"It's been a while, Carl."
Carl entered the Afterlife through a route known only to regulars. When he shed his disguise and revealed himself, Claire, the bartender, spotted him at once.
"It has been a while, Claire."
Carl nodded to Claire. Noticing that the Afterlife was not particularly busy today and that the person he was meeting had yet to arrive, he took a seat beside the bar.
"Looks like I got here a little early. How's business, Claire? The entrance looked completely blocked."
"It's been like this for the past couple of days. It'll settle down once this excitement dies off."
As Claire spoke, her hands never stopped moving. She skillfully prepared Carl's usual drink—a cup of sweet tea with mint leaves and ice—and slid it in front of him without needing to ask.
"But Crispin got completely screwed. He'd just gotten back from an out-of-town job and didn't know what was going on, so he got swarmed by tourists the moment he arrived."
"I saw him. He looked like he was about to die of embarrassment just standing at the entrance." Carl took a sip of tea. "Speaking of which, has anything interesting happened in the city lately?"
"What else could there be? The biggest news is that you practically called every available merc in the Afterlife over to Dogtown. Everyone who worked for you made a fortune in Eurodollars. The ones who missed the boat and were risking their lives elsewhere for some idiot fixer's scraps regretted it so badly their guts turned green when they came back to the Afterlife and heard the news."
"You can't blame me for that."
Carl set down his ice-cold sweet tea. "I couldn't exactly tell people who already had jobs to put them aside and come work for me first.