Chapter 5: The Lobby

Hazel texted me at noon.

She had found my number on the booking sheet.

Ms. Shanahan, events. I have a linen van and an empty afternoon. A man with twelve boxes behind a locked door needs one of those.

I looked at the message for a while.

Then I wrote back: Yes.

She pulled up outside my old office tower at one, in a white van with SHANAHAN HALL on the side in faded blue letters.

She wore jeans and a gray sweater, and she still had the headset around her neck.

"You don't need to do this," I said, climbing in.

"I know." She checked her mirror. "I'm bad at watching people get robbed."

"It's not exactly robbery."

"Is the debt real?"

"There's no debt."

"Then it's robbery," Hazel said, and pulled out into traffic.

She drove with no wasted motion and no apologies.

At the second light, she held out a paper bag without looking at me.

Inside was a ham sandwich.

"My grandmother made it," she said. "She asked if you were eating. I said I didn't know. She said to find out."

I ate half of it in the passenger seat while she navigated the lake road.

It was the first real food I had tasted in two days.

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't thank me yet. Tell me what we're walking into."

"A building with a doorman. And a woman who thinks I'll be too polite to make a scene."

"Are you?"

"I was, until Saturday."

She almost smiled at the windshield.

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