Voice Read Free Page B

“True that. What did what’s his name do to piss her off?”
    “Invaded her personal space, I think.”
    “Note to self.”
    John laughed again. “No kidding.”
    “Well, looks like this place is all partied out. I’m gonna go get the car,” Danny said. “See you out front?”
    “Yeah.”
    Danny headed for the door. John nursed his beer, staring at the row of bottles at the back of the bar and thinking.
    Stephanie Case. So that was her name. She didn’t remember him—why would she have?—but he’d seen her band once before, playing some hole in the wall downtown. The band had been okay. She had been amazing. She played scorched-earth guitar, taking no prisoners and leaving smoldering ruin in her wake, and John had been enthralled. He’d watched nothing but her for the whole set, and then panicked and run like hell out of the bar before she got off the stage, afraid he’d say something unutterably stupid if she passed close enough for him to say hi.
    And then she’d walked in just before his set tonight. He wished he hadn’t recognized her. In the time it took him to place the face—and that had not been long at all—he’d gone from singing for the fun of it to singing for her, and he didn’t need anybody to tell him how incredibly fucking stupid that had been. He’d tried to turn the performance up to eleven just for her, but his nerves had worked their peculiar evil, and instead of delivering a transcendent performance he’d been even worse than normal. What had he been thinking, that somehow he’d magically impress her and by the end of the set she’d be clamoring to join his band?
    Actually, that was exactly what he’d been thinking, he admitted. A whole series of increasingly fantastic scenarios had slipped through his head while he tried to perform. None of them were realistic, but by the third song, he had known he was going to fire Seth. He needed killin’, as they said here in Texas. How he was going to convince Case to join up he hadn’t had the foggiest clue. The friction with her own band had been a near-miraculous stroke of good luck, and then the invitation to play the college show had jumped into John’s head while he was talking to her.
    Yeah, and that had its own set of problems he’d have to navigate. He shook his head, put his empty bottle on the bar, and started toward the door. There’d be time to worry about all that later.
    Outside, the street was dead—midnight downtown on Easter Sunday dead. The shops and clubs were mostly dark, and the parking meters stood, lone sentinels in front of empty spaces. The only movement was a plastic cup lid skittering along the sidewalk, blown along with a small cloud of grit.
    To John’s right, a man leaned against the brick wall of the bar, cigarette burning down in his hand. Tight blue jeans, white silk shirt unbuttoned at the throat, black cowboy boots. He gave off the vibe of an old rock-and-roll guy, his years long past. The kind of guy who’d missed fame and fortune by a hairsbreadth, the kind of guy you might catch at some hole-in-the-wall blues dive playing his ass off, and you’d walk away thinking, Fuck! He’s good! Why haven’t I heard of him? Maybe John had seen him somewhere—that might account for the vague sense of familiarity he got from the guy. The guy had been inside watching the set, but John couldn’t help feeling he’d seen him somewhere else.
    The guy gave John a thin smile and took a drag.
    John nodded absently and looked down the street for Danny’s car. Nothing moved anywhere.
    “You don’t have the money, do you?” the guy said. His voice was a low, hoarse whisper, the sound of an oily rasp dragged across wood.
    John’s attention snapped to the man. “What did you say?”
    The guy took a step closer, and an awful scent, fishy and ripe with decay, hit John’s nostrils, faint but foul beneath the smell of cigarette smoke. The guy grinned without humor. His face was sharp, angular, and though he was