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She should get it shortly.
In the meantime, we have a very rich—and very corrupt—man to kill.
26
Sara
“Sara! Sara! Sara!”
The chanting of the audience combined with the deafening applause is like a shot of heroin into my veins. I’m so high I feel like I’m flying, and I bow, laughing, as the chanting intensifies.
My bandmates—Phil, Simon, and Rory—are bowing alongside me. The audience, though, seems focused on me. Probably because the guys changed the name of the band from The Rocker Boys to Sara & the Rocker Boys last month, completely ignoring my objections. For whatever reason, Phil decided that the band is much more marketable with me as the lead singer, and every poster now prominently features my face in addition to my name. Last week, I actually had a patient at the clinic recognize me as “that Sara” and request my autograph—a highly embarrassing incident that resulted in the clinic staff nicknaming me “The Celeb.”
This is the first time we’ve done a larger outdoor venue, and I wasn’t sure we’d be able to pull it off. Though it’s almost May, the weather is still unpredictable, and up until two days ago, we didn’t know if it was going to be fifty degrees and raining or seventy and sunny. It ended up being somewhere in the middle—sixty-seven and partly cloudy—and we got a great turnout. Our goal was to sell at least a hundred tickets to cover the venue costs, but judging by the number of enthusiastically clapping spectators, we sold close to four times that amount.
We finish bowing and do one more song as an encore before leaving the stage. As always happens after a successful performance, it’s hard to come off the high, so we go to a nearby bar to celebrate and unwind.
Like me, my bandmates do this as a hobby. Phil, our guitarist, is a math teacher; Simon, the drummer, is a freelance writer; and Rory, our bassist, works in a call center. Unlike me, however, all three of them would like to do this as a career, and as often happens after a great performance, they immediately start talking about going on tour.
“We could start in Seattle, then make our way down the West Coast,” Phil says, picking up his beer. His blue eyes glitter feverishly in his ruddy face. “From there, we could go all across the Southwest and—”
“Fuck Seattle.” Rory knocks back a shot of tequila and slides the glass toward the harried bartender. “We go straight to California. San Francisco, then L.A. It’s the best for artists like us, not to mention the weather and the culture and the food…”
He continues, gesticulating wildly as he talks, and I grin as I notice several women openly staring at him. With his freckled face, unruly red curls, and a bodybuilder’s physique, Rory looks like a cross between Little Orphan Annie and an Abercrombie model on steroids. It’s a combination that shouldn’t have worked, but it does—and I suspect the success of the band owes as much to his looks as it does to our combined talent.
Not that Phil and Simon are bad-looking. Simon, in particular, reminds me of a young Denzel Washington, only with a punk-rock vibe. Phil is a bit more average, with a receding hairline and a hint of a beer belly, but his outgoing personality more than makes up for any physical shortcomings. All three of my bandmates are attractive in their own way—and each has hinted, at one point or another, that he’d like to take me out.
It’s too bad all I can see when I look at a man these days is that he’s not Peter.
The guys don’t know that, of course. They’re happily oblivious to the terrifying mess in my past and the FBI agents who still stubbornly follow me around. All my bandmates know is that I’m a widow, and they think grief for my dead husband is the reason I don’t date.
“How long has it been?” Phil asked sympathetically when I joined the band back in February, and I told him my husband passed away about a year and a half earlier, having never awoken from a car accident that left him in a coma. Phil expressed his condolences and has tactfully avoided the topic since, as have Simon and Rory.
In fact, after carefully letting me know that they’re interested and just as carefully being turned down, they’ve completely backed off and have taken to treating me as some kind of saintly figure, an untouchable Madonna encased in a bubble of grief.
They’re not far off, only the loss I’m grieving has little to do with George, who’s fading more from my memories each day. At this point, it’s been over three years since his accident, and even longer since our love suffocated under the weight of his addiction. Each time I think about him now, all I remember is how I felt when I found out about his double life as a CIA agent… about the secrets and the lies that brought Peter to my door.
