Page 21 of Echoes of a Muted Song

“Glad you both know how to handle yourselves, but you let my crew do that for you from now on.”

“I’m more than good with that; it’s why I brought you on.”

“All right then, I’m going to have to give some more thought to who is going to guard Keegan,” Sully said as our steaks arrived. “Now let’s dig inbefore this scrumptious feast gets cold.”

“Hallelujah and Amen,” Mickey said as he snatched up his knife and fork and began carving off a piece that he immediately swirled through his smashed potatoes.

Across the table I saw Sully do the same and wondered if they’d noticed yet or if they were both too busy digging into steaks that smelled like a slice of heaven?

Oh yeah, it was gonna be fun watching them figure it out, and if Mickey needed someone to talk to, then I’d make sure he knew he could come to me. We’d all sacrificed a lot in terms of relationships and love while we chased our dreams. It would be nice to sit back and see us all succeed in that department too, and figure out what our own little slice of forever was supposed to look like, even if we had to cobble it together one broken, damaged chunk at a time.

Chapter 13

(Johnny)

In the crack of a gavel bang I found myself being led out of the courtroom, not in cuffs through the back door, escorted by an armed guard, but down the center aisle, past openly sobbing members of the McCall family who were beyond pissed at the judge for granting bail again. I was just stunned that my lawyer had been spot on about the way the judge would lean if I presented myself before the court and followed him in stunned silence.

“W-what just happened?” I asked once we were safely in the SUV.

“You kept your freedom, at least for now,” Mr. Sousa, Oscar he’d told me to call him multiple times before I’d finally manage it, told me as he drove. “I hope we can make that a permanent condition now that you’ve agreed to let me offer a reward for new information.”

“I still don’t like it, but it doesn’t matter whatI like anymore. I have more than just myself to think about,” I said.

“I don’t like it any more than you do, Johnny, but what I would like even less is you sitting behind bars for shit you didn’t do,” Oscar said.

“But what the judge said today, to the prosecutor, that means he was on my side, too, right?” I asked.

“It does, but he’s not a trial judge. You won’t be going in front of him next month,” Oscar explained.

“But he believed me.”

“He believes that you are not a flight risk, in part because you appeared before a warrant could be issued to bring you back, but also because we agreed to provide the prosecutor’s office with a detailed tour schedule and assured them that none of our shows were slated to take place outside of the country.”

It was a good thing I’d gotten a look at the tour schedule, or at least what there had been of it, before Draven and I had left Palm Springs. He’d been steadily working on it for months, adding bookings, leaving gaps to give us days off and wiggle room in our travel schedule. He wasn’t planning on us crisscrossing the country, either. That shit pissed everyone off and left tempers frayed by the end of the long stretches. He planned for us to work our way across the country by hitting the states that held our biggest fan bases. I loved that idea, and gettingour fan clubs involved. He was issuing VIP tickets to fan club members and in turn, they’d already started getting involved in spreading the word about upcoming shows. It was marketing brilliance at a grassroots level, and I got to go back and be a part of that, at least for a little while.

“Look, Johnny, your story has never changed, and we’ve got accident recreation footage compiled by three independent companies that shows that your description of the events is the most likely scenario that took place that night.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the prosecutor won’t show up with recreations of his own to show other ways it could have happened, without the vehicle that I keep telling everyone was there.”

“But they have Rebel’s statement, too.”

“Which is tainted by the results of the breathalyzer and his blood alcohol level at the time they drew it, which was still well over the legal limit an hour after the accident took place, you know this. It’s admissible and I intend to use it, but the prosecutor won’t have to work to poke holes in it. The evidence is right in the report.”

“Shouldn’t that tell them something, since it also states in the report that it was his car?”

“It tells them what we all know and what no one is disputing,” Oscar said. “That you were behind the wheel and that you were sober. You blew clean on the breathalyzer and your bloodalcohol level was 0.0. If this had been a case of impaired driving, you can bet that no judge in the city would have freed you on this second bond.”

“And yet they’re still trying to pin this shit on me.”

“Two people died,” Oscar said. “Families need someone to blame, and the authorities want to wrap up the case so all the noise dies down. They have a heavy metal musician, a classic muscle car, and a patch of ice that wasn’t big enough to cause that wreck unless the vehicle was traveling at a speed that exceeded the posted limit by a great deal. At the speed you say you were driving, my forensic reenactments will show the events unfolding the way you say they did. But their theory has always been that there wasn’t a second car or the van that you described as being in the left lane. Mrs. McCall claims to have only seen one set of headlights behind them and that they were weaving all over the road.”

“Because they were, but that wasn’t me doing all the weaving. That’s the car I told them about, the one that whipped around me, cut me off and caused me to lose control in the first place. The only reason we’re not talking about a different wreck is because I turned the wheel when I realized that spinning into the median grass would have sent Rebel’s car into the van that was driving past first. I should have just hit the fuckin’ thing. Rebel and I would probably stillbe in the hospital, if we’d survived the wreck. It was one of those old school box vans carpenters and repair guys use. My uncle had one. It got hit by a dump truck one morning and the damn thing still started and got him to work. They’re indestructible. That’s why I swerved. I saw that van and knew it would hurt like a son of a bitch if we hit it. The grass was right there on the other side of it. If I’d hit it, we’d have both gone off the road into the median and no one would have gotten hurt but us. The guy in the van would have been fine. He’d have just slid to a stop at the bottom and everyone else would have been safe. The McCalls would be alive, their kids wouldn’t be orphans, and we wouldn’t be about to offer a reward to the guy whose night I chose not to completely fuck up by hitting him. That patch of ice never would have been a factor, either, because I wouldn’t have been anywhere near it.”

“And you will have the chance to tell them that in court next month,” Oscar said. “If there is a trial. Let’s see what offering that reward turns up, but Johnny, I really need you to think about holding a press conference and telling the world what you just told me. Money talks, but so do emotions. It might not have occurred to the guy in the van that him getting to drive away unscathed that night is because you made the choice to cut the wheel in a different direction. Maybe he holds the same level of confidence you do about the sturdiness of the vehicle hewas driving and brushes the whole thing off, or maybe he starts thinking about his own mortality and Mr. and Mrs. McCall. Maybe he’s got kids, a family that gets him thinking about what would happen to them if he was gone. Maybe he’s had it happen or knows someone who has. Maybe he’s struggled because of it or watched people he cared about struggle. Maybe he’s seen them work two jobs and drag themselves through the door tired, with aching feet, to still pull together a meal for their kids. Who’s going to want that for their family?”

“Damn, dude, you’re scary sometimes,” I said, turning to look at him. “Did they teach you all that psychological shit in law school?”

“No, my mama taught that to me every day after my old man was killed in a construction site accident,” Oscar said. “I got to watch as one by one his well-meaning friends stopped coming by to check on her and those neighbors who’d been helping with food and other stuff we needed had to turn their attention back to their own families and other neighbors in crisis. I watched her pick up the pieces and carry on, be mother and father and bring in both incomes. But she would never have had to do that if any of the guys on my old man’s crew had come forward to speak about the unsafe work conditions they were forced to endure each day. People need to stop turning a blind eye to things that they know are wrong.”

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