“Call if I can be of help.I’ve learned that you already have friends, but a man can never have too many of those.”
Louis prepared to slip by Kade, pausing to rest a hand meaningfully on the younger man’s shoulder.
“Why don’t you and your associates stay awhile?”said Louis.“Have another drink.It’s on the house.”
“And your friends will keep us company, right?You still don’t trust me.”
“I wouldn’t want you to feel abandoned and unloved in a big city.”
“I can see now why you’ve lived so long.”
“Longer than you might think,” said Louis.
By the lake, all was quiet.The lake was always quiet.Even the water made no sound as it lapped the shore, and the dead had no voice.The woods, too, were forever silent.It had taken Martin a while to spot that no birds flew through them and no insects buzzed.But above the clouds that forever lowered, there was movement.What was it that had once been written on theunknown regions of maps?Here be dragons.Dragons, andworse.
Jennifer sat on the grass that wasn’t grass.She broke off a stem that wasn’t there and observed it not being.
“Is there a problem?”Martin asked.
“I think so,” said Jennifer.“An action has been taken.Either the machine is trying to reset itself—”
“Or?”Martin pressed.
“Or someone is recalibrating it.”
Chapter 16
At PubKey, the music changed from classical to math rock.The door was locked behind Louis and the fake clientele kept an eye on Kade and his people, but the mood was less tense than before.Amir noted, with mixed feelings, that the cute bartenders were no longer behind the bar.They had been replaced by a heavily tattooed man in his thirties who was not cute, but on the upside, showed no signs of wanting to point a shotgun at Amir’s head, though the night was still young, as the saying went.
Amir hadn’t known the older female bartender was deaf until she began signing.He wondered if she was mute as well, because for him the two went together, even as he suspected he was probably wrong.Had he asked her, she might have gone ahead and pulled the trigger on him, and to hell with the consequences.Now Amir saw her emerge from an anteroom containing stacked cases of beer and a spare cooler.She passed Amir without acknowledgment, and the door was briefly unlocked before closing behind her again.Amir, who tracked her in the mirror all the way, saw Louis waiting for her outside.Amir was very glad Louis was no longer in the bar.The longer he spent in Louis’s vicinity, the more aware he was of his own mortality.He had underestimated Louis because of Louis’s age.It was a fallacy of youth.
Amir put his iPad to sleep.He had not worked for Kade for very long, and feared he wouldn’t be working for him much longer.But he had learned a lot from his short time in the Bitcoin bar, not least the absolute inadvisability of a cross-body draw.
“I’m sorry,” he told Kade, who had accepted another glass ofwhisky from the new bartender, but had not otherwise spoken since Louis’s departure.
“For what?”
“For being taken so easily.”
Kade swiveled on the stool to regard him.
“Do you think we came here to get killed?”Kade asked.“If you’d drawn your gun, that’s what would have happened.”
“To be honest, I’m no longer sure why we came here.”
“I’ll tell you why: if we hadn’t come, we’d be dead.”
Amir thought about this.
“Because Louis would have assumed you’d picked up the paper in earnest,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You could have called to tell him otherwise.”
“That’s not how it works.He had to be able to look me in the eye.More than that, he had to know I was willing to put myself at his mercy.”
“What will he do now?”
