Page 72 of Lost
The barrel swung from Lysander’s face to Jack’s.
“Okay,” Lysander said quickly, holding up his hands in surrender. “I’m getting in.” He glanced at his friend. “Jack, get out of here.”
“Yeah,Jack. And take this with you.”
The man in the front passenger seat threw something onto the pavement, but Lysander didn’t have time to see what it was before he was being roughly shoved into the back of the car. Alfonzo followed, his gun far too close for comfort. Lysander’s heart raced; he had to fight hard not to panic.
He caught one last glimpse of Jack’s stricken expression before the tyres squealed and the car launched into motion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dakota’s song did not want to work for him.
This beat was too fast; that tune was too slow. It had seemed like a good idea to use a piano, as it had been the girl’s instrument of choice, but Zack couldn’t express himself with the keys the way he could with a guitar. Any lyrics he managed to write were cliché, or they just weren’thim. He had gone through the process of writing and scrapping so many times that he was giving himself a headache.
But he couldn’t afford to stop — the clock was ticking.
“Don’t try to force it,” were Pat’s words of wisdom whenever Zack complained about his predicament. “Just give it some time, and eventually it’ll flow.”
That was easy for the singer to say. Pat could write two songs to every one that the rest of them had to work tirelessly to pump out. And to add insult to injury, ninety percent of his lyrics were hits rather than misses. Zack would never admit it out loud, but sometimes the man made him feel incompetent. He knew Pat often felt the same way about him when it came to writing riffs.
That was why he had the singer with him now.
With Pat’s help, he reasoned, he should be able to write a masterpiece — but that was assuming he could come up with something for them to work with. Until then, all Pat could do was offer the occasional suggestion or words of encouragement. It was all that Zack would allow him to do. He wanted to at least get this started on his own.
He had never expected it to be so difficult.
Georgia kept insisting that he needed to take a break, and a big part of him knew she was right. But every time he tried he felt like a slacker, so in the end he and Pat resorted to calling the rest of the band over for an afternoon of light drinking and musical conversation, so that Zack could at leastfeellike he was doing something useful. Maybe he would talk to Brendan, he mused. Perhaps the guitarist could be of assistance here.
When Brendan, Chris and Aaron finally showed their faces, Georgia left the five of them in favour of the kitchen. While Zack was sorry to see his wife go, he was forever thankful that she always knew exactly what he needed — and right now that was the company of his band.
They broke out the beer and Zack listened to his friends chatter away while he nursed the bottle he didn’t much feel like drinking. It felt strange on a Monday afternoon when he was supposed to be working and he knew that Lysander would be home any minute, so he refrained. Drinking was for the weekend now.
Brendan wasn’t drinking anything either. It made Zack feel a little better about his lack of consumption.
“So things aren’t flowing for you.” Brendan shrugged off the problem as if it were nothing. “Take your time with it, man. Just because the fans might be expecting a song for Dakota on the next record, doesn’t mean you have to bust your balls to deliver. Release it in your own time. If you rush it, you’ll only end up regretting it.”
Zack knew this to be true, but it didn’t make him feel any better. It made him feel like more of a failure. First he had failed to find his daughter before it was too late, and now he was failing to get a song written for her in time to make it onto the next album. He could almost imagine her pouting at him from across the room. She looked like the sort of girl who would have pouted.
The front door burst open, and for a moment he wondered if she’d sent Lysander to pout at him in her place.
Zack turned, about to ask his son where the fire was before he realised that he was not looking at his son at all. Sweat glistened on Jack’s brow and there was a wild, fearful look in his eyes as they darted around. They sought Zack, and when they found him they went wide with relief.
“Jack?” Zack asked when the boy failed to speak. “What’s wrong?”
“Lysander,” the boy said quickly. He was still trying to catch his breath. “Three guys in a car. They took him!”
A dead silence fell over the house in which nobody moved, nobody spoke, and besides Jack nobody even seemed to breathe. The only thing Zack could see was Jack — the way the sweat ran down the side of his face, the way he trembled like a leaf, and the envelope that he held out for the man to take. Zack’s own name stared back at him from the front of it, hastily scrawled in blue.
“What is that?”
“They told me to take it. I think they wanted me to give it to you.”
Zack stood, practically ran the three steps he needed to reach Jack Avery, and snatched the envelope from him.
Pat and Brendan were on their feet in seconds. Brendan went to Zack’s side; Pat led Jack to a chair, telling the boy to breathe, to calm down, that everything was fine. Zack should have felt guilty that he was more concerned about the contents of the envelope than he was about his son’s friend, but he couldn’t change the way that he felt. He could apologise for that later.
“Sit,” Brendan advised. “Whatever it is, it’ll probably go over better if you’re sitting down.”
