38. The Homeward Slide
NICKY
Ian was obsessed with the boxes of merchandise Bruce gave away to the press. It got a little silly, I thought.
“Look,” he hissed to me in Minneapolis. “Your code is back.”
“I’m sorry?” Sheree hadn’t made it to the VIP suite yet—she took the world’s quickest shower before she met her fans—and I only needed to make sure the press had whatever they needed.
“Your inventory code. It’s on the merch box.”
“So?”
“It wasn’t in Calgary. Archer, Mal, c’mere.”
He infected his bandmates with his insanity. “We need to get into the merch storeroom,” Mal announced. “See if all the boxes have Nicky’s code or not.”
“Why?” I asked, exasperated. “What difference will it make?”
But they wouldn’t listen. They decided Archer had the very best chance of charming someone in the merch booth to get into the storeroom.
“Guys, I don’t know what you’re doing, but Bianca is going to be right there. Don’t be crazy!” Their plotting made me nervous. I wanted nothing to do with merchandise. If it was going missing, I wanted to be miles away from that.
But even Ian wouldn’t listen. “Go on, Arch. See what you can do.”
“Consider me Bond—James Bond.” He winked, devastatingly handsome, and strode from the suite gracefully.
“I’m doomed,” I grumbled.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Mal put his brotherly arm around me. “Arch won’t get caught. If he does, we’ll disavow all knowledge of his presence.”
“Mal, please don’t tease me about this.”
Archer didn’t return until we all met up at the bus, but he came equipped with the knowledge that none of the boxes in the storeroom had my inventory code on them.
“That means nothing, guys, I’m telling you. They order new merchandise when we sell out. I haven’t been in the storeroom to mark boxes for . . . seven shows. That’s a lot of merch.”
“Yeah, but none of the boxes? You’re sure none of them were marked?” Ian focused on Archer closely.
“Well, I didn’t see for myself, but my new best girl Rachel checked for me. Look for yourself.” He showed us a photo on his phone of a storeroom packed to the gills with boxes. I recognized the few odd-sized boxes that had driven me wild when I was working merch but saw none of my marks. “Remind me to send her a signed hoodie,” Archer added with a pleased smile.
“Did Bianca give you any grief?”
“Nah. I sat on the counter and signed autographs for people. If we get a silver-ink pen, I can sign our black hoodies next time.”
“I’ll get one for you for the Chicago concerts,” I said absently. At least Bianca wouldn’t connect me with Archer signing passing breasts.
But when we got to Chicago, Archer hadn’t been at the merch booth for half an hour when he reappeared in the VIP suite. He grabbed Ian and Mal, and the three of them huddled over Archer’s phone. Their air of excitement was maddening to me, stuck as I was at Sheree’s side taking photos, receiving gifts, and handing over programs opened to the right page for autographs.
It wasn’t until the evening’s meet-and-greet was winding down that I could grab Ian. “What happened?”
“Look.” He showed me a photo of a storeroom.
And most of the boxes had my inventory marks on them.
The fuck?
I looked up at him, confused. He nodded and ran a warm hand down my back. “Wait until we’re back on the bus. I have an idea.”
The end moments took forever, but at last, the final guest departed and we all walked back to our buses.
Ian sat us at the kitchen table to make his presentation as Ken began our next leg of the trip.
“Okay. For a tour this big, where we often play two cities over two nights, you can’t just have one set of instruments. Everyone needs two guitars or two basses or two drum kits.”
“You do?” I asked.
He paused in his recitation and looked at me. “You never noticed that I play a red Fender at some gigs and a sunburst Gibson at the others?”
“You do?” I repeated.
He shook his head in despair. Archer laughed at me, and Mal patted my head. “It’s okay, honey. Not everyone pays attention to the important stuff.”
I shrugged him off and turned back to Ian. “Go on.”
“Everything that goes onstage is called front of line. And whenever we arrive at a stadium, we pretty much leave the bus and go up to the stage, right? Where our instruments are waiting for us. Mal’s drums are set up. Sheree’s keyboards are already in place. The only way to have everything set up—hell, to have the stage itself built—is to have two front of lines that leapfrog each other on the tour. Every other city, I play the Fender. The next place, I play the Gibson. Got it?”
My mind was racing. “You think they’re doing the same thing with the merch. There are two trucks, not one. And since I was in the merch room every other concert, I inventoried half the supplies and never came near the second allotment.”
Ian held his hands out in exasperation. I’d ruined his Big Reveal. “Well, yeah. That’s what I think.”
I got up to pace, agitated. “I should have thought of that. At the end of the night, we reconcile the merch—what was sold, what’s still in the storeroom, how much the stadium gets paid, how much the tour gets paid. And when we walk to the buses in the middle of the night, the merch is still in the storeroom.”
It was like a jigsaw puzzle when I thought I’d been doing a crossword.
“But when we arrive at the next stop . . .” Archer prompted me.
I turned back. “When we arrive at the next stop, the merch has already been unloaded, checked in, and stacked in the storeroom. So unless they had a space-time portal or something, how did the same merch get to the stadium faster than we did?”
I was an idiot. I’d seen one set of boxes and assumed that was the only set of boxes.
“But how does that make a difference?” Mal asked. “Two sets of merch means . . . what?”
