The People Next Door (9 page)

The proprietor plunged beer glasses into scalding basins of sterilizing water, hopping them onto motorized brushes until his
fingertips were raw and numb. He’d only been here since one, but already Mick’s forty-four-year-old body felt like a sack
of hot hammered coins. Steam clung to his face like a fever. Glasses clinked, people laughed, silverware crashed in a tub.
He zoned in and out of the dining room’s warbling early bird din. He went through decades-learned motions until the last of
the twenty-two ounce pins porpoised out and landed trophy upright on the rubber-webbed beach to dry. An hour after entering
the restaurant, he wanted to dig a hole in the ground and bury himself. For a moment he imagined refilling the sinks and climbing
atop the bar’s worn cherry veneer to soak his feet in the sink, but there were health codes to observe.

Even here, in The Last Straw, his dying sports bar.

He fountained seltzer into a highball glass, swirled the fizz and swallowed it warm. He glanced at his rubber watch, wiping
a little sperm of soap foam pooled in the cup of the digital face – 6:22.
Shit
. Amy was going to be
irate. He had to get the hell out of here, pronto, and yet something was nagging him, urging him to stay. Something was in
the air.
Something’s going to happen in here tonight. Something the others can’t handle. What, or who, is it?

He surveyed the dining room. Reggie was off-loading a plate of wings to the young couple in the corner at table 6. Reggie
was a nice guy, always well groomed. He dressed loud, a white kid from Greeley who drove a heap of a Cadillac he called The
Lac and fancied himself a playa. He seemed to be on top of his game, his patrons content with their food.

Jamie had been circling a businessman hiding behind a wall of newspaper, the untouched mountain of nachos at table 9, slick
blond hair, the guy’s sleeve appearing like a puppet every few minutes to hoist another free refill on his Arnold Palmer.
Good kid, Jamie – earnest, motivated. Never needed a push, her pixie hair and peasant thighs and that firm little runner’s
butt in perpetual motion, and she always earned a decent tip. If there was trouble here, it wasn’t with her tables.

A head of wavy blond hair high up on a golden brown neck bobbed by and Mick did a double-take. Oh, you gotta be shittin’ me.
Brett was supposed to have been cut over an hour ago, but there he goes with another pitcher of Buff Gold, nowhere better
to be. Yukking it up with the rugby studs at 14, the ones getting loud in their grass-stained elbow pads. Brett was a semi-pro
sand volleyball player with a volleyball for a head and a penchant for milking the time-clock. In an industry where even
strong profit margins were eight to twelve per cent, mismanaging payroll was the lethal serpent in the garden.

‘You’re long overdue, Brett.’ Mick snapped his fingers. ‘Time to clock out.’

Brett didn’t hear him. Goddamn Alt Rock satellite channel cranked, Chris Cornell caterwauling off the window panes another
brain-numbing and unnecessary expense.

Expenses, payroll, money, accountant – where was Eugene Sapphire, anyway? Boom, that was it. Maybe that was why Mick’s gut
was full of acid. Wasn’t their monthly meeting today? Mick retrieved the new Droid Amy had bought him, poked, scrolled, scoped
his calendar: nothing about the accountant, but then maybe the new phone hadn’t synced his calendar. Maybe the meeting was
next week. Good. Next week was always better than this week. Mick didn’t want to hear about money.

He holstered the device. ‘You’re bleeding me dry, Brett!’

‘You need something, Mick?’ Jamie dipped behind the bar with a round corked tray piled with glasses and a half-eaten burger
the size of a car tire, it’s center flesh bleeding over a wasteland of fries. Pig portions, fat customers, more wasted overhead.
Time to design a new menu, start interviewing chefs.

‘The hell’s Brett still doing here?’ The edge in his voice sent Jamie back a step, so he softened the follow-up. ‘I told you
to cut him loose at five. We’re dead.’

Jamie paled. ‘I thought maybe … Amy wanted to make sure we were covered.’

‘I know, I know. You didn’t know I was going to be here.’ Mick smiled, realizing he had slung his wrath in the wrong direction.
He shot more club soda, slugged it back, stifled a burp. ‘Thanks, Jamie. You’re the one holding the entire trapeze show together
these days. Another Arnold for the newspaper man?’

