I don’t know how many minutes I stared at them so intently, but it must have been too long for Angie, because she bumped my shoulder. “Hey, you. You’re mighty quiet.”
“Sorry,” I said. “You were right. These guys are really good.”
“Ah, professional admiration,” she said. “I guess you’re always looking at other people playing guitar and comparing.”
“Sometimes.”
The waitress, Kendra, came over and plopped the two drinks down on the table. “Six dollars,” she said.
“That is way too much for a dang soda and you know it,” Angie said.
“It’s all right,” I said, before the girls glared holes into each other. I laid the money on her tray. “Thank you.”
She looked me up and down a second, then whipped around to leave. She stomped away as if something more than a drink order had just happened.
“I take it you two did more than just go to high school together,” I said.
Angie pulled her cup across the table. “Maybe she got mad I dated her ex. I don’t know. It’s high school. It’s past.”
I wondered if the ex had actually moved to ex status before the “dating” began.
“When did you graduate?” I asked. I was hoping it had been at least a couple years.
“Not last year, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “I’ve been out.”
“All right.” My eyes wandered back to the stage. It was worth being here just to listen to these guys, even if Angie wasn’t exactly my type. I found myself comparing her to Jenny and made myself stop. Jenny was gone. A whole country away. We couldn’t be much farther apart than we were at the moment.
Angie sipped on her drink a while, swinging her leg beneath the table to the time of the music, occasionally bumping up against mine.
Then she got antsy again and scooted closer. I knew I should be feeling it, the way she was pressing her body up against my arm. But I wasn’t.
She leaned her head on my shoulder. “You wanna get on out of here?”
Normally I wasn’t one to turn down an easy invitation. But we hadn’t even said ten sentences to each other. “Let them finish their set,” I said.
She sighed heavily, and I wondered what the deal was. Was she that set on a quick lay? A girl like her could pick up a guy whenever she wanted.
That tingly feeling came over me again. The waitress was leaning against the bar with a self-satisfied smirk on her face.
I felt Angie stiffen beside me and mutter a quiet “Oh, shit.” She was looking at the door.
I no more turned my head to see what had gotten her attention when a fist slammed into my jaw.
Chapter 31: Jenny
I spent the night with my mother when all I could find for the Sonic Kings was a web page with an email address. I wrote them asking about Chance and then let Mom take me shopping.
We got what she considered an appropriate “interview suit” even though I knew I wouldn’t wear that to the studio, ever. Only the bean counters came to work in stuff like that, but it made sense, since that was what my mother was used to.
I had a lot of other issues to deal with before I could worry about the job situation.
When I got up in the morning, feeling retched, sick, and tired, I checked my mail and saw some guy named Paul had written me back.
Are you the girl from the beach? Saw the spread. Chance got kinda spooked by it and took off the next morning. No clue where he went.
My heart sank. If they couldn’t find him, I was really stuck.
I need to find him. What do you know about him?
He wrote back pretty fast.
Not a lot. Why don’t you come to our gig and the boys and all will figure out any intel he dropped. Tonight at Cain’s. 9 p.m.
I had no idea what Cain’s was, but I’d look it up. I wrote him that I would come and thought about rustling up a date, then realized how ludicrous that was. Corabelle was in Mexico, but Tina might go, if I could extricate her from her hot doctor.
~*′`*~
The band was in the middle of its set when Tina and I got there around ten. I hadn’t told her I was pregnant. I couldn’t find the words yet. And I certainly didn’t want the band to know, so it was just as well the secret was only mine.
I explained to Tina that I wanted to track Chance down, and the band said they could help. She wasn’t the sort of person to question motives. Dr. Darion had a late shift at the hospital, so she was fine with coming along.
The Sonic Kings were playing some dive bar in a suburb between LA and San Diego. It was an hour’s drive, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to be drinking anyway. That was one thing I already knew from drunkenly reading the surgeon general’s warnings on the labels of thousands of bottles of beer.
The place was dark and half-empty. The band sounded about the same as they did at the party, decent but without any spark.