Chapter 1

Forty minutes before the doors opened, Trey Boatwright took Rufus Calder by the elbow and turned him toward the front of the store the way a man turns a chair.

"Not you," he said. "You'll be gone before I count to five."

The shop smelled like solder, old wood, coffee, and dust. Sunburst guitars hung in rows on the wall hangers, each one catching the hard October sun through the window. Framed photographs sat under little brass lamps. Behind the glass counter: a register, a card reader, a tablet dock, a hand-painted sign that had been over the door since 1979.

Everything in South Congress String & Tube had been arranged for the camera that would follow Cade Merrick through that door at two o'clock.

Rue did not pull his arm away.

He was seventy-eight, lean and slightly stooped, navy windbreaker zipped to the chin, brown cap pulled low. His jeans were clean. His roper boots were scuffed past saving. His hands were the hands of a man who had spent fifty years inside amplifiers - burn scars, callus, a thumb that knew wire by feel.

The plastic grocery bag hung from his left wrist. He held the handles the way you hold something that can break.

"Sir." Boatwright's earpiece curled around his ear like a comma. "Doors in forty. I need the floor clear. You've been standing here twenty minutes."

Rue looked past him, at the wall of photographs.

"I'm not asking you twice," Boatwright said. "Name?"

Rue said nothing.

"Fine." Boatwright smiled for the two women by the vinyl bins, then dropped the smile. "Bag."

Rue's fingers tightened on the handles.

"Sir, I can call this in as a theft right now, or you can hand me the bag and walk out with your dignity. Your choice."

He didn't wait. He took the bag by the bottom, turned it over, and shook it into his open palm.

The pickup landed there. Small, heavier than it looked, nickel-silver baseplate, copper wire wound tight around six slugs. The kind of thing a man would recognize only if he'd spent years on a bench.

Boatwright held it up between two fingers, into the window light.

"What's this?"

Behind them, the line outside had grown past the coffee shop and around the corner. Somebody laughed. A phone came up. Fans pressed to the glass, wanting a look at whatever was happening inside the shop where their hero was going to sign.

Rue's thumb rose an inch, without looking, and traced a small tight circle in the air.