FAREWELL GHOST

into view like a fish on a line. It was a Marshall the size of a tissue box, and it was on. Clay liberated that too and carried the whole jumble over to Peter’s weightlifting bench.
Was the thing malfunctioning? How long had the amp been on?
“What do you want from me?” Clay asked.
Above, near where the lone bulb hung, he heard the whispering again.
He clutched the guitar and didn’t look up.
He didn’t run either. Though Clay couldn’t explain why, he was no longer afraid.
A neon-green pick was wedged into one of the Rickenbacker’s tuning pegs; Clay pried it loose and strummed the strings.

3
GENERATOR
His fingers played the Rickenbacker lightly at first, like he expected the strings to snap loose and lash his face. Then, with more feeling, and more—until he was bringing his hand all the way up to his ear and driving the pick down as hard as he could. The guitar was real. The weight of its body assured him so, its beauty too, far nicer than any he’d owned (his Wilsson was a toy in comparison). Exactly the type of axe Clay had envisioned owning while fronting a successful band. And it deserved a better fate than being buried in a crawl space.
But was it Boyle’s? Had the man stowed it under his home studio for superstitious reasons, the way a ballplayer might wear pink underwear while swinging a hot bat? Or had someone—Ganek?—left it there as a memento? And had then, what, forgotten to nail the board down?
Either way, Clay thought he’d hang on to the guitar and amp till someone showed up to claim it.
The whispering did not occur again, so the only thing haunting him was the idea that he’d been thinking about this very guitar at the music shop today, and now it had materialized underfoot. There was something exhilarating in not being able to explain that.
He tried “Louie, Louie” and “Blitzkreig Bop”—marveling at how the strings were still in tune after so many days (months? years?) of neglect—before graduating to Rocket Throne hits like “Face the Music” and “All Goes Dark.” After that, Clay dusted off a few songs he’d written himself—though they paled so completely to Boyle’s material, he quit them right away.
At some point, Peter’s Mercedes returned home. He must have assumed Clay was asleep (his son’s nocturnal nature yet another thing he knew little about) and that the preset on the alarm had failed a second night, because he re-armed the remaining zones before going to bed. Which meant Clay couldn’t enter the house without setting off the bells and whistles. Which, considering his father’s fanatical love of REM (not the band), meant that Clay was locked out for the night. Which suited him fine. He played the Rickenbacker without pause, fiddling with note progressions until he stumbled on a riff he had never heard before. He married the riff to a chorus with a catchy hook, and within an hour had fleshed out a new song. “I like you,” he whispered to the strings. “If you have other secrets, I’d love to hear them.”
By the time the sun was peaking over the Verdugo Mountains, Clay’s fret fingers were raw and he had one song polished with another in the works.
His father finally emerged on the back deck, stretching his arms and yawning with the moan of a Cro-Magnon thanking the clouds for making the sun again, and Clay left the Generator to join him.
“You’re up early,” Peter said, skeptical of the fact.
“Getting in the habit,” Clay replied. “It’s better for a groundskeeper to do his chores before the heat of the day, don’t you think?”
“It didn’t sound like you slept at all last night.”
Clay hesitated. “Oh. You heard me playing?” The mini-amp was only a single watt and he’d kept it at half volume.
“No. But I couldn’t miss your pacing around the house. Up one hall, down another, upstairs, downstairs. If I wasn’t so exhausted, I’d have chained you down.”
“Pacing,” Clay echoed. “Right.” Stopping short of saying it: There was no one in the house but you, Dad.
They were halfway through breakfast, Clay having made bacon and eggs on the outside grill—for no other reason that he’d never cooked outdoors before—when their intercom buzzed. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” his father grunted. “It’s not even nine in the morning.”
Peter stalked into the house to tell their would-be solicitors that the castle was closed, but he recommended the Dark Hollywood tour for “its complete accuracy and shameless profiting off other people’s tragedies,” then returned with a puzzled look knotting his forehead. “They say they’re friends of yours. Two guys and a girl.”
Now it was Clay’s turn at the intercom. A surveillance screen, linked to the gate camera, showed Savannah and her companions—not Fiasco Joe or Spider, but two other males, one of them either very short or a child.
Parting the gargoyle, Clay scrambled out to her. “My brothers were giving me a lift to work,” Savy said, by way of greeting. She was wearing clothes significantly more conservative than their last meeting—khaki pants and a dark green polo with the words knickerbocker stenciled over her breast. Her skin was the color of milk meeting coffee in the morning sun. “There’s a trail nearby where we watch the sunrise. I was worried it was too early, but we could smell bacon burning.”
“Well, the cops do have a firing range nearby.”
The older brother snickered, and Savy smiled, glad to see Clay didn’t mind her pop in. On the contrary. After the debacle with Fiasco Joe, he’d wondered if he would ever see her again. “This is Mickey,” she told him, pulling her younger brother into a headlock. The kid was maybe ten years old, and undersized at that, but he carried himself with a mature intensity; a scale-model adult with eyes that were openly, and accurately, suspicious of Clay’s intentions. “And this ugly one here is called Mo.”
The older brother pounded Clay’s fist and gestured quickly as he spoke.