“It’s fun.” He handed me some of the money. “You try. Although you might want to walk to the other side of the roof. Some of these Southside assholes are richer than they look.”
I knew that part was true. Just look at Bram.
“I’m not going to throw yourmoneyoff the roof, Jagger.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s… it’s crazy. It’s wasteful.”
“It’s only money, mouse.”
There was a new tenderness in his voice when he used the nickname and I was surprised I didn’t mind it as much as I had before.
Mice are smart. Crafty.
Mice find a way to survive when everything else dies.
“You’ve done this before,” I said, finally understanding.
“Lots of times. It’s how I met Hawk actually.”
“By throwing money off a rooftop?”
“Yep. We had an appointment — he was looking for a broker — but my head was all fucked up back then. So I’d go to the roof of the building next to where I worked in the city and throw money to get my head straight.”
“Sorry to be dense here, but how exactly did throwing away money get your head straight?”
“It was a reminder of how useless it was,” he said. “Kept it in perspective when I was moving all those millions of dollars, sweating it out over quarterly earnings statements and IPOs. So anyway, I blew off my meeting with Hawk. Didn’t know the guy from Adam. He was just a name in my appointment book, put there by my secretary.”
“Then how did you meet him?”
“He waited for me for about ten minutes, then left all pissed off like Hawk gets when someone keeps him waiting. Except when he was leaving the building, he saw the money floating down from the roof.” Jagger laughed. “I still remember the look on his face.”
I laughed too, because knowing Hawk, I could imagine it.
“So he waited downstairs until I came out and asked me if I was the psychopath throwing money off the roof.”
“To which you said…”
“To which I said, ‘yep.”
“And then what?” I couldn’t help it. I was all in, fascinated by the strange story.
“Then he said, ‘let’s get a drink.’”
“And that was it?” I asked. “You’ve been friends ever since?”
“Well, the road was a bit more… winding than that. But yeah. More or less.”
I looked out over the town I’d called home my whole life. It looked different up here, the north side clean and new, Southside forgotten, ignored by everyone who didn’t live here.
“And so now you come here to throw money?”
“Now I come here to throw money,” he said behind me. “Go ahead.”
I walked to the edge of the roof on the other side, small houses stretching to the preserve. “It feels wrong to throw it away.”
“You’re not throwing it away,” he said. “You’re giving it away. You’re releasing it.”
