Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

truth,” he tells her. “You can’t go wrong with the truth.”
    It’s the first flat-out lie he’s told her, and I know that from here on, he’s going to pick up speed. He’s told the story before.
    “In early ’65, we heard the Blues Project play in the Village, and the crowd went crazy for what they were laying down. Old Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but reworked into rock. I’d always loved the stuff, but we didn’t think anyone would buy it.”
    Shonna Lee moves a little closer and lets him run his hands up her calves.
    I loved Bo Carter, Blind Blake, and Robert Johnson, and I’d been saying blues was our ticket for over a year by then, but Bish didn’t want to know from nothing until Dylan had the Butterfield Blues Band back him with electric instruments at Newport. Their LP came out and knocked everyone on their ass, and Bish finally heard what I’d been telling him.
    Shonna Lee’s eyes move over to me like she’s heard the whole riff already.
    Bish gives her a smile so sticky I expect her to wipe her face. “Then the Stones and the Animals and the Yardbirds started shipping it back to us. I knew there was a fast train coming in and we had to jump on board before it left the station without us.”
    I go to the cart and sink my teeth into an apple before I scream.
    “I’d never played an electric guitar before, and it took Jack a while to persuade me to give it a try. See, I loved Muddy and Elmore James and the others, but I really felt like the acoustic country blues was in my blood.”
    My apple tastes like wax.
    “My soul, more like.”
    His eyes are starting to glow and I wonder how much longer before he suggests they take this into the bedroom. We’ve been on the road off and on for twenty years now, and he’s still the best there is, and she’s one of the perks. In twenty more years, when he’s turning into a lounge act or an oldies tour, she’ll be able to tell her kids that she banged Bishop Underwood.
    Damned if I know why that bothers me.
    I break the seal on the bourbon and pour three fingers neat. I hardly taste it before I pour three more.
    Then the girl’s next to me, stacking melon and strawberries on a plate, squirting a little blob of whipped cream beside them. Two more buttons on her blouse are open now. Barefoot, she’s still fairly tall and I’m still fairly not, so I get a good look before I straighten up and we look at each other eye to eye.
    She pours two flutes of champagne and dumps a handful of ice into a glass and drowns that in the bourbon, clear up to the rim. Bish watches her walk back to him with everything on a tray, real slow, like honey dripping off a table. When I swallow, Jim Beam burns in my throat.
    She and Bish clink flutes, then he drains his. Hers goes on the end table, and I’m not sure any of it even wet her lips.
    “So you got a Les Paul,” she says. “Any reason you chose that particular guitar?”
    “Well, I was playing a Gibson acoustic, an old Hummingbird. It’s in the other room, as a matter of fact. I still write songs on it.”
    Yeah,
I catch myself thinking,
and muskrats really do ramble
.
    “Maybe you can show me later,” she says. This time, her voice doesn’t seem to reach her eyes.
    “I’d love to.” He lets her slide a strawberry into his mouth and plays with it before he takes a swallow of the bourbon. “Anyway, I liked the neck on that Gibson, so I figured it’d be easier to move to an electric guitar if I was already used to the feel of it.”
    There was more to it than that, of course. I had a Martin D-45, loved it like my mother, beautiful sound, but by then I’d signed over my rights, so he was making the royalties and I was just the sideman, which meant that when “we” decided to go electric, it was my guitar that went. I don’t even know what that beauty would be worth now, thirty years later. We’ve got enough money for me to buy a busload of them, but it wouldn’t be the same.
    “I tried a Gibson hollow-body first,” he tells her. “But they feed back when you crank up the amplifier. Then I found a Les Paul.”
    Right. He heard Clapton playing one on that John Mayall LP and gave it a shot.
    “What is it about that guitar you like so much?” The girl feeds him another strawberry. There’s a look in her eyes, like before the night’s over, she’s going to ask him to cut his hair and wrestle a lion. She sees me raise my glass of bourbon again and shakes her head, just a little.
    “Oh, the