Chapter 21: Anita's Crowd

"Good morning Tony," BJ said as he walked down to the dock.

"Morning BJ, come on aboard. Got a pot of fresh coffee, want a cup?"

"Wouldn't turn one down, just black is fine."

Tony started to get up but Anita called from below, "I heard that, I'll get it. Good Morning BJ!"

In only a minute she appeared from below with a fresh cup and the pot to refill Tony's. "I was just fixing to make breakfast BJ, would you like to stay?"

"Why sure Anita, that would be nice. We don't keep breakfast things here but we make some nice stacked sandwiches for lunch, my treat later on."

"Sounds great, be about ten minutes," Anita replied.

"Cute kid, talented too," BJ said and then thought for a minute. "You two aren't just a couple of kids that washed up here are you?"

Tony laughed. "No, not exactly. We're running away from home actually. Mom said it was OK as long as we were back in time for school Monday."

"Hehe, and the music?"

"Well one thing's for certain. If you live in our house there will be music, and not the kind that plays on the radio. Anita's only been playing guitar for about six months, but she has three different teachers and she enjoys playing. Obviously she loves a stage, so she works hard at it."

BJ gave him an odd look as if something didn't make sense.

"Oh, Anita was adopted, she's only been with us six months or so but that doesn't matter. She was part of the family even before that it seems."

"What I heard wasn't just some kids playing in the garage Tony."

"Yeah," Tony said. "There's seven of us in a band in Savannah. We did our last gig as a cover band on New Years. We're going into a studio next week to record our first album."

BJ looked at Tony. "Wow, that good huh?"

"Yeah, it's a good group. Those guys last night thought I was some kind of guitar god, but I promise you my friend Dewayne, our lead guitarist, puts me to shame. Here, listen to this." Tony went below and popped a tape into the sound system, then came back out on deck. Gwen taped every show and they kept the best ones for themselves.

"This is kind of a mix, some covers and some new stuff we're going to record," he said when he sat back down.

"Man I can tell already your drummer has me beat by a mile. Everyone in the band as young as you two?"

"Nah, young though. Anita's the youngest by a lot. She rehearses with us all the time, but she doesn't get to actually play on stage that often. Mom normally won't let her go on club gigs with us. The girls you hear on this tape are one of my other sisters, Tina, and the other I think is still my girlfriend, Rebecca; they're sixteen. All the guys are seventeen or eighteen now."

"Now who is that?" BJ asked as Last Regrets started up. It was the power ballad for Rebecca.

"Our secret weapon. Rebecca Harris. Like nothing that anyone's really heard before. She's something special, no doubt."

"I'll say, and you have a fiddle, ah violin player too?"

"Secret weapon number two. My little sister Tina. Let me see. I think on the album she'll have to lay down tracks for guitar, keyboards, sax, violin, and flute. She can't just play all that, she's really, really good at all of them as well."

"Impressive. And damn there is some serious blues influence in that guitar playing, your friend?"

"Yep, my best friend. Too bad in this day and age the first thing people notice is he's black. You'd think we were beyond that by now. He just does things on that guitar that baffle the rest of us. He makes me squirm for a few weeks then he shows me what he's doing."

"So what you youngsters gonna do today? Wouldn't bother me if you wanted to stay another night. On Friday nights people tend to wander in and out. Didn't nobody leave last night. It was pretty good for the till if you know what I mean."

About then Anita arrived with a tray holding three plates of bacon, eggs, grits, and toast and began setting a place down in front of each of them. "What do you think little one? BJ's invited us back for a repeat performance. Want to play some more tonight?"

"Can we? I had fun last night. I kind of like playing with different people and just jumping in with songs you've never played before," she replied with a big grin on her face. "Then it was kind of fun seeing if they could keep up with us."

"Yeah," Tony said. "It's probably the purest form of music. Just throw a bunch of musicians together and see what comes out of it. It's always a lot of fun no matter how it sounds."

"Sounded damned good to me," BJ said.

"Alright, we'll stay then. I'll trade you docking fees for a bit of music. Fair deal?"

"Sounds like I'm getting the best end of it." BJ replied.

Tony chuckled. "Maybe, but you've never taken a boat this size into a marina and had to pay the fees just to tie her up, it gets pretty expensive."

"Well I'll get the word out that you'll be back, should have a good house tonight. It's hard to break even in the winter like this."

Anita and Tony spent a fairly lazy day. Tony just had a compulsion to play music and was constantly playing something on one of his guitars. Anita was content to let it be background music to the book she was reading for school. Things were getting pretty interesting for the Jewish girl.

Around six they changed clothes and started taking their instruments back up to the restaurant. BJ's was not fancy, but the fresh seafood was delicious and there was plenty of it.

After bringing in the instruments and taking them to the stage they went in search of BJ to see if he was ready to play. They found him in the kitchen.

"You two go ahead, a few others will be around in a bit. I gotta finish up here in the kitchen."

