Beneath the Stain - Part 5 Read Online Free

numbing on his stomach, Mackey was still a raging red-hot bitch monster when they arrived at the stadium, and the sound check was getting on one snarled nerve at a time.
    “Okay, y’all,” he snapped at the roadie getting under his feet and trying to coil the microphone cord, “I get that the equipment should be different. You keep telling me I shouldn’t have cords on my mics. But that’s not the equipment we got right now, and we gotta make do with what’s here. Anybody got any idea how I’m supposed to deal with you guys running under my feet like monkeys for the whole fucking set?”
    “How about you move right and we move to your left?” said a rather timid voice.
    Mackey glared over the heads at all the borrowed trouble Tailpipe Productions had apparently hired for this gig.
    It was a girl. A pretty girl, not that she was trying to be. She had a strawberry-brown braid down to her waist, with lots of curls frizzing out of it and little sweaty ringlets around a heart-shaped face. Unlike Shelia, she wasn’t twig thin—no. She wasn’t fat either, just not willowy. Sturdy and soft, round in the right places. In a way, sort of a girl version of Trav, right down to the redheaded brown of her eyes.
    She was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt like the other roadies, but they were all looking at her like she’d sprouted breasts.
    Probably because she was the only girl.
    “I move right and you all move to my left,” he said, at first ready to rip her a new one. And then it hit him. “That’s fuckin’ genius , darlin’—no fuckin’ lie. You all hear that? If I’m going left, I will expect you on my right. If I’m going right, I will expect you on my left. None of this dodging around the back or ducking under the front bullshit. I will expect you there and leave you the fuck alone to do your jobs. Now I’ll bitch at Trav to get us some new equipment, but right now, this is a fair solution. You all with me?”
    He saw some numb nods and some resentful looks at the girl, but Mackey was satisfied. Emergency choreography at its best, right up until he tripped on the tall skinny guy with the blond hair for the six thousandth time.
    With a snarl, he hurled his broken microphone stand off the stage. “What in the actual fuck are you doing here?” he hollered, the clatter of the mic stand punctuating the ring of his voice. “Where’s the girl? She knows what she’s doing, get her the fuck up here!”
    “She’s not certified—” the guy whined.
    Mackey almost smacked his subservient little face. “I could give a damn if she’s certified. Give her a fucking field promotion, but get her ass up here before I kick your ass down! Oh! And I will write an actual check and double it for the first person who can get me a mic stand that actually fucking stands !”
    “Well if you’d quit throwing them off the stage, they wouldn’t break,” said the girl, clambering up on the stage with more nerves than grace.
    Mackey was about to rip her head off, and then he realized what she’d just done had been sort of why he called her up in the first place.
    “This is true,” he said, conceding the point. “But that one had it coming.”
    “I’ll try to scrounge up one that’ll behave,” she said earnestly, and some of the tension that had been squeezing Mackey’s head since they’d arrived relaxed a little.
    “I’ll take that as a personal favor,” he grudged. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
    “Briony,” she muttered, wrapping the cords around at the foot of the stage while she talked.
    “Briony, you are my personal tech for the evening, you got that? If anyone needs to say something to me, they say it through you. You are, hands down, the one person not in the band that is not pissing me off right now, and if you could do that for me, I may let the rest of humanity live.”
    She got to her feet and dusted off her knees, grimacing. “You’re sort of an asshole, has anyone told you that?”
    Oh