Out came a Miller Lite and a Jameson on the rocks. Pat shuddered as he took a long pull of whiskey through the red swizzle straw. That first sip painted all the corners as it ran down his throat into the pit of an empty stomach.

“What do you say, Pat?” Steve Miller put a foot of ostrich leather up on his beer fridge.

“Got my wife’s dumb-ass brother-in-law in town.”

“Aw shit. The not quite family.”

“Exactly. And he’s a fuckin’ Fed.”

“Based around here?”

“No, DC now.”

“What branch of the Fed?”

“G-man.” Pat pulled on the Miller Lite and swallowed a burp. “Don’t ask me how that happened—can’t find his ass with two hands.”

Steve Miller cackled and refilled both tall and small. The first of several rounds as Pat read the paper and got lost in his cups, so it was some time before Pat looked up at CNN, playing on the corner TV. The volume was turned down—but there was a reporter on the NYSE floor and something coming across the crawl.

“What’s going on?”

“Sky is falling.” Steve Miller was working on a crossword and didn’t look up. “Market crashed today.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Dow Jones in the toilet.”

“How bad?”

“Last I saw, it was down four hundred points. More than Black Thursday.”

“Shit.” Pat reached into his jacket, looking for his beeper. He patted down all his pockets. “Let me settle up with you.”

Pat threw money on the bar and hustled out to his Cougar. He found the beeper on the passenger seat. The office had tried him four times. Fuck. Pat walked to the 7-Eleven at the end of the strip mall and threw a quarter in the pay phone. He had had two beers and four whiskies, but he shook off the buzz. He called Shapiro, director of personnel and his immediate boss.

“Les, just got your page.”

“Where the fuck are you, Malone? I called Love Field and Gene said you were out of there two hours ago.”

“Sorry, I left his office but was still on site—wanted to go through the personnel files without getting him all in a twist.”

“Market tanked and people are freaking out.”

“Want me to come back?”

“Nah, no good now. The market just closed. You might have missed the start of the next Depression. We’re down seventeen percent. Not as bad as United, down twenty-two percent. I think we survived the day, but it was a bloodbath. IBM down twenty-three percent, US Steel close to forty, Kodak gutted.”

“Shit.” The Malones owned both IBM and Kodak stock.

“Where the fuck are you? They think it’s going to be worse than ’29. They had to stop trading on half the blue chips.”

“Unbelievable.”