The bar had no sign. That was the point. You either knew where The Basement was, or you weren't the kind of person who belonged there.

Nick Moretti sat at the far end of the counter, nursing a whiskey that had been sitting too long without ice. The neon from the bodega across the street painted his face in shifting rectangles of red and blue. He looked like a man who had been sitting there for three hours, but the glass in front of him had exactly one inch of whiskey in it. Which meant he'd been there for exactly forty minutes.

Danny Russo came in like he owned the sidewalk. Italian suit, too white for this part of town, hair gelled into something that could survive a hurricane. He spotted Nick and slid onto the stool beside him like he'd been expecting to.

"You bring it?" Danny asked, nodding toward the paper-wrapped package in Nick's coat pocket.

"I brought it," Nick said.

"Good. Because I brought Greenie."

He set a small plastic terrarium on the counter. Inside, a lizard the colour of an unripe lime shifted its weight and blinked at the world with the philosophical indifference of something that had never once worried about anything in its life.

Maggie came around with a bottle of absinthe she didn't put on any menu. She poured two fingers for each of them and didn't charge. Old Man Perez, who had been nursing a beer in the corner since midnight, shuffled closer out of idle curiosity.

"What are we betting?" Danny asked.

Nick unwrapped the paper. Inside was a small cat carved from volcanic rock—black stone with flecks of white that caught the neon light like eyes. The craftsmanship was perfect. Every whisker, every tension in the tiny shoulders, every angle of the ears: flawless.

"Rocco," Nick said.

"Rocco," Danny repeated, testing the name. "Like a rock."

"Exactly."

They put Rocco and Greenie on the counter, six inches apart from a bottle of Macallan sitting on the top shelf behind the bar. Maggie had already dropped fifty between them. Old Man Perez tossed in a twenty. Danny's friend from the numbers game, who had wandered in off the street, added a hundred.

Greenie started moving immediately. She crawled along the counter with slow, deliberate purpose, each scale catching the neon light, each movement pulling her closer to the bottle.

Rocco didn't move. He was stone.

"Three inches," Maggie called out, measuring with her finger. "She's got her."

Danny crossed his arms. "You got a problem, man? I'm winning here. You want to call it?"

Nick watched Greenie cover another inch. She was at four. The bottle was two feet away. Maggie had just taken in another hundred from the numbers guy.

Nick picked up the trash can lid from behind the bar. It was heavy, rusted at the edges. He held it over Rocco like a hammer.

"You know what?" Nick said, his voice calm, almost bored. "This thing's been sitting on my shelf for five years collecting dust. Maybe I should just—"

He swung.

And Rocco was gone.

Not a blur. Not a smudge. Gone. One instant he was there, a small black cat of stone, sitting on the sticky counter between a bottle of absinthe and a half-crushed napkin holder. The next—

"Up top," Nick said.

They looked up. There, perched on the wooden shelf behind the bar, sat Rocco. Not on the Macallan. Not anywhere near it. He was sitting on top of the highest shelf, right next to a jar of maraschino cherries, in a pool of light from the small bulb Maggie used to check inventory at closing.

The numbers guy said something in a language Maggie didn't speak. Old Man Perez stopped mid-sip. Danny's mouth opened and closed three times like a fish that had just learned about gravity.

Nick set the trash can lid down. He didn't look at Danny. He didn't look at anyone. He raised his hand.

"Maggie. The usual."

She poured a shot of the good stuff and slid it across the counter without a word.

Danny finally found his voice. "How. How did you—what is that? Is that— is that a trick?"

Nick picked up the shot and looked at it the way a man looks at a door he's been standing in front of for a very long time.

"Rocco," he said, "don't get me wrong. I love the guy. But sometimes you gotta remind him who's in charge." He took the shot in one pull and set the glass down with a click that sounded exactly like final.

"As they say," he added, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, "when you hit rock bottom, that's when you bounce back, right?"

Danny didn't laugh. Nobody laughed. But Old Man Perez turned back to his beer with the faintest hint of a smile, and the neon painted the room in red and blue and the kind of silence that comes after something impossible has just happened and everyone present has decided, for reasons they will never explain, to pretend it was normal.

The bottle of Macallan sat untouched. Greenie had stopped moving too. She was just a lizard on a counter in a bar with no sign, staring at nothing with the ancient eyes of something that understood exactly what had happened and would never, ever talk about it.