“Lack of money and desperation,” Glen filled in.
“That’s probably it. Our first record was a lot of Auto-Tune, you know.”
Glen snorted. “Yeah—my buddy called it Auto-Tune and cheekbones. And I laughed, you know—’cause you and the four other guys on the cover, you gotta admit….”
“We look like we don’t have a brain in our pretty little heads,” Cash said, admitting it freely. “Well, that’s the package. Sincerity without substance. And a nice hook.”
“You wrote the lyrics yourself,” Glen told him. He wanted the boy to know he wasn’t fooled.
Glen may not have been fooled, but Cash was definitely surprised. “You saw that?”
“Yup—you got songwriting credits on the entire album—sometimes, words and music, sometimes one of each. Was that bullshit?”
“No!” Cash’s voice rose, and Glen shushed him. They could hear voices outside. Not close, but still. No reason to blow their presence now. “No,” Cash whispered, more quietly this time. “I had a hand in every damned song.”
“Then that album meant something to you besides a meal ticket,” Glen said, voice steady. “Why’d you go ghost on Clive?”
Clive had run the tower for more missions than Glen or Damie could count. When he’d retired to go do the agent thing, using up his grandmother’s inheritance to launch himself, Damien and Glen had made a lot of jokes about how they were about to become twin stains on the tarmac. Clive had been a steady voice on the intercom, guiding them in for too many years for them to not miss him when he left.
“I….” Cash’s “I got this” faded from his voice, and his shoulders slumped again. “I… I let someone down.”
Glen grunted. At this kid’s age, that could mean anything from “I slept with the wrong guy,” to “I set the world on fire just to watch it burn.” “You are going to have to be just a mite more specific than that,” he said grimly.
Cash leaned his cheek on his knees. “Have you ever had a friend you’d do anything for?” he asked.
Glen grunted, thinking about Damien back home, closed off and sad and afraid. He’d used to keep up with Glen, snark for snark and with a hero’s strut, but after a helicopter crash that was not his goddamned fault and a bunch of surgeries that scared Glen just thinking about them, Damien was struggling to find his own way.
It hurt Glen to watch him do it. Glen would die for Damien Ward, but he wasn’t sure how to bring him back to life.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Cash said softly.
“Business partner,” Glen said briefly. “Knew him since flight school. Lots of saved bacon between us.”
“Has he ever been in trouble?”
Glen laughed shortly, thinking about being part of a rescue party that located helicopter wreckage at the base of a cliff. Damien and his passengers had gotten out before the thing had fallen off the ridge, but Glen hadn’t known that as his brother had brought the dogs close to the wreckage, looking for bodies because nobody could have survived that fall.
Worst moment of his life, waiting for Preston’s dogs to mark bodies. But then, Preston had been in love with Damien since Glen had brought him home when they were both cadets—hadn’t been a picnic for him either.
“Stories I could tell,” he said, voice gruff and tight. “Your friend get in trouble?”
“Drugs,” Cash murmured. “They were everywhere. I used some but never got a taste like she did.” He shuddered. “It got… bad.”
Glen had seen bad. Guys he’d grown up with, including his first lay. Glen hadn’t been in love with the guy, but seeing him go from a fun kid to a junkie with brown teeth had hurt.
“Rehab bad?” Glen knew the answer to this one. Clive had told him.
“Yeah.” Cash rested, searched his face, and Glen wasn’t sure what was there—he wasn’t known for being cuddly—but something must have reassured him. “I went too. I’d like to say it was just for company, but truth was, I needed to get my shit together. Doing blow ’cause you’re bored is no way to live.”
“And a good way to run through your profits,” Glen agreed, not judging. Nothing to judge, really. When Glen had been young and stupid, he’d had the Air Force and Damien. This kid had the record business. Glen couldn’t say he would have made better choices; he was pretty sure his would have been worse.
“That too,” Cash acknowledged.
They were quiet for a moment, and the voices they’d heard earlier faded into the night.
“How much you got left?” Glen asked softly. Being back against the wall financially could make a man desperate—witness the poker game that night.
“In the bank?” Cash’s mouth pulled up at the corners. “Plenty. But….” He grimaced. “It will sound paranoid to you. The whole story is… is really James Bond.”
An hour ago, Glen would have guessed that he’d been ready for nothing more than a beer and bed—but now, this kid’s shadowed, troubled eyes shiny in the dark, his low tenor voice soothing Glen’s rough edges, he could say this with a whole heart.
“Go ahead, kid, I’ve got nothing but time.”
What followed was a tumble of a story.
Cash and his friend Brielle had signed up for rehab—Jalisco had some good ones, and Cash’s mother had money. Brielle had been struggling, though. They had enough friends and Cash had enough fame to make keeping temptation away problematic, to say the least.
Brielle may have had a taste for candy, but she was, as far as Glen could tell, the only one in Cash’s entire life who he could talk to. She’d been the one to tell him to audition for Clive, the one who had encouraged his music in school and through college, and the one to tell him to insist on some creative control. But listening to Cash’s narrative, Glen could hear the yearning in her, the wish for someone, anyone, to help her find peace with herself.
At the end of the band’s first tour, Cash had gotten back to his hotel room to find it trashed, a naked, confused Brielle weeping in the center of it.
In spite of Cash’s protest that he needed “to get his shit together,” according to Glen’s intel everybody had known it was for the girl. His friend had needed him, and he wouldn’t bail.
But she wasn’t ready after the first twenty-eight days, so Cash had gone looking for something out of the way, secluded, where nobody was going to bring cocaine by with your good-luck teddy bear. He’d found a little place outside of Agujero en la Roca called Tranquilo Paz—and Cash, who spoke fluent Spanish, thought that sounded good. Tranquil Peace. Perfect.
“We didn’t realize until we got there that that was the name of the guy,” Cash muttered. “He called himself Tranquilo Paz, and he… he said everything was voluntary. But then he’d set it up so we didn’t eat, or didn’t sleep, or didn’t even take a piss unless we’d earned enough ‘trust’ as he called it. I spent a week there—and he was canny. He did it slowly. First it was ‘Say please, my children.’ Then it was ‘You’re so beautiful, you can live without for just another hour.’ And then it was ‘You filthy whore—how dare you disobey me by fainting?’”