Anita and Tony were just starting Endless Love when she walked in the front door. A small smile appeared on her face as she took in the scene of Anita and Tony playing together in the tavern in front of nearly a hundred people. She stood transfixed as he sang his half of the duet straight to her. Then she took off at a very dangerous dead run.

Tony just managed to get up from the piano before Rebecca slammed into him and hung on for dear life. He wrapped his arms around her and picked her up off her feet to plant a kiss on her lips. The audience, of course, had no idea what was going on.

Anita, never one to spare a quip for Rebecca, said into her mike, "She can't stay away from him for twenty-four hours. You can get down now Becs, he's not going anywhere."

"She's not the only one," Tina said from the door. "You two do know you missed practice this morning right?" She was followed in by Riley, Dewayne, Kyle, Jerry, Cheri, and even Matt.

"Oookayy," Anita said into the mike. Looks like the gang's all here. If Tony survives the next three minutes you're in for a surprise, I think. Why do I smell a rat? BJ!?"

A laughing BJ came out from the kitchen and approached the kids. "BJ did you set us up?" Anita asked, hands on hips.

"Well, a young lady called after breakfast and asked if I was holding onto a couple of musical truants who were missing rehearsals and asked if they could use my place to catch up. Figured it was that band Tony mentioned this morning. I told 'er 'shore, come on out.'"

"OK," Tony said into his microphone. "I guess they decided if they couldn't bring Anita and I to the band they'd bring it to us, though I'm not sure if I'm playing the music or facing it just yet."

Cheri came up and joined Tony and Rebecca's hug. Tina, however, was all business. "OK, you guys, we have a lot to set up." She made no move towards Tony at all. Two out of three is better than I expected he thought before joining in to help the band set up.

It took the better part of a half an hour to haul in the equipment and get it all set up. Gwen and Chrissie had also arrived and insisted that everything run to their boards. Oh well, thought Tony last night was fun but this is definitely going to be technically better.

Word had been spread and no one in the band would have been surprised to see a fire department inspector show up and start counting heads. It had happened to them several times before in clubs that were charging at the door and sold more tickets than their venue allowed. BJ just seemed content to call a couple of extra waitresses in and make his extra money from the bar and appetizers.

Tina started alternating with Anita on guitar and finally gave up half way through and simply let her play. Anita had established herself as the crowd favorite the night before and they cheered every time she was onstage. Tina could always find something to do, either with another instrument or her voice.

By the time BJ called "last call" at around two AM the place was still packed and the band absolutely had to refuse to play anymore and start breaking down equipment before the patrons started trickling out.

"Everyone staying on the boat tonight?" Tony asked.

"Nope," Tina replied. "You and me brother. Riley's taking the girls home. The boys will get the truck back to the office." Tony just nodded and picked up another load and headed to the truck.

The trip back on Kalliste the next morning was colder, in more ways than one, than the trip down had been. In other ways it was remarkably the same. Tony sat in the cockpit with Tina, working furiously on one guitar or another as she navigated Kalliste.

"Eh, that won't work," Tina said after he tried to work a mini-bridge into the rhythm of one piece.

"Yeah," Tony replied. "There's something there that could be done to add a bit and I can't quite make it sound right."

Tina thought about it for a minute. "Yeah, but simplify it, take the hammer out of it and just bend the E instead of hammering to the A."

Tony tried Tina's idea and wasn't particularly surprised that it worked. He pouted a minute, looking at his guitar. "Well shit, musically it almost has to go to that A somehow. Why is it better this way?"

"Because Dewayne breaks some rules on the riff there. If the two of you were in the same room you would have realized it right away. So you just use a slow bend of the E and it bridges right back to his theme. You're not matching his note, you're reaching for it. The first time Dewayne hears that he'll know exactly what you're doing. Don't get me wrong, it needed something and I couldn't figure it out either until I heard you trying to come up with something new."

Tony nodded and tried the piece again, imagining how it would sound backing up Dewayne's lead. It would start a bit odd and just about the time anyone heard that, he'd meet Dewayne's own identical note and he'd look like a genius. "There's a reason we let you boss us around on this shit sis. Want anything to drink?" Tony stood up to go below.

"Nah, I'm fine."

Tony returned with a bourbon-and-water in a plastic cup. "OK Tina, I'm a big boy, let me have it and let's see if we can get it to where you'll at least like me a bit again."

Tina sighed heavily. "I'm afraid the girls took some of the fight out of me. Some things you said on the phone. You didn't do it for Cheri did you?"

"No, she was involved though. The fire was a message to me; it was a plain and simple exercise in bullying. We had already won the legal battle for Cheri when we left that meeting the week before. He was trying to scare me away."

"Oh boy! He didn't know you very well, did he?"

Tony grinned a bit looking up at her sitting on the captain's seat. "That's exactly what Anita said."

"So why, why didn't you just leave it at that. The insurance and all will cover it."

