Chapter 14: Recall

Nobody in the shop moved.

The furnace roared behind me.

Matt was at the bench with a pipe across the rails, and he kept rolling it, slow, so the gather wouldn't drop.

Tori pushed her sunglasses up into her hair.

Her eyes were red around the edges, and her makeup was perfect anyway.

"Hi," she said to the room. "Sorry. I know this is weird."

Nobody said it wasn't.

She turned to Matt.

"You're the owner, right? I'm Tori Blaylock, from Wyndham Beauty. I'd like to place an order."

"Talk to my partner," Matt said, and didn't look up.

Tori's smile flickered.

Then she turned it back on me.

"Al. Please. Just listen."

"I'm listening."

"We want to go back to the old bottle. Your bottle. Eighty thousand of them, as fast as you can make them."

"We make about six hundred a day," I said. "With everybody on double shifts."

"Then make what you can. We'll say the rest are coming."

"Say to who?"

She took a breath.

"There's a press release," she said. "Wyndham is returning to its original artisan glassmaker. Small-town craft. Family business. People love that."

"And the brown serum?"

"We'll say the formula needed adjusting."

"My formula."

"It doesn't have to say whose."

"You said whose on national television."

Tori's chin went up.

Then she pulled a folded check out of her blazer pocket and held it out.

"Three hundred and fifty thousand," she said. "Up front. Today. I know about the bank, Al. Everybody in this town knows about the bank."

The men on the step looked at each other.

One of them looked at the whiteboard through the office door, at the number with the circle around it.

I knew what three hundred and fifty thousand dollars meant in that room.

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