Chapter 2: Double Shift, Empty Till

The bistro on a Wednesday night was a different creature from the bistro at lunch.

The same tables, the same narrow corridor between the kitchen and the back booths, the same ambient jazz coming from the speakers at a volume that implied sophistication without committing to it – but by seven o'clock, the room had a temperature that lunch never managed. Something opened up in people after dark. They ordered a second bottle. They laughed louder. They reached across tables for each other's hands. Elijah had always liked this shift more, even when it was harder, which it usually was.

It had been a slammed night. A Thursday reservation had been moved to tonight, effectively booking two large tables during the same time slot. The floor was operating in a controlled chaos, and Elijah was focused to the point where nothing else existed beyond the tables and the customers. This, Elijah had long since realized, was why he was good at this. It took his whole brain, and his whole brain was a happy place to be. Elijah moved through the dining room with the smooth efficiency born of doing this a long time. Clear the starter, pivot, check the water glasses, glance over to catch Priya's eye and know, by the set of her chin, that table seven was ready for menus. Pivot again, smile at the couple in the booth by the window, where the couple had been holding hands over the water glasses since they'd been seated. "How are we doing?" Elijah asked the hand-holding couple. They were the kind of couple that liked to be asked. "Wonderful," the woman answered, and sounded like she meant it about something other than the food. "Great choice on the branzino," Elijah told the man, whose eyes had been fixed on the plates from the next table over. "I'll let the kitchen know." Back to the service station. In his apron pocket, the folded piece of paper.

He had checked his bank balance twice today, once during lunch. The figure had not lost its humor, the way things lost humor and began to be other things. He had two hundred and twelve dollars in the two hundred and twelve dollars he had made the night before, and tonight's tips would add to that, and it would still be a long way from twelve thousand, four hundred and seventeen.

He took a bread basket to table four and stood for a moment to take the order from a man eating alone in the back corner, a big order, a hungry man or a man killing time or both, and as he walked back to the kitchen to put in the order, he did the math the same way he had been doing it all day, the same locked equation, and then table twelve called him over and he stopped the math and started the job.

At nine-thirty, the night had settled into a sustainable speed, and Elijah took a moment in the back to eat a bowl of whatever was left in the staff pan and to look at his phone.

A text from Dani. "Are you alive?"

He typed back. "Technically. Busy night."

Three dots. Then. "I made soup. It'll be there when you get home."

He stared at the phone for a moment. Then put it away before he could feel things about soup.

He had a call. From a number he didn't recognize. Not the collector. He didn't call it back. Whatever it was would have to wait until he was off the clock. He put his bowl in the sink and went back to the floor.

The rush crested just before ten and broke in the way it always did, the tables settling into dessert and digestifs, the room's noise dropping half a register. Elijah started running closing tasks in the background, rolling cutlery, restocking the bread station, checking that the side plates were stacked right, while still working the floor, because that was the trick of a late shift, keeping the momentum from the rush carrying you through the wind-down.

He had two tables left. A quartet of women celebrating something, three of them clearly already committed to a good time and the fourth clearly driving, and a single man in the back corner booth who'd been there since eight and was on his second whisky that Elijah hadn't seen him finish.

He wasn't the kind of man you forgot to notice. Elijah had clocked him when he sat down, the suit, for one thing, which was not the kind of suit that people wore to mid-tier Brooklyn bistros, and the way he sat, spine straight against the booth back, jacket still on, like relaxing was something he'd scheduled for a different time. His laptop was open, but he'd stopped looking at it an hour ago. He had the stillness of someone who was thinking, and the kind of face that made you wonder what about.

Elijah set the check at the women's table, collected the card machine on a pass-through, and angled toward the corner booth.

"Another?" he asked, nodding at the glass.

The man looked up. His eyes were grey and had the quality of something assessing without appearing to assess — the kind of attention that felt like being measured for something you hadn't agreed to be measured for.

"No," he said. His voice was unhurried. "Just the check."

"Of course."

Elijah moved away. He was back in four minutes with the card machine, dropped it on the table without hovering, and went to collect the birthday party's dessert order. He was at the service station when his phone buzzed in his apron. He ignored it. It buzzed again. He pulled it out.

The unknown number. A text this time.

The alley call. About forty-six hours now, by my count. I may have a solution. Come back to your section when you're done with the dessert order.

He read it twice.

His eyes moved to the corner booth.

The man with grey eyes was looking at his phone. Not at Elijah. He didn't look up.

The dessert order came through the pass. Elijah took it, delivered it, smiled at the right moments, answered a question about whether the chocolate fondant was house-made with the small speech he'd given six hundred times. His hands were completely steady. Inside was a different thing.

He went back to the corner booth.

"Can I help you with something?" he said, which was what he said to guests, and not what he meant.

The man looked up again. Whatever assessment had been going on behind those eyes appeared to have concluded. He reached inside his jacket, unhurried, the way he appeared to do everything, and placed an envelope on the white tablecloth.

"Sit down, Mr. Collins."

"I'm working."

"You're in the wind-down. The kitchen closes in twenty minutes. Sit down." He said it without a threat in it, which somehow made it worse. He nudged the envelope a fraction of an inch closer to Elijah with two fingers. "Please."

Elijah looked at the envelope. He looked at the man. He pulled out the opposite chair and sat down.

"You were in the alley."

"I was at the table by the back window," the man said. "The alley's acoustics are not as private as you might hope."

Elijah looked at him for a moment. "That's not—"

"Comforting. No." He folded his hands on the table. Neat. Controlled. "My name is Alexander Reed. I have a proposal that will be of significant benefit to you, if you can set aside the instinct to be insulted by it long enough to hear it." He paused. "Can you do that?"

The envelope sat between them. The room murmured. The jazz suggested sophistication without committing.

Elijah's tip jar was full. His bank account was a joke. And he had somewhere under forty-six hours now, on a timer set by a man who had not asked nicely.

"I'm listening," he said.