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“Great. Let’s get them. You know the Eagles’ ‘Those Shoes’?” Able asked.
“I’ve listened to it. Should be able to find the notation online,” Letty said. “Can you play the guitar part? Do you have a talk box?”
“I got the guitar, I sing, and Jan does a great talk box imitation.”
Jan said, imitating a talk box: “Buttout-Buttout; Buttout.”
“Then we’re good,” Letty said. “The bass part an idiot could do.”
Jan said, “Thanks. I’m the bass player.”
“Let’s get the drums off the truck. I’ll set them up while you guys are looking at what Paul did overnight.”
“Did it fast,” Able said to Baxter.
“Go-fast pills,” Baxter said. “Didn’t bother to sleep.”
The hacks were impressedby the degeneracy of it all.
As the four men walked outside to unload the drums, Lettytook out her phone, tapped the camera app and turned on the video. She stuck the camera in her back jeans pocket with the camera protruding an inch or so above the pocket.
At the truck, the men were unloading the drums. Letty spent a lot of time with her back turned, stooped to tie a shoe, led the way to the door to hold it as the men paraded through with the pieces of the drum set. Able cleared away a weight bench to make space, and they spent two minutes putting the drums, amp, and throne more or less where Letty needed them.
“I can take it from here,” Letty said. “You guys go do the computer stuff.”
Letty hooked up the amp and moved the snare and kick drum around, set the cymbals, adjusted the pedal on the hi-hat, and made musical noises, while the men moved to the other end of Able’s studio to look at computer monitors.
That done, she went out to the truck to get her laptop; on the way back to the studio, she saw Able looking out a window, watching her while staying back and to the side. She pretended not to see him, switched the laptop from one hand to the next so he’d be sure to see it. Inside, she set up the laptop, and yelled down the length of the studio: “Hey. What’s the wi-fi password?”
With the password, she went online, took a look at notation for “Those Shoes,” played through it a few times—a lot of sixteenth notes on the hi-hat—and then brought up the Eagles’ version and played along.
With the men hunched over a keyboard and monitor, she sent the phone video to the laptop, moved the video to the encrypted email app, and sent the video to Delores Nowak with a note that said simply, “Faces.”
That done, she deleted all of her copies of the video, on both thephone and laptop, called up a notation for Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll,” which she already knew well, and worked through it. Able walked down to her, watched for a moment, then said, “No fuckin’ way.”
“Way,” she said.
“Come listen to us talk. We got another guy coming to see what we’ve done. We can jam until he gets here.”
“What about our money?” she asked. Of course she did.
“Coming,” he said.
Baxter was looking tired.He was sitting in front of a video monitor showing lines of software text. When Letty came up, he said, “Pop me a cartwheel.” She walked back to the drum set, got her purse, fished out the amber tube of Adderall, took it to Baxter and rattled out a single orange pill. “That’s all you get. Next you gotta sleep.”
“Yeah, I’m about done here,” Baxter said. He popped the pill, swallowed it dry, made a face.
Letty: “Ready to push the button?”
“No. They’ve still got work to do. When they push it, I want to be in, like, a game show audience with lots of witnesses,” Baxter said.
“But it’s almost ready to push?”
“Close. I think they got it.” Baxter looked at Able. “You got it?”
“If all those switches do what you say they do.”
“They do.”
