Page 74 of Bounced!

“I said they don’t want to sell. That’s different from saying there’s no number.” He sighed, and I heard him choosing his words, a tired, careful man who’d spent his life in these situations. “Everything’s got a number, Mark. You know that. You ran a business. But the number that moves a fund that wants a whole block isn’t a number I think you want to hear. Once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. I’ve watched you already lose sleep over this, and I don’t—” He paused. “I don’t want to be the one who puts a figure in your head that keeps you up till Christmas.”

“Gerald, please.”

“Let it go, son. I say that as a friend. Take the next four months, throw the best party that bar’s ever seen, and let it go. That’s my advice. Free of charge.”

“I’m not going to let it go. I can’t.”

“I know you’re not.” His tone was almost fond, mostly sad. “You never let anything go. It’s why you were the best tenant I ever had, and it’s why this is going to hurt you more than it should.”

“Then give me the number,” I said. “You said it yourself. Everything’s got one. I’m not asking you to promise me anything or contribute to our cause. I’m not even asking you to tell me it’s possible. I’m a grown man, and it’s my bar, and I’m asking you, what did they pay for the block? That’s all. Give me the thing I can’t un-hear, and let me decide if I’ll ever sleep again.”

Quiet on the line.

Finn had gone still beside me, arms folded on the countertop, head down.

I put my hand on his shoulder without thinking, two men bracing on the same counter for the same blow.

“You’re sure?” Gerald said.

“I’m sure.”

He took another breath.

The longest one yet.

And then Gerald Foss, who’d fixed my roof and sent his regards to my family for seven years, told me the ungodly number.

Chapter 25

Dante

Dostoyevsky decided Mark’s house was a death trap approximately four seconds after we walked in. He was a sixty-pound greyhound with the nervous system of a hummingbird and the survival instincts of a much smaller, much stupider animal. He bounded through Mark’s front door on his spider legs, took one look at the size of the place and the size of the man standing in it, and pressed his entire trembling body against the backs of my knees like he was trying to climb inside my spine for safety.

“There he is,” Mark crooned, stepping around the counter slowly, the way you’d approach a spooked horse. “There’s the man. Hey, Dosty. Hey, buddy. You’re okay.”

Dosty peered around my leg, decided Mark was too big to be survivable, and retreated into a defensive position behind the coatrack, from which he conducted surveillance.

“He’s shy,” I said.

“He’s a coward with a good heart and legs like a Bambi. I remember the briefing.” Mark crouched, then thought better of looming and lowered himself all the way down, six-foot-three of beefy man folding cross-legged onto his own kitchen floor, making himself small, or as small as a man his size got. He didn’t reach for Dosty. He just sat there, down at dog level, looking politely off at the middle distance like a man waiting for a bus. “I read up on greyhounds. They have a whole thing. You don’t come at them. You let them come at you. So I’m going to sit here like an idiot on my own floor and let your dog decide I’m not going to eat him.”

“That could take a while.”

“I’ve got nowhere to be.”

So we waited.

Dosty emerged from behind the coatrack by degrees, the way a soldier clears a room.

First his nose.

Then one eye.

Then the long, anxious wedge of his head, ears pinned back, tracking Mark with the deep suspicion of an animal who had never once in his life been proven right about a threat and refused to let that ruin his record.

He took a step.

Froze.