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A loud bang behind them.
Sachs gasped--not at the noise, which she recognized immediately as a truck backfire--but at Sellitto's reaction. He'd jumped aside, actually taking cover behind a phone kiosk, his hand on the grip of his revolver.
He blinked and swallowed. Gave a shallow laugh. "Fucking trucks," he muttered.
"Yeah," Sachs said.
He wiped his face and they continued on.
*
Sitting in his safe house, smelling garlic from one of the nearby restaurants in Little Italy, Thompson Boyd was huddled over a book, reading the instructions it offered and then examining what he'd bought at the hardware store an hour ago.
He marked certain pages with yellow Post-it tabs and jotted notes in the margins. The procedures he was studying were a bit tricky but he knew he'd work through them. There wasn't anything you couldn't do if you took your time. His father taught him that. Hard tasks or easy.
It's only a question of where you put the decimal point . . .
He pushed back from the desk, which, along with one chair, one lamp and one cot, was the only piece of furniture in the place. A small TV set, a cooler, a garbage can. He also kept a few supplies here, things he used in his work. Thompson pulled the latex glove away from his right wrist and blew into it, cooling his skin. Then he did the same with his left. (You always assumed a safe house would get tossed at some point so you took precautions there'd be no evidence to convict you, whether it was wearing gloves or using a booby trap.) His eyes were acting up today. He squinted, put drops in, and the stinging receded. He closed his lids.
Whistling softly that haunting song from the movie Cold Mountain.
Soldiers shooting soldiers, that big explosion, bayonets. Images from the film cascaded through his mind.
Wssst . . .
That song disappeared, along with the images, and up popped a classical tune. "Bolero."
Where the tunes came from, he generally couldn't tell. It was like in his head there was a CD changer that somebody else had programmed. But with "Bolero" he knew the source. His father had the piece on an album. The big, crew-cut man had played it over and over on the green-plastic Sears turntable in his workshop.
"Listen to this part, son. It changes key. Wait . . . wait . . . There! You hear that?"
The boy believed he had.
Thompson now opened his eyes and returned to the book.
Five minutes later: Wsssst . . . "Bolero" went away and another melody started easing out through his pursed lips: "Time After Time." That song Cyndi Lauper made famous in the eighties.
Thompson Boyd had always liked music and from an early age wanted to play an instrument. His mother took him to guitar and flute lessons for several years. After her accident his father drove the boy himself, even if that made him late to work. But there were problems with Thompson's advancement: His fingers were too big and stubby for fret boards and flute keys and piano, and he had no voice at all. Whether it was church choir or Willie or Waylon or Asleep at the Wheel, nope, he couldn't get more than a croak out of the old voice box. So, after a year or two, he turned away from the music and filled his time with what boys normally did in places like Amarillo, Texas: spending time with his family, nailing and planing and sanding in his father's work shed, playing touch then tackle football, hunting, dating shy girls, going for walks in the desert.
And he tucked his love of music wherever failed hopes go.
Which usually isn't very far beneath the surface. Sooner or later they crawl out again.
In his case this happened to be in prison a few years ago. A guard on the maximum security block came up and asked Thompson, "What the fuck was that?"
"How do you mean?" asked the ever-placid Average Joe.
"That song. You were whistling."
"I was whistling?"
"Fuck yes. You didn't know?"
He said to the guard, "Just something I was doing. Wasn't thinking."
"Damn, sounded good." The guard wandered off, leaving Thompson to laugh to himself. How 'bout that? He had an instrument all along, one he'd been born with, one he carried around with him. Thompson went to the prison library and looked into this. He learned that people would call him an "orawhistler," which was different from a tin-whistle player, say--like in Irish bands. Orawhistlers are rare--most people have very limited whistling range--and cou
ld make good livings as professional musicians in concerts, advertising, TV and movies (everybody knew the Bridge on the River Kwai theme, of course; you couldn't even think about it without whistling the first few notes, at least in your head). There were even orawhistling competitions, the most famous being the International Grand Championship, which featured dozens of performers--many of them appeared regularly with orchestras around the world and had their own cabaret acts.
