Nine Lives stuck the needle into the bottle and pulled back the plunger.
Sarah laughing in the sun.
I wonder what makes pink-haired Sarah run?
Then came the chorus, with Erin, Martin, and Owen in a soaring three-part harmony: “Run, Sarah, run.”
“Run,” sang Quentin. “Pink-haired Sarah, run.”
She took a deep breath and held it as Nine Lives pulled back her sleeve to expose her shoulder.
“Run, Sarah, run,” sang the chorus.
Quentin sang, “Hon, what are you running from?”
Sarah leaped up from the seat, caught hold of the edge of the sunroof, and hauled herself through the small opening.
And braced herself as Fred made a sharp turn into the nearest parking lot.
“Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, realizing the futility of the exercise even as she did so. Of all the luck, they’d pulled over at a much-advertised strip club. It was probably an hourly occurrence here for a pink-haired woman in a low-cut shirt and an emerald necklace to scream for help out the open sunroof of a limo.
They had both her ankles, but she kicked violently and managed to grasp the side of the car. She was almost out.
Then, with one hard jerk from inside the limo, she bounced onto the seat beside Nine Lives again.
Goonie grabbed her, putting his full weight on her arms while Fred sat on one of her legs. She jammed the other high heel into an unknown part of Nine Lives and ground in. Not because this would help, but because she was pissed.
“Would you hold her?” Nine Lives yelped. One of his cat-eye contacts had fallen out. He turned his furious gaze on her: one cat eye, the other eye with the pupil blown out almost to the edge of his hazel iris. He sat on her, too, and felt around on the seat for the lost bottle.
“Don’t do it, man,” Goonie advised. “The concert is around the corner, and we need her conscious to get us past security.”
Everything is going to be okay, she recited Martin’s litany in her head. Everything is fine. I’m fine. Everything is okay. And then, Quentin’s words: It’s okay to ask for help.
“Pink-Haired Sarah” neared its end, and Quentin prepared to repeat the first verse. He signaled to Martin to signal to Erin to signal to Owen to change the lyrics, replacing run with come. He’d sung it this way for them in the album sessions, but Erin nixed this version because she thought Sarah would hate them for the dirty double entendre. It seemed appropriate now, and Quentin had nothing to lose. The crowd whooped its approval at the change as Quentin sang,
Sarah laughing in the sun.
I wonder what makes pink-haired Sarah come?
Come, pink-haired Sarah, come.
A limo with a smashed fender made its way slowly through security to park at one side of the stage. Quentin had thought all the professional wrestlers were in the audience already, but sometimes Mad “Red” Mud liked to be flamboyantly late.
They ended the song to the loudest applause of the night, which Quentin barely registered. Martin had predicted that “Pink-Haired Sarah” would win Quentin his first Grammy. But who cared, if the song’s eponym ran to another hemisphere to disentangle another codependent band? If she was really angry with him, she might do just that. She might instruct her office not to tell him where she’d gone.
In that case, he could fly to New York tomorrow and do some snooping. He already had an in with the lady in the Stargazer travel office. Or he could sweet-talk Wendy. Or have a man-to-man with Daniel.
Something thwacked him in the back of the head, and Owen’s drumstick rolled in front of Quentin’s toes. Owen kept a stash of extra drumsticks for this purpose. Quentin must have been daydreaming. “Martin wrote this next song,” Quentin said quickly, “ ‘Barefoot and Pregnant.’ You may notice that Erin is taking her shoes off.”
The audience moaned, and Erin grinned defiantly. She tossed one of her low-class high-heeled shoes into the crowd.
“We had to talk Erin into making the announcement,” Quentin went on, “because she hasn’t told her grandma out in Irondale. Sorry, Lillie Mae. And because Erin and Owen haven’t gotten married yet.”
Martin played the first few notes of the wedding march that launched “Barefoot and Pregnant.” These were easy lyrics and it was an easy bass line, so Quentin could think ahead while he went through the motions. At the end of the song, which slowly devolved into a long fiddle solo, Mad “Red” Mud would jump up onstage, grab the mike from Quentin, and holler that Erin was pregnant with his baby. The other professional wrestlers would follow him onstage and start the fake fight extravaganza.
Erin, Owen, and Martin were concerned about the extravaganza. Really there wasn’t anything fake about it. They would have to punch each other hard because they hadn’t rehearsed it. But Quentin had insisted on this. It was bad enough that they had to warn security not to intervene. If they practiced with the wrestlers, too, the plan would definitely leak to the press. Besides, the fake fight couldn’t look fake. To avoid the fray, Erin would climb up on one of the enormous speakers and play her version of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while the fireworks started.
And then, as soon as the cameras turned off and Quentin could extricate himself from the tussle, he would see about that flight to New York.
Or not. Just as he stepped back in feigned surprise to let Mad “Red” Mud take the mike, Sarah climbed the stairs to stand behind the speakers at the side of the stage. Thank God!
With Nine Lives. And two enormous goons.
Quentin lifted off his guitar strap and swung the guitar behind his head to use as a weapon. And then stopped short as Nine Lives motioned to the syringe stuck in Sarah’s shoulder, plunger out.
Oh God. What was that maniac doing to her?
Someone tackled Quentin from the back. Quentin landed heavily on his ribs. The guitar went flying. He struggled to stand and make it over to Sarah, but a wrestler jerked him into the fight center stage.
“Would you stop a minute?” he yelled to Red. “There’s a—”
Red socked Quentin in the jaw, and Quentin reeled back toward Sarah. The two goons were coming for him.
Then one of the goons skidded back into a speaker. Owen had fallen into him.
“Owen!” Quentin said, bending over him. “Help me! There’s a—”
The goon was up, and he had Quentin by the shirt. Then a wrestler punched Quentin in the gut, and punched the goon hard enough in the head that the goon went down, on top of Quentin.