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trying to set you up. She’s trying to frame your ass.”
    Garrett threw his hands in the air. “Why would she want to do that?”
    “She’s pissed at you for quitting Ascendant. And because the two of you were a thing, and now you’re not.”
    Garrett knew Mitty was taking his side against Alexis more out of friendship and loyalty than any well-considered opinion, but still, he needed to streamline his thought process, not go off on tangents. “So she had a banker shot just to blame me? A theory has to make sense for me to consider it.”
    “It makes plenty of sense.” Mitty frowned. “Sorta. She’s always been high-and-mighty, and I don’t trust her.”
    “Thanks, that’s really helpful.”
    “Whatever.”
    Mitty had turned on a small television when they first got into the room and switched it to CNN. There’d been ten minutes of coverage of the shooting in the last hour, but a reporter on the scene—and another at a police press conference—had said the shooter was an obsessed female stalker, but they hadn’t released her name. Nobody had mentioned Garrett or Ascendant or even the possibility of its being anything other than a random killing. Garrett had a flash of intense paranoia: Had he imagined the entire phone conversation? But how would that be possible? He had known nothing about the shooting until he answered his work phone.
    No, he told himself. Do not think that way. Simple logic was still his friend. A to B to C. Do not deviate from known facts and hard data: categorize, test, analyze.
    “Whoever called you made a mistake,” Mitty said. “The shooter was some crazy bitch with a gun, and she capped this dude, and no one on TV has mentioned anything about you, or a pattern, or anything like that.”
    “So you’re saying that I’m imagining all this?” Garrett booted up the laptop that Mitty had brought from her home. “I might take that personally.”
    “No, no way,” Mitty said a little too quickly. “I’m just—you know—examining it from all angles.”
    Garrett glared at her briefly, then connected to the tire shop’s Wi-Fi—Mitty said her uncle paid for high speeds to watch Venezuelan porn when business was slow. Garrett logged on to his virtual private network to search the Web for information on the shooting. His VPN let him go online without being tracked. He let the digital data wash over him and felt intense relief. He was back in the global information flow, where he belonged, moving from website to website, news feed to opinion piece. He checked the markets and interest rates, going from graph to chart to an endless scroll of numbers. The Dow had sunk on news of Steinkamp’s death, and the VIX—the Volatility Index—had skyrocketed. He ran videos and read interviews and blog posts. A veil of anxiety had descended on Wall Street. The smart money was on edge. Everyone was on edge.
    All the while, Mitty kept up a running stream of commentary at his ear, complaining about Alexis Truffant, bitching about the Dominican whore heruncle brought to the bedroom, and spending a good twenty minutes on her new diet. “Just Coke Zero and cottage cheese. It’s a cleanse.”
    “That’s not a cleanse. A cleanse is—forget it.” Garrett found a news item from Agence France-Presse. “There’s been a bank run in Malta.” Garrett scanned the news update. “Started just after the Italian stock drop. It lines up perfectly.”
    “What’s Malta? A coffee drink?”
    Garrett ignored her. He pushed back from the laptop and massaged his temples.
    Mitty watched him, concern softening her face. “Head hurting again?”
    Garrett nodded imperceptibly. Yes.
    “You got meds?”
    He shrugged. Yes, but he needed to stay off them for a while—not that Mitty needed to know that.
    She watched him for a moment. “I’ll run to the corner, get us some beers. Maybe some snacks. That’ll help, right?”
    “Sure,” Garrett managed to mutter. “But be careful.”
    She returned fifteen minutes