So he plays Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations (the 1955 and 1981 versions) on repeat; it always sounds, to him, like a perfectly built machine. (He first found the album in a collection of his mother’s things left in a closet, but he would consider that irrelevant if anyone asked.) It helped a little.

He made it. The plane didn’t crash.

But the feeling didn’t go away when he landed. Danny notices all the electronics all around him. People looking at their phones, rather than each other. Flatscreens on the walls and hanging from the ceiling, running through loops of advertisements and bland greetings from the mayor. The noise of announcements over the sound system. Ordinarily, this is comforting. He has always loved the idea of all these things performing within appropriate tolerances.

But for the first time he can remember, it doesn’t feel like they’re on his side. It’s irrational. He knows that. It doesn’t help.

The sun is going down as he makes his way to his rental car — it took an annoyingly long time to find his reservation, which had been lost in the system.

In the parking lot, he’s still wearing his earbuds, listening to the sounds of Gould mumbling along to his playing (he’s up to the 1981 performances), so he doesn’t hear the footsteps until the men are right behind him.

He turns around.

“I said, the fuck you think you’re doing back here, Sharp?” the first guy says.

Of course, Danny thinks. The henchmen. The thugs. The muscle.

It’s so insanely predictable he feels physically tired by it. It takes him a moment to place both guys. They graduated with him, but they’ve put on some mileage since those days. Mike Fuller and Lonnie Decker. He’s disappointed.

Not in them. They were not good people even in high school. Linemen on the football team, which was a get-out-of-jail card for all their little cruelties. They were never as bad as the West Side Warriors — Wade Wellman and his usual gang of idiots — but they got to let their worst impulses run free.

To Danny, the sad arc of their lives since graduation is obvious in a glance: their clothes and beer guts and mean little smiles. He can guess the contents of their browser histories, the porn sites they visit when their wives and kids are asleep, the “hot stepdaughter action” clips they have bookmarked.

“Look at the balls on you,” Lonnie says, “showing your face after what you did.”

Right. That.

Even without the threat of an occult conspiracy, Danny knows there are people who hate him and want him dead for what probably seem like pretty good reasons.

Danny shut down Sharp Industries and offshored its operations shortly after he graduated and took full control of the company. Along with the collapse of Sax Enterprises, the decision put half of Middleton out of work.