you live here?”
I shook my head no, then glanced at the building. “I work here,” I answered.
“Are you a roadie too?” he asked.
“I'm a musician,” I explained. “My band is practicing inside the studio.”
“Oh, cool,” he said, and this time he smiled. “I'm Dallas, by the way. You'll see my dad, Skully, moving equipment around. He’s the big guy with the shaved head and has a large tatt on his arm of a skull.”
“I'm Harrison Fletcher, but you can call me Fletch.”
“Well, Fletch, do you feel like sharing a joint with me while the sun sets, or does that sound too douchy to you?” he asked.
“Thanks for the offer, but I can't right now,” I answered. “I gotta get back inside and rehearse a while longer with my band. Keep me in mind for next time?”
“Yeah, sure. I'll be here every day until the trucks leave for Nevada. As soon as that happens, we'll all be traveling with the rigs to unpack everything once we get to the venue,” Dallas said.
“Do you know who Spumoni is?”
“Of course,” Dallas confirmed. “He's in charge of this entire operation, and he’s also my dad's boss.”
I held my hand up to block the sun to see him better. “If you see him around, could you tell him I'm looking for him?”
“Yeah, sure,”
“Sounds good,” I said and gave him a friendly wave. “I'll see you around then.”
Chapter Two
Over the next three days, I occasionally caught a glimpse of Dallas working in the building with the other roadies. He'd say hi as I passed him, but otherwise, we hadn't really talked. After rehearsal on Friday, my band wanted to grab something to eat and maybe shoot a few games of pool at a bar we frequented now and then. I wasn't much in the mood for that scene tonight and decided to go home and enjoy the rare silence in the apartment I shared with Mike, our drummer, instead.
I exited the rehearsal studio by the back door, and the identical image greeted me like the other day when I was talking to Dagger on the phone. Dallas was setting up what looked like pillows on the top of the same trailer. I knew he wasn't there to watch the sunset this time because that had already happened a few hours before I left the building.
I felt myself grinning as I walked over to the rig. “Hey, Dallas,” I yelled up to him. “How's it going?”
His head popped up over the edge of the metal roof. “Hey, Fletch.” Dallas’s smiling face greeted me. “Why aren't you shooting pool with your buddies?”
“How'd you know about that?” I asked him.
“Mike asked me if I wanted to go with them, but I wasn’t in the mood for a noisy bar.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“Feel like getting stoned?” He held up some kind of oddly shaped pipe.
I thought about his offer for a moment. There was no reason I needed to rush home. Mike would be out drinking for several more hours, so I could hang with Dallas for a bit and still have time alone at the apartment to work on some music.
“Yeah, okay. I can do that,” I agreed. “How do I get up there?”
“Great!” he cheered and then hurried to the very back of the rig. “You can use the stairs on the back of the trailer beside the door hinge.”
I walked between the trailers and came around the back of the one Dallas was perched atop, then hefted myself up onto the bottom rung of the ladder. I carefully scaled up, and then Dallas helped me swing myself onto the roof. It was like climbing into a treehouse from my youth.
“Welcome aboard,” he said with a light tap of his hand to the back of my shoulder. “It's not much, but I like it up here.”
“Does your father know this is where you hang out?”
“Yeah, it's kind of my thing,” he admitted. “Whenever he can't find me, he knows I'll be on top of a rig nearby. I never go far, and for some strange reason, being able to look down on things clears my head. I always feel better after spending a few hours in my nest.”
“Nest?” I laughed.
Dallas waved a hand around in a manner to highlight the arrangement of pillows and blankets he’d laid out on his rooftop patio, and it did, indeed, resemble a nest of sorts. Scattered about was a giant pillow that looked more like a beanbag chair, an opened sleeping bag spread