He didn’t turn on the headlights until he was four blocks from the lot.
By then, he was home free.
FLORRY WAS WEARING hisALL ACCESS laminate in the sky-blue color of the day, but he had all the others in his jacket pocket just in case one of the security guards gave him any bullshit about the color having changed at midnight. This was now two in the morning, and the concert site was as still as a graveyard. He walked onto the site familiarly, not expecting to be stopped by the security guard at the entrance, nodding to him, in fact, but not explaining why he was there, never explain, never apologize, just march in.
Whistling softly to himself, he walked directly to the control tower some hundred and fifty feet back from the stage. This was where all the really expensive equipment was; he expected to get stopped here, and he was.
“What’s up?” the guard there said, even though he could plainly see the blue laminate pinned to Florry’s jacket.
“Sound,” Florry said, and held up the black bag in his hand.
Keep it simple, he thought.
“Want to open it for me?” the guard said.
“Sure,” Florry said pleasantly, and unzipped the bag.
The guard flashed his torch into it.
He was looking in at a black metal box some ten inches wide by fourteen inches long by two inches high.
He was looking in at tomorrow’s utter confusion.
“Fuck’s that?” he asked.
“Micro-amplifier,” Florry said.
Which it wasn’t.
“Little late, ain’t it?” the guard said.
“Musicians,” Florry said, and rolled his eyes.
“Okay, go on,” the guard said, and watched while Florry headed straight for the console. He kept watching as Florry poked around the board here and there like somebody who knew what he was doing, and then he got bored and strolled over to where another guard was standing near the sound stack on the right side of the stage.
That was when Florry really got to work.
It took him five minutes to locate the four matrix output cables going from the console to the processing rack. It took him another five minutes to unplug the outputs from the console and patch in his black box. A minute later, he had the box snugly tucked in among the other equipment in the electronic racks.
Whistling, he waved to the two guards near the stage, said good night to the guard at the entrance, and left the site.
From a telephone booth on the corner where he’d parked his car, he phoned the Deaf Man to tell him everything was set for tomorrow.
“Thank you,” the Deaf Man said.
CARELLA COULDN’T SLEEP.
Old songs kept running through his head, songs to which he didn’t know the words, or only knew some of the words, songs he couldn’t quite remember, snatches of melody blurred by time, an incessant concert he couldn’t completely hear, songs from very long ago, hissing and echoing from a static-ridden radio to blend together in what he recognized was a low-key nightmare, but a nightmare nonetheless.
He couldn’t believe that the concert tomorrow was the Deaf Man’s real target. If he knew the man at all, and he thought he knew him pretty well, then the concert—whatever he’d planned for the concert, a fire, whatever—would only be the diversion. This was a free concert, there wasn’t any box office the Deaf Man hoped to rob, his true target had to be somewhere else, the real thrust had to be elsewhere.
But where?
Big city, this one.
The songs running through his head.
Time running through his head.
The clock ticking relentlessly toward one o’clock tomorrow when the concert would start.
What else was happening at one tomorrow?
And where?
The songs kept hissing from the old radio, saxophones and trumpets, snare drum and bass, piano and trombone.
What? he wondered.
Where?
13.
THE MORNING OF APRIL FOURTH dawned gray and uncertain, a lowering sky covering the city like a gunmetal lid. The crowds began gathering at eight in the morning, long before the concert site was open to the public. This was a free event, with unreserved seating, first come, first admitted. By ten o’clock, the overcast began burning off, and by a little before eleven the sun was shining brightly and the sky was as blue as a periwinkle’s bloom. A fresh breeze wafted in over the River Harb, adding a briskness to the day, but no one involved with the concert in the park was complaining. For April, they could not have wished for better weather.
It must have been like this in olden times, Chloe thought, when people from miles about came to local fairs. Sil had asked her to meet him at eleven sharp, at the main entrance to the site. As she approached now, she saw at once that a crowd had gathered around him, shouting his name, waving autograph books and programs for him to sign. The moment he spotted her, he broke away from the crowd, and came to her, and took her hand. She felt enormously privileged as he ushered her quickly through security and led her toward the cyclone fence that enclosed the backstage area.
“Better put this on,” he said, “let you go wherever you like. He slipped a lanyard over her head. The orange laminate hanging from it had the name of the group, Spit Shine, printed across the top, and then—in bolder lettering below it—the wordARTIST. They went past the beer tent and then through the guard gates, and he helped her up the wooden steps leading to the stage. People were busily coming and going everywhere. Still holding her hand, he led her to where Jeeb was testing his sound levels. Each of the artists had one or two, sometimes three, stage monitors at his feet, enabling him to hear any other performer onstage in whichever proportions he chose. As Sil approached, Jeeb was monitoring a sample chorus from the two girls in the crew, standing some six feet away from him on either side, and rapping out the lyrics to “Hate,” which would be the second song they’d be doing today.
“Jeeb,” Sil said, “I’d like you to meet Chloe Chadderton. Chloe, this’s Jeeb Beeson, leader of the group.”
“Hey, how you doin?” Jeeb said.
“Her husband wrote ‘Sister Woman,’” Sil said.
“We openin with that,” Jeeb said.
“I can’t wait to hear it,” Chloe said.
“Girls do the main rap, me an’ Silver do a kind of jungle chant behind ’em. Works real fine. Your husband wrote some fine words, Chloe.”
“Thank you,” she said, though George Chadderton seemed a long time ago, and Silver Cummings represented the present and, she hoped, the future as well. Six feet away, like bookends on either side of the little triangle Chloe formed with Sil and Jeeb, the girls kept rapping the lyrics to “Hate,” the words angling up out of the speaker at Jeeb’s feet:
“You got a date with hate…
“At the Devil’s gate…”
CARELLA AND BROWN figured they’d get there by noon. Check with the security people, see if they’d seen or heard anything suspicious in the hours before the concert was scheduled to begin. But neither of them was convinced that the concert was the Deaf Man’s target, so they sat now at their separate desks, poring over newspapers and magazines, trying to pinpoint any event that would start at oneP .M. and that might or might not include fire as part of the performance.
Neither of them realized that the event they were looking for had been posted on the squadroom bulletin board all week long.