Nine Inches (19 page)

“Rick Sims.”

Th
ey shook hands across the counter.

“What can I do for you, Rick?”

Sims hesitated.
Th
ere were musical accessories inside the display case — strings, picks, capos, tuners, straps — but no instruments in sight.

“I’m looking for a used electric guitar. Not too expensive. But maybe this isn’t — ”

“Don’t worry, you’re in the right place.” Mike pointed to a gray metal door, on which the words
INNER
SANCTUM
had been carefully stenciled in black paint. “We keep the guitars in there. It’s easier to control the humidity. Why don’t you take a look while I
fi
nish my dinner.”

Sims glanced at the overstu
ff
ed burrito on the counter. It was standing upright, protruding from its foil wrapper like a fat banana from a shiny metal peel. A few grains of rice had spilled from the ruptured tortilla onto the glass below.

“Where’s that from?”

Mike seemed pleased by the question. “You know Ernesto’s? Over by the train station?
Th
ey got this truck that stops by the o
ffi
ce building next door, when the cleaning people are there. I basically live on these things.”

“Looks pretty good.”

“Best burrito ever.” Mike tugged on a wiry sideburn, pondering Sims with a knowing expression. “You hungry? I could cut it in half.”

“No, no. I’m not gonna — ”

“I’m happy to share,” Mike insisted. “I always stu
ff
myself and then I regret it. You’d be doing me a favor.”

Sims was tempted. He didn’t have any dinner plans,
fi
gured he’d stop at Wendy’s on the way home, his last resort on nights like this. Mike’s burrito looked way more appetizing than an industrial chicken sandwich. But it seemed wrong, somehow, taking food from a guy he’d just met.

“
Th
at’s okay. I’m gonna check out the guitars.”

“Your call,” Mike said with a shrug. “Just give me a shout if you need anything.”

•••

DROGAN’S HAD
a limited inventory, maybe twenty guitars hanging on the walls of the Inner Sanctum, but Sims could see right away that it was an impressive collection, one instrument more valuable than the next.
Th
ere were no price tags, just index cards identifying the year and model, with a concise descriptive phrase scrawled below — 1957 Telecaster (“a true classic”), 1973 Deluxe Goldtop Les Paul (“Jimmy Page Favorite”), 1968 Chet Atkins Nashville (“all-original hardware”).
Th
e only one that seemed remotely in Sims’s ballpark was a 1995 Epiphone SG (“reliable Korean workhorse”), with a white body and black pickguard.

Mike had told him it was okay to handle the merchandise, so he li
ft
ed the SG from its hanger and gave it a test drive. It was a lot heavier than the Fenders he’d been considering, but the action was light and fast, and the chunky neck
fi
t nicely in his hand. He strummed the chords to “Down by the River,” and
fi
nger-picked the intro to “Stairway to Heaven,” which he’d learned in high school and never forgotten. He was working his way through “One Way Out,” the quick, stuttering ri
ff
he hadn’t quite mastered, when he noticed Mike standing in the doorway, looking faintly amused. Sims stopped playing.

“I’m not very good. I’m just getting back into it.”

“Sounds okay to me,” Mike said. “But you gotta plug that thing in and make some noise. It sounds really sweet through this Marshall over here.”

At the other stores he’d visited, Sims had refused to play through an amp.
Th
ere was always an element of performance when you did that, a sense that you were being watched and judged.
Th
e only guys brave enough to do it were the ones who could shred like Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen, the guys who’d been practicing for years in their bedrooms.

“No thanks.” Sims tried to smile, but his lips felt unnaturally tight. “I’m really not — ”

“Tell you what.” Mike tossed him a cable. “Let’s just jam a little. Start with an E blues.”

Sims’s face got hot, as if there were an electrical coil implanted beneath the skin. “I don’t know how.”

“Sure you do.” Mike took a hollow-body Gibson o
ff
the wall and plugged it into a small beige amp. “Just play a one-four-
fi
ve.”

Sims shook his head, a stranger in a strange land.

