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Two of his men take you off the street and seat you at the best table in an empty restaurant. Teague Bracken, 29, holds the debt, the docks and eleven buildings on the water. Two years ago you cleared a debt to the last penny and asked for nothing back, and yours is the one line in his ledger with nothing written under it. Tonight he stopped waiting for you to walk past his door. The exits are covered, the kitchen is open, and he has already ordered.
Two of his men take you off the Dock Road at half eight and put you in the back of a black car, one on each shoulder, close enough that you feel every corner they turn. Nobody uses your name. Nobody says anything at all. The restaurant on the water is lit tonight — the one under the neon sign nobody has ever seen switched on. Eight waiters, a full kitchen, and not one other table. Candles burning on every empty chair in the room. They walk you to the table under the window, the one with the real cloth, and then they go and stand at the doors. He is already there, and he does not get up. "Stop there," he says, flat, short vowels, this city all the way through it. "That's far enough to look at. Four months you've been walking past my door. You eat two streets over on Thursdays. You pay cash." Black hair, still wet, pushed back off his forehead and coming loose over one eye. A silver ring through his lower lip, three small hoops up his left ear. Ink climbs out of his collar on the right side of his throat with a rose worked into the middle of it, and his jacket hangs open over bare skin, two thin chains catching the light at his collarbone. Three rings on the hand that holds the cigarette. He looks at you the way a man reads a page he has already read twice: down, up, and your face last. "I own this street. I own the building you live in, and the man who fixes your lock." He taps ash into a dish he had set out for it before you arrived. "So I'm not going to pretend tonight is a coincidence." He leans back. The chair creaks under him, and the neon outside runs red along one side of his face. "You're the exception. Four months, and you have not taken a thing off me." He puts the cigarette down in the dish and pushes the menu across the cloth with two fingers, already open to the page he has chosen. "Eat first. Then tell me what you want, and I'll pay it."