Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge (24 page)

Once again she felt the telepathic glow of his approval. “All that and more,” he said. “At least I think.” He spun in his chair, scanning the office, before stopping exactly where he’d started. “This is my music filter company, right?”

Bailey chuckled, until her telepathy clued her in that he wasn’t
joking. She composed herself quickly. “Um, yes.”

“Right on,” said Sorensen. “Then why don’t you and I talk about that for a bit?” He searched around the surface of his desk. “Most people are all about digital résumés these days, but I’m a sucker for the feeling of papyrus in my hand. You didn’t happen to bring a—”

Before he could finish his sentence, Bailey was sliding a copy across his desk. And as a cherry on top, she smiled. Nicely.

As Sorensen read her résumé, Bailey read his thoughts. She’d already gotten the impression he was eccentric, and apparently one of his eccentricities was that he operated on surface level and surface level only. His subconscious practically handed her answers. When he asked questions, he rarely had a specific idea in mind; more often than not, he just wanted her response to strike a certain mood or tone, and all Bailey had to do was act accordingly.

“So one last question,” Sorensen said after a long round of largely perfunctory quizzing about her internships and goals.

“Anything,” Bailey said.

“Do you want a beer?”

“Um.” It was 10:30 a.m. Day drinking would mean losing her grip on the gold rush, but she’d already felt him mentally scratch a checkmark next to her name, so at the very least she’d succeeded enough to placate her mother. Why the hell not? “Sure.”

“Excellent.” Sorensen extracted two bottles from a drawer that apparently doubled as a minifridge and then patted his chest pockets, frowning.

“Here.” Bailey handed over her UPenn bottle opener. Figured it would be
that
part of her education that proved useful in an interview.

“Wonderful.” Sorensen bowed his thanks and popped open the beers. Bailey took hers with a smile, threw back a healthy glug, and almost coughed. It was darker than she’d expected, and much
stronger, too.

“You like it?”

Bailey nodded, smiling even as her eyes watered.

Sorensen brightened. “It’s my own microbrew. Russian imperial stout, about twelve percent ABV … or maybe it was fourteen percent. Are people still drinking beer a lot? Like, it’s still cool?”

“I’m more of a cocktail person myself,” Bailey said politely, “but—”

“Yes!” Sorensen jumped to his feet. “See, I knew it.” He pointed out his window to a huge black facade. “Next Sorensen venture’s gonna be a little cocktail place right up there, in the Willis Tower.”

Bailey stopped herself from wincing. That name was something no true Chicagoan would ever call the Sears Tower. Her mental broadcast of Sorensen’s thoughts came in a bit slower after half a beer, but still, when she racked his brain, she discovered he genuinely had no idea that the landmark had recently—sacrilegiously—been renamed. In fact she wasn’t even sure he knew where he was. Then she remembered that she should speak.

“Oh?” she said, sipping the beer. “Really?”

“And,” Sorensen said proudly, “it’ll be a distillery, too. Not of everything, of course; just gin, vodka, rum, tequila, and … what’s the one that tastes like oranges?”

“Triple sec?”

“That’s the one!” Sorensen said. “My business partner—he’s the one with all the booze knowledge—he says it’s better to start small. But
I
thought up the name,” he added proudly. “Apex. It’ll take up the top three floors—”

Dimly Bailey could read his mental image: a stylized logo that made the
A
look like the tower—the
Sears
Tower, thankyouverymuch—in silhouette. Along with it was an image of his partner, a small, energetic old man with an impressive mustache.

“You’re working with Garrett Whelan?” Bailey burst out.

Sorensen paused, his hands spread in a dramatic representation of Apex’s facilities. “How’d you—”

“I, uh, read about it in the
Trib
,” Bailey said. It was a stupid lie—who even read newspapers anymore?—but Sorensen didn’t seem to notice. If anything, he was delighted.

“Gary—I call him Gary, although I don’t think he likes it—he’s a
great
guy,” he said. “With the way he talks, though, I’m not gonna play Scrabble with him anytime soon. How do you know him?”

“He’s, um, an old family friend,” Bailey said, her heart sinking.

Garrett can’t be distilling it himself. Where would he even find the space? Or the money?

Sorensen. He was the money, Apex was the space, and with every sip Bailey was losing her ability to investigate telepathically.

She plunged back into his brain. He was picturing busy bartenders behind counters, fending off customers who reached for drinks like a horde of brain-hungry zombies. And there was Sorensen, dressed as a pharaoh, mingling freely beneath gigantic steel vats—

The image wavered.
Shit
.

“Is the beer not good?” Suddenly concerned, Sorensen leaned over the desk.. “Would you prefer an IPA? Or a lager? I could have Jess come in and make you a cocktail: martini, old fashioned—”

“No,” Bailey said, hastily gulping her beer. “It’s great. Tell me more about Apex.”

