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private call I’d like to make. Can I use the phone in your apartment?”
    Bob grinned at Jon, then at Toni, then back at Jon. “You two can use my apartment for anything you want, if I can watch.”
    Toni laughed—a little tensely, but she laughed. She liked Bob, Jon knew. Considered him harmless, a teddy bear with a hard-on.
    “No, really,” Jon said, “I need to use the phone. How about it?”
    “Sure,” Bob said, and led them back around the bar to a hallway. They followed him down it.
    Bob lived at the Barn. So did a German Shepherd about the same size as Jon. It stayed in the bedroom Bob kept, on the lower floor of the barn part of the Barn, in the rear, a bedroom Bob referred to as his apartment.
    Bob unlocked the door, and the dog began to growl. It sounded like Mt. St. Helen’s thinking it over. Bob reached a hand down and grabbed the dog by the collar and pulled him away from the doorway, back into the bedroom. The dog was still growling, but that only made Bob laugh. Amid the laughter, he gave the dog a sharp command, and the dog sat, teeth bared, Rin Tin Tin with rabies. If Bob hadn’t been there, Jon and/or Toni would have been dead by now.
    It was a big, messy room: plush red carpeting with underwear, shirts, other clothing carelessly wadded and tossed; a queen-size canopy waterbed with red satin sheets and black plush covers over at the right. No rough barn wood here: dark paneling, with built-in closet. At the near end was a bookcase wall with no books in it, just thousands of dollars’ worth of stereo equipment, as well as a 19-inch Sony with videotape deck, and a library of XXX tapes.
    Also the phone, which Bob handed Jon as he marched the dog out into the hall, closing the door as he went. Toni stood and watched as Jon touch-toned Nolan’s number.
    On the third ring, he heard Nolan’s voice: “This is Nolan.”
    “Nolan! Listen . . .”
    “You’re talking to a machine. Leave your message at the beep.”
    Jon just looked at the phone.
    “What’s wrong?” Toni said.
    “An answer machine,” he said. “Now I’ve heard everything. Nolan’s got an answer phone! I don’t believe this.”
    The phone said, beep .
    Jon left his message, Bob locked his dog back in the bedroom, and they all went back into the club, where Jon and Toni headed for the stage.
    For the last set.
     
     
    4
     
     
    WHEN SHE blew the words on “Heartbreaker,” Toni knew she was scared.
    Certainly not stage fright—she’d been singing with rock bands since junior high—but some other kind of scared, something in her stomach that was far worse than butterflies.
    Something cold.
    Something alive.
    Fear.
    When the song was finished, she rushed over to Jon and whispered, “Fill in with something. I need a few minutes.”
    Jon nodded, and away from the mike, stage-whispered to Les, Roc, and Mick to “forget the list—do ‘Light My Fire’ next,” a song Toni didn’t do anything on, which would give her a chance to take a break.
    She stood inside the cubbyhole room stage right as the band went into the old Doors classic, Jon doing right by the elaborate pseudo-baroque organ break at the beginning. She was breathing hard. She wanted a smoke. She’d given it up two years ago and rarely had felt the urge since the first hard months, but now she wanted a smoke. She went out and bummed one off Tommy, the roadie, sitting at his sound board halfway down the dance floor, over stage left. Then she returned to the cubbyhole, sucking in smoke as if it was food and she was starving.
    Mick was singing. He didn’t sing very well, and in fact was incurably flat, but the Doors tune lent itself to that: the late Jim Morrison was known for many things, but singing on key wasn’t one of them. Then the band went into the instrumental section of the song, Jon taking the organ solo, a sing-song thing that climbed the scale in mindless little would-be Bach progressions.
    She wondered if that big sandy-haired guy—Jesus, was he