Picking the Ballad's Bones Read Free

behind Brose Fairchild and watched to see what
McCorley would do next.
    The Martin girl tried signing to the
first customs officer but he didn't seem to understand, and when
Gunn stepped forward to explain or possibly interpret, he warned
her sternly to stay in line. Meanwhile, Fairchild, the old gal, and
the Randolphs passed by another officer without much incident, but
MacKai was stopped and ordered to unzip the garment bag.
    "Anything to declare, miss?" the
officer asked the redhead as she slung her flight bag up onto his
counter.
    "Just the usual," she said.
    Up ahead, the customs officer was
eyeing the banjo, which was softly playing a line from an old
ballad that started, "Oh, let me in, the soldier cried. Cold haily
windy night—"
    "Does it always do this, sir?" the
customs man demanded.
    "Sure as hell does, buddy," MacKai was
saying. "And you better believe it cost me a pretty penny to get
that electronics engineer to rig it up this way."
    "As you say, sir. However, we can't
allow you to bring this into Britain."
    "And just why would that be?" MacKai
asked softly as anxiety welled up inside him that after coming so
far, the devils were finding yet another way to separate him from
the only key to reclaiming the music. At the same time, he knew
that belligerence wouldn't get him far with the authorities so he
tried to sound pleasant.
    "We have a description of an
instrument of this sort, self-frailing, I believe it said, as
stolen goods, sir."
    "That must be some other banjo they're
talkin' about, officer. See this one here was given to me by . . ."
MacKai tried to explain but the officer nodded to an armed man
behind him who started forward.
    "And what do you mean by the usual,
Miss?" T. Burns's official asked.
    "You know, a lid of heroin, a few
crystals of crack, and some new stuff—"
    "I'm sorry, miss, we don't like joking
about that sort of thing. You'll have to—"
    Ordinarily, she would have delighted
in choosing that moment to disappear from sight and memory, leaving
the man with a loaded flight bag, a mountain of paperwork, and
nobody to blame anything on, but McCorley had just opened his own
bag. He pulled something from it and threw it to the floor behind
the customs official. A thick cloud of acrid smoke billowed up from
the floor as if cloaking some particularly bashful
dragon.
    "Shee-it!" Fairchild bellowed, and
grabbed the redhead's hand, barreled into MacKai, and plowed the
rest of his party before him with the exception of McCorley, who
lobbed the wee little bomb far enough into the cattle-pen
arrangement to give himself time to escape before the whole works
blew sky-high.
    Shouting, coughing, random gunfire,
and an alarm siren mooing throughout the terminal added to the
excitement. No security guards from inside the terminal tried to
stop Willie and his friends from leaving the customs area, however,
because of the nostril-burning day-old-corpse smell of the smoke
that doubled everybody up with coughing. Out in the terminal,
nobody tried to apprehend the fleeing group because plenty of other
people were dancing around trying to find out what the excitement
was all about, was it dangerous, and how to avoid being hurt by it
while enjoying the spectacle as something to write home
about.
    Faintly tinkling in the background,
the banjo, half-smothered by the garment bag, played the line from
Loch Lomond that was sung as, "You take the high road and I'll take
the low road."
    "How the hell do you get out of here?"
Willie demanded of nobody in particular.
    "You heard the banjo," Gussie said.
"They take subways around here. Torchy honey," she hollered back to
the redhead, "You're the local. Which way is the
subway?"
    Torchy Burns, as she was sometimes
called, occasionally liked to play by the rules just long enough to
confuse everyone, so she led them to the nearest underground
station.
     
    * * *
     
    "Wait, wait, wait," Sass said. "What
is it with this redheaded lady? Is she a spy or what?"
    "Or what," the