Marcus Vale was on his second coffee when I arrived at Harbour and Hatch at nine forty-five AM.
This told me two things. One: he had been there a while. Two: whatever he was waiting to say, he had been rehearsing it for long enough to need the chemical support of multiple espresso-based beverages.
He looked up when I walked in. He looked at my face. He looked at my bag. He looked at the specific way I was walking — which was, apparently, something he had become capable of reading, because he said, before I had sat down:
"How bad is it?"
I sat down.
"On a scale of one to ten," I said, "where one is a minor inconvenience and ten is a fifteen-year criminal network built by a dead man and inherited by his widow—"
Marcus closed his eyes.
"Ten," I said.
He kept his eyes closed for approx
