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piped through overhead speakers made it hard to eavesdrop, if you kept your voice low. Lots of white and silver tablecloths, standing out against a backdrop of black tables and black leather cushions. She’d already managed to put a dusty gray footprint on one of the latter, but that didn’t matter. They wouldn’t throw her out for that. Wouldn’t want to make a scene.
    She drank her beer and fought down a nagging unease about the swag. It had taken a hell of a lot more than ten or fifteen minutes for Tommy to kill the alarmon the object, and they’d ended up having to take the whole mess—table and all—back to Tommy’s creepy basement workshop. When it was done, Tommy’d run a shaking hand over the field of stubble on his head. Then he’d crossed his arms, wiry and tattooed in the white tank top undershirt he always wore, and shrugged. The actual object didn’t have any more mystical powers than his gym socks, Tommy had said, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. Maybe that was why it had been all magicked up. He hadn’t said it with much conviction, though.
    It wouldn’t be the first time Clive had put in an order for something that didn’t live up to its billing, and he hadn’t minded in the past, but Anna worried anyway. He’d been real good to Karyn’s crew over the last few years, and Anna would hate to burn him, or the relationship. He wasn’t the kind of connection you could replace overnight.
    At nine p.m. on the dot, the restaurant door swung open. Anna got one good look at the man who walked in, and she swore under her breath. The guy’s name was Gresser, so naturally everybody called him Greaser, at least when he wasn’t around. He had a face that looked like it had been pushed in by an enormous fist, a two- thousand-dollar suit, and an attitude that could make a hyena run off to look for better company. Rooms cleared when he walked in, because anybody who recognized him suddenly remembered somewhere they had to be. People on his bad side got out to avoid getting damaged, and people on his good side made themselves scarce so that he wouldn’t be tempted to ask them any favors. It was an open question whether it was better to be in his good graces than not.
    Curiously, Anna had never heard a story about Greaser so much as laying a finger on anyone. He didn’t have to. When you were Enoch Sobell’s strong right arm, fate went out of its way to smite your enemies for you.
    She’d seen him once across a crowded room, just as that room started to become miraculously uncrowded.She’d been smart enough to go with the flow and ease out the nearest exit at the time, but that wasn’t an option this time, not unless she wanted to spend the next few days trying to track down Clive Durante and do some heavy-duty explaining. She pushed against the wall and sank down in her seat, looking away from the door.
    In her peripheral vision, the big man’s shape just got bigger. Silence, surrounding him like a cloud, approached—and then he sat on the bench across the table from her. She looked up, meeting a pair of small, piercing eyes.
    “Anna Ruiz,” Greaser said. His voice was soft, and Anna found herself sitting up and leaning forward to make sure she heard everything. “Expecting someone?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “You ain’t him.”
    “You run with Karyn Ames’s crew.”
    “Vice President of Business Development,” she said, trotting out the same joke she always used. It seemed a lot more tired today than usual.
    “That’s good,” Greaser said. “Clever. You know who I am.”
    It didn’t sound like a question, but Anna nodded just to be on the safe side. She wished the guy would break eye contact for a second. Blink, even.
    “You know who I work for.”
    Another nod, this one more emphatic.
Let’s make sure there’s no misunderstandings here,
Anna thought. She was surprised to note a thread of excitement in her anxiety. He was looking for her, specifically. Everybody said