Matt half-hoped their plan, concocted over drinks at lunch—their scheme, to be honest—would end as so many others did, in a third (or fourth) round of beers and someone’s finally remembering they all had shops to open come morning. Public displays of civic fervor were no fit pastimes for small business owners. Leave adventures to kids dumb as they’d once been, a new crop of which the Quarter sprouted every year and ate faster.
But Corbin Rafferty did not calm. The idea stuck in his mind like a fishhook in the lip, and he would not stop wriggling long enough to let others pry it out. He took to the street, and Matt followed.
Determination straightened Corbin’s weaving path. He visited taprooms and tea shops whose owners he knew, and regaled them with his plan. He met customers on sidewalks and outside construction sites and playing ball on public courts, and in each venue he proclaimed: I’ll bring the Stone Men for you all to see. Come to the market tonight at nine. The message took them as far as Hot Town before Matt noticed the Crier following them, a bow-shouldered man in guild orange. He dropped into a convenience store, waited for the Crier to pass, then stepped out behind him.
“You want something.”
The Crier spun and stumbled and caught himself on cracked pavement. He had to look a long way up to meet Matt’s eyes. “Just a story.”
“You have the story already.”
“One witness is nice; twenty would be better. If your friend—or his daughter—calls the Stone Men, and they come, that’s news.”
“Maybe they won’t show.”
“That’s news, too.”
“Come tonight, then,” he said. “Stop following us.”
Matt didn’t wait for the Crier’s answer—walked past him, instead, to join Rafferty, who was haranguing a demolition guy, regular customer of Matt’s, a big round man who bought a dozen eggs every other morning. Every day Matt expected to learn the demo guy’s heart had burst. Maybe he didn’t eat all the eggs himself.
Rafferty burned out around four in the afternoon beside a bratwurst stand—sat down on a dirty bench and leaned over his knees, head bobbing. Carriage wheels rattled over uneven cobblestones. Matt set a hand on Rafferty’s back, but the man didn’t react. Matt didn’t worry. Rafferty’s flare-ups came and went like heavy traffic down a poorly paved street, leaving torn ground and deep holes behind.
After a while Rafferty looked up, staring through his stringy hair. “You’re still here.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t do this, Corbin.”
“I have to show them.”
“Ellen didn’t sound happy about it. She sounded scared.”
Rafferty’s head jerked around. All weakness left him. He looked like he did before he threw a punch. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing. Come on, Corbin. Let’s get you home.”
He half-carried Rafferty to his street, in spite of the stares of stroller-pushing moms and dads, and jeering kids on stoops who should have been in school. The man insisted on walking the last half block to his building and letting himself inside. Matt watched, then went home himself, found Donna working over a ledger she’d brought from the office. The kids were still at school. He hugged her from behind and thought about Rafferty’s wife and the ruin the man had made of himself in the three years since her loss.
“You smell of beer,” Donna said, but she kissed him back anyway, then shoved him off. “Shower. Sleep.”
He lost the rest of the day to fitful dreams of stone teeth and nails, and the tension in the Rafferty girls, like they were still pools about to freeze. He tried to open his mouth, but he had no mouth. He woke at sunset, scoured sober, with a bad taste on his tongue like a small furry thing had died there.
When he reached the market, he had to push through a crowd—unfamiliar folks for the most part, strangers called by strangers called by friends—to the clearing at the center, a bare twenty-foot circle around a ghostlight lantern that underlit the crowd’s faces green, made them seem ghoulish. The brownstones around the market square stared down on them all, silhouettes in their windows. Uptown nobs watching the little people’s show. The rent here had been too high for normal folks for years. Maybe these posh types had already sent rats to the Blacksuits—pardon me, there’s a disturbance in the market square, perhaps you could come inquire.
Rafferty and his daughters stood in the circle’s center, the girls on the dais where Criers sang their news, Rafferty pacing before them. He wore a red coat and walked with the swagger stick he sometimes carried. Uncombed hair fountained from his scalp.
The others stood around the inner edge of the circle, uncomfortable. “I thought you’d keep him out of trouble,” Sandy said when Matt reached her.
“I did,” he said, knowing he hadn’t.
A Crier stood across the circle from Matt and Sandy—a woman wearing a narrow-brimmed hat and a long coat, watching.
Rafferty began without preamble. “We all heard the news. Stone Men are snouting into our business, breaking our laws, preaching false gods.” Uncertain nods. “And the Blacksuits do nothing. They make like nothing’s happened. I will show you the truth. My daughters have seen the Stone Men. My Ellen will call them. The Stone Men will come, and we’ll all see. Blacksuits can’t ignore that.”
“What,” someone called from the crowd, “if they don’t come?”
“Then the Criers are lying, and my girl is. But she’s not.” Ellen tensed so much at that she might have been a mannequin. How had Corbin brought them here? Wheedling? Promising? Shouting? He didn’t hit them, Matt thought. Hoped.
“We can’t let him do this,” Sandy said. “With the girls.”
“The girls said yes.”
“That was bullshit at lunch, Matt, and it still is. They’re terrified. They can’t say no to him. You saw it. I thought you’d talk him down this afternoon.”
“I didn’t hear you try.”
“He doesn’t listen to me.”
“Nothing for it now.”
“Nothing but to hope this works,” she said. “With so many people watching, he can’t back down if it doesn’t.”
Rafferty paced around the lantern, casting shadows.
“Well, then,” he told Ellen. “Go on. Pray.”