Roman had been angrier than this. Plenty of times. His old man was an alcoholic. You learn how to deal with people like that, eventually. When you’re young, and you haven’t got any other choice, you learn how to deal with them fast.
It didn’t mean that it didn’t raise his blood pressure just thinking about the man after all this time. But he didn’t need to think about it any more. The old man had died of heart failure six years ago. They told him, you keep drinking, it’ll kill you. How long after did he start again? Could it have been as long as six hours?
Roman clicked his teeth together again. There was no use picking a fight in the studio. It wasn’t just his manager that would be embarrassed by it, after all. A big, public blow-up was the sort of thing that was going to get him noticed by the press again.
When you’re thirty-eight and you’ve been in the business since you were still too young to get laid, press that suddenly shows up is never good. It’s a guarantee that if you’re suddenly getting wall-to-wall coverage, it’s either bothering you because something great happened and they’re trying to suck the life out of it—a wedding, for example—or they’re jumping down your throat for something stupid that happened.
Well, he wasn’t quite dumb enough to fall into that hole. At least, he thought so. He hoped so.
“We’re just talking in circles at this point,” Roman said. “Let’s just table it, come back tomorrow, and take another look.”
“Sure. Hey, hoss, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Good.” He hoped that the didn’t let anything on at this point. Because he was angry. And he would rather Tommy not just leave to let him cool off. “I wanted to talk to you, too.”
“Yeah. Okay. Over dinner maybe?”
“Sure, Tom.”
“Usual place?”
“Sure.”
He shouldered his guitar case and walked out to the rental car. The drive, he made in silence. He checked the phone at every red light; not to see if there were any messages. He would have felt the ring. He wanted to feel to make sure that it was there at all. Apparently, going missing was something that his phone had been discovered to do, and it was best not to jump to conclusions.
After all, maybe it did just get up and walk out. He looked out the window at the passing storefront shops. They didn’t get better as he drove, they got worse. They’d be in a scary part of town before Roman would pull into a parking lot. He’d been in a lot of scary parts of town. These days he had the money to avoid them if he wanted to.
In Detroit’s case, it was something of a rite of passage for him. He wanted to be here, even if it was a bad idea. Because he liked the place, first and foremost. And because he wasn’t going to keep doing this work if he was afraid of one little spooky neighborhood. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. He’d been coming here almost ten years, and he was pretty certain that they still didn’t know precisely who he was.
The woman behind the counter was different this time. Her lips were large, and she pursed them when she looked at him. Then she tried to make something that vaguely imitated a smile. As to whether or not it worked, Roman didn’t care a whole lot.
There was a sign by the door. Please seat yourself. He did.
They served Mexican food here. Not the best Mexican in town. He’d personally been to a dozen better. They weren’t particularly authentic. The cook was a big-bellied black guy named Reuben who made food that he wanted to eat.
They were small, but they weren’t particularly chatty. Some places, the owner really prefers to talk and get all friendly. But that wasn’t Reuben, and whoever owned the place didn’t seem to want to make himself known. Maybe Reuben owned the place, frankly Roman didn’t know.
It wasn’t really even the bar that brought him here. He didn’t drink, though they were pleased to advertise that they had the longest bar in town. That probably wasn’t true, either. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know.
The food was just good. And it was consistent. And it was the kind of low-profile place that nobody showed up. And they seemed to keep strange hours, that kept them up all night when Roman needed to be up all night and didn’t want fast food.
It took Tommy a few minutes. Maybe he was fussing with that pistol in his pocket or something, like he was hoping to get mugged so he would finally have an excuse to insist they didn’t come here.
He looked around, and saw Roman, who looked up at him with a look that didn’t have any anger in it at all. Fifteen minutes was plenty of time to cool off when you weren’t looking at the rat in the eyes and listening to him lie to you.
“I won,” Roman said.
“We weren’t racing.”
“You’re always racing for something,” Roman said vaguely.
“I guess.”
“You’re racing to get out of Detroit, isn’t that right, Tommy?”
He smiled, but the confusion on his face made itself plain. “Sure, boss. I don’t love it around here or anything.”
“Hoping to get back to California, is that right?”
“Well, you know. It’s cold up here. I have a whole part of my wardrobe that’s just so I can dress when we come up to Michigan, you know that?”
“You could just be cold, you know.”
Tommy barked a laugh. “Sure.”
“And you could try better to hide your attempts to get me to leave, too.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know someone contacted the girl. Someone who had access to my phone. Someone who deleted the message from my text log so I wouldn’t know that they’d done it.”
Tommy stood up in a hurry. Roman pressed down on his foot hard enough that the producer yelped.
“Sit down.”
“Wasn’t me,” he said. “Maybe, I dunno, she was strung out or something. You know, those girls.”
“No, I don’t think that’s the case, my friend. Maybe you ought to reconsider, before I start reconsidering how friendly we are after all.”
The producer gulped.
“Now, you want to try running that by me again?”