"Can I ask you something?" he said.
I looked up. He watched me the way I watched him. In no hurry. Like he had nowhere to be and didn't much care when he got there.
"Depends on the question."
"The name." He nodded at the bottle. "Madigan & Sons. You know the story behind it?"
Every muscle in me went still.
"No. Why?"
He shrugged, the smile staying put. "I'm from Ireland. Dunraven, out west. Been drinking this my whole life. Always wondered about the family behind it." A beat. Then he said it, light, like it was nothing. Like it wasn't the worst sentence in the language. "Heard they're all gone now. The actual Madigans."
My stomach dropped. I caught the underside of the bar where he couldn't see my hand do it.
Cliffs on fire and the sea gone orange below them. My father's hand clamped over my mouth, salt and smoke on his skin, his voice a growl against my ear. The walls coming down. Men in the dark with accents I couldn't place. His whole weight crushing me into cold stone, and the last word he ever gave me, the one he saved for when it got bad.
Run.
It came and went in less than a breath, and I stayed exactly where I stood with my face giving up nothing. Giving nothing away was the one skill the years had ground into me past the point of failure.
"That's what I've heard, too," I said.
He nodded, slow, turning the glass. "Shame. Whatever they were, they knew how to make whiskey."
"Yeah," I said. "They did."
I went back to work and didn't look at the pair of them more than I had to, and I ran the till twice because the first count came out wrong, which it never did. Dunraven, out west. Half the west of Ireland was from somewhere near Dunraven. It didn't have to mean anything. I told myself that a number of times.
When the scarred one stepped to the bathroom, the talker spoke again, easy, to my back.
"You're Irish."
"What makes you say that?"
"The way you pour. You don't measure. People measure, unless they grew up around it. Learned by watching." A pause. "Where are you from?"
"Chicago."
"Originally."
I held his gaze. Patient. And the patience was the part that put my neck on alert. "Does it matter?"
"No," he said, easy. "Just curious. I notice Irish."
"Occupational hazard?"
That smile. "Something like that."
The scarred one came back from the bathroom. He didn't sit. He put a hand on the talker's shoulder and leaned down close to his ear.
"We should go," he said, low. Not a suggestion.
The talker didn't argue. He just nodded, the easy way a man goes along with the sensible one without making a thing of it.
He pulled a credit card out of his jacket and set it on the bar. It was corporate, an Irish bank, a name I didn't know.
"Run that whenever you're ready," he said, and buttoned his jacket.