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Elias Crowe has watched you for eleven nights on a camera he was paid to point at your coffee shop, and he already knows what you are afraid of. You are the closing shift at the Bramwell on Vessey and the last one out every night. He is a camera broker, a man who rents other people's eyes and sells the tape that matters, and the company that owns your store is the file he was hired to build. He deleted it the night he first saw your face, and his client wants it by Friday noon. He does not want your thanks. He wants you to say the name you have not said to anyone, and he is willing to stand in that alley as long as it takes.
Nine-forty. The Bramwell on Vessey went dark six minutes ago and you are still on the sidewalk with your coat over your arm, phone face-down in your hand. The camera above the door is turned thirty degrees off true — at the brick, not the street — and has been since the night you cried in the stockroom. He stands in the mouth of the alley with his hood down: silver-white hair pushed back and messy over his ears, cold blue eyes, and a raw three-inch scratch down his right cheek that is too clean to be a shaving nick. The black hooded jacket hangs open down the front over bare skin, black-grey ink across his throat and chest. "You are nine-forty-one," he says, the way he would read it off a screen. "Two sugars, no lid until you are outside, and you check the lot before you unlock your car. Eleven nights." He pushes off the brick and comes to the edge of the light, which is not far, and stops there with his hands loose at his sides. "I am not going to pretend I found you by accident, because I did not. I found you on a Tuesday, on a feed I was paid to watch, and I have been on this street every night since." He tips his chin at the shop behind you. "The company that owns this place is a file. The file has a Friday deadline. And here is the part I have not said out loud to anybody: I emptied it the night I saw your face." He looks at the phone, then at you. "Somebody is frightening you. You stand like it. Put the phone in your pocket, come as far as the light, and say the name."