Chapter 8
TOMMY
The bakery I'd been thinking about turned out to be closed for a private event.
The girl at the door said it real apologetic, with that Charleston warmth that made you feel like she was personally sorry on behalf of the entire pastry industry, and pointed me down the block toward another place.
Real Lowcountry food. They do biscuits like your grandmother, if your grandmother knew what she was doing.
I walked.
Charleston in the morning had the smell of a city that had been a city for a long time—salt, slow-cured wood, the cooling iron of the storm drains, last night's bourbon spilled somewhere on a brick.
I liked it. I'd liked it from the ride in, even at midnight when I couldn't see most of it.
The streets had a rhythm I recognized in my body before I could name it, and after a few blocks, I figured out what it was.
Charleston walked at the pace of a man who'd already done what he needed to do that day.
I walked at that pace.
The Carolinian was the kind of place I'd have walked past in a city that had less of itself to offer—white tablecloths, candles in the daytime, the ambient hum of a room that took itself seriously without needing to talk about it.
But the menu in the window had something called country shrimp that I needed to know more about, and I was a man who'd been promised a hot shower and was going to get a long lunch instead, and I wasn't picky.
The hostess sat me in the back corner, near a small platform where a stool waited empty.
I ordered two things off the menu and a black coffee.
I needed to think.
I needed to think about Dominic Craine and the active federal investigation, and the timing of a deputy director showing up in a Charleston hotel suite at the exact moment a Dane he'd never met before walked into the city.
I needed to think about what in close proximity to federal agents who subsequently died meant, because in my experience the Bureau didn't say things like that out loud unless they could prove the first half and were guessing at the second.
I needed to think about my brothers, and what they'd actually been doing for the last twelve months that the FBI of these United States considered worthy of a personal house call from one of its top guys.
I needed to think about Grant's face at the river.
I needed to think about why nobody had picked up when I'd called.
I didn't get to.
The food came.
The country shrimp turned out to be shrimp on a bed of grits with a sauce I would've sold a kidney for, and the biscuits were the kind that didn't even need butter, which didn't stop me from putting butter on them.
I ate slow. I'd learned in the unit that you ate slow when you didn't know when the next meal was coming, and I didn't know when the next meal was coming.
Habit dressed up as wisdom. I'd take it.
The waitress came back for my plate and refilled my coffee, and I leaned back against the leather banquette and let the food do its work. The room had filled in around me. The lunch crowd moved at the easy rhythm of a city that didn't believe in eating standing up.
That was when the girl walked in.
She came in through the kitchen, which I noted because most performers came in through the front.
She came in with a guitar case slung over her back like she'd carried that exact case down that exact hallway a thousand times in her life, and she set it down by the platform with the practiced economy of somebody who'd been setting down guitar cases since she could lift one.
She looked nervous.
It was a quiet kind of nervous. The kind a stranger wouldn't see. But I'd spent a lot of my life learning to read the involuntary tells in people who were trying to look like they weren't telling, and this girl was telling.
The shoulders pulled in a quarter inch. The mouth doing that resetting thing that women's mouths did when they were prepping themselves. Her eyes scanning the room not with the practiced sweep of a performer reading a crowd but with the wary check-in of somebody bracing.
A waitress passed her, said something. She made a smile that didn't reach. Set her case flat on the floor. Lifted out a guitar.
A Gibson.
A J-45, by the look of it, and not new. Beat up in the right places. Loved, the way an instrument got loved by somebody who actually played the thing.
She tuned with her ear, not a clip-on. That told me a few things at once.
She sat on the stool, adjusted the strap, and started to play.
She was good. That came across right away.
Her hands knew where to go without her thinking about it, and her voice had the kind of natural warmth you couldn't teach—soft pitch control, vowels rounded the way singers' vowels rounded when they'd been singing since they could talk.
“Coat of Many Colors,” played simply, the way Dolly herself would have wanted it.
She was also scared.
The voice was holding back. I heard it in the second verse. It was like watching a horse that knew it could run pulling itself a quarter step off the bit because it had been told once that running was rude.
She had something. She wasn't using it.
I knew that look. I'd seen it more times than I'd liked—talented people carrying a hand against their own throat. The kind of restraint that didn't come from training. The kind that came from somebody, somewhere, telling them once that being too much was the worst thing they could be.
I'd never had that problem with most things.
The guitar was the exception.
The guitar was the one thing in my life I didn't take into rooms.
That was Mama's. That was mine and Mama's. Nobody else's. Not my brothers. Not the women I'd slept with. Not the men I'd served with. None of them had ever heard me play.
The most exposure my guitar got to other human beings was the occasional songwriter's open mic in a city I was passing through and didn't intend to come back to, where I'd sign up under a name that wasn't mine and play three songs and disappear before anybody could buy me a drink.
Or the rarer thing—when I walked into a small bar on a weekday and the guy who was supposed to play didn't, and the owner looked stricken, and I'd say I can fill in if you need it.
I never took the money. I didn't need the money.
I needed the playing. There was a difference, and I knew it.
The reason wasn't complicated.
The reason was my mother, sitting at a kitchen table, humming something with no words while she rolled out a pie crust.
I carried the guitar strings in my pocket because I couldn't always carry the guitar. They were a way of keeping her with me. A practical relic of the only person in my life who'd ever known the part of me I didn't show.
They were also useful in a pinch. A length of high-tension wire wrapped in nylon was a lot of things in a lot of situations, including the bad ones.
I'd wrapped one around a man's neck in a basement in Dushanbe once and watched his eyes go where eyes went.
Garrote. Old-school. The Godfather had nothing on me.
I was a sentimental man with a practical streak.
But mostly, I carried them because of her.
Because I might find a guitar somewhere and need a string. Because the world was big and music was bigger, and a man who couldn't play when the chance came was a man who'd let his mother down.
That was the math.
The G string went on the girl's guitar in the middle of a chord.
I heard it before she did—the sharp pop of high tension giving up, and then the chord collapsing under her hand.
She stopped playing. The room noticed, the way rooms noticed uncomfortable things, and a kind of soft attention turned toward her that wasn't kind enough to help and wasn't unkind enough to leave.
She kept her face neutral. Sorry about that. Give me just a minute. Polite. Performing the recovery the way she'd been trained to perform recovery—at a job, I thought, at a job exactly like this one.
I watched her go for her case. Watched her find what she was looking for and not find what she needed.
I watched her color change.
A man at a table near her left her some lip about it. The kind of man who started in on his third glass of wine before his food showed up. I didn't catch all of it. I caught enough.
I was already moving.
I crossed the room. I didn't think about it much.
There was a moment when she looked up and our eyes met, and my brain registered three things in fast order: she was younger than I'd thought from across the room, she had eyes that didn't entirely match her face yet because the face was still learning what to do with them, and she was very pretty in a way that was not designed to be pretty, which was the only kind that ever got me.
"What gauge?"
"What?"
"Your G string. What gauge do you run?"
"Thirteen. Medium."
I had the packet out of my pocket before she'd finished the word. Held it out. She blinked at it. I told her guitarist, simple, true. I let it sit.
I crouched down on the carpet in front of her stool—one knee down, the way you went down to a child's eye level when the child had something to say. Held my hand out for the Gibson.
She looked at me.
"I've got it," she said. "I can—"
"I know you can. But you've got an audience and I've got nothing but time, and I string faster than most. Let me."
The lush at the table to my left made a noise.
I gave him exactly the look he needed. Held it half a second. Watched him decide his wine was suddenly fascinating.
She handed me the guitar.