Jazz Funeral

must have. Tyrone was looking for her.” He pointed. “She could have gone to the trailer.”
    But she wasn’t there and there was no evidence she had been. She could simply have slipped away, via the backstage barricade opening, and then left the fairgrounds. It would have been easy from here.
    And then she could have gotten a taxi or one of the shuttles that ran between the fairgrounds and other places.
    But where would she head? Skip had to wait till the end of the damn song to ask the Boucrees.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
    Melody took a bus to the Jax Brewery, one of the shuttles, and then walked to the hotel, cursing herself for forgetting a change of clothes. She was dying in the caftan. And she was so high from the performance and the hash that she could barely remember why she’d left the stage. That the end of the road had come. Suddenly she didn’t feel even slightly suicidal.
    She felt hot, restless; eager to get the makeup off and get into some shorts. In seven minutes flat she was dressed, white, but still black-haired. She’d put the wig in a ponytail. She planned to sneak out without paying the bill, and after that she wasn’t sure what to do—just get away to think, that was the extent of her plan.
    Was there, finally, a way she could work this out? That she could go back home to her mom and dad and be safe? She didn’t think so. She thought she’d probably end up in jail. If she got lucky.
    But she had to think. Maybe she’d overlooked something. She’d never experienced anything like the rush she got on that stage, and it just killed her that she’d had to bug out. Life seemed suddenly worth living.
    She bounded down the stairs, still riding the crest of the high, and heard a familiar voice. She stopped dead. The person she least wanted to see was talking to the desk clerk, undoubtedly asking for her.
    Melody cursed herself. It would have been so easy. Someone could have watched her leave, seen her board the bus, and then it would have been a simple matter of going to the Jax Brewery to wait for it. Or if the bus got there first, as it obviously had, to prowl the streets looking for the only woman for miles in an African caftan. The only reason Melody had got this far had to be that her tracker had guessed wrong, thought she’d turn downtown, and had searched there first. After that, all you’d have to do was try the other way, asking bums, anybody who looked like they’d been there awhile, if they’d seen the spectacle Melody had made of herself.
    Oh, dumb, dumb, dumb! I could just kill myself!
    She eased up the steps and out of sight. She’d registered as Janis Frank, which would probably mean nothing to anyone else, and anyway, the hotel probably wouldn’t give out her room number. Still, she was a minor … there might be ways to pressure them. Or bribes.
    She looked for a back way. There were only stairs that led to a basement, a filthy sweltering hellhole with lots of nasty scraping noises; rat sounds.
    She hid in a barrel of heavy cardboard, and as she huddled in the hot, filthy dark, the hash turned on her. Each scrape of a rat’s toe seemed like doom, her killer come to drag her off to her fate. The heat was so oppressive she couldn’t breathe. She’d be dead soon.
    But she hadn’t meant to go this way. Her body would be found stuffed in a stupid barrel in a fetid basement, and it wasn’t fair, she could sing! She’d proved that today.
    It could have been the start of a great career. Should have been. But she was going to die here; of suffocation, if the killer didn’t get her first.
    A sob escaped and a new wave of panic swept over her. She couldn’t stay where she was. She’d been crazy to think she could hide here. She was overcome with a desperate need to get out of the barrel, to breathe some air. She was like an animal caught in a trap. But getting in the barrel had been a lot easier than getting out was going to be. She’d pulled a wooden box up to it and stepped on it. To get out she had to raise a leg practically over her head and then step down, hoping to reach the box. She was sweating gallons.
    She missed the box. And came crashing to the floor, barrel and all, hitting her head on the box. The pain was excruciating. Yet not nearly so bad, she thought, as the noise, which reverberated like an explosion.
    She tried to sit up, heart threatening to rip her ribs out, and the last thing she remembered was the sensation of slipping, her mind slipping, her soul,