Bound God

Chapter 6: Off the Books

Off the Books

The last student of the day wanted a 2100 on the SAT and had the personality of a wet towel. Coin got her through forty practice questions on the strength of the same three jokes he'd been using since June.

He finished at a quarter to seven and signed her out at the desk on the way past. The girl at the desk said next week's schedule would be up Friday. He said okay, and did the arithmetic on the walk to the car: two afternoons a week at a rate that had looked fine in June, and a gas tank that hadn't.

Out on the sidewalk, he finally took the phone out of his pocket.

Eleven missed calls. Six texts. All of it from the same landline.

He didn't read the texts. He didn't play the messages. He wiped the whole thing — texts, calls, the log — in about four seconds, then opened the log and went through it again, because his phone lied, and he had never in his life taken anybody's word about a machine.

It was a habit, and one he'd stopped explaining to people. Their eyes glazed over, and he'd made his peace with that.

He was broke. Not softly broke — broke the way where you know your balance to the dollar and you eat the sandwiches the center leaves out on Tuesdays, because whoever's on the desk always over-orders. And the phone in his hand was the newest BlackBerry made.

BlackBerry was the phone you bought if you had something to protect — lobbyists, lawyers, men with doors on their offices. He had better security posture than the people it was built for, and he'd gotten there with his own hands, in his own apartment, with nobody's help.

Every new handset, before he took it home: the checklist, in the same order, three hours of it. Wipe it, rebuild it, close whatever opened on its own, walk every permission twice, then go back through it looking for whatever he'd missed. Most of a Saturday, every time, and he never skipped a step.

The warranty went in the trash in the parking lot, the way it always went.

He drove over to the strip with the window down.

The strip was eight blocks of neon and valet stands and people with money who wanted the money seen, and Coin had never once been there as a customer. He'd worked out the door charge at the place two doors down from 52, out of pure curiosity, and it came to a week of groceries.

52 sat in the middle of the block with its name in plain white on the glass — no rope, no line, a short bar and a back room that wasn't a booth but got called the booth anyway, and behind the bar everything anybody had ever asked for. It was quieter than every other door on the block, and that was what people meant when they said the place was clean.

Clean described the room. It never once described the people in it. Coin had learned that in his first month, and his first month had been a hell of a month.

He'd walked in off the avenue a year and a half ago looking for somewhere to sit for an hour, and stayed because the man at the door hadn't looked at him twice. That was the whole reason. He'd been meaning to find a better place ever since.

The man behind the bar answered to Stamps, for reasons nobody had ever gotten around to explaining, and he was standing there with his arms folded when Coin got up to the rail.

"I'm not late."

"You're not late."

"You called me eleven times."

"About the two people I asked you for." Stamps wiped the bar with a rag that didn't need it. "You didn't call me back once."

"I've been busy."

"Everybody's busy."

Coin leaned in on his forearms. "So it's one of those nights. Which is it — a ballplayer, a senator, or somebody with his own plane?"

"Confidential." Stamps set the word down the way you'd set down a stone.

"Then I want a raise."

There was a bang from the end of the bar. Joe had been working the shakers since before Coin started there — Ghost, they called him, on account of the hands — and one of them had just gone down flat on the wood, loud enough to turn four heads. Joe looked around the room, apologized to it, and went back to work.

Coin turned back to the rail. "The company I work for during the day made me an offer this week. So I'm looking at my nights. I've got three jobs and I'm about to have four, and one of them is going to get shorted. I'd rather it wasn't this one."

Stamps looked at him for a while. Coin had been on the receiving end of that look before. It was the look of a man doing the math on what the other guy was worth and not liking the number.

"Double," Stamps said. "One price. Tonight."

"Done."

He said it flat, the way you'd read off a license plate. Only his eyes did anything about it.

"Go change."

The staff room was a closet with a mirror and a rack of the same shirt in five sizes. Coin took the one that fit and tied the bow at his collar — a bow tie, in July, in a place whose air conditioning the regulars called a rumor.

Joe came through while he was buttoning his cuffs. He looked at Coin's head and shook his own.

"You cut the hair. You don't look like you live in a car anymore."

"I'm going for sunny," Coin said. "Sunny and well-adjusted. It's a whole category of guy."

Joe kept shaking his head and went back out to his shakers.

Coin still hated Shears for it. Forty dollars, a guy who called himself Shears, a towel over the mirror, and now he looked like a waiter, which was fine, because he was one.

Stamps was at the rail when he came back out. Coin straightened his cuffs and spread both hands.

"A year and a half," he said. "Day one of the new rate and you're already grinding me."

"You're not selling your body." Stamps picked up a rag and did nothing with it. "If you were selling your body, I'd treat you better."

"I can't argue with you. You're the boss. You're the biggest man in the room."

"That's right."

Behind him the tray was already loaded — the good glasses, the ones that cost more than the drinks that went into them. Coin picked it up and made it look weightless, because a year and a half of doing this had taught him how, then took what was left of his pride and put it on a shelf with the rest.

