Chapter 7: Ten More Women

Carter didn't say anything in the hallway.

He just looked at me for three long seconds.

Then his mother snapped his name from the elevator, and he went.

He didn't text that night, or the next day, or the day after that.

For six weeks he'd texted my father every morning, in his careful amnesiac voice, thanking him for the private room.

Now nothing.

"I don't like quiet," Sam said on Friday.

"Neither do I."

"So we go look at him."

"We?"

"You were going to make me say 'we' or you were going to follow me in your own car," he said. "I'm saving gas."

Tripp's bar is on Second Street in Old City, in a brick building that used to be a pharmacy.

It's called the Apothecary. Carter came up with the name, and Tripp still tells people he did.

At nine o'clock on Friday night Sam parked his gray Explorer across the street.

He put it between a food truck and a fire hydrant.

"Isn't that illegal?" I said.

"Very."

He turned the engine off and handed me a paper cup.

"What is this?"

"Wawa coffee. Decaf. Stakeout coffee is supposed to be bad. It's tradition."

I tasted it.

"This is criminally bad."

"I've had worse. In 2016 I sat outside a rowhouse in Kensington for nineteen hours on gas station coffee and one bag of pretzel rods."

"Did you catch him?"

"He was at his mother's in Delaware the whole time."

I laughed into the cup.

Sam watched the bar door with the patience of a big cat.

He had a camera on his knee with a lens as long as my forearm.

"You do this a lot?" I asked.

"Used to. Now I mostly sit in rich people's dining rooms and tell them not to pay."

"You told my father to pay."

"I told your father not to pay without proof of life. He paid anyway, because he loves you, and you loved the guy."

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