Somehow Clay doubted that. His Rick, if not literally possessed with Boyle’s talent, was certainly one of a kind, easier to play than any guitar Clay had ever laid hands on. It had carried him through a rooftop audition and a crazy first gig—to say nothing of several spectral encounters and a kind of back-yard exorcism.
On the ride home, BadVan was full of laughter and post-gig euphoria. The booking manager for The Echo had been at the party and had invited them to play her club the following night. And not the tiny hundred-occupant Echo either, but the Echoplex downstairs, which held four times as many people and hosted national acts. The Physical Jerks were headlining tomorrow and a stomach flu had run its way through their tour opener—so Farewell Ghost would get thirty minutes right before the Jerks went on. They had a right to celebrate. They’d worked damn hard. But Clay could share in none of the rolling revelry. He sat slouched in back with the drum cases, mute, while Fiasco Joe got the game going again: “Bon Scott. Death by misadventure.”
“Dimebag Darrell,” Spider countered. “Gunned down on stage.”
“Chris Cornell,” Mo said. “Detroit.”
“Jimi Hendrix,” Spider answered. “Choked on his vomit.”
Fiasco snapped his fingers. “Eric ‘Stumpy Joe’ Childs—”
“—choked on someone else’s vomit!” everyone shouted.
To top off the evening’s anticlimax, Savy had disappeared after their set. Clay interrogated Mo about where she’d gone, but her brother knew nothing. “I’ve been looking for her too. There’s at least three people dealing Oxy here, and she promised to keep them away from me.” In her absence, Clay had run interference for Mo, keeping him focused on the music rather than the transactions going on in the factory shadows.
At Clay’s front gates, there were bro-hugs all around. “It’s only the beginning,” Fiasco told Clay, handing the Rickenbacker’s severed neck through the driver’s window.
“You want your amp?” Spider called from the side door.
“Keep it,” Clay said, carrying his guitar case like an empty body bag into the night. “I don’t have much use for it right now.”
Sudden, crushing loneliness made a lousy counterpoint to the sense of oneness he’d felt with the crowd two hours before. Clay wondered if this was why so many musicians put themselves through endless tours while their marriages fell apart and their mansions stood empty. When the music was over, what was left but all-consuming silence?
Making his way up the driveway, Clay skirted his father’s Mercedes and Estelle’s lemon-colored Bug. These days, the two of them were home before midnight every night, the master suite doors shut up and ’80s hair ballads masking whatever gross debauchery was underway inside. So Clay skipped the house entirely, unlocking the Generator and stepping inside to find the lights already on. The room was empty. But someone had been here. Clay noticed a subtle shift in the furniture, a displacement of the jumbled, but organized chaos on the coffee table, a reshuffling of the sheet music on the music stand. Not Boyle’s doing—the resident apparition had an uncanny talent for leaving things just as they were. No. Someone’s been spooning my porridge. Someone in the flesh. But who would bother? Essie, out of curiosity? His father, on a meddlesome search for drugs? “Rocco?” Clay called. “Who was in here?”
A minute passed. He felt nothing of the spatial-presence that coincided with Boyle entering the room. He drew an At the Drive-In record from the leaning Pisa tower in the corner and dropped it onto the player. Just as he lowered the needle, something TICK-Tick-ticked outside.
Clay waited for the sound to repeat.
It did—a pebble, or something of equal size, skittered across the stone walk and plinked off the Generator’s open door. Clay poked his head out and witnessed a third pebble clearing the perimeter wall, flying in a wide arch to land in the moonlit grass. “Who goes?” he bellowed.
“Come on, dude, your voice isn’t that deep.”
“Savy?”
“Let me in. There’s a cantankerous bat flapping around out here.”
Clay hurried to the front gate, unlocking it manually. Savy scampered out of the scrub, in the exact place as the first time he’d laid eyes on her, carrying her case in one hand and—and the Rickenbacker’s missing body in the other. The visual, of Savy suddenly appearing in the streetlight with the guitar he never thought he’d see again, left Clay dumbfounded. Where had she disappeared to? How had she found it? How had she gotten to his gates? There was no car in the cul-de-sac.
“I couldn’t let those savages keep such a beautiful instrument,” Savy told him. “A little detective work, and I tracked it to some skater twerps taking it as a souvenir. Then I ran into a friend—the keyboardist from Robo-Baby? She gave me a lift here in her Barracuda.”
“Wow,” Clay told her. “Damn. Thanks.”
“Mo said you looked out for him when I was gone. Call it even.”
In the Generator, they pieced the Rick together and studied the jagged fracture in the fretboard, the broken strings frayed out like bolts of lightning. “Even if Fiasco finds a specialist, it could be months before she’s working again,” Clay said. “And this guitar… it’s not a guitar that looks like the one Boyle played. It is one thatBoyle played. I found her buried under the floor right over there.”
Savy’s jaw dropped, but only a little.
“This is going to sound stupid, but sometimes it felt like a little of Rocco Boyle was still on the strings.”
“Now you’re worried the magic’s going to wear off.” Savy nodded, understanding. “Musicians are a superstitious lot. I used to carry a blue scarf my mother gave me, tied it over my jeans like this…” She propped a boot on the coffee table and pantomimed a knot-tie around her thigh. Her jeans had several slits in the denim and Clay fought the urge to peak at the exposed flesh. Good thing, because Savy looked Clay square in the eye then, her own eyes narrowing. “But it’s bullshit, man. There are no magic
