Elfie waited in the tunnel with Jonas, who passed backpacks and other bug-out kits to the musos as they jogged off the stage and then sprinted for the cars.
Tryp, Xan, and Cadell were left on the stage for the next-to-last encore, so Jonas readied bags. “Xan will want to have a meeting to do a post-mortem,” he said. “Rock won’t leave until the stage is loaded out, though. We’ll meet tomorrow morning after you handle Tryp.”
“Okay. I already explained it to Rock.”
“And that’s good. Nobody’s mad, Elfie. The audience didn’t notice a thing.” He looked up at the cement ceiling, nonchalant in what he was about to ask. “Just how close was it?”
“I always look at the monitor before I light the electric match,” Elfie said, “so if I hadn’t noticed beforehand, the most likely outcome would have been a missed cue.”
“That would have been okay, too. And if you hadn’t looked?”
“The flame projectors would have converged on Xan’s head, probably at least setting his hair on fire, probably much worse.”
Jonas sat in a chair and clapped his face into his hands. “Why the fuck do we even have flame throwers and bombs on the stage?”
“Because audiences expect it.”
He nodded. “And we wouldn’t want to give the audience a lame show, not when we can endanger the talent just a little.” He dropped his hands to his knees. “Okay. Screw the meeting. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again, and I’ll clear it with Xan. Don’t even worry about it. I’ll tell him that we’ve instituted a new procedure or something to prevent it from happening again.”
“Thanks.”
Jonas cornered her with a hard look. “Just one more thing: what made it happen this time?”
“Just one of those things, Jonas. With the sound and the lighting and specials, we’ve got thousands of cues per show. Even with six-sigma, mistakes sometimes happen.”
“Is dealing with Tryp’s shenanigans too much for you?”
Her first bonus check had already been deposited, and if she kept making that kind of money, she really could go to college in the fall instead of in two or three years, or more.
Plus, the thought of not seeing Tryp, of only catching glimpses of him during sound check because their schedules were out of sync, sent a ache through her chest. “It’s fine. I’m handling it.”
“If I have to choose, I’d choose not having my musicians set on fire over having you babysit Tryp. I can deal with him, but he seems better, and it’s only been a few days.”
“Rock is picking up my slack. I just got distracted, just once.”
“By Tryp?”
She should have been more restrained, but it gushed out of her. “He kissed me last night and I kind of freaked.”
“He kissed you?” Jonas bobbed in his chair like he had almost stood up.
Elfie stared at her black tennis shoes. “Yeah.”
“Oh, Jesus. Did you want him to?”
Good question. “I didn’t think about it beforehand, but, well, yeah.”
Jonas ran a hand through his hair, ruffling the brown waves. “Be careful with him.”
That wasn’t what she had expected. “How so?”
Jonas waved and shook his head, refusing to divulge details. “He’s been through a lot his whole life and especially in the last year.”
“Oh?”
He sighed. “Plus, I don’t know if he had a thing for Rhiannon, but she and I are together now.”
Out on the stage, the song ended.
Tryp blazed into the tunnel, hooked his bag off Jonas’s arm, and caught Elfie’s hand, running with her through the tunnel toward the parking lot. Her backpack bounced against her spine because their luggage would probably be a couple hours behind them.
All the musos hated runners, the mad dash to cars waiting to spirit them away from the arenas before the crowd’s traffic gridlocked the parking lots. If the arena or club didn’t have facilities for showers and cooling down, a runner was the only other option to being stuck, sitting on metal folding chairs in a concrete tunnel for hours.
The technicians, however, worked their asses off during those hours, loading out the show for the next stop on the tour. They wished they were sleeping in the leather seats of wide SUVs in the dark of midnight.
After a short sprint to the cars, Tryp dragged Elfie into a car after him and reached past her to yank the door shut. He slapped the front seat. The limo surged out of the parking garage, tossing her backwards and Tryp onto her.
“To the hotel in Monterey?” the driver asked. The next city was only an hour up the road, so they were taking the cars directly there. The tour bus would meet them for the next long overnight drive to Los Angeles the night after that.
“Yep. Privacy screen, if you would?”
A black divider rose between them and the driver, cutting off their view of the oncoming road through the windshield.