Chapter 5

It was black, sixty feet long, CADE MERRICK TOUR 2033 in silver letters and a picture of a guitar neck running the length of it. The crowd outside made a sound like water coming up a beach.

Boatwright let go of Rue's elbow.

"Nobody moves," he said, and went out the door.

Rue watched through the glass. A driver in a black polo opened the bus door. Cade Merrick came down the steps with a guitar case in one hand and a coffee in the other, tired around the eyes, dark hair tucked behind his ears, a silver belt buckle catching the light.

He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the line. He looked at the sign. He looked at the kid holding a 1998 record sleeve, and he smiled at her, and Rue's chest did something he had spent thirty-one years training it not to do.

Cade walked past the window.

Six feet. Rue stood on the other side of the glass with his hands at his sides, cap low, and his son - forty-four years old, close beard, silver rings, a laminate on a lanyard - walked past him into the shop without turning his head.

He had not seen him. Rue had made sure of it.

The bell over the door chimed. The crowd inside pressed forward. Boatwright, walking backward, guided Cade toward the signing table at the back with both hands out like a man herding a parade. "Mr. Merrick, right this way, we've got you set up, water, coffee, whatever you need-"

Officer Delgado came in at 1:51 with his hat under his arm.

He was in his fifties, wide through the shoulders, unhurried. He looked at the crowd, the signing table, the man in the windbreaker by the window, and he took out a small notebook, because the department still gave them out.

"Who called?"

"I did." Boatwright left Cade's side and came back fast. "This individual was in possession of merchandise he can't account for. Refused to identify."

"I gave you my name," Rue said.

"You gave me a first name."

The officer looked at Rue. "Sir, can I see some ID?"

Rue reached into his back pocket and produced a worn leather wallet with a Texas ID inside, issued in 2016, the photograph ten years younger and ten years less tired.

"Rufus Calder."

"Mr. Calder." Delgado wrote it down. "Where's the merchandise?"

Boatwright patted his pocket and produced the pickup, holding it flat in his palm.

Delgado looked at it. He was not a musician. He saw a small metal object with copper wire and six metal dots.

"Where'd it come from?"

"I made it," Rue said.

"You made it."

"Yes, sir."

Boatwright snorted. "He's been standing at that window for forty minutes refusing to say a single word, and now he's a manufacturer."

Delgado turned the pickup over. "Do you have proof of that?"

Rue was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "No."

And that was the thing about misdirection. It doesn't need a lie. It only needs a silence in the right shape.

Delgado wrote something else down. "Mr. Calder, I need you to stay right here while I talk to the manager."

At the signing table, Cade Merrick uncapped a Sharpie and signed a record for the girl in the denim jacket.

On the stairs behind the register, a woman in a denim apron stopped halfway down and stared at the pickup in the officer's hand.