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“Question three is whether the club can make it go away.” I looked straight at him and made sure he was looking back. “It can’t. This isn’t a man. It isn’t a debt or a rival or a building. It’s a woman with a lanyard doing exactly her job, and there’s nobody to lean on, nobody to pay, and not one damn thing to burn down. Your tools don’t work here. I need you to hear that, because I think you’ve been running solutions since the second you saw the seal on that card and every single one of them is wrong.”

The room held.

He didn’t reach for a fix. No money, no connections, no let me make a call. He stood there with his arms crossed and his eyes on the card and let the whole thing land on him. “What was question four?” he said.

“Whether I’m going to run.”

“Are you?”

“My grandmother is an hour from here in a building she can’t leave,” I said. “So, no.”

He gave me a single nod at that. It was the first thing I’d said all night that he didn’t have to think about. “The compound has a room,” he said.

“No.”

“East townhome. Separate entrance, nobody comes through without clearance. Freak needs monitoring, somebody ought to be watching that drain.”

“I close this place most nights,” I said. “Whatever’s wrong here is wrong at nine o’clock, not at two in the morning. A bed forty minutes away doesn’t change one thing about that.”

“No. It doesn’t.” He didn’t dress it up. “But somebody in that lot at closing does, and you’d say no to that, so I’m asking for the part you might say yes to.”

I opened my mouth to say no again and didn’t, because he’d said the last part like a man laying down a card he already knew I was holding.

The backroom door that didn’t always latch. The key Tessa said got recut. Gerry’s explanation about the alarm company, which had been fine right up until I repeated it to myself in an empty building at nine at night and heard how it sounded.

Three things. None of them proof of anything. All of them mine, because I hadn’t said one word about any of it to a living soul, and the reason I hadn’t was that saying it out loud to this man would mean he’d do something, and I had no idea yet what this man did about things.

“No,” I said.

He didn’t push.

That was the part I wasn’t ready for.

He just nodded, short, and let the no sit where it landed.

I stood there with a mop in my hand and was furious about it. Then he picked the card up off the counter, looked at it, and set it back down in front of me. Not in front of himself. In front of me. “That’s yours,” he said.

“I know it’s mine.”

“I’m saying I know it too.”

He and Freak went out into the dark and the lock clicked behind them, and Stitch immediately got up on the exam table where a wounded biker had been sitting thirty seconds earlier.

“You’re not supposed to be up there,” I told him.

He was unmoved.

I picked up the mop and finished the floor.

I sat in my car for a while after they left.

Men push. That’s the whole thing men do -- they say the thing, and then when you say no they say it again with different words, and you spend the rest of the conversation defending a position you shouldn’t have had to take.

He said his piece and then he let me have my no.

I was angrier about that than I’d been about any of the rest of it, and it took me most of the drive home to work out that I wasn’t angry at all.

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