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hair that was graying at the temples, and widow’s peaked. He had high cheekbones, a mustache, and a mean look, but those eyes, those narrow, squinting eyes, had something else in them besides meanness. Intelligence, for sure. Humanity? Humor? Maybe not.
    At the time, Nolan had been running some sort of restaurant in Iowa City, in which Jon was a partner, it seemed, though he didn’t say much about that. When she saw Nolan, he’d be dressed in a sportcoat and turtleneck and slacks, something casual, in a country club sort of way, and the guy looked good, looked right. Only something was wrong; something about him made her think of a gangster.
    She used to kid Jon about that.
    “I wonder what your gangster friend’s doing right now,” she’d say, sitting up in bed in a motel room, watching TV, on the road with the Nodes.
    “Probably sticking up a bank,” Jon would answer, with a funny smile.
    She and Jon had continued to share a room on the road, even though their romance had turned into a friendship, albeit a friendship that included sleeping together (but only occasionally screwing) and getting out of each other’s way when an attractive member of the opposite sex came along. She had a feeling Jon could have been serious about her if she let him, but her insistence that she was not a one-man woman, that marriage and whatever were not in her plans ever, cooled him off a bit.
    And he did seem to like the freedom to go after the bitches, like that Darlene she’d spotted out in the bar. Jon was a weird kid, in a way, so goddamn straight. He didn’t even smoke dope—no drugs at all; no booze to speak of, either.
    There was that one time, however, that he got good and plastered. It was at a party at some trailer out in the country, where a guy had a hog roast at three in the morning after the Nodes had played a particularly long night at a particularly rowdy bar. The girl Jon was with, a short little blonde in halter top and jeans, was the sort who wanted to drink but would not drink alone, and so Jon drank with her and later crawled off into the woods with her, too. But by the time he ended up back at the motel with Toni, he was plastered—plastered in the way that only someone who doesn’t get plastered often can get plastered. And he started to talk.
    And he told her the damnedest things.
    About him and Nolan.
    And bank robberies and shooting somebody called Sam Comfort, some crazy old man who was a thief himself who Jon and Nolan were looting, and wild goddamn things about some girl getting her head blown off by somebody called Gross, and shoot-outs in lodges up in Wisconsin. And the next morning Jon asked her to forget all that stuff he told her last night, and there had never been a word about it since.
    Till tonight.
    “Light My Fire” was almost over.
    She got back up on stage, and Jon gave her a little smile and she gave him one back, nodding, and they went into the next song.
    Playing tambourine and singing back-up, she glanced over at Jon, and he was into the music—not a sign of worry. And she felt better. Jon had left a message for Nolan, and the woman in white and her big sandy-haired stooge didn’t know that. And that made Toni feel better; the cold feeling at the pit of her stomach was gone.
    Then she noticed Jon flubbing the words on “Jailhouse Rock.”
    And at the back of the room, standing by the double doors, the big sandy-haired man waited and watched.
     
     
    5
     
     
    THEY GOT called back for two encores. One encore was typical for the Nodes; they were good enough to expect that. A second encore indicated to Jon that the word had spread through the crowd that this was the band’s last night.
    Some of Roc’s followers were shouting for “Cat Scratch Fever” again, and even though Jon and Toni weren’t featured on it, making it inappropriate for an encore, Jon went ahead and announced it and went off with Toni into the stage-right cubbyhole to wait it out.
    “ That fucking thing