Chapter 6

Sunny Okafor had been on the phone with a distributor in Nashville for thirty-four minutes, arguing about a back order of tubes, and she had missed all of it. She came down the last four steps and stopped with her hand on the rail.

"Officer."

"Ma'am."

"I own this shop. What's in your hand?"

Delgado held it out. She took it without asking, which was her right, and turned it under the light.

The baseplate was nickel-silver, unplated, hand-cut. The wire was copper, wound tight, forty-two hundred turns, maybe more. The lead wires were cloth-covered, old stock. And on the flat of the bobbin, near the second slug, was a small scratch - a slip of a screwdriver, made once, years ago, by a man working too fast on a bench.

Sunny had seen that scratch before.

She had seen it a hundred times, from six inches away, every time she did a setup on the black guitar in her repair room - the guitar Cade Merrick had bought from this shop in 2008, used, off the rack, for four hundred and twenty dollars and a set of strings, when he was nineteen and had a beard he couldn't grow yet.

She had told him that day that whoever wound that bridge pickup was a good hand.

She turned the pickup over. Then she looked at the old man by the window.

His hands were at his sides. She looked at his hands for a long time.

"Mr. Boatwright," she said. "Come here."

"Sunny-"

"Come here."

He came. She held the pickup up between them, at his eye level.

"Where did you get this?"

"Off him. In the bag."

"And what did you do with the bag?"

"I-" Boatwright shifted his tablet under his arm. "I secured the merchandise."

"You emptied an old man's bag in my window and put his property in your pocket."

"It's not his property-"

"Did you call the police before or after you took it?"

"Sunny, the doors were opening, I had to make a call-"

"Did you call the police," she said, "before or after you took it?"

Boatwright's mouth stayed open.

Sunny handed the pickup back to Officer Delgado and walked to the register. She took the key off her apron - the small one, brass, worn at the teeth - and knelt behind the counter, and unlocked the bottom drawer.

Nobody in the shop had ever seen inside it. Nico had worked there three months and had been told, kindly but clearly, that if he ever opened it, he should consider his job already over.

The drawer was shallow and lined with felt, and it held thirty-one hand-wound pickups, each in a small paper sleeve, and thirty-one birthday cards, each one unsigned.

Sunny lifted out the top card. Dated March 2002. Inside, in blue ink, in block letters: Happy 13th. Keep playing. The tone is in your hands, not the amp.

She stood up slowly. She walked to the wall. She reached up to the second row from the top, fourth from the left, and lifted the framed 1991 photograph off its hook.

The picture lamp went dark.

At the signing table, Cade Merrick signed his name, and then stopped, mid-stroke, because the woman who owned the shop was walking toward him carrying a photograph he had walked past a thousand times without ever looking at.