‘The news – oh, no, he’s fine.’ Jamie was blushing, pulling her lip. The customer had gotten under her skin in some way.

‘Everything all right?’ Mick said.

Jamie glanced toward the hovering
Daily Camera
. ‘He’s a little strange.’

‘He hit on you? You want me to take care of him?’

‘Oh, no, not like that. Though he is kind of handsome. He just looks sorta not there? He keeps smiling but his eyes … They’re,
like, dry.’

Mick panned the room, got distracted by the rugby team. They seemed to have multiplied, their scrum erupting. Two combatants
lining up plastic cups, the teams swinging pitchers like steins in a mead hall. A ping-pong ball
thwocked
wetly on the table and the jeers of six college boys scraped the rafters. ‘Drink, mother-fucker, drink!’

Tuesday happy hour beer pong special: Brett’s idea. The goal was to prop up their slowest night of the week. The result was
ogre clientele, bad news for the carpets, absolute zero net increase in the nightly take.

‘Was it the nachos?’ Mick bent to straighten the foul
rubber mat between them. ‘Swear to God I’m going to fire Carlos. I mean, it’s
nachos
, right? I’m no longer asking him to do
au poivre
—’

‘He didn’t eat the nachos,’ Jamie said. ‘I offered, like you said, always push the apps. And he said okay, but he’s just been
sitting there. Every time I check in, he like just stares at me.’

Mick thought the girl was controlling some kind of weird shiver. ‘That’s it?’

Jamie frowned. ‘And I don’t think he blinked. At all. He just—’

‘I’ll handle Brett,’ Mick said. ‘Let me know if the guy keels over. I gotta get out of here anyway. Can you handle the closing
tonight?’

Jamie tensed again, but nodded. ‘I’m getting used to it.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, no problem.’

‘Okay. I owe you one.’

Jamie scurried off to the kitchen. Mick turned and pulled his daily wage from the bar register. He hadn’t cut himself a paycheck
in fourteen months and the two hundo he removed tonight just about cleaned out the till. As he was pocketing the wad, he caught
movement in the bar mirror: Eugene Sapphire entering, black wind-breaker trailing like a cape, thwarting Mick’s escape. Sapphire’s
eyes were bloodshot, his mouth set in a crooked snarl, and Mick thought, So this is what the grim reaper looks like. A fucking
accountant dressed in a KMart suit.

‘So that’s it,’ he said. A small miner with a pickax seemed to be standing behind Mick’s forehead, digging for gold. ‘Thirty
days. Fourth of July weekend plus, what, a week?’

The accountant’s neck turtled up from the shell of his starched collar. ‘Forty-five or sixty if you can renegotiate some of
the invoices with your suppliers—’

‘I won’t stiff my partners,’ Mick said, upending his whiskey sour. ‘They’ve already gone above and beyond.’

‘—and run a skeleton crew, pull double shifts, and go into a liquidation mode with half a menu, maybe ninety, but—’

‘I was already pulling double shifts and I’m not keeping it a secret until the last day. Not happening, Gene.’

Eugene Sapphire had been the Straw’s numbers man since the doors opened. He had roomed with Mick’s father, Bernard Nash, in
college, and remained bright-eyed, sharp in his calculations and sage in his advice, with a nice head of gray hair Mick associated
with members of the Senior PGA Tour. He hadn’t apologized for
being late and Mick guessed that Sapphire now regarded Nash Jr as a lost cause.

‘If it comes to
that
,’ Mick said, ‘we’re going to maintain our dignity, go out with a bang. I’ll throw a party for one of the local charities,
put a full-page ad in the
Camera
, a sort of farewell to the community that’s been so good to us, some bullshit like that. But I’m conceding nothing at this
point. Let’s be clear.’

‘All well and noble, Mick,’ Sapphire said. ‘But my job is to give you your options. Realistically. Have you heard from your
strong man in Denver lately? The police apprehend your Bonnie and Clyde?’

‘The police are useless and Jim Butler is no one’s strong man. He’s the new breed. Cyber crime, corporate espionage, ID theft.
Says he’s working on a last-known address, but I think he views this whole mess as a waste of his time. And maybe it is. I
mean, what’s the point, Gene. Principle? Pride?’ He laughed.