“It’s your basic blues progression,” Mike explained. “You’ve heard it a million times.”

He started strumming some chords, and Sims recognized the changes right away, the backbone of every Chuck Berry song he’d ever heard. Just an E and an A and a B. He played along until he had it down, at which point Mike broke o
ff
for a solo, improvising some tasty licks while Sims struggled to maintain the chug-a-chug rhythm, repeating those three chords over and over, the old one-four-
fi
ve.
Th
en Mike showed Sims a pattern he could use to play his own solo, a simple
fi
ve-note scale. Sims’s
fi
ngers were slow and clumsy, but it didn’t matter.
Th
e notes were right, and they meshed with the chords in gratifying, sometimes magical ways. He felt like he’d cracked some ancient code.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s almost like I know what I’m doing.”

“You got a nice feel for the music,” Mike told him. “
Th
at’s what counts. It’s not about who plays the fastest.”

He showed Sims a basic shu
ffl
e, then added some
fl
ourishes.
Th
ey played a slow blues in a minor key and even took a shot at “Born Under a Bad Sign,” with Mike growling the lyrics over Sims’s slightly erratic accompaniment. Sims felt exhausted and exhilarated by the time they called it a night.

“I like this guitar,” he said, carefully replacing the SG on its hook. “Can I ask you what it costs?”

“I’m not sure,” Mike confessed. “Let me check with my uncle.”

“Your uncle?”

“He’s the owner. I’m just helping out.”

“Don’t you have a price list or something?”

“It’s all in his head,” Mike explained. “I’ll try to talk to him tomorrow.”

THE SEX
with Olga was quick and dirty. It couldn’t have lasted for more than a couple of minutes. When it was over, she straightened her skirt, dusted o
ff
her knees, and kissed him on the cheek.

“See you around,” she told him.

On the way home, Sims didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what had happened, or what it meant, because he was pretty sure it hadn’t meant a thing. It was just dumb luck, as if he’d stumbled upon a bank robbery and somehow ended up with a bag of money in his hand. He wasn’t innocent, he understood that, but he wasn’t exactly guilty, either, or at least not as guilty as he looked. He was mostly just concerned with avoiding a scene at home,
fi
guring out a way to get past Jackie without telling too many lies.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to tell a single one because she’d given up and gone to bed. She barely stirred when he slipped in beside her, just mumbled,
Th
at you?
and went back to sleep. In the morning she acted like everything was
fi
ne, bustling around the kitchen in her robe, making lunch for the twins, giving him the usual rundown of her daily schedule — ten o’clock yoga, shopping at Whole Foods, and then she had to take the boys to the Rock Gym for their climbing class, the later session, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to start dinner until six at the earliest, so maybe it would be better if they did some kind of takeout. It wasn’t until Trevor and Jason went upstairs to get dressed that she dropped the act.

“What the hell happened last night?”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I had a little too much to drink. I should’ve called.”

To his surprise, she didn’t press for details.

“Are you hungover?”

“Nothing a few cups of co
ff
ee can’t
fi
x.”

She managed a tiny smile, but he could see that it cost her something.

“Please don’t do that again, Rick. It’s really disrespectful. Not just to me — to the boys, too.
Th
ey kept asking me when you were coming home.”

“Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

Th
at was it, nothing like the third-degree he’d been dreading. He dropped the boys at school, grabbed a venti latte at Starbucks, and continued on to the Health Plan, wondering if there would be any awkwardness with Olga. It had been a long time since Sims had had drunken sex with someone he barely knew, and he had no idea what sort of morning-a
ft
er protocol was currently in e
ff
ect. You were probably just supposed to send a friendly text —
Th
x!!
Th
at was fun!!!
— but he was old-school, so he headed straight to the Pharmacy to say hello, only to discover that he’d been let o
ff
the hook for the second time that morning.

“Olga’s not in,” said the assistant, a young Muslim woman in a headscarf. “She called in sick.”

