Chapter 6: Coordination Support

I went back for the ring before I'd reached the parking lot.

The bartender held it up between two fingers.

"Figured you might."

I put it in my coin purse.

Not on my hand.

At 7:52 the next morning I was standing outside a brick building on Twenty-Fifth Avenue.

Gold letters on the glass door.

Boudreaux and Delacroix.

I had my portfolio under my arm and my one good blazer on.

It was a little tight in the shoulders.

Inside, everything was white oak and linen and good light.

Six young people at long tables.

Nobody over thirty-five except a tall man at the back with a pencil behind his ear.

Claudette came down the stairs with two coffees.

She handed me one.

"You came."

"You told me to."

"People don't usually listen."

She walked me to the back.

"Luke, this is Joanna. Joanna, Luke Delacroix. My partner. He draws the buildings. I make them worth walking into."

He looked up from a set of plans.

Close gray hair. Short gray beard. Dark eyes that didn't hurry.

He looked at my blazer, then at the portfolio.

"This is the one from the bar?"

"This is the one."

He set his pencil down.

"Claudette. We talked about this."

"We did."

"We're three weeks from the Harbor Grand pitch. I don't have time to train somebody's aunt."

He said it right there, in front of all of them.

The girl nearest us looked up and smirked.

I felt my face go hot.

For twenty-five years I would have smiled and said, Oh, I don't want to be any trouble.

"I'm not anybody's aunt," I said. "And I don't need training on how to be useful. I need a desk."

Luke looked at me a long moment.

"You ever read a vendor spec sheet?"

"I've read every contract Glenn Chastain signed for his first ten years in business. I can read a spec sheet."

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