Then he caught me looking. And the smile came back—slow and warm and just for me—and he raised his coffee cup in the smallest possible toast.
I looked back down at my strings before my face could do anything I'd regret.
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 calledcountry shrimpthat 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 theactive 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 whatin close proximity to federal agents who subsequently diedmeant, 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 thekind 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.
