Harlan Coben - Just One Look

“Yes.”

“Not backstage. I only saw Lawson and the two girls.”

He shut his eyes.

“What happened, Jimmy?”

His face sagged and he suddenly looked older. “I was pretty wasted. I could hear the crowd. Twenty thousand strong. They would chant my name. They would clap. Anything to get the concert started. But I could barely move. My manager came in. I told him I’d need more time. He left. I was alone. And then Lawson and those two chicks came into the room.”

Jimmy blinked and looked at Grace. “Is there a cafeteria in this place?”

“It’s closed.”

“I could use a cup of coffee.”

“Tough.”

Jimmy started pacing.

Grace asked, “What happened after they came in the room?”

“I don’t know how they got backstage. I never gave them passes. But all of a sudden Lawson comes up to me and is all ‘hey how’s it going?’ I was happy to see him, I guess. But then, I don’t know, something went really wrong.”

“What?”

“Lawson. He went crazy. I don’t know, he must have been higher than I was. He started pushing me, making threats. He shouted that I was a thief.”

“A thief?”

Jimmy nodded. “It was all nonsense. He said…” He finally stayed still and met her eyes. “He said I stole his song.”

“What song?”

“ ‘Pale Ink.’ ”

Grace could not move. The tremor started moving down her left side. There was a flutter in her chest.

“Lawson and that other guy, Alworth, wrote this song for Allaw called ‘Invisible Ink.’ That was pretty much the only similarity between the songs. That part of the title. You know the lyrics to ‘Pale Ink,’ right?”

She nodded. She didn’t even try to speak.

“ ‘Invisible Ink’ had a similar theme, I guess. Both about how fragile memory can be. But that was it. I told John that. But he was just out of his mind. Whatever I said just pissed him off more. He kept pushing me. One of the girls, she had this really dark hair, was egging him on too. She started saying they’d break my legs or something. I called for help. Lawson punched me. You remember the reports that I was injured in the melee?”

She nodded again.

“I wasn’t. It was your husband. He hit my jaw, and then he jumped me. I tried to push him off. He started shouting how he was going to kill me. It was, I don’t know, the whole thing was surreal. He said he was going to cut me up.”

The flutter expanded and grew cold. Grace was holding her breath. This couldn’t be. Please, this just couldn’t be.

“By now it was just so out of hand, one of the girls, the redhead, told him to calm down. It’s not worth it, she said. She pleaded with him to forget it. But he wasn’t listening. He just smiled at me and then… then he took out a knife.”

Grace shook her head.

“He said he was going to stab me in the heart. You remember how I said I was stoned out of my mind? Well, that sobered me up. You want to sober someone up? Threaten to stick a knife in their chest.” He went quiet again.

“What did you do?”

Had she spoken? Grace wasn’t sure. The voice sounded like hers, but it seemed as though it’d come from someplace else, someplace tinny and distant.

Jimmy’s face, lost in the memory, went slack. “I wasn’t going to just let him stab me. So I jumped him. He dropped the knife. We started wrestling. The girls were screaming now. They came over and tried to pull us apart. And then, when we were on the floor like that, I heard a gunshot.”

Grace was still shaking her head. Not Jack. Jack wasn’t there that night, no way, no chance at all…

“It was so loud, you know. Like the gun was behind my ear or something. All hell broke loose then. There were screams. And then there were two, maybe three more shots. Not in the room. They were from far away. I heard more screams. Lawson stopped moving. There was blood on the floor. He’d been hit in the back. I pushed him off and then I saw that security guard, Gordon MacKenzie, still pointing his gun.”

Grace closed her eyes. “Wait a second. Are you telling me Gordon MacKenzie fired the first shot?”

Jimmy nodded. “He heard the commotion, heard me calling for help and…” Again his voice trailed off. “We just stared at each other for a second. The girls were screaming, but by now they were being drowned out by the crowd. That sound, I don’t know, people talk about the most terrible sound, like maybe it’s a wounded animal, but I’ve never heard anything that comes close to the sound of fear and panic. But you know that.”

She didn’t. The head trauma had wiped out the memory. But she nodded so that he’d keep talking.

“Anyway, MacKenzie stood there for a second, stunned. And then he just ran. The two girls grabbed Lawson and started dragging him out.” He shrugged. “You know the rest, Grace.”

She tried to take it all in. She tried to understand the implications, tried to fit it into her own reality. She had been standing yards away from all this, the other side of the stage. Jack. Her husband. He’d been right there. How could that be?

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“No, I don’t know the rest, Jimmy.”

He said nothing.

“The story didn’t end there. Allaw had four members. I’ve been checking out the time line. Two months after the stampede someone hired a hit man to kill one of the members, Geri Duncan. My husband, the one who you say attacked you, ran overseas, shaved his beard, and started going by Jack. According to Shane Alworth’s mother, he’s overseas too, but I think she’s lying about that. Sheila Lambert, the redhead, changed her name. Her husband was recently murdered and she disappeared again.”

Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t know anything about any of that.”

“You think it’s all just a big coincidence?”

“No, I guess not,” Jimmy said. “Maybe they were scared of what would happen if the truth came out. You remember what it was like those first few months – everyone wanting blood. They could have gone to jail, maybe worse.”

Grace shook her head. “And what about you, Jimmy?”

“What about me?”

“Why did you keep this secret all these years?”

He said nothing.

“If what you just told me is true, you didn’t do anything wrong. You were the one attacked. Why didn’t you just tell the police what happened?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. “This was bigger than me. Gordon MacKenzie was part of it, too. He came out the hero, remember? If the world ever learned that he fired that first shot, what do you think would have happened to him?”

“Are you saying you lied all these years to protect Gordon MacKenzie?”

He didn’t reply.

“Why, Jimmy? Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you run away?”

His eyes started shifting. “Look, I told you everything I know. I’m going home now.”

Grace moved closer. “You did steal that song, didn’t you?”

“What? No.”

But she saw it now. “That was why you felt responsible. You stole that song. If you hadn’t, none of this would have happened.”

He just kept shaking his head. “That’s not it.”

“That’s why you ran away. It wasn’t just that you were stoned. You stole the song that made you. That was where it all started. You heard Allaw play in Manchester. You liked their song. You stole it.”

He shook his head, but there was nothing behind it. “There were similarities…”

And another thought struck her with a deep, hard pang: “How far would you go to keep your secret, Jimmy?”

He looked at her.

“ ‘Pale Ink’ became even bigger after the stampede. That album ended up selling millions. Who has that money?”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong, Grace.”