys I could help them out. But then I hear you and Sofia in the cellar, the fighting, the fucking, I forgot how hot it was listening to you two, and she mentions the evidence she had. Finally, after she almost ruined us, that royal bitch was going to be the answer to my prayers.”
Pure, throbbing rage blocked out the ache in his shoulders, sent feeling back into his bound hands. But he couldn’t fight, and he couldn’t run, so all he could do was verify one last awful truth.
“She almost died from her miscarriage,” he said through his clenched jaw.
“Huh,” John said. “She didn’t tell me she was dying.” Not even an attempt to deny it. “Wouldn’t have made any difference. The road was calling, man.”
The tunnel opened up and they were walking into a massive cavern. It would have been magnificent, something to behold, if John’s headlamp wasn’t focused on the huge pond in the middle of it. He nudged Aish forward with a hard jab of the gun when Aish hesitated, finally understanding. Their footsteps struck hollowly against the stone, like the black pool sucked up all the sound and light and life that came near it.
When they were at its edge, John came up beside him, the headlamp tilted up from his face and the gun pointed at Aish’s
