Chapter 3

"Where?" Boatwright said.

Nico's mouth opened, then closed. Three months on the job meant three months of Sunny Okafor telling him what was behind the glass counter, what was behind the register, and what he was never, under any circumstances, to open.

"I don't know. It just looks familiar."

"That's not helpful."

Boatwright pocketed the phone. Dispatch had put him on hold, which meant the police were coming when they were coming, and in the meantime he had an old man in a windbreaker standing in front of his window like a bad review.

He walked Rue toward the front - not roughly, but firmly - so the fans could see the store had the situation handled. Rue's cap brim shadowed his eyes. The sun through the glass caught the pale blue of them anyway.

A girl in line pressed her phone to the window and took a picture.

"Sir," Boatwright said, loud enough for the glass, "I need your name."

"Rufus."

"Rufus what?"

Rue looked at him and said nothing.

"Okay. Rufus nothing. Great."

The line outside shifted. A man in a Cade Merrick tour shirt knocked twice on the glass and gave a thumbs-up - not to Boatwright. To the old man, who had the look of somebody who'd been through worse and was bored by this.

Boatwright's earpiece crackled. The upstairs office, where Sunny had been on a distributor call for half an hour, stayed dark at the top of the stairs.

He turned back to Rue. "Let's try this. You came in with a bag and a part you can't account for. You're going to tell me who you're working with, or you're going to sit in a squad car while the biggest signing this store has ever had happens without you."

Rue's thumb and forefinger rubbed together again.

"I'm not working with anybody."

"Then what were you going to do with it?"

Rue looked past him, at the wall.

There were forty-two photographs on that wall, arranged by decade. The oldest were black and white. The newest were digital prints of the shop's Christmas parties. Sunny's predecessor, a man named Hollis Rusk, had started the collection in 1979 and hung every one himself, straight, with a level. If you moved one, he knew.

Second row from the top, fourth from the left: a color print from 1991, faded on one side from twenty years of afternoon sun. A young man on the shop's front step, a toddler on his hip, a guitar in his other hand. On the white margin at the bottom, in blue ink, in a woman's handwriting: Cade's first.

Rue had looked at that photograph every time he'd come to Austin in the last decade. He had never once come inside.

"Hey." Boatwright snapped his fingers. "Eyes on me."

Rue looked at him.

"You've got nothing to say?"

"No, sir," Rue said. "I've got plenty. None of it's for you."

Boatwright's phone buzzed. He glanced down at the text from dispatch - unit en route, four minutes - and when he looked up, a small white rectangle had slipped out of the old man's jacket pocket and landed faceup on the floor between them.

A bus ticket. Austin to Amarillo. Departure 3:40 p.m.