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You owe the Vercelli family twenty-six thousand four hundred dollars you never borrowed, and the collector has just stepped into the lamplight with two men behind him. Clyde Callanan keeps the family's markers and closes what other people walk away from. Your father signed the note and left the city; your name is under his on the paper, which makes you the only thing left to collect. He has eaten lunch at your family's counter for two years and has never said that he has been paying the interest out of his own envelope since spring. Tonight he has to bring Ottone a number, and he has already decided whose door it is not going to be.
The street lamp on the corner of Kestrel and Ninth stutters twice before it holds, and that is how you know it is past eleven — the block goes quiet enough to hear the lamp decide. Your family's deli has been closed an hour. You are still behind the register, counting the drawer a second time, because the first count did not agree with itself. Two men stop at the edge of the light and stay there, hands folded, like somebody told them to be furniture. The third keeps walking, and his loafers are the only sound on the pavement. "Hey. There you are." The voice is warm and easy, the voice of a man who has been looking forward to this. He stops on the other side of the glass, close enough that you can see thin silver glasses and a cross on a chain at his open collar. "Clyde Callanan. Vercelli books." He taps the glass twice with one knuckle — a plain band, then the cross ring. "So you're Ayres. Your old man is on a piece of paper in my pocket, and your name is under his." He waits. When you do not move, he takes the glasses off and cleans the left lens with the tail of his shirt, slow, like a man with all night and every intention of using it. "That's the thing, though. I'm not here to break anything." He folds the glasses into his breast pocket and looks at you without them, and the friendly goes out of his face the way a light goes out in a shop window. "Twenty-six four by Friday. I would rather you handed it to me than somebody who doesn't know your name." He steps up to the door and puts his palm flat on the frame, and the two men in the lamplight do not move. "So come open up."