“Right on. Except, well, there isn’t that much more to tell,” Sorensen said. “We’re not officially open for business yet. Oh! But you should definitely come to our grand opening. You don’t have other plans on Halloween, right? I mean, I know there’re a lot of cool parties going on but—”

Halloween. Bailey resisted the urge to shiver.

“Um, yeah,” she said. “That’d be great.”

“Radical.” Sorensen gave her the hang-loose gesture. “I’ll have
Jess get you an invite.”

She saw him imagining the party—people in costumes from glass wall to glass wall, drinking until it was November—but her bottle was down to the last few mouthfuls, and the picture was faint.

“Anyway,” Sorensen said, “enough about me. Did I forget to ask you anything?”

Plenty
, Bailey thought.

“Um, no,” she said, then smiled. “I think you covered it.”

“Well, I really liked meeting you, Bailey,” he said, rising. She rose, too, and they shook hands. “You’ll hear from us soon, all right? And please do come to the party!”

Bailey was out the pyramid door in two seconds.

“Bailey!” Jess popped out of nowhere. “How’d it—”

“Move!” Bailey yelled, practically pushing her to the side. “I mean, um, sorry! Let’s just be friends, okay?”

Once downstairs and out of the elevator Bailey dug out her phone and stared at its empty black screen. The number she dialed would determine the course of everything that happened next. Her mom was right: the day she interviewed
was
going to change her life.

She made the decision and dialed. After three rings, a voice growled, “What is it, kiddo?”

“Vincent—wait, how’d you know it was me?”

“Got a special phone. It tips me off in case I’m about to get a call I don’t want. This one of those?”

“Probably.” She bit her lip. The worst-case scenario flashed through her head: he would hang up, abandoning her for breaking bartending law. She would have to face this crisis alone, and do it before someone managed to slip her a shot of oblivinum.

But it wasn’t just about her; it was about all of Chicago. So she explained everything: the forbidden interview; the cocktail she used outside her official duties; the telepathic information that fitted
together all the terrible pieces.

“What am I going to do, boss?” she said. Her chin trembled, and when she touched her cheeks, she found they were wet. She scrubbed at her eyes, mascara streaking her hand. Even if Vincent disbarred her and forced her to knock back oblivinum, there was no use crying.

“You’re gonna get up here,” he said. “And when you do, I’ll tell you what’s next.”

THE DEVIL’S WATER DICTIONARY.
The Gold Rush

A beverage to bridge the abyss between minds

1
. In a shaker with ice, mix two ounces of bourbon, one ounce of honey syrup, and three-quarters of an ounce of lemon juice
.

2
. Shake well
.

3
. Strain results over a single large piece of ice in an old fashioned glass, and serve
.

T
he power of telepathy has been known to bartending since at least 1872 in the form of the whiskey sour. The Wisconsin bartender Zedediah “Lucky” Gurnisson took credit for the cocktail’s invention. Though initially good publicity, the claim backfired when another bartender fixed himself a whiskey sour and used telepathy to determine that Gurnisson was lying—both about inventing the drink and about people calling him Lucky.

Variations of the whiskey sour evolved into what is now known as the gold rush as early as the 1950s, although its initial applications were less than aboveboard: in particular, the Philadelphia bartender Chester Lyndon set out to refine the unreliable whiskey sour after mistakenly believing that it was necessary to root out communist spies among his regular customers. (Lyndon was later forcibly disbarred.) The editors of this book advise that the gold rush is best deployed in sparsely populated areas, where the psychic feedback is more manageable.

L
EMON
J
UICE
.

F
IG. 62—
Citrus limon
.

Unlike orange juice, which is still magically functional even after extra levels of processing, lemon juice must be squeezed fresh. (Commercially available lemon-shaped squeeze bottles are rightfully regarded as a joke.) It has been effectively combined with all five of mixology’s base liquors, rendering it perhaps the most vital nonalcoholic mixing ingredient besides ice. Lemon juice is frequently used with a sweetener to counteract both its acidic flavor and its chaotic effect on a drinker’s animus. Some point to this necessary harmony of sour and sweet as symbolic of the need for balance in the practice of the craft; more literal minds will realize that lemon juice simply tastes awful straight up.

H
ONEY
S
YRUP
.

The substitution of honey syrup for sugar was Lyndon’s true breakthrough. In the interests of keeping his ingredients “all-American,” he chose honey harvested from bees he kept in his backyard, using only rainwater to boil it into syrup. The
result was improved telepathic clarity and control, which he misattributed to his own patriotic fervor. When a bartender in Greece duplicated his success using local ingredients, Lyndon denounced the result as nothing more than a fluke, a label he affixed to every non-American gold rush until his death in obscurity some years later.

F
IG. 63—
A beehive
.