The Eighth Day

Chapter 1

They're watching you."

At the sound of the words, Shawn Jaffe jerked his head up from his breakfast to find a man standing across the restaurant table from him.

The stranger's bedraggled appearance clashed with the hardwood floors and impressionist decor of the Café del Mar, and sweat gleamed on his face beneath the subdued lights of the restaurant's chandeliers. His hair was plastered to his forehead in disheveled tangles, and his eyes were rimmed with red and framed by dark circles.

The man leaned forward and placed his palms on the digital tabletop, where a haphazard scattering of apps displayed the latest headlines, Wall Street projections, and videos of pundits debating current events.

Shawn leaned back in counterbalance. He looked down at the man's splayed fingers, black crescents of dirt beneath the nails.

"They're watching you," he said again, louder this time, the words hissing between clenched teeth. The conversation at nearby tables stuttered, and contemptuous looks flitted in their direction. The man glanced over his shoulder, then back at Shawn. When next he spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper.

"Nothing you know is real."

Shawn didn't know if he should ignore him and hope he'd wander off or call for a manager, a waiter—anyone—to intercede. He glanced down at his breakfast, a plate of toast and eggs that leaked yolk in an obscene, yellow smear.

"Please."

Shawn looked up at him, at his rumpled and stained white button-down shirt, at the shadow of stubble that darkened his jaw, at the inextricable nature of the situation.

"I'm sorry," Shawn said, not knowing what else he could say.

"Your name isn't Shawn Jaffe. You aren't from Ohio, and you're not an investment broker. Come with me, and I'll explain everything."

Shawn straightened in his seat, eyes wide and mouth agape. "What? How did you—?"

The man glanced over his shoulder again and gasped as if punched in the gut. "Oh God. No. It's them. They're here."

He turned and stumbled away, careening off a table opposite Shawn's, and the flatware skidded across its surface in an angry clatter. A pair of suits seated at the table glared at him. One of them wrenched a red napkin from his lap and threw it on the table. The stranger paid them no mind as he regained his footing and fled across the restaurant.

Shawn scanned the room. Another man—impeccably dressed in a dark suit and tie, hair slicked back—stood just inside the entrance to the restaurant. He held the door open with an outstretched hand and watched the flight of the stranger who'd given Shawn his bizarre warning.

Dark suit's gaze flickered sideways toward Shawn for the briefest of moments. Then he turned and left, and the door closed behind him.

The stranger didn't look back. He wove through the tables in a blind panic until he reached the rear of the restaurant, threw himself through a pair of swinging doors, and disappeared.

Trepidation knotted itself into a tight ball in Shawn's gut. Around him, the restaurant buzzed with nervous energy.

A woman's voice rose above the others. "What the hell was that about?" she asked, and someone else called out, "Whatever he ordered, I don't want it," inspiring a round of nervous laughter.

He had figured the stranger was crazy, and maybe he was, but he also knew Shawn's name, where he was from, his job. And dark suit was proof the man's paranoia amounted to more than delusions. He had to know what the stranger meant by his cryptic warning.

Shawn stood and hurried after the stranger. As he did, a wave of silence washed over the restaurant once more as the people seated around him realized the morning's drama had not yet reached its conclusion. Shawn set his jaw, his strides long and purposeful. He burst through the swinging doors in the rear of the restaurant and found himself in the kitchen.

Shawn surveyed the room, looking for the stranger. Rows of silver-gray ovens, stoves, countertops, and cabinets stretched its length. A troupe of chefs, each wearing a white apron and toque blanche, stood as still as figures in a photograph. They held spoons and spatulas that dripped with the morning's cuisine.

They all stared at the stranger, who lay on his back next to an overturned metal serving cart, a small dark hole in the breast pocket of his shirt. He stared through the ceiling, unblinking and unseeing forevermore as the answers he'd promised bled out onto the floor in a thick pool of red.

Behind Shawn, the doors creaked as they swung back and forth. He scanned the room, stunned by how death had come and gone so swiftly.

Then one of the chefs spoke. He was a tall and gangly man with a drooping black mustache and bags beneath his eyes. "He shot him," he said.

"Who shot him?" Shawn's gaze flickered across the faces of the men standing before him.

The chef raised his arm and extended a bony finger, not toward one of his comrades but toward a door at the rear of the kitchen, the words FIRE EXIT stenciled in red block letters across it.

Shawn forged ahead, shouldering his way through the phalanx of chefs. He felt a hand on his arm, and at first he thought that hand meant to stop him, but it was a meaningless gesture without weight that fell away as he passed. He stepped over the body, around the overturned cart, and broke into a stumbling run.

Behind him, the chefs came to life. Panicked cries rose and jumbled together in a tangle of confusion. Shawn didn't look back, and he didn't slow as he slammed into the fire exit's crash bar, throwing the door open and stumbling out into a narrow alley. A congestion of sounds clogged the air—the hum of traffic, the blare of horns, the murmur of a million voices caught in the daily grind.

At the far end of the alley, a dark-haired man was getting into the passenger seat of a black sedan. Like the well-dressed man in the restaurant, he wore a dark suit.

"Stop!" Shawn cried, a solitary, flat syllable that echoed down the alley.

The man froze, half in and half out of the sedan. He looked back at Shawn.

Shawn stopped breathing. He stood frozen, his arms hanging at his sides. He could only stare at the dark suit staring back at him as he remembered the man lying dead in the kitchen. He shivered in spite of the warmth of the sun that bled into the summer morning. He waited for the drawing of the gun, the squeeze of the trigger, the explosion of pain and darkness that would follow.

But the man turned away without a word. He dropped the rest of the way into the passenger seat, pulling the door shut and disappearing behind the tinted glass. The car sped away with a squeal of tires, lost to the traffic and buildings of the city.