The accountant did not laugh. ‘One hundred and eighty-two thousand of your hard-earned dollars. That’s your principle.’

Mick finished his drink. ‘You know what kills me? These fucks, Greg and that dingbat Leslie, they weren’t kids or addicts.
It’s not like I hired some ex-con for a bartender and his dime-store grifter girlfriend for a hostess. They’re fifty years
old, for Christ’s sake. Leslie has two kids in Wyoming. Greg used to own a car wash. Here, in my town, right down on Valmont.
Known Amy since she was in braces. They knew what this would do to me. I thought I was doing a good thing giving regular
people some responsibility, a living wage. But these leeches …’

Mick held his hands out over the table like ram’s horns, his face reddening.

‘I saw them now, I’d choke the fucking life out of both of them myself. I’m serious, Gene. My father would be proud.
Proud
. It’d be worth this place going down the tubes if I could wrap my hands around their fucking throats, just for a minute.
That’s all it would take. One minute.’

Something in his neck fluttered and he wished Jamie would bring him another double. His device purred against his tired dick,
setting off Pavlovian dread. It was after nine and he had a new text. From Amy.

Are you insane? Do you want to have a

stroke? Get your ass home now.

‘Right,’ Mick said to his phone. When he looked up, the newspaper man was exiting his booth, two tables behind Sapphire. Mick
had forgotten the guy was still here, and now all he caught was a head of slick blond hair above a plain black suit. Had he
been listening in? Was he some kind of bill collector, maybe an agent from the IRS? It seemed uncanny the guy had sat in the
Straw for almost three hours without Mick ever getting a good look at him. He caught one final glimpse of the shoulders pushing
through the doors, and without knowing why, Mick was up out of his booth, giving chase. His forehead felt like molten iron
as he burst through the front doors.

But when he scanned the sidewalks, the patio seating area, and the parking lot beyond, there was no sign of the stranger.
The dozen or so cars in the Straw’s corner of the lot were empty. The man had vanished into the night.

Someone grabbed his arm and Mick jumped, cocking a fist.

Sapphire reared back. ‘Easy, easy. Jesus, Mick.’ Mick deflated. ‘Sorry, I thought you were … you see that guy sitting behind
us? Blond hair, the suit?’

‘No, I did not.’ Sapphire looked at his watch. My God, the man wanted to go home.

Mick’s eyes darted around the lot. ‘It’s like he’s been waiting for me. I know him from somewhere. He wants something …’

‘Mick, listen to me.’ Sapphire wagged a finger. ‘You’ve got to stop this. This anger. You’re wrong for it, and you need time
to get back on your feet. You’re a parent, a man in the community. This stuff happens. Even the best businessmen don’t always
see it coming. You want to do your father proud? Go home. Talk to your family.’

‘About what? How do you do that?’

‘Focus on what comes next. You need an idea. I can help you form a new plan around something. But you need to start looking
at this as a blank slate.’

Only now did Mick grasp that tonight was
the
talk, the moment the surgeon comes out of the theater and informs you he has done everything in his power. The Straw was
no longer on life support. It had been pronounced.

The reality staggered him. ‘I could pull some money out of the house …’

Sapphire tsked behind his long graying teeth. ‘You go to the bank with a personal guarantee, they attach you to the note,
and everything the note’s attached to is now attached to the rest of your life. Your residence, all of your personal assets
as well as Amy’s, would no longer be exempt. Keep your home out of it. At all costs, Mick. Pay your mortgage first, keep a
roof overhead. Everything else is secondary.’

‘Goddamn it. This wouldn’t have happened to them. Dad might have missed the signs, but Mom would’ve sniffed it out. I killed
it, Gene. I killed my parents’ restaurant.’

‘Sometimes a thing has to die before it can be reborn.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

‘We’re living in a different world. They had their battles, believe me.’

‘Yeah, but they won. My dick’s in the dirt here.’

The accountant nodded. ‘Boulder is brutal on restaurants. There’s money
here, but it’s fickle. Pete Pomfrey couldn’t make it in this town and he pulled two of the best seafood capers I’ve ever dined
in. Restaurants don’t last, champ.’

Champ
. Sapphire knew Mick’s father had called him that.