"That wasn't my studio Tina and you know it. It was yours. I know a big part of this is you girls, especially Rebecca, being surprised that I would go to extremes. I know all the rational answers Tina, but you do not burn down my sister's dream and get away with it. I know all the answers and arguments coming, everything from 'let me take care of myself' to 'I wouldn't want you to do that for me.' I just don't work that way, it's not in my makeup to turn the other cheek to something like that."

A pause settled in for a moment. "Yeah, both of them said you kept calling it my studio."

"Tina five years from now, am I going to get up in the morning and head in to an office in that studio to see what the latest cool thing going on there is?"

Tina's face settled into a pout. "Nah, I don't suppose the day-to-day of something like that is like you is it?"

"Nope, but it's very, very much like you. It's your baby. Five years from now you are going to leap out of bed in the morning because you can't wait for the next thing to happen there. We built it for you, for your future. It was always Tina's studio in my head. We may as well have put that on the door."

"Oh shit. You didn't do it to protect anyone at all, did you?"

"No, not really. Not in a pure sense. Yeah, in one way a message needed to be sent to leave us alone. But no, I'm guilty as hell of just turning around and doing everything I could to just smash their teeth in. Anita knows it. I'd hoped to do it in a way that you all wouldn't really understand other than I cost them a lot more money than they cost us.

"The dumbass was trying to scare me, but short of harming one of you he goes out and does the single thing that would make me madder than hell." Tony paused and took a deep breath. He then said in a soft voice, barely a whisper, "He wasn't supposed to die for it though."

"What did you do? Why couldn't you let me in on it and help you."

"You aren't going to like the answer to that. I wouldn't let you help to protect you. You're my little sister. Part of what I did was dangerous and some of it downright illegal. I'm not about to let you get involved in that. You're the only one who knows the particulars of this. What I did was find me some mobsters of my own. I paid them a quarter of a million dollars to make the entire Christmas shipment of that Yakuza family's legitimate electronics business, best guess is something like $30 million worth, disappear. The legal bit with the semi-conductors was just icing on the cake."

"You had it stolen?"

"Nah, they still have it. It's in South America somewhere, Uruguay I think. They did kind of miss that big Christmas buying season though. Last I checked the Kymo Electronics Ltd. stock price was down about sixty-five percent."

"Boy, big brother, you don't fuck around do you!" While Tina's interest in finance was limited, even she could understand this.

"Not where my little sister's involved I don't. But that was just the message: 'I have the muscle to hurt you and hurt you badly. Now don't harm your little minion Yakimoto, but do keep him away from us from now on.'"

"They killed him instead."

"Yeah, they know I can make things happen again and they know that if anything happens to me they are well and truly screwed. If I can make their legal shipments disappear under their noses they think I can do things to their illegal things as well and that's probably a lot more money."

"Can you do that?"

"Nah, I wouldn't have any idea how to contact those guys again, but they would get pissed if anything happened to me. And they would know it. Killing Yakimoto was just the Japanese goon's way of saying they're in control of their own organization and it won't happen again. Anyway that's my guess. Who knows how gangsters think.

"Anita did make me think about the protection thing and she's right," Tony continued. "If I did nothing he may have gone after anything else I had: Tammy's Wheels, probably even Kalliste. He knew she was mine.

"I promise you though Tina, no one was supposed to die. I didn't want him dead. I actually thought he was far enough up in his organization from that PI report that he was safe."

"You hit back too hard."

"Yeah, well, remind me of that the next time I go off and start a war with the mafia. No, never again. I might just possibly not lose Rebecca over this. Never again. Tony needs to go back to being a good little boy. Avenging angel doesn't suit me well. I rather like the superhero gig rescuing little girls better."

"I'd try to not add any more girls to your collection Tony. Concentrate on the ones you have and yeah, go back to being good little Tony and Rebecca will be fine. Now come here, a little bird told me you wanted something from me." Tony stood and just kind of shrugged. Tina wrapped him in a hug and said in a fierce whisper, "I forgive you Tony."

Tears were streaming down his face as he replied, "Thanks sis, that means the world to me. I love you."

"I love you too, but let's get moving. We can make the Marina by eleven-thirty and be home before one."

There was a rather larger than expected welcoming committee when Kalliste approached her home dock. Jerry, Matt, and Dewayne were there along with Gwen, Cheri, Anita, and Rebecca.

The reason became clear shortly. As soon as the boat was secure and shut down Rebecca grabbed Tony and headed towards the house. She silenced his immediate protests by explaining that everyone was there to make sure Kalliste got a thorough wipe down inside and out and Anita would take care of the engine room.

He knew something was planned. Rebecca was in girlfriend mode wearing a white blouse and a pretty green skirt. She was even adorned with the emerald choker and earrings he had given her for Christmas. When his mom asked about the cost of the set he explained to her that dad had bought her a lot of jewelry over the years, some of it expensive enough to be insured. This was definitely the insured kind.