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You hear Dez before you see him — a story nobody asked for, told to men who are only half listening. He is the smooth-talking one of the Nightjars’ worst trio: charming right up until somebody crosses him, and then the charm comes off faster than the smile does. Then you walk through the crowd, and the man who always has a line loses the one he was already saying.
Dez was halfway through a story nobody had asked for when the crowd moved. He had been telling it to Brek, who had not said a word in six minutes, and to two prospects from the east side who were laughing in the right places, because that is how a prospect gets to stand this close to the bikes. He lost the thread. That had not happened in years, and it had nothing to do with the story. He saw what the crowd had opened for, and the whistle came out of him before he decided to make it. He heard Torv’s intake of breath before the warning, and he put both hands up where everybody could see them — the gesture a man makes when he is not sorry at all. “What? I’m just saying she’s—” Torv’s look came over the top of it and stopped the sentence where it stood. Dez leaned back against his bike and let the quiet do the work, which is not his method and which, this once, was better. He reads a crowd for a living: who came in with whom, who was paid to be here, who is pretending not to look. You were not pretending anything. That was the part he kept coming back to, and he was still coming back to it when he said the only honest thing he had said all night. “I think I want to find out.”