The Directive by Matthew Quirk Page A

shoulders, punched me affectionately, and called for shots of Old Crow.
    “What happened to this place?” I asked.
    “Oh,” Smiles said, looking around. “Ted went in on something with Cartwright, wouldn’t say what, came into some money, fixed the place up.”
    “Is Cartwright around?” I asked.
    “In the back probably,” Luis said.
    I noticed a guy at the end of the bar staring at me, his face washed in wavering green light from the fish tank. When he saw me looking, he returned his attention to his beer.
    “Hey,” Licks said. “You and Jack into something? You got a piece for us? You just say the word.”
    “What’d you hear we were into?”
    “Well, my cousin heard from a guy who saw Jack downtown, very high-class stuff—”
    “You should talk to Cartwright,” Luis said, cutting him off. He looked like his patience with his drinking partners had run out several years ago. “These guys are just fucking up some rumors they picked up secondhand.” He nodded his head toward the back door.
    “Thanks,” I said, and walked past the bathrooms, then through the kitchen. The guy who’d been checking me out headed for the front door, his hand in his pocket.
    At the door to the back office, I pulled the knob to the right, clearing the latch. I’d bar-backed at Ted’s in high school, and the lock on the door was so old and loose that the trick always worked. Ted kept everything that mattered in a safe.
    Coming into the back office, I was just about to make a joke about how, after twelve years, he still hadn’t fixed it, but any mirth I was feeling dried up when I saw two guns brandished: a shotgun in Ted’s hand and a pistol from the guy sitting across from Cartwright.
    They lowered the weapons once they recognized me. Ted calmed everyone down, then came over and clapped me on the shoulder. He had a gaunt face with a gray scruff of a beard and a nose crooked as lightning.
    “Michael Ford,” he said. “God. What’s it been? Ten years?”
    “More or less,” I said.
    “Your father’s out?”
    “He is.”
    “He never came by to see us.”
    “That’s just the terms of his probation. No association with felons unless he’s doing reentry work.” Ted seemed to take it in stride.
    Cartwright only nodded at me and said, “With you in a minute, Mike.” He sat at a card table with a Danny DeVito look-alike playing checkers. There was a good-sized stack of money lying beside the board. Cartwright watched a basketball game on a TV in the corner while he waited for his opponent to take a turn. He was drinking whiskey neat instead of old-fashioneds, which was usually a good sign he was losing money, either on the board or on the games.
    The other guy made his move, hesitantly, and then smiled. Cartwright smiled back, jumped a king backwards, and held out his hand to get paid. His opponent looked confused for a minute, and then his defeat sank in. He slid the money across. Cartwright scooped it up, then joined me near a dartboard they had set up in the back.
    “Good to see you, Mike. What’s up?”
    “I was looking for a camera.”
    “You’ll get a better deal at the mall.”
    “I’d rather go through you. A small one. Pinhole, hopefully smaller than a deck of cards.”
    “They make them smaller than the button on your shirt now. I can do that.”
    “And something that runs off a battery. Almost like a baby monitor, so I can pick up the signal and see what’s up inside.”
    “I could work that out. Battery lasts about a week. You can set it to send in bursts. Just need a repeater nearby with a power supply.”
    “How close?”
    “A city block.”
    “Cool. What do you think that’ll set me back?”
    “All together? This sounds pretty fucking dodgy, so I’ll have to charge the I-don’t-know-nothing tax. Say six hundred. Why aren’t you just buying this off the web?”
    “I’d rather it not be connected to my name.”
    Cartwright took a deep breath, looked to the basketball game for solace,