The problem was, Eli realized, that he kind of was the man. Or, at least, he very easily could become the man in, like, twenty years. He had all the traits that could boost him into that vaunted position. Fair hair and the kind of chubby-cheeked smile that—combined with the fact that he was a straight white dude—meant people just believed him, without really trying. Meant that people honestly wanted to help him, in whatever his endeavors were. Remove roadblocks rather than set them up in his way. Hell, courtesy of his eighteenth birthday, his petty criminal record had been wiped clean. Nobody in Chicago had even considered trying a fourteen-year-old white boy with curly blond hair as an adult for a string of grocery and convenience store beer thefts. He was just a boy to them, being a boy. And while maybe he deserved a little reprimand, he didn’t really deserve a permanent record.

That was how Eli knew that life wasn’t fair. It had never been fair to him. It had been unreasonably kind to him. He had to make up for that somehow.

Eli put down the vape pen. Playtime was over. Really, he had two choices now.

1. Help Jo make a case for what Wild Nights Bookstore was worth.

2. Give up and go back to being as complacent as he’d ever been.

That was it. Help out the person who had given him a real chance—back when Eli’s record was still a thing that kept him from being hired—or give up now. He could easily go back to being the kid who thought stealing six-packs was the best way to show the world that he saw it for what it was.

Or he could save the day. Like the real Batman.

Eli started searching for commercial property values in Wicker Park. He whistled when he saw how many zeros gentrification added to a purchasing price. Eli wasn’t sure how to compete with that. But maybe if he could make a case for a strong, sustainable business, Archer Hunt wouldn’t want to sell.

Eli started searching through the office, looking for old invoices. He found them—daily takes stretching back to the nineties—in a series of binders on the bookshelf behind the desk. All the numbers were down, year over year. For decades. Not that these were exact data. But he could see the downward trend as he looked. The worst of it was recent, too. Almost a year ago to the date, the numbers started to really and truly spiral downward. The more Eli flipped through, the more he realized that there wasn’t a real case for Wild Nights staying open. If Eli just took the last twelve months of data, he’d probably make an excellent case for closing the store down permanently.

Eli had been right. Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium was going under.