It seemed so clear to me. I sat down at the table again. “Okay. Let’s say you’re Bianca.”
“Let’s,” Mal said agreeably. “I crave human blood.”
“And extremely dramatic eye makeup,” Archer added.
I appreciated their humor but was caught up in my thoughts. “You’re Bianca. You’ve got a scheme to steal merchandise. I don’t know how—maybe you have an ally or something. But you set aside a box or two every time you’re in the merch booth. Once someone realizes that they’re hemorrhaging black, size-large Sheree T-shirts, all you have to do is switch the counts in the inventory and say that everything that came in on Truck A was actually sold at the Truck B venues.” I looked up, horrified. “Instead of my spot-on counts, she could blame every loss on the little intern. Me.”
I felt like a fool. Like a victim. Like I wanted to crawl under the table with Charlotte and refuse to come out.
Ian put his arm around me, and I buried my head in his chest. “So it’s Bianca,” he said.
“I guess.” I nodded, no longer caring as much about who it was as I did about my being used.
“So . . . we beat her up?” Mal asked hopefully.
“No way.” Archer put a warm hand on my shoulder. “We catch her in the act.”
I sat up. “How?”
We eyed each other and then shrugged. “Does James Bond have to do everything?” Archer asked, which made me laugh.
“We’ve got Pittsburgh, Montreal, and Washington before we finish up with the New York City concerts,” Mal said. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Thanks, guys.” I turned to look at Ian. “How did you ever figure this out?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Those merch boxes bothered me. They still do. I never see any of the press getting those T-shirts or whatever. I’m going to watch them more closely next time.”
“Okay,” Mal said. “I’ll help.”
“I don’t have to sweet-talk any more merch girls? I have this cool pen now.” Archer waggled his silver pen at us. “It’s fun to sign for people who can’t afford thousand-dollar tickets.”
Mal chucked him on the shoulder. “I think Ian and I can cover surveillance on one box. You do you, boo-boo.”
“Aww,” Archer cooed. “Thanks, honey!”
In Pittsburgh, Ian used Charlotte to excuse why he had to keep moving around the room and not get tied into a conversation—but when Charlotte actually needed a walk, he had to leave Mal in charge of the stakeout.
“Guy in a FedEx uniform picked up the box toward the end of the night,” Mal reported, his eyes shining. “Bianca’s mailing things to herself!”
“Shit,” Archer mused. “That’s actually kind of clever!”
“Yeah,” I said. “But why doesn’t Bruce notice? Every concert, he has me put a large box of merch on that desk. Doesn’t he wonder where it goes? He certainly knows I’m not distributing it.”
“So Bruce is in on it too?” Ian asked.
“Let’s beat them both up!” Mal flexed his biceps impressively, showing us large drummer-sized hands.
Ian bumped fists with him. “We’ve got a lot going on but not a lot of clarity. Let’s keep watching.”
The same thing happened after the Montreal concert: a FedEx worker picked up the merch box and walked out of the VIP suite. The only difference was that Mal swatted at Ian, and they both took off running. I had to wait until we were back at the bus to hear why.
“It was the same guy!” Mal announced. “Not just any FedEx guy—it was the same weasel-faced guy who picked up the box in Pittsburgh. Unless he just happened to transfer to a new city several hundred miles away, he’s not a FedEx guy. He’s an accomplice in a FedEx uniform.”
Now, that was interesting. “What happened when you chased him?”
Ian and Mal looked downhearted. “We lost him. He got into the elevators just as the doors closed, and we had to find the stairs. We did our best, but these stadiums have about six thousand exits. We never saw him again.” Mal looked down, frowning at their failure.
“And I guess I don’t have to tell you that we didn’t see an idling FedEx truck anywhere,” Ian said.
“It’s a clever idea,” Archer said thoughtfully. “You can get anywhere in a FedEx uniform. Even Fist would let that guy in without a pass.”
Shit. That sounded like a possible security risk. I called Fist immediately and put him on speakerphone.
“Hey, it’s Darling Nicky!” (Fist had been going through a Prince phase ever since we played Minneapolis.) “How you doing, sweet thing?”
“Fist, did you let a FedEx guy into the VIP suite tonight?”
“Sure did. They come and go all the time.”
I looked at Ian. He nodded. “Fist,” he said, “is it always the same guy?”
Fist paused. “Nah, I’d have noticed. I mean, I think . . . well, they’re mostly little guys . . . shit. What are you saying?”
Ian looked back to me. I gulped and went on. “If someone who wasn’t a FedEx guy wanted to get into the suite, would buying a FedEx uniform do it?”
“Fuck me.” Fist was silent, and we let him think it out. “I need to talk to Emmett. Do you have reason to suspect something?”
Archer nodded at me. Ian took my hand. “We think,” I said, “that it might be part of why so much merchandise has gone missing.”
“Fuck me. Fuck me raw. Thanks, Nicky. I gotta go.”
After I hung up, I surveyed the guys. Tension. Hope. Excitement.
“God,” I said. “I hope we did the right thing.”
“We did,” Ian said. “And we’ll see what happens to that box of merchandise after the concert in D.C.”
Of course, none of us knew then that I wasn’t going to be at the Washington concert.