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The only thing Seth has left togive.
There are two sides to every rock ’n’ rollstory;
it’s time for Seth to tellhis.
DIRTY LIKE SETH
CHAPTERONE
Seth
I’d donesome dangerous shit in my life. Stupid-dangerousshit.
Getting hooked onheroin.
Overdosing.
Almost dying at the age of twenty-two.
Yeah; those were definitely topthree.
But this, right now, had to rank right up there on the stupid-dangerouslist.
For one thing, I was trespassing on private property, on the lot outside a bar owned by a member of my former band, Dirty. The entire band was inside the bar, and while they had no idea I was here, they were about to find out. And I really wasn’t sure how they were going toreact.
But no doubt, they probably weren’t going to roll out the red carpet forme.
For another thing, the bar was crawling with security, and the security guys who shadowed Dirty these days were mostly of the ex-military or biker variety. Which meant a whole lot of dudes who knew how to drawblood.
And last but not least, I was leaning on a motorcycle parked at the back of the parking lot behind the bar. A Harley. A bike that didn’t belong to me but clearly belonged to a serious biker—one of the West Coast Kings, according to the skeletal black King of Spades insignia painted over the gastank.
It was Jude Grayson’s bike. Head of Dirty’s security team. At least, I was banking on that being thecase.
If it wasn’t Jude’s, I was banking on, at the very least, that it was the bike of someone he knew, and therefore I was not about to get murdered the instant the biker in question stepped out the back door of thebuilding.
I was doing what I always did when I was nervous: playing guitar. But my mind was on that door. It was painted red, with a security cam on the wall above, pointing straight down. It wasn’t pointed at me, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some other one thatwas.
It was early evening and the lot was deserted. There were a few big trucks, the kind that hauled band gear and film equipment and stage shit, and several other vehicles jammed into the narrow parking spaces. But there was a high fence around the lot with a locked gate, and apparently no one in Los Angeles was stupid enough to climb that fence to getin.
No one butme.
I was halfway through Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” when the red door cracked open and some dude’s head popped out. He kicked the door wide and stepped outside; he walked right over to me, winding his way through the parked cars as the heavy door swung shut behind him. And yeah, he was a biker. A baby biker. Couldn’t be more than nineteen. He had an overstuffed taco in one hand, half-eaten, so I must’ve interrupted hisdinner.
Could’ve been the dude with the earpiece who’d materialized on the sidewalk shortly after I’d scaled the fence; could’ve been someone on the security cams. But someone had tipped him off that I was out here. And since it wasn’t Jude himself who’d come outside, whoever it was probably didn’t recognizeme.
Someone new to theteam.
This kid, wearing a black leather Kings cut over his T-shirt, a badge stitched to the chest that readProspect, looked more stunned with my idiocy than pissed off. I didn’t know him, and whether he recognized me or not seemed beside the point. Either way, his eyes were stabbing out of his head in the direction of my ass, which was resting on the bikeseat.
Maybe if I was really lucky he was also stunned by my musical skills, because his eyes kept darting from the bike to my guitar to myface.
“Do you know whose bike that is?” he said, his mouth open and full of taco meat he’d forgotten to finish chewing. Apparently, he was more concerned with my ass trespassing on the bike than with the rest of me in thelot.
I kept playing, looking him steady in the eyes, and said, “I know whose bike it is. You can tell him Todd Becker’s here to seehim.”
The kid shut his mouth, chewed slowly for a bit, and stared at me like he was deciding whether I was dangerous, stupid, or just plain crazy. Apparently landing on the latter, he shook his head. He glanced at the plainclothes security dude on the sidewalk, who was pretending not to eavesdrop. Then he tossed me a biker-brat glare that saidYour funeraland stalked backinside.
And for the first time today, I actually wondered if this was a giant fuckingmistake.
