SEE WHERE WEBB GOES NEXT IN AN EXCERPT FROM DEVIL’S PASS FROM SEVEN (THE SERIES).
NOW
Beneath the vintage black Rolling Stones T-shirt he had found at a thrift store, Webb was wearing a money belt stuffed with $2,000 in prepaid bank cards. It was a lot of money for a seventeen-year-old who worked nights as a dishwasher. The belt cut into his skin as he sat against a building on a sidewalk in downtown Yellowknife, but Jim Webb didn’t feel the pain.
Not with a Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar in his hands and a mournful riff pouring from his soul as he played “House of the Rising Sun,” humming along to the words in his head. Webb was killing time before he had to catch a cab out to the airport.
Playing a guitar in a hotel room drew loud, angry knocks on the wall from the other guests, but playing on the street drew cash. That was one reason for the acoustic guitar—it was uncomplicated. Electric guitars needed amps and cords. The other reason was the sound. Just Webb and his guitar and his voice. What people heard was all up to him, and there was a purity in that kind of responsibility that gave him satisfaction.
Already half a dozen people had stopped to give him the small half-friendly smiles that he saw all the time—smiles that asked, “If you’re that good, why are you sitting on a sidewalk with an open guitar case in front of you, waiting for money to be tossed in your direction like you’re a monkey dancing at the end of a chain?”
Those looks never bothered him. Nothing bothered him when he had a guitar in his hands. For Webb, there was no rush like it. Playing guitar, hearing guitar, feeling the strings against the callouses on his fingers and thumb, watching people watch him as he played. All of it. No other way to describe it except as the coolest feeling in the world. Instead it was how he felt when the guitar was back in the case that worried him.
Barracuda Page 9