‘What does, old man?’ Mick said. ‘Tell me. I really need to know.’

‘If I knew that, young man, I wouldn’t be an accountant.’ Eugene Sapphire clapped him on the shoulder and –

Flashes of orange strobed behind Mick’s forehead and he was
free falling, plunging into the water. The sun was blinding and the scent of mildewed astro-turf wafted over from the dock
and the lake cupped around his eyes and he went down into the darkness. There, in the cooler depths, where the green-blue
surface gave way to deep brown and then black, and the temperature dropped ten degrees, and the silent murmur of the lake
tightened in his ears, he saw –

Hands. An old man’s hands. Liver spotted, arthritically gnarled, with thick green veins. A black trench coat, the hands unbuttoning
this garment from the throat down. The coat draped over a chair, the water pattering to the wood floor. In a room both familiar
and secretive, a large wooden desk with a green leather top and all the implements and tools that bespoke the workspace of
an important man, a trusted man, a banker or lawyer or councilor of some kind
.

The old man sat in a large leather chair with cracking seams and brass wheels, rolling himself tight against the desk. He
opened a ledger and made a few notations in fine black ink, numbers with a series of initials, then withdrew a check from
his breast pocket, inserted this into the ledger, and wheeled himself backward with expert control and bent to open a low
cabinet door
.

Inside the cabinet, a safe
.

A black numbered dial, the small door gunmetal gray. The old fingers with yellowing, almost feminine nails, ran the dial back
and forth too fast for him to read the combination. The safe door opened and there were shelves, and he heard the old man
grunt with the effort of bending to insert his ledger. Inside, on the bottom shelf, were stacks of tightly banded new bills,
hundreds, tens of thousands in Benjamin Franklin paper all
bricked up, two of the stacks plastic-wrapped. On the top shelf sat a piggish gun, short and black, as well as three inches
of Wells Fargo statements bundled with a thick blue rubber band
.

The safe door closed, the dial spun, the cabinet door closed, and then he was looking over the old man’s shoulder as he turned
at his desk and looked up, to the door. The office door opened and a woman in a blue flannel bathrobe entered with a tray
set for tea: a steaming silver pot, two small china cups on their saucers, a short jar of honey with a wooden swizzle with
a beehive tip. The woman’s gray hair was thick, middle-parted, falling to her shoulders. Sad, Jane Goodall eyes that were
still lovely. Her lips were moving but the sound was muffled, as if they too were underwater. Each rose from their chairs
and walked out, the old man’s arm around her waist, the office door closing
.

Mick churned beneath the water, lungs tight, blood surging as he kicked to the surface, toward the light of a new day
.

My father’s best friend
.

The one man with the inside line to my entire operation
.

I trusted him and the filthy old bastard bled us dry
.

He broke through, gasping, and found himself standing in the Last Straw’s parking lot. For a moment he was shocked to find
himself dry, standing on wobbly legs, out of breath. His arms felt loose. He blinked, searching the parking lot for Sapphire
and his powder blue Lexus, but the accountant was gone.

He had left right after patting Mick’s shoulder. Is that when it had happened? Had the old man’s touch set off some kind of
vision? Did I come to this realization on my own, or did the insight come from something else?

What the hell was happening to him?

He didn’t know. What he did know was that his headache was gone. In its absence there was dull anger and tired depression.
Years this man had worked for his parents. He tried to imagine his mother, who kept track of everything in her leather-bound
pencil ledgers, missing this parasite’s tricks. He couldn’t fathom it. He had thought it a lapse of inventory control, then
theft at the hands of Greg and Leslie, his former head bartender and his waitress-girlfriend. He’d caught them comping drinks
to friends, pocketing cash, hiking a case of champagne and a prime rib out the back door one New Year’s Eve. It seemed to
fit, though he’d never uncovered a real trail of evidence. But of course now that seemed stupid, too piecemeal. An accountant,
though, a man you trusted, that was a man who could do some real damage, and disguise it cleverly.

This was why he had felt the need to stay tonight. His accident on the lake had shaken something loose, if only his complacency.
Maybe that was it. Or maybe he had a new edge going on here, something altogether more powerful. If so, what else could he
do with it? The questions left his hands shaking with the possibility of life-changing payback.