“I’m sure we didn’t,” she said in a patronizing singsong.

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“Our attorneys will be contacting you, Mr. Kenzie. As will the Attorney General’s Office, Division of Mail and Computer Fraud. Good day.”

She hung up in my ear.

“Patrick?” Angie said.

I shook my head again, dialed my bank.

I grew up poor. Always afraid, terrified actually, of faceless bureaucrats and bill collectors who looked down on me from above and decided my worth based on my bank account, judged my right or lack of right to earn money by how much I’d started out with in the first place. I worked my ass off over the last decade to earn and save and build upon those earnings. I would never be poor, I told myself. Not again.

“Your bank accounts have been frozen,” Mr. Pearl at the bank told me.

“Frozen,” I said. “Explain frozen.”

“The funds have been seized, Mr. Kenzie. By the IRS.”

“Court order?” I said.

“Pending,” he said.

And I could hear it in his voice—disdain. That’s what the poor hear all the time—from bankers, creditors, merchants. Disdain, because the poor are second-rate and stupid and lazy and too morally and spiritually lax to hold on to their money legally and contribute to society. I hadn’t heard that tone of disdain in at least seven years, maybe ten, and I wasn’t ready for it. I felt immediately reduced.

“Pending,” I said.

“That’s what I said.” His voice was dry, at ease, secure with his station in life. He could have been talking to one of his children.

I can’t have the car, Dad?

That’s what I said.

“Mr. Pearl,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Are you familiar with the law firm of Hartman and Hale?”

“Of course I am, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Good. They’ll be contacting you. Soon. And that pending court order better be—”

“Good day, Mr. Kenzie.” He hung up.

Angie came around the table, put one hand on my back, the other on my right hand. “Patrick,” she said, “you’re white as a ghost.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Jesus Christ.”

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “They can’t do this.”

“They’re doing it, Ange.”

When the phone rang three minutes later, I picked it up on the first ring.

“Money a little tight these days, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Where and when, Manny?”

He chuckled. “Oooh, we sound—how shall I put it—deflated, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Where and when?” I said.

“The Prado. You know it?”

“I know it. When?”

“Noon,” Manny said. “High noon. Heh-heh.”

He hung up.

Everyone was hanging up on me today. And it wasn’t even nine.

10