Like many impulsive and sudden unions, it was a bad idea. Still, when he straggled home past dawn, his linen suit torn and ruined from the inside, one of his upstairs neighbors, the female half of a quiet happy couple in their twenties, helped him into his paltry studio and asked what happened, what kind of wedding could that have been? Within minutes he was fucking her on the butcher block, and a few days later when the male half came down to inquire about some nighttime scratchings in the walls, Reynard had him too, and in the days that followed he spent hours leaving them both terrified and turned on. Like many bitter singles, the phantasm wants to break up others. Engulfing, or being engulfed with, this fox ghost has made him more ravenous, and has changed Reynard’s looks considerably. His face flickers, or anyway changes over, like a mobile in the wind, as unrecognizable as some of these newly gentrified blocks. In the right light, like all sneaky fucks he looks like a monster, but then handsome, as handsome as can be. He crosses town quickly, and a teenage girl, her moody stares out the window a soundtrack to a favorite crashy pop album, thinks for a moment some tall and ferocious animal is there to carry her off in this hateful, smoky daylight. If only, she thinks, if only, at last. But Reynard’s target is in the bar he’s heading toward. I need a drink too, his ghost says.

Bottle Grove is open. Three people are inside, Martin Icke puzzling over his phone and half-listening, Rachel Nickels quite drunk, Stanford Bell downstairs closing up the speakeasy space, which got busted last night, thanks to an anonymous tip. Improper fire exits and other violations. The city is treating the speakeasy as it has speakeasies in bygone days, shutting them down unless some powerful patron can bribe away the law. Martin is thinking of this as he tries to decode Padgett’s message under the jazz album, if it’s a message, and if it’s Padgett for sure. The Vic could reopen the speakeasy, help it make a little more money. Money could help it make a little more money. So could risking everything by reopening it in secret. Anonymous tip. Rachel slides ten dollars toward him.

“That for a tip,” she says slurrily, “and another.”

Martin puts off his device and ambles over. “That’s either no drink or a lousy tip.”

“For a twenty?”

“It’s a ten.”

She twists her head to look at it. “I have mistaked so many mades.”

“Everybody does.”

She switches out the bill. “Is that terrible of me?”

“Is what?”

“What I was saying, about Ben.”