“I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“Food poisoning.”
Th
e assistant smiled wryly. “Olga gets that a lot. Especially a
ft
er parties.”

By mid-a
ft
ernoon, Sims had begun to wish he’d taken the day o
ff
himself. His head was throbbing and his mouth felt parched, no matter how much water he drank. And there was always one more kid to examine, another tongue to depress, another scrawny arm to jab with a needle. And all the while, the sound of his own droning voice.

How’s fourth grade treating ya? Wearing your seatbelt? Any trouble concentrating? No, that’s perfectly normal. Just a sprain. An ingrown hair. Let me take a look. Try not to scratch that, okay, champ?

He rallied toward the end of the day and was feeling a little better as he exited the building. It was a sunny a
ft
ernoon in early April; a fresh, blustery wind swept across the parking lot like a promise of better things to come. Sims was tired and a little distracted — he was debating whether to pick up some
fl
owers for Jackie — so it didn’t even occur to him to be alarmed when he saw the stranger waiting by his Audi: a man, probably in his late
fift
ies, balding and thickly built, wearing a rumpled gray suit.

“Are you Sims?” he inquired, the slightest trace of a foreign accent in his voice.

“I’m Dr. Sims. Can I help you?”

Th
e man smiled and extended his hand. Even as he reciprocated, Sims felt the
fi
rst vague inklings of trouble.

“I’m Yevgeny Kochenko,” the man said, squeezing Sims’s hand with more than the usual pressure. “Olga’s my wife.”

“What?” Sims laughed in spite of himself. He tried to extricate his hand, but Yevgeny’s grip seemed to be tightening. “Olga’s not married.”

“You think it’s okay to fuck my wife?” Yevgeny asked in a weirdly calm voice as he crushed Sims’s hand in his own. “How you like it if I fuck your wife? Maybe I fuck her in the ass? How about that, Dr. Sims?”

Sims
fl
ashed back to the night before, trying to remember if Olga had been wearing a ring or had said anything to suggest that she had a husband. He was sure she hadn’t — she’d seemed pretty damn single to him — but even if she had, he would have pictured a much-younger, better-looking man with a full head of hair.

“You sure you’re married to Olga?” he said, but instead of answering the question, Yevgeny punched him in the stomach and then in the face, and that was just the beginning.

LUCKILY FOR
Sims, there was a fair amount of activity in the parking lot. Several people witnessed the assault and started screaming; two security guards rushed out of the building and intervened before Yevgeny could in
fl
ict any irreparable damage. Sims was taken to the ER at Rosedale General, where he was treated for facial lacerations — twelve stitches under the right eye, seven more on the chin — and diagnosed with a mild concussion.
Th
e doctor kept him under observation for a couple of hours before letting him go.

Jackie didn’t say much in the hospital, and she was just as quiet on the way home. She could barely look at him, didn’t seem the least bit concerned about his condition or curious to know why he’d been attacked by a sixty-year-old Russian jewelry-store owner whose much-younger wife worked in the Health Plan Pharmacy.
Th
e silence was unnerving, and Sims couldn’t stand it for more than a couple of minutes.

“It wasn’t an a
ff
air,” he said, trying to move his pu
ff
y lips as little as possible. His whole mouth hurt, even his fucking tongue, which he’d accidentally bitten at some point in the proceedings. “It was just one time. Last night at the retirement party.”

“I don’t care, Rick. I really don’t want to know.”

Sims switched the ice pack from his le
ft
cheek to his right.
Th
e Percocet was starting to wear o
ff
.

“We were drinking and she followed me into the men’s room.”

Th
at got her attention.

“You had sex in the men’s room?”

“No. She just stood there and watched me pee.”

“Is that some kind of turn-on?”

“I don’t know. We were drunk.”

“So where’d you do it?”

“In the parking lot. Up against her car.”

“Congratulations.” She gave him a big thumbs-up. “Did you at least use a condom?”

Sims winced. “
Th
ere wasn’t a lot of planning.”

“Terri
fi
c. Now we can both get herpes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was really irresponsible.”