"They're money," Stamps said, low, walking him one step toward the back. "Nothing's going to happen tonight that hasn't happened. If they want you to sit, sit. If they want you to drink, drink. Keep your mouth shut about everything else in this building."

"Sit, drink, shut up. That's the job."

"Good."

"What if it's more than sitting?"

Stamps put a flat hand between his shoulder blades and shoved him at the service door.

"Move."

The booth was past the plants at the end of the room, and the music died about six feet before you reached it, which was most of what people were paying for.

Four sofas around a square, twelve people on them, two of the women having come with somebody and both of them looking at the tray before they looked at him. Voices doing the thing money does when nobody's listening to anybody.

"— put it on the card, he's got the card —"

"— he doesn't take students, that's the whole —"

"— ask your father, he's the one with the —"

Somebody laughed at nothing. Somebody told them to shut up. Coin came through all of it with his face doing nothing and set the tray down in the middle of the square.

"Hennessy. Fruit's coming."

One of them had noticed something and was looking at him. "Robin. What?"

"Nothing." The young man didn't take his eyes off Coin. He had one hand resting on the rim of his glass and a row of studs up the side of one ear that caught the light every time he moved his head.

"Banks," Robin said. "Twice in one day."

"I'm on the clock," Coin said. "If you want to catch up, catch me after."

"I'd love to catch up." Robin tipped his head at the tray, at the bow tie, at the room. "It's just — of all the things I pictured you doing with that brain, I have to say."

"After," Coin said. "You can say the whole thing after."

Two of them were watching this the way you watch a game. The one who'd spoken up drank, then said, to nobody in particular, "Wait. This is him? This is the professor's guy?"

"Banks here is the star of the show," Robin said. "My grandfather's pride and joy."

Coin kept squaring glasses and let it run.

"So how good is he?" one of them said.

Robin opened his mouth. Coin got there first.

"If I were that good, I wouldn't be carrying your drinks."

It came out easy, a shrug with words attached to it, and it closed the subject the way it always did. He'd used that line four times that year and it had never once failed him, because it promised exactly one thing: that there was nothing interesting here.

"Anyway," Robin said. "They sell the hour here, don't they."

"Hundred," said the one with the card. "It goes on the card."

"A hundred's the house," Coin said. "Mine's double."

Somebody at the far end of the square caught the wrong pipe and had to be handed a napkin. Robin's smile stalled for a second, which Coin enjoyed more than he intended to, and then it went back up.

"Worth it," Robin said, and moved his legs, making room. "Sit down."

Coin sat. Easiest money of the week. There were men in this town who paid the hourly to have somebody sit next to them and say nothing for four hours; he'd done one of those once, and had never understood a minute of it.

The laptop was on the far sofa with the lid open and a browser up, black, no page in it. Robin was in finance. The market had closed at four.

Coin clocked the machine — the model, the angle, where the cord ran, who was standing behind it — and then put it aside and went to work.

Work was talking. Work was taking whatever the table put down and setting it back down with something on it. One of them complained that the card readers up and down the avenue had been failing all week, and Coin told him why, and it took ninety seconds. Somebody else wanted the hurricane season argued about, so they argued about it. Somebody else was following a mayor's race in a city none of them had ever lived in, and Coin knew where it had turned and said so, and after that they'd decided he was a guy who read the paper.

He was. Four sites and two feeds, every morning, for years, since before he'd touched anything that mattered, because nobody gets through a door without knowing what the door is attached to. He could hold up a table like this one for three hours. Nobody had ever invited him to one.

His biggest goal in life was to get back at society. He hadn't found a good way to do it yet.

And Robin Vance didn't ask him one thing.

That was the part Coin kept coming back to. A whole evening at a table with somebody who knew his last name and his teacher's name, and not one question about his nights, or his phone, or who he worked for during the day. Around the forty-minute mark Coin found himself liking him for it, which he noticed, and filed, and did nothing with.

He didn't like the ear. The row of studs, the light coming off them — either expensive or wrong, and he'd never worked out which, and either way he couldn't look at it long. He stopped looking at it the third time and kept it stopped.

The fruit came eventually and nobody touched it.

At one o'clock he stood up. He'd drunk two glasses of somebody else's cognac and told them who he was and nothing else, and the talking had come to five hundred dollars at the doubled rate, and the shift had doubled too — four hundred for the night. Nine hundred dollars, for sitting on a couch and running his mouth.

"Goodnight," he said, to the square in general and to Robin in particular.

The Warden would still be where he said he'd be, or would still say he was, waiting for Coin to come crawling in at four in the morning with his hat in his hand. Coin gave that the attention it deserved and picked up the tray.

Two steps from the plants, he turned back.

Robin had bent down for the laptop, one elbow on the sofa, reaching past the screen for a glass, and his knuckles brushed the keyboard on the way.

The page came back up.

Black. White type. No pictures. The kind of layout you set when it's going to be read on a projector.

ILLUMINAT

The window was cut off at the edge of the page. The rest of the word was somewhere past the frame.

Coin finished other people's sentences for a living. He finished this one without being asked.

Illuminati.

He carried the tray out through the plants, past the music, and he didn't hurry, and he didn't stop.