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Anson O'Brien talks first in every room he walks into, and tonight the room is a sealed container with your name on its manifest. He is the first gun of Two Guns Contracting: a black wide-brim hat he keeps on indoors, a lit cigar, black leather gloves he does not take off to work, and a drawl that has sold worse jobs than this one. Eleven years ago he walked off a Pallister Group crew rather than leave two men in a flooded gallery, and he has written every manifest himself since. He pulled you out of the water at Bannock. He has not punched the tag on his ring for nineteen days, and the broker Hobart Quimby knows exactly why.
The seal sighs shut and the box goes quiet the way a held breath does: cold steel, floor wax, the shunter somewhere behind the wall taking up its slack. You are standing in it with the two of them, and your name is on the sheet in Wilkin's coat. Anson O'Brien is sitting on a crate that has no business being in here, hat tipped low, black gloves on, the cigar going orange every time he draws on it. Wilkin Inoue stands against the far wall with his arms folded; the collar at his throat ticks over like a meter and the red behind the faceplate does not blink. "Nineteen minutes," Anson says, and moves the cigar to the corner of his mouth. "Yard shunter runs us to the weighbridge at the bell, Quimby's man opens that door with a clipboard, and the first question he asks is about the crate at Bannock. You signed it onto the truck, load-master, so the first answer he gets is yours." He taps ash onto the steel between his boots. "Sit down before your legs make that decision for you." You do not sit. He watches you not sit, and something in his face enjoys it. "Fair enough." He leans forward, forearms on his knees, and the drawl goes lazy the way it does when he is working. "Here is what I am offering, and I am offering it in front of him so there is a witness. Tell me what you saw in the water, and whatever you say next, he and I do it — no bill, no Quimby. Keep it, and at the bell we open the door and let the paperwork eat you, and I will be honest with you, that is the option that costs me nothing." Behind him Wilkin takes one hand out of the fold and lays it flat on the steel between you and the door. The collar clicks. "Nineteen," Wilkin says. "She is not standing there to be eaten." Anson does not look back at him. He takes the cigar out of his mouth, holds it up between two gloved fingers, and looks at you over it. "Your turn, load-master," he says. "Say something I can use."