“I understand service was sloppy tonight,” Crawley said.

“Did my father tell you that?”

“I haven’t spoken with your father. I sent an observer to eat at the restaurant.”

“You sent a spy to your own restaurant?”

“Espionage is a common business practice.”

“Against yourself?”

“Apparently it was warranted.”

I sighed. Old Man Crawley had more eyes in more places than anyone I knew. I wouldn’t be surprised if right now he told me to stop picking my nose.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, I oughta tell you a little bit about Old Man Crawley, or “Creepy Crawley,” as all the little kids call him. The guy’s a legend in Brooklyn—the kind you really don’t believe until you actually meet him, but by then it’s too late to run. He’s very rich, very selfish, and generally mean. He’s the kind of guy who’d hand out vomit-inducing candy on Halloween, and then sell Pepto-Bismol across the street at jacked-up prices.

I’m one of the few people who actually knows him, on account of he’s mostly a hermit. He used to be entirely a hermit, until he hired me to walk his dogs and to date his granddaughter, Lexie, who’s blind, but has managed to make her blindness seem like a mere technicality. Pretty soon dating her stopped being a job, and it became real, much to Old Man Crawley’s disgust. There was this one time Lexie and I kidnapped Crawley, and forced him to see the outside world. He liked it so much he now has us kidnap him on a regular basis.

The weird thing is that I kind of like him. Maybe it’s because I understand him—or maybe it’s because I’m the only person who can call him a nasty old fart to his face and get away with it. I can’t quite say that Crawley and I are friends, but he dislikes me less than he dislikes most other people. Still, with Crawley, the line between tolerance and disgust is very thin.