making more money on sales from iTunes and the physical CD than they were from live shows, which had never happened before. They’d be able to afford to take some extra time getting their next release just right.
So maybe it wasn’t an enormous surprise that the registration clerk knew one tune or another from Out of the Pond. Nice, yeah. Egoboo, for sure. But maybe not an enormous surprise. “Impossible Things Before Breakfast” wasn’t a single, though. Never had been, never would be. If you knew that one, you not only had the album but you really liked it.
“Are you going to the show tomorrow night?” Rob asked her.
She shook her head. “Can’t afford it,” she said regretfully.
“What’s your name?”
“Tina Morton.”
He wrote it down. “Show up at will-call. They’ll have a seat for you.”
“Thanks!” She beamed at him. That might turn into something promising later on, or it might not. He wouldn’t worry about it now. Tickets were only twenty-five dollars, but he wasn’t far from the days when twenty- five dollars weren’t only himself. And if the next album tanked instead of taking off from what Out of the Pond was doing, he’d go right back there again.
The rooms, next door to each other, were, well, rooms. Rob had been in a lot of different rooms in a lot of different places. He’d had some that were better than these, more re worse. These were on the ground floor, as the band had requested. They wouldn’t have to shlep stuff up and down stairs.
After everything was out of the cars, Justin stretched and grimaced, miming an unhappy back. “We’re gonna be too old for all this hauling one of these days. One of these days soon,” he amended, so maybe he wasn’t faking the sore back. “What do we do then?”
“It’s not what we do then. It’s what we do in the meantime. We’ve gotta make ourselves a big enough deal so we can pay roadies to take care of all the heavy, sweaty shit for us,” Rob said. “What I want to know is, where do you go for dinner when you’re in Missoula, Montana?”
“Go ask Tina at the desk,” Justin answered. “Or I will if you don’t want to. She’s not half bad.”
“My old man always tells me Never volunteer, but I’ll do it. Not half bad is right,” Rob said. “And she knows ‘Impossible Things Before Breakfast’! How impossible is that?”
“Pretty much so, most places, but every once in a while they do let the brain-damaged ones out of the Home for the Terminally Inane,” Justin said. Rob shot him the bird and went back to the front desk to chat up Tina. When he came back, Justin gave him a sardonic hand. “Twenty minutes, man. What were you doing?”
“Like, talking.”
“Like, right! I’ve never heard anybody call it that before. That long, you probably did it twice.”
“I wouldn’t have,” Rob replied with dignity. “Some people don’t blow their load too quick the first time. Anyway, about dinner-”
“You mean you remembered dinner, too?”
Rob took no notice. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. “Back toward the Interstate half a block is something called the Stone of Accord. ‘Where the Gaelic meets the garlic,’ it says on the menu-she showed me one.”
“Corned beef and linguini! Cabbage pizza! Oh, boy!”
“Menu looked pretty good. And they’ve got Moose Drool on tap. Maybe a block and a half the other way is the Montana Club. If you haven’t lost all your money gambling, you can eat dinner there.” Rob knew about poker clubs that doubled as restaurants; San Atanasio had several. When he was little, they’d paid the town a lot in tax revenue. Now, thanks to the big Indian casinos, they’d fallen on hard times. And, without that tax loot, so had San Atanasio.
“Which is better?”
“Stone of Accord is a couple of bucks cheaper. Tina says the food’s better, too.”
“Okay. We’ll blame her if it turns out to be crappy.” Justin set a hand on Rob’s shoulder. “But don’t worry. We’ll blame you, too. If it’s good, though, she gets all the credit.”
“Have you been talking with my father?” Rob asked, not altogether in jest. The band walked up to the Stone of Accord. The food proved pretty good. The other three guys drank toasts to Tina. Draft Moose Drool stout was as good as anything this side of Guinness. And if you wanted Guinness instead, all you had to do was ask for it.
The waitress recognized them. “You look just like you do online!” she exclaimed, as if that were some kind of surprise.
“Not me,” Rob said gravely. “I wouldn’t let ’em photograph my tail.”
“We made him climb out of the formaldehyde bottle, too,” Justin said. The girl just kinda looked at him, which meant she didn’t know what the hell formaldehyde was. Fancier than in-formaldehyde, Rob supposed. He also got his low taste in puns from his old man.
“You guys are playing at the Civic Stadium, right?” she asked.
“No, over at the Golden Sluice, near the university campus,” Rob said.
“I’ve been there. No way it’s big enough!” she said. “People will be jammed in there. Lined up around the block, like. You guys are the hottest band to come to town in a long time.”
God help Missoula, in that case, Rob thought. Aloud, he said, “I like the way she talks.”
“Me, too,” Biff Thorvald agreed loudly. He sounded as if he liked it a lot. He got her name, and promised her a ticket. If they were gonna sell out the place, why the hell not? Rob liked Tina better-she got the jokes-but the waitress was a long way from terrible. No guarantees, but sometimes life on the road could be a lot of fun.
V
“Oh, Christ. Another one,” Colin Ferguson said mournfully. Not all the little old ladies who died in San Atanasio went on the South Bay Strangler’s page in the ledger. Not even all the little old ladies who got murdered in town did. Just the week before, a punk ransacking a house for shit to steal so he could feed his habit put three slugs into seventy-four-year-old Lupe Sandoval when she got back from Safeway sooner than she might have. One of them blew out the back of her head. The punk sat in a cell, awaiting arraignment. Colin had questioned him; he still had no clue he’d done anything wrong. It made you wonder why you bothered sometimes. Meanwhile, the widow Sandoval’s family was scrambling for the cash they’d need to bury her.
Maria Peterfalvy, though… She’d got out of Hungary in 1956, one jump ahead of Russian tanks. A framed black-and-white photo on her dresser showed her not long afterwards. She’d been a beauty; no other word for it.
She wasn’t beautiful now, lying there on the bedroom floor in the cramped little tract house where she’d lived for upwards of forty years. First with her husband and kids; then, after he died and they got on with their own lives, by herself.
She wasn’t living now, either. Gabe Sanchez looked out through the window. Filmy curtains kept people on the outside from seeing in, but not the reverse. Sanchez said, “Here’s the first news van.”
“Happy fucking day,” Colin answered. Mrs. Peterfalvy wouldn’t mind his language, not any more she wouldn’t. He patted his hair with his hand, though he couldn’t imitate a newsie’s perfect coif. He held his fist-an imaginary mike-under Sanchez’s nose. “Tell me, Sergeant, why haven’t you been able to catch this Strangler son of a bitch when he’s knocked off-what is it? nineteen? — little old ladies now.”
“Nineteen is correct, yes,” Sanchez replied, as if he were really being interviewed. “And we haven’t caught him because he doesn’t leave fingerprints anywhere and his goddamn DNA isn’t in any of our databases.” He eyed Colin as if his boss truly were a brain-damaged reporter. “So why don’t you fuck off and die and let me try and do my job?”
“But don’t you realize you aren’t protecting the public the way the public deserves to be protected?” Colin persisted, his eyes wide with inncent indignation (or possibly raw ignorance).
Gabe Sanchez started to say something, then stopped and shook his head. “Man, that’s scary. You sound just like one of the shitheads. How d’you do it?”
“The more you repeat yourself, the better the imitation you do,” Colin said. “I mean, if you only say something once, it can’t be important, right? It can’t have any real significance, either.”
“That, too,” Sanchez agreed. “And here comes another van.”
