You Fired a Tech Genius novel · Chapter 4 of 32

Chapter 4: One A.M.

By one in the morning the building was empty except for the cleaner, the fern and the two of us.

Bridger had gone to sleep on a couch in the conference room with his jacket over his face.

Zoe's office was a glass box at the end of the floor, and she had taken off her shoes.

She sat on the edge of her desk in her socks, with a list of eleven hundred merchants glowing on a monitor behind her.

"Press," she said. "A story in the trade paper, a clean one, with your name and mine."

"Nobody reads it."

"Nine hundred owners read it. I've counted subscribers."

"They subscribe," I said. "They don't read."

I was standing at the whiteboard with my sleeves pushed up, and I could feel her watching my forearms.

"A grocer opens at six," I said. "He's alone with a register until eight."

"He doesn't read a trade paper. He calls the guy down the block."

"So?"

"So we don't need nine thousand people. We need the forty everyone calls."

I wrote a short column of numbers on the board.

"Forty owners," I said. "Each runs between two and nine stores."

"Every one of them has a cousin at another counter who does what he does."

"Which forty?"

"I took their support calls for six years," I said. "Nights and weekends."

"The outside desk kept passing the hard ones up to me."

I started writing names.

I wrote them from memory, and then the stores and the streets, and which of them said thank you.

Zoe stopped looking at the monitor.

By the thirtieth name she had slid off the desk and come to stand beside me.

"You know their kids' names," she said.

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