Hiro pushed open the door and stepped inside. New windows, old brick, smelled like coffee and fresh wood.
He walked up to the bar and took a stool.

"Coffee. Black please."

He glanced around. A few tables, booths in the back. Quiet spot.

The keys came in an envelope and slid under the door of Angelo’s room at the boarding house on Michigan Avenue. No letter. Just a matchbook from the bar with one line written inside the cover in his cousin’s handwriting.

Take care of her for me.

Angelo turned the matchbook over a few times, then put it in his breast pocket and went to see the place.

It looked better than he remembered from opening night. The old brick still had its vines. The new windows caught the late afternoon light and threw it across the floor. Two-tops and four-tops up front; booths along the wall with their privacy screens; and in the back, the little bar and the stage, empty now, with chairs still stacked on the tables.

The two bouncers at the door straightened up when they saw him. They’d heard.

“Mr. Vitale.”

“Relax. Nothing’s changing tonight.” He stepped inside and took off his hat. “Dom hired you; you stay hired. You do the job the way he had you doing it, and nobody’s got a problem.”

He walked the room slowly. Ran a hand along the bar top. Checked the booths, sat in one for a second, and looked out at the floor from behind the screen. Good sightlines. You could see the door from there without anybody seeing you watching it.

Dom had always had an eye for that.

Behind the bar, the girl working the coffee machine watched him, unsure whether to keep pouring or start looking for another job.

“Sign stays,” Angelo told her. “Name stays. Coffee in the morning, drinks at night, and music on the weekends, the same as before.” He set the matchbook on the bar. “This is still my cousin’s place. I’m just keeping the lights on till he comes back for it.”

He glanced toward the stage, then at the booth in the corner with the best view of the front door.

“That one’s mine from now on. Anybody who comes in asking for a quiet word, you send them there.”

Before he sat down, he walked out the back door to look down the alley.

Past the trash cans and a stack of empty crates, half hidden behind an overgrown hedge, stood an old brick garage he hadn’t noticed on opening night. Two wide bays, wooden doors greyed by age, and a rusted padlock hanging from the latch. The vines from the main building had crept across the roof and down one side like they were trying to swallow it whole.

Angelo tried the padlock. It came apart in his hand.

He hauled one of the doors open. Dust, cobwebs, an oil stain on the concrete floor that had to be twenty years old, and a workbench along the back wall with a few rusted tools still hanging above it. Nobody had parked anything in here in a long time.

Plenty of room for two trucks. Maybe three, if you didn’t mind your mirrors closed.

He stood in the doorway a minute, looking from the garage to the bar’s back door and back again. Thirty steps, maybe less. A man could load a truck in here at three in the morning, and nobody on the street would ever know.

He went back inside, folded his coat over the back of the corner booth, and sat down.

“The garage out back,” he said to the girl behind the bar. "Does Dom ever use it?”

She shook her head.

“Good.” He pulled a new padlock out of his coat pocket, the kind he bought by the box for the yard in Philly, and set it on the table in front of him. “Then it’s mine now. I’ll have a truck in there by the end of the week.”