Page 115 of Hard Count
Vivienne softened, “Go for it.”
Piper locked his eyes on the giant Baccarat crystal vase in the entryway. He picked up the fifty pound vase and smashed it on the marble floor.
“I need Tank, Viv.”
“I will give him a call.”
He sat on the kitchen stool after she left, staring at the floor.
He did not eat anything.
He got up and went to the window that faced the hills, and he stood there, hands in the pockets of his hoodie and watched the light change over the ridge.
Piper opened Donna’s text. It looked different now that he knew what she was going through. Jayson owned them both.
He walked back to the large marble entryway. He picked up the other Baccarat vase, the larger one, and smashed it on the floor and screamed, “FUCK!”
Chapter Forty-One: Los Angeles
The photographs went up three hours after Vivienne left.
Piper was eating a bowl of yogurt, shattered crystal littering the marble floor of his entryway, when Vivienne called.
“It’s up.”
“Where?”
“Riley’s Patreon.”
“Okay.”
“Tank is fifteen minutes out. He’s staying with you tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t open the front gate. Don’t look out the window. Don’t answer any number you don’t recognize. If the landline rings, which it’s going to, don’t pick it up. I’m on my way.”
“Okay. I have a landline?”
“Piper, please stay funny in times of fucking chaos, always.”
Piper hung up first as he calibrated the anxiety surging through his body.
By seven, the first news van was on the street.
By seven-fifteen there were three. By seven-thirty the TMZ live stream was up, and a cameraman was standing on the sidewalk across from the gate with a ring light on his rig and was narrating, loudly, to an audience.
Piper had closed every blind in the house. He had turned off every interior light except the one in the kitchen. He was sitting on the couch in the living room with the television off and a glass of Chardonnay on the coffee table, and his phone face-down on his thigh.
The street outside had a sound it didn’t usually have. The hum of running engines that did not belong to people who lived there. The intermittent click of a long lens. Piper had spent mostof his entire adult life on show, but this was different. This was an ambush.
Tank came through the side gate, and through the side door off the kitchen. Tank walked toward Piper holding a grocery bag with a look that said everything was going to be okay. Piper’s eyes started to fill with tears.
“Dude, I am all cried out,” Piper said as he wrapped his arms around Tank.
“Fuck dude, we need to get you together. You eat?” Tank laughed.
“Yogurt.”
