Page 39 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
After he left, Davin turned to me, eyebrow already raised. “That was fast. You friends with the business already here in town? You didn’t strike me as a surfer.”
“I’m not,” I agreed, then motioned down to the beach, where my friend Grady sat on the sand, two boards with him, sunning himself in the morning light. “But Grady spends most days here, and he rents his boards and offers lessons.”
“One guy?”
I shook my head, frustrated for no real reason. “Not just one guy.Thatguy, Grady, my friend. Whose business would probably be ruined if a surf shop opened right here.”
The look Davin gave me at that was a little disbelieving at first, and—was it weird that his suspicion was hot?
Of course he was suspicious, though, he was a vampire. It was their natural state of being. Like Wu Mei’s sudden escape from town simply because Charles had implied he wanted a coup. I wondered if they were born that way, or if it was an actual vampire trait.
But the look graduated to grudging agreement, and he nodded. “That’s true. A good person wouldn’t want to do that to a friend.”
I didn’t think you had to be a good person to do decent things, but maybe I was wrong. I’d sure seen plenty of indecency from people who claimed to be better than everyone else.
Either way, I wasn’t gonna screw Grady over. He was a great guy, and one of the only people I could definitely call my friend.
“That’s gonna be a problem in other ways too, you know,” Davin said, still watching Grady. I couldn’t blame him, Grady was hot like burning. Finally, Davin shook it off and turned to look at me. “Not too many businesses are going to be fine with him setting up there, selling his services. Either they’ll be overlapping with him, or it’ll seem unprofessional to them.”
I was annoyed by the thought of people finding Grady unprofessional. Sure, he wasn’t a storefront, and he was the most relaxed man ever born...but just trying to squeak out a living by selling his skills and renting his boards? That wasn’t offensive in any way.
Anyone who said otherwise was probably someone who wanted to hide unhoused folk so they didn’t have to think about them existing.
The eleven o’clock guy was the first one to bring up money.
Bring up because he specifically said his people were looking for something in the range of “eighty” which...sounded amazing to me, frankly. Eighty grand? That was maybe all the money I needed to pay the damn taxes.
Still, Davin went weirdly alpha with him. He started standing between us, speaking in short, sharp sentences, and generally being a little “I have the biggest dick in the universe. Or maybe Iamthe biggest dick in the room.”
I managed to tell the guy we’d let him know and get his card before he left, but as he was walking out the door, Davin snatched the card from me.
“Whoa, hey there, wait a minute,” I demanded, trying and failing to snatch the thing back as Davin ripped it in half. “That guy wants to pay me eighty grand for this place.”
Davin, who’d been starting to open his mouth, paused, cocking his head at me. “Eighty...” He stopped, looked around the empty shop, then back to me. “How big is this place?”
“Um, about two thousand square feet on this side. Our side is bigger because of the back-office area. Why?”
“He wasn’t offering you eighty thousand dollars. He was offering you a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.” The way he said it, so flat, so matter-of-fact—shouldn’t he have been jumping for joy if that were true? “Eighty is—businesses rent per square foot per year. And he was offering you eighty dollars per square foot.”
I swear, I almost swooned. Literally money troubles go bye-bye. I wouldn’t even have to, like, work.
Well, there would be taxes, so I’d probably still have to work.
But—
“That company,” he interrupted. “Do you know what they do?”
“Not . . . really?”
His lips screwed into an unhappy expression, and unfortunately, I had a feeling he was gonna tell me. “They just got caught exploiting people in third world countries. They were basically enslaving them, forcing them into indentured servitude and then working them sixteen hour days in sweatshops.”
“Just got caught? Like...recently? No chance they’ve mended their ways?” I really, really wanted them to have fixed it.
I wanted that hundred and sixty grand.
His expression didn’t suggest I was going to be pleased. “Last week,” he corrected. “And they’ve doubled down on it instead of even apologizing. Said what they’re doing is ‘offering people a better life for a little hard work,’ when that’s not even close to the truth.”
Sixteen hour days.
