“It’s not anything terrible, or anything like that. It’s a con, I told you. Not an honest kidnapping. Basically I pick her up from school, you pick a good day. Right when you’re dropping her. You scream and go home frantic. Then you get a phone call—”

“He’ll trace it.”

Martin blinks, then looks at something lying on the bar like a dead person: a phone Rachel, or that guy with the scarf maybe, left behind. “He’ll trace it to someone else’s phone,” Martin says, pointing over at it. “A lost one. People leave them here like shoes outside a mosque.”

“You can’t get into some stranger’s phone.”

“That’s my problem. Yours is panicking to your husband. And forty minutes later she’s back in your arms, a close call. I mean how much would he pay, how much could the Vic get his hands on in an emergency, with no questions asked? I mean, make a conservative estimate.”

“Sure, let’s be conservative now.”

He looks wide at her. His shirt’s on, and except for his bare feet, and his plans to kidnap somebody, he looks like Martin Icke. She thinks of him stacking glasses, scooping ice into a bin, straightening the rubber flooring wet and sticky from the ply of the trade. “We can do this,” he says, “inerrantly.”

“People like us botch up lunch,” she says. “We botch up parallel parking. We botch up having friendships and fun.”

“According to my calculations—”

“Miscalculations.”

He shushes her, actually says ssh, and pulls her, naked, to her feet. She is unsteady, drunk, and she hates it, a dark choky loathing, Martin’s leading her farther back in the bar. His denim legs scratch up against her bare hips. She has never liked this, being more undressed than the boy. She hates it, going down the cold stairs. It’s worse than fuck. It takes her, this blurry scared path, to a cage she suddenly re-remembers, in some locked-up warehouse hidden in plain view. Whatever happened with that? It’s a story from her wasted days, drunk and high all the time, and here are just cardboard boxes, dusty heavy curtains sagging on the walls. Here’s just an ashtray and a sofa she thinks used to be, hideous, in his apartment. She’s probably fucked on it, she thinks, fucked and thrown up.

“We’ll open my computer down here,” he says. “Your kid can watch a movie and drink a Shirley Temple. By the time the fish finds the genie it’ll be over and done with.”

“No,” she says.

“That’s a promise,” he says. “This is a very safe thing, Padgett. Nobody knows this place. You don’t even know where we are.”

“We’re underneath Bottle Grove,” she says. “The bottom of the bar, the speakeasy.” An illegal room, she thinks.