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age when other kids could hardly carry a tune, he’d already begun harmonizing
with the pop songs he heard on the radio.  His ear was flawless, his pitch
true, his understanding of music elemental, its concepts vividly clear to him
long before he ever learned the words for them.  At the age of six, he began
picking out simple tunes by ear on his grandmother’s old Baldwin, and she hired
a piano teacher for him.
    Loretta Lucchesi’s tastes ran to classical German composers,
heavily interspersed with Italian opera.  He reluctantly learned to play Bach,
Beethoven, Vivaldi.  But he hungered for something else, something to make his
blood run and his toes tap.  He found it when the Beatles crossed the Atlantic
and changed the face of popular music forever.  The piano ceased to be an
instrument of torture the instant he realized he didn’t have to play the
classics.  Danny began working his way feverishly through rock and jazz, rhythm
& blues, old standards.  Because the piano wasn’t portable, he bought a
secondhand Fender guitar and taught himself to play that.  But it was his
voice, had always been his voice, that was Danny Fiore’s true instrument.
    Thirteen months in Vietnam cured him of his youthful naiveté. 
When he came back, Danny had changed.  His world had changed.  He moved out of
his grandmother’s apartment over the butcher shop on Salem Street and into a
room in the heart of Boston’s Combat Zone, where junkies slept in doorways,
triple-X-rated movies played day and night, and pimps and hookers plied their
trade.  He claimed an empty street corner near Filene’s, sat down on a milk
crate with his Fender, and began singing for the tourists. 
    Danny never looked back.  The music hummed and throbbed inside
him, and he came alive in front of an audience.  His music was his mistress, a
siren far more seductive than any mortal woman.  And unlike mortal women, this
lady wouldn’t disappoint him.  She was going to take him straight to the top.  With
a little help from Casey Bradley.  Danny was a singer, not a songwriter, but he
possessed an artist’s appreciation for a good song, and Casey wrote songs that
sent an icy blue finger down the center of Danny Fiore’s cynical spine. 
    He plumped the pillow behind his head, took a drag on his
cigarette, and watched the smoke rise toward the water-stained ceiling of the
attic bedroom where his buddy Travis had spent his adolescence.  Drawing the
ashtray across the night stand, he said, “Tell me about Casey.”
    Sprawled across the other bunk, Travis looked up from a tattered Star
Trek paperback.  “What about her?”
    “For starters,” he said, “how come you forgot to tell me she’s a
knockout?”
    Travis blinked.  “A knockout?  My sister?”
    He drew deeply on the cigarette.  Exhaled.  “Christ, Trav, are you
blind or just retarded?”
    Travis returned to his book.  “She’s not your type.  My sister’s
too level-headed to look twice at a bozo like you.”
    Dryly, he said, “I didn’t say I wanted to marry the girl.”
    “Don’t go getting any ideas, Fiore.  Casey is off limits.”
    Obviously.  The rock she wore on the third finger of her left hand
clearly advertised her status.  But it didn’t diminish his curiosity.  He knew
instinctively that here was a woman who would never play games, a woman who
would meet a man halfway, a woman who would demand as much as she gave.  With
Casey, a man would never wonder where he stood.
    She scared the hell out of him.
    And what the devil was she thinking of, marrying that Lindstrom
character? Danny thought of her eyes, the color of jade:  cool, but with a hint
of fire buried somewhere in those smoky depths.  He’d be willing to bet that Lindstrom
hadn’t tasted any of that fire.
    He wondered why the thought gave him so much satisfaction.
    When he crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray and sat up,
Travis eyed him warily.  “Where are you going?” he asked.
    Danny