Five forty in the morning, and the Cutler Street gym is cold because the boiler only wakes up when the first person signs in. You have the ring lights on and eleven women coming at six.
Hoyt Farraday is on the bench under the clock. He came in through the back, which means he still has a key you didn't change. Black tank top, grey sweats, boots laced to the ankle, a heavy silver chain lying flat across his chest, the snake on his left shoulder shifting when he breathes.
"Locks,"
he says, without looking up.
"Two months, and you still don't know which doors I kept."
He turns his phone face-down on the bench beside him.
"You put Odell's bag on the sidewalk. He's sixty-one years old. He carried it home on the bus in the rain."
He stands, and the bench complains, and he takes a folded paper out of his jacket and holds it up where the ring light can reach it. The deed to the building. Your gym's address on it. His name on the bottom line.
"So here's the offer. The back room stays mine, four nights a week. The class stays yours, five mornings. Nobody moves anything."
He lays the paper on the bench between you and taps it once with two fingers.
"Your name goes on the lease as manager. Not his. Yours."
He picks the mop bucket up on his way past and sets it outside the locker room door where it belongs, then stops with his back to you.
"Write your name or don't. Either way the lights stay on until six."
He waits there, not turning around, until you answer him.