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apartment had no dishwasher. She did dishes when they started getting stinky or when she ran out of clean ones. That appalled her old man, not that it was any of his business.
    The buzzer sounded. There was Hagop, waiting for her to pass him through the building’s security system. She did. A few seconds later, she heard his shoes on the stairway up to the second floor. She had to remind herself she was supposed to be glad to see him.
     
    Spokane wasn’t a big city. With Washington State there, though, it had plenty of little clubs. This one had been around a long time. The joint’s name—Harvey Wallbanger—proved as much. Lots of things had come back into style over the years, but not drinks with Galliano in them. As far as Rob Ferguson was concerned, a Wallbanger was a nasty thing to do to a perfectly good screwdriver.
    But Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had played here the year before. Rob and his bandmates were glad to be back. The sound and light guys—the guy on lights was a girl, actually—knew what they were doing. The management didn’t try to stiff acts as a matter of principle, the way so many clowns who ran clubs did. And the crowd was lively and enjoyed the show. They had last year, anyhow.
    Which meant . . . they were the same kind of weirdos as the ones who played in the band. And if that wasn’t a judgment on them, then it was a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Or something.
    Rob turned to Justin Nachman, who would have been Squirt Frog if the band were set up like that. Justin played lead guitar, did most of the singing, and had as much fame as anyone in a resolutely unfamous band could claim. “What would you call the kind of stuff we play?” Rob asked.
    “Beats me,” Justin answered cheerfully. “I don’t put labels on it. I just play it. Long as you don’t call me late for supper, you can call it anything you want.” He meant it, or near enough. Nobody in the band was on the wrong side of thirty, but Justin had a good set of love handles.
    They’d gone round that barn before, of course. They’d been going round it since the band formed— congealed was the word Justin used—in Santa Barbara. Rob and Charlie Storer, the drummer, were the analytical ones. Justin and Biff Thorvald, who played rhythm guitar, didn’t sweat it. They did what they didand hoped they did it well enough to keep them from needing to look for honest work.
    Charlie said, “We’re probably somewhere between Frank Zappa and Al Stewart.”
    He’d said that before. Arguments came and went like tides, and almost as regularly. Rob sighed. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he asked, a rhetorical question if ever there was one. He answered it, too: “For one thing, most of the people who listen to us have never heard of Zappa or Al Stewart.”
    “I think you’d be surprised,” Charlie said. “Al Stewart still gigs at places like this. Zappa would, I bet, only being dead makes it harder.”
    “Maybe a little,” Rob agreed in tones he’d picked up from his father. In some ways, they were like water and sodium, and caught fire whenever they touched. In others—most of them ways Rob never thought about—they were very much alike.
    “That’s what I said.” Charlie’s brown hair frizzed out in a perm that looked as if he’d stuck his finger in an electric socket. It bounced when he nodded, which he did now.
    “Yeah, yeah.” Rob wasn’t about to be sidetracked, in which he also took after Colin the cop without noticing it. “The other thing I was going to say is, I don’t think there is any place between Al Stewart and Zappa.”
    “Sure there is,” Charlie said. “They both write interesting, off-the-wall lyrics. Only Zappa stopped caring about whether he sounded like a rock-and-roller after a while, but Al Stewart still does. Well, as much like a rock-and-roller as you can sound with just a couple of acoustic guitars.”
    Rob pondered that. It wasn’t one of Charlie’s usual comebacks.