Suckers Read Online Free Page B

again.
    Ray flashed him a quick smile.
    Dan massaged the back of his neck.
    “How are you doing?” Ray asked.
    “Fine.” His voice was flat. He shifted to get more comfortable on a couch that’d had all its comfortable spots worn out of it months ago. He tried to focus on the television.
    What he did instead was rub his neck, remembering how that thing’s body had felt when he’d tried to grab hold: writhing and rubbery and slick. Like a pulsing, thick-skinned organ outside of its host body. A shudder jerked down his spine.
    The television wasn’t doing anything for him. His gaze dropped to Ray’s upturned profile, his nose and chin like an outcropping of rock in the face of a cliff. If he had to be attacked in a dark alley with anyone, he guessed Ray was about as reliable as they came. He hated to think if it had been Jamie.
    “Hey,” he said.
    Ray looked over.
    “Thanks. For last night.”
    “No problem.” He tilted his chin back toward the TV.
    The bathroom door shuddered open, sticking in its tracks. Josh called it colorful names under his breath it as he tried to close it back up.
    When this tour was over, one thing Dan wasn’t going to miss was this bus. “How many more shows?” he asked Ray.
    “Three. No, hold up. Four.”
    Four. The shows didn’t exhaust him, but all the hours in between… He scrubbed his face.
    “Day off today, though,” Ray said.
    Shit. He’d take shows over downtime any fucking day.

CHAPTER FOUR
    It was a day off only if you counted sitting on a bus for seven hours a “day off.”
    Because they had all afternoon and evening to travel, they could afford to stop for a sit-down meal at least. After some discussion about the road signs on the highway and what everyone was in the mood for—everyone except Jamie, who was crashed in his bunk—they rumbled off the interstate.
    Jamie managed to haul his ass out of the bunk to join them, sulking in a half-stupefied state until he was on his third drink.
    After two weeks on the road, you ran out of things to talk about. Got irritable. Pulled into yourself. By the time you got up close to two years, you were like a big family crammed in a three-room trailer—and sometimes there was still nothing to talk about. You ate to the sounds of forks, ice cubes against glass, an occasional fart. Maybe a story from Stick about the chick he banged the night before…because he could pick ’em.
    As they made their way through lunch, Jamie, bristling against the quiet, began dropping silverware for the hell of it. He’d call the waitress over to get another replacement—and another drink, thanks. Drumming his spoon against his water glass while he waited. Laughing to himself: sudden short hiccoughs over nothing.
    It was a spike hammering into Dan’s forehead. The anger that had ebbed since the night before came scrabbling back on claws. Jesus fucking Christ . Had it always been like this, this much of a pain in the fucking ass? Jamie’d been worse, a lot worse—there was the time he’d gone missing for three days in the middle of laying drum tracks, running up the bill on the studio for no fucking reason. Or when he’d moved himself into their rehearsal space, a twenty-by-twenty room with no windows, and they had no idea he was living there until the building owner to let them know they were violating the rental agreement.
    Or the time he pawned his drum kit because a dealer he owed money to was going to “kill” him. He still owed them for buying it back for him.
    Dan wondered if he was getting too old for this. He was barely thirty. They’d been doing this ten years, the three of them. At some point it had to get better, right?
    He wrenched the spoon from Jamie’s hand.
    Jamie said, “What?”
    Ray wiped his hands on a napkin, dropped it on his plate, came out of his chair without a word. He ambled toward the doors, pulling a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket.
    Dan was wary of thinking Ray felt the same as he did. Whenever he