A heavy drizzle spattered the Lincoln as it rolled through the damp San Francisco night. Karoline Rosenda was silent and still except for periodically twisting around in her seat to check on their charge. Be OK! Be OK! Echoed over and over in her thoughts like a fire alarm, but she wisely kept it to herself.

Shane, of course, said nothing. Rosenda knew him to adopt the platitudinous “silent type” affect whenever things got tense, and she had to admit; this was bad. Really fucking bad. If Z found out that she had let her star get dosed and subsequently lobotomized by their driver, both of them were going to be looking for jobs. That’s if the dumb son-of-a-bitch lived through this. If he died on them, they were really fucked.

It was bad enough that they were cruising around town with a naked and hogtied British national trussed upon the backseat. God forbid if they got pulled over for something. Rosenda breathed a small sigh of relief that they had the Lincoln. This was San Francisco; nobody was going to mess with a Lincoln Continental with an Irish driver. They might as well have diplomatic plates on the car from the borderless nation of Privilege.

“Wash going on?” A slurred voice from the backseat made Shane and Rosenda jump. “I can’t moove.”

“Lucious, listen to me,” Rosenda tried to explain. “It was for your own good, you were going to hurt yourself.” She climbed around to face the beleaguered rock star and searched his swelling face for a sign that he understood. Cole, for his part seemed to be taking in this new information and weighing its merit.

“Oh, all right,” he ultimately conceded. “Can you untie me now?”

“Sure…”

“No,” Shane interjected, “we can’t. Not until we get to our safe house. There you can run around like a chicken with your head cut off all you want. In my car, you stay tied.”

“Oh, all right.”

The Lincoln moved with the stealth and purpose of a panther north along Scott past Alta Plaza Park toward the Marina.

“Are we going to hide him at some millionaire’s house?” Rosenda asked as she watched the buildings get fancier and fancier as they got closer to the Bay.

“Just keep an eye on him and don’t worry about where we’re going,” Shane growled. The Lincoln caught the green light and swung left on Lombard, following the sparse traffic along the curve toward the bridge, before suddenly swerving right onto Lyon. It wasn’t until Shane turned past the newly restored Palace of Fine Arts rotunda and parked behind the science center that one of the Oppenheimer brothers had opened in the old exhibit hall that Rosenda began to guess what his plan might be.

Designed by local architect Bernard Maybeck, and built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, the Neo-classical Palace of Fine Arts framed a picturesque lagoon, complete with swans that slowly floated through their private dream world. The tableau was designed to echo a decaying ruin, and until the last few years, it had done it’s job extremely well; the original wood, plaster, and burlap finally succumbing to the harsh weather arriving from the Pacific.

The City had just finished rebuilding everything in poured concrete and steel, and Shane, who knew everyone from the contractors to the supervisors, had the keys.

“Hold tight, I’ll make sure we’re sound,” Shane stepped out of the Lincoln and took off toward the museum. Rosenda watched him go, fully expecting the night to end in the cavernous exhibition building. Shane, however, veered off toward the rotunda before completely disappearing into the fog.

“Say, sweetheart,” Cole tentatively tried his luck at using his battered charm. “Can’t you loosen this rope a bit? I mean, bloody hell, your friend there is either a cowboy or in to some really kinky shit. I can’t feel my hands.”

Rosenda thought hard about the possible ramifications of loosening Cole’s bonds, then thought about what Shane might do if he came back and Cole was back on the loose. She quickly realized that he might not do a thing. It was really no skin off his balls if Cole fucked right off and was never heard from again. She, however, did not have that luxury.

“Look, Lucious, I don’t care what issues you are working through that make you act like a drunken clown juggling lit torches in a lumber yard, but you are not going to burn down my career.”

Cole was still trying to muster his faculties enough to construct a pithy rejoinder when Shane yanked open the rear suicide door. He reached into the Lincoln and without a word, grabbed Cole by a confluence of knots, which invariably made them all suddenly cinch tighter.

The rock star yelped as he was hauled out of the car and to his feet. Shane silently took his measure, and deciding that the man before him was probably not going to bolt, produced a large, very sharp knife.

“All right, I am going to cut you loose. If you bolt, I’ll catch you, and when I do, I’m going to pitch you into the lagoon,” he explained, pointing with the blade toward the murky, freezing pond that reflected the ornate colonnade and rotunda. “We need to get you inside and find you some clothes. Are you onboard, smart guy?”

Cole, whose core temperature was dropping fast as he stood buck naked in the fog, only nodded his head enthusiastically.

It was mere minutes before Shane reappeared and ushered the pair toward an open door in one of the larger columns that held up the soaring Greco-Roman dome. A concrete angel impassively watched over the proceedings as he stood off to the side, making sure that Cole wasn’t going to make a break for it. Once inside, he shut the door behind them, throwing the space into total darkness.

“Don’t move,” he warned. “There’s a lot of construction tools laying about, and I wouldn’t want either of you to break any of them.” With that, the pair could hear his retreating footfalls moving away from them.

“How the hell does he know where he’s going?” Cole asked in genuine wonder.

“Don’t ask me,” Rosenda shrugged in the void. “Maybe he’s a fucking leprechaun.” That garnered a snort from Cole somewhere to her right, which was as close as she could come to seeing in the dark.

With the sound of a powerful electrical contact being thrown in the distance, a row of flood lamps suddenly bathed the narrow 60-foot-tall room in blinding light.

Cole, whose retinas had just retracted to the back of his dry skull, recoiled and looked for someplace to hide as if he were a giant cockroach. He didn’t, or couldn’t, see Shane step out of another door across the room carrying a paint-splattered pair of coveralls which he threw to Cole without a word as he approached, hitting him square in the chest.

“Put those on,” he instructed. “We’re tired of looking at your bony ass.”

Rosenda, who to that point had been too freaked out by the situation to process that she was basically alone with a musician infamous for his sexual proclivities and prowess, only nodded her head in slight disappointment.

“Look, Cole, I’m sorry I had to clock you, but I’m sure you’d have rather stayed out of the county psych lockup, and there was no way to reason with you.”

“It’s all right, mate,” the Englishman acquiesced. “I would have done the same for you.”

Shane considered the slight musician doing his best to knock him out and laughed despite himself.

“That shot was ace,” Cole asked probing his outraged face with his long fingers made for playing guitar. “Is there anywhere around here to get some ice? I’d hate to do the gig tomorrow night looking like I caught the worst of a rugby scrum.”

Shane thought about it for a moment and ventured he could trust Rosenda to babysit while he popped over to the liquor store on Chestnut. Besides, it was her ass if the fool went AWOL. He could go for a cold one himself.

“I’ll be right back,” Shane said, surveying the scene as someone coming in off the street might. “If anyone comes by—they shouldn’t, but if they do—you two work for Shamrock Construction. Mick Jigger here, is a painter, obviously, and you…”

Rosenda lifted one carefully sculpted eyebrow, curious to how Shane saw her fitting into his alibi.

“You figure it out.” With that, he left the way they came in and disappeared into the fog.

Follow the story:
Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1

Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2
Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 2
Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 1)
Kingdoms of the Radio: Don’t Poke the Bear (Pt. 2)
Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 2
Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 3
Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 3
Kingdoms of the Radio: Chae Burton 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 3