Tough Tender by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan Books

4

When she blew the words on “Heartbreaker,” Toni knew she was scared.

Certainly not stage fright—she’d been singing with rock bands since junior high—but some other kind of scared, something in her stomach that was far worse than butterflies.

Something cold.

Something alive.

Fear.

When the song was finished, she rushed over to Jon and whispered, “Fill in with something. I need a few minutes.”

Jon nodded, and away from the mike, stage-whispered to Les, Roc, and Mick to “forget the list—do ‘Light My Fire’ next,” a song Toni didn’t do anything on, which would give her a chance to take a break.

She stood inside the cubbyhole room stage right as the band went into the old Doors classic, Jon doing right by the elaborate pseudo-baroque organ break at the beginning. She was breathing hard. She wanted a smoke. She’d given it up two years ago and rarely had felt the urge since the first hard months, but now she wanted a smoke. She went out and bummed one off Tommy, the roadie, sitting at his sound board halfway down the dance floor, over stage left. Then she returned to the cubbyhole, sucking in smoke as if it was food and she was starving.

Mick was singing. He didn’t sing very well, and in fact was incurably flat, but the Doors tune lent itself to that: the late Jim Morrison was known for many things, but singing on key wasn’t one of them. Then the band went into the instrumental section of the song, Jon taking the organ solo, a sing-song thing that climbed the scale in mindless little would-be Bach progressions.

She wondered if that big sandy-haired guy—Jesus, was he big—was still in his booth, waiting for his mythical phone call. She decided to find out. She’d have plenty of time; this song went on for nearly ten minutes. She wandered back through the club, nodding as fans touched her arm and made comments about the sad fact that the Nodes were splitting, and then she was in the bar, where the big sandy-haired guy was sitting in the booth, talking intensely with a woman.

A woman in white with a black cardigan and tinted glasses and a beautiful face and—even seated in a booth it was obvious —a beautiful body.

Suddenly the cigarette was burning her throat. I knew there was a reason I quit these fucking things, she thought, and went up to the bar and put the cig out in an ashtray up from the bottom of which a little picture of Bob Hale stared. Standing next to her at the bar were two young women.

Toni had seen these women before; they had been to hear the Nodes at the Ramp in Burlington a few months ago, part of a group of half a dozen hard, hoody-looking bitches, one of whom had been attracted to Jon, and vice versa. She was one of the two at the bar, a lanky brunette about nineteen, in jeans and jeans jacket and a Nodes T-shirt; lots of eye makeup, and smoking a cigarette.

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