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Able nodded: “We’ll see.”
Carl started playinga video game; Baxter continued probing Encino Power. Able, Jan, and Letty moved down to the drum set, plugged in, and began jamming around “Those Shoes” and “Rockand Roll,” and later, Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” old stuff that everybody knew.
Able had a decent voice and Jan really could imitate a talk box. At one point, as they were working through a guitar passage, Able stopped long enough to say, “If we practice for a couple weeks, we could do the LA cover-band circuit.”
“Maybe some bars in San Dimas, but nothing on the Westside, where the money is,” Jan said. “That’d take a year.”
While they were working on the Petty piece, Letty saw Carl sneak out the door. He was back in five minutes, looking too innocent: he’d been in the truck, she thought, checking them out.
Which was a good thing.
They’d been jammingfor forty-five minutes when the man they were waiting for finally showed up, with a girlfriend in tow. Both were wearing ball caps, sunglasses, and covid masks, although covid masks had been dropped by most people in LA.
The masks were not so much to prevent disease, Letty thought, as to defeat cameras. The man was tall, dark-haired with curls to his shoulder blades, four or five inches over six feet, with big athletic hands. His girlfriend was black, also tall and athletic, dark glasses flashing under the brim of a straw hat.
They’d rung the bell at the far end of the studio, and Carl let them in. Letty, Able, and Jan didn’t hear the bell, and kept playing until the newcomers walked into the studio. Letty pointed her sticks at them and Jan and Able trailed off, put their instruments on guitar stands, and they all walked down to meet the masked duo.
The first thing the man said, looking at Baxter and Letty, was “No names.”
“Gotta call you something,” Letty said.
The woman laughed and said, “How about Bob and Sue?”
Letty asked: “Yeah? You cops, too?”
The new Bob said, “Able told us you dodged the Bob and Sue bullet. We’d like to hear about that.”
Baxter told them the story about talking to an LA hacker friend and being warned off.
“Are you really Paul and Charlie?” the woman asked.
“Maybe,” Baxter said, with a fake-furtive glance at Letty.
“How about Paul Jims and Charlotte Snow, recently of the University of Florida at Gainesville?” the man asked.
Letty threw a hostile stare at him, then said, “Are we done sniffing assholes? We want you to look at Paul’s work and give us some money and we’ll kiss you good-bye.”
“Where are you going?” the new Sue asked.
Baxter shrugged: “Maybe Seattle.”
“Rains all the time in Seattle,” Sue said.
“I try to work indoors when it’s raining,” Baxter said. He turned to Letty and asked, “We still got sandwiches?”
“I’ll get some. You want a banana?”
Letty went outto their truck. She understood that since they couldn’t see the faces of the newcomers, Baxter was suggesting she get a picture of their vehicle. She’d already taken photos of the cars driven by Able, Jan, and Carl, but now there was not an unfamiliar car in the lot; Bob and Sue had parked somewhere else and walked to Able’s place.
She got food and Cokes from the cooler and carried them inside. Baxter looked at her and she shook her head: no luck.
Bob and Sue focused on a computer monitor as Baxter walked them through the hack. Baxter paused long enough to take a sandwich and a banana. Letty sprawled in a chair and poked at her laptop. She interrupted the computer work to ask Able if he had some headphones she could use. He pointed at a rack down the studio, and she got a pair and sprawled in the chair again, plugged into YouTube music videos.
After an hour or so, the people around the computer broke up and Letty took the headphones off to hear Bob say, “Looks good to me. Needs somebody to pull the trigger, to write the trigger, but it should work. I’d like a copy of Paul’s program to see where I could go with it.”
Letty said, “Sure. Soon as we see some cash.”
Bob looked at Sue and nodded, and Sue asked, “Really?”
