THE DUCK INN was a fake log cabin with a neon duck sign with flapping red-blue-green wings and a gravel parking lot planted with sickly pines. Going in the door, they met Jud Windrow, coming out.

"Hey, Virgil," Windrow said, taking a long look at Signy. "You going up to the Wild Goose tonight?"

"Probably have to pass. I have a forensics conference tonight," Virgil said. "The case, you know."

"Yeah, well, I'm heading over there now. We had a meeting out at their trailer-home, and Wendy's gonna sign up."

"You fix the drummer thing?" Virgil asked.

"Yeah, I think. Berni told us about talking to you this afternoon. She was pretty upset."

"People are dead," Virgil said.

"I hear you, brother." Windrow looked Sig over again and said to Virgil, "Don't do anything Willie wouldn't."

"I'll keep that in mind, partner," Virgil said.

Windrow laughed: "Yeah, partner. Well: better get my young ass over there."

SIG WAS MILDLY INSULTED by the exchange and, when they got inside, asked, "What was that about?"

Virgil told her about Windrow, and she said, "He was pretty… presumptuous."

Virgil leaned across the table and said, "You don't know how good-looking you are. The guys in this place have their tongues hanging out. That's what he was reacting to."

She said, "Well…"

They got on famously. She ate a burnt steak with mashed potatoes and drank two-thirds of a bottle of Santa Barbara Pinot Grigio and told him the joke about the minister checking in at the motel ("I certainly hope the pornography channel in my room is disabled"-"No, it's just regular pornography, you sick fuck") and he told her about how his aunt Laurie on his mother's side ran away with a minister, and how his father tormented his mother for a week by suggesting he might preach on the topic.

An hour and a half slipped away, and when they finished, she insisted on a walk through the downtown, so she could show him around. They looked in at a couple of bars, and she said hello to a couple of people, and a half-hour later, back at the truck, she asked, "Have you got your cell phone?"

"Sure-you need to make a call?"

"No. But this time, leave it in the truck, huh?"

"Yes!" He took the cell phone out of his pocket and put it in the cup holder. "You are a woman of great practicality."

"Damn right," she said.

BACK AT HER HOUSE, she popped a Norah Jones album in her Wave CD/radio and went off to the bathroom, and when she came back out Virgil put a hand on her hip and said, "Dance," and they danced around the room to "Come Away with Me," "One Flight Down," and "The Nearness of You," and she said, "Oh, God, Virgil," and licked his earlobe, and he pushed her against a handy wall…

Headlights swept through the front windows, the automatic yard light came on, and Virgil moaned, "No!"

Sig pushed free and went to the window and peered out through a curtain and said, "It's Zoe. She knew you were coming over. We'll tell her it's inconvenient. She'll take off."

Virgil wrapped her up from behind and said, "Honest to God, and not to be crude about it, but if I don't get you on the bed tonight, something could break. I mean, something might fall off."

Sig reached back and squeezed his thigh: "We'll just get rid of her."

Zoe knocked.

17

THE DOUBLE-WIDE SMELLED like Dinty Moore beef stew, coffee, sweat, and the vagrant vegetable odor of marijuana. Jud Windrow leaned back in the beanbag chair, scuffing his boot heels across the shag carpet; sucked on a Budweiser, tried to stay alert, and listened to Wendy, Berni, and Slibe snarl at one another.

He'd seen all this before. You had artists who'd spent thousands of hours learning how to play a musical instrument, who could tell you anything you might want to know about writing a song, about bridges and transitions and about single specific words that you couldn't use in a song. Cadaver? Had anyone ever used cadaver in a song?

They knew all that, worked it, groomed it, smoothed it out, sat up all night, night after night, doing it-and they didn't know a single fucking thing about business. They were in a business, but they didn't know it. They thought they were in an art form.

He sighed and let them fight it out.

HE'D PUT THE SKUNK among the chickens when he mentioned the necessity of recruiting another drummer, and possibly somebody different on the keyboards. Berni had gone ballistic, and he'd thought for a few seconds that she might come after him, physically, but then she had started pleading with Wendy, trying to save her job, and when Wendy had looked away, Berni began to cry.

"I… I… I get this asshole cop who drags me down to the police station and tortures me, and now you guys are kicking me out of the band… No, don't say you're not."

Windrow then suggested that she could help front the band: play a rhythm instrument of some kind, sing backups, and she'd quieted down a bit.

"As long as I get to stay…"

Wendy defended the keyboard player: "We put too much weight on her, is all. She's fine on recordings, but hasn't got an act, you know? She stands back there and plays and looks kinda dead. We can work on that."

"She can play," Windrow said. "But you don't see many big bands without everybody having some kind of personality."

"We'll get her a hat," Wendy said. "I'll work on her. The thing is… she does the melodies on the songs. She made the 'Artists' Waltz' into a waltz… used to be a straight-up ballad."

"Okay," Windrow said. "So she's okay. Get her a hat."

THEN THEY MOVED ON to the terms of the contract, and that's where Slibe jumped in with both feet. There were terms which, Windrow admitted, were favorable to him. After the initial month-long house-band gig, they agreed to play the Spodee-Odee for a week in each of the next five years, at Windrow's option. If they refused, they'd agree to pay Windrow the equivalent of fifteen percent of the royalties from any records released during that period. On the other hand, if Windrow didn't want them, in any particular year, he could cancel them without penalty.

Slibe shouted at Wendy: "You see what happens? This guy takes a cut out of everything. He owns your ass."

"Not her entire ass," Windrow said. "Fifteen percent of it."

"That's how these guys steal from you," Slibe said. "They get you all tied up in legal contracts that you can't get out of."

Wendy wanted to sign anyway, for reasons that Windrow told her were good.

"Listen: you can stay up here and be a ratshit band and play at the Wild Goose or maybe get a couple gigs down in the Twin Cities, or wherever, but you aren't going to break out that way. You won't," he said.

"They could get people to listen to them up here-" Slibe began, but Wendy said, "Shut up, Dad, let him talk."

Windrow went on. "If you wanna break out, you gotta put it on the line. That means I bring you down for a month, expose you to some of the top acts and top managers and agents in the business. And I pay you. What do I get? I get a new band that nobody knows-but you're pretty good, and my big payoff comes if you do well. You make a couple records and they sell okay. So then you gotta come back and play the Spodee-Odee for not much money, but hell, that won't hurt your reputation any. It's one of the top slots on the circuit. I pack the place for a week, and you get to keep all the money from your albums."

They heard a car turn in at the driveway, and Slibe got up to look. "It's that Zoe," he said.

"I called her," Wendy said.

"What the fuck for?" Berni asked.

"Because she's smarter than we are, and she knows about things like contracts and taxes," Wendy said. "And besides, she's in love with me, so we don't have to pay her."

"She's a pain in the ass," Slibe said. "And she hates my guts."