Chapter 7: Forty Minutes

Quarles gave Jarek a written warning on Monday morning and put it in his file.

"Another one, and you're out," he said. "Both versions of that story agree on one thing, and I don't like it."

"What's that, sir?"

"That you were the only man on that terrace who moved."

Jarek said nothing, and Averett, watching through the glass of the security office, did not either.

The rest of the week they did not speak of the boathouse.

They spoke of the schedule, the route, the weather, and whether the sourdough had risen.

They stood on opposite sides of a very polite wall, and every day it got thinner.

On Thursday Kingsbury Nights held a press afternoon in the Tower lobby.

Two hundred fans had been let in behind ropes, and a hundred more were waiting in the street.

Averett signed things and posed for pictures, and a girl in the front row burst into tears and gave him a bracelet.

Then someone at the back shouted something ugly about his father, and the crowd shifted.

It was a slow, heavy lurch.

"Mr. Kingsbury," Jarek said into his ear, calm. "We're leaving. Left hand on my belt."

"Rule one."

"Left hand on my belt."

He put it there.

Jarek opened a path through the people with his shoulders and one flat palm, and he never raised his voice.

They went through a staff door, down a corridor smelling of bleach, and into the service elevator.

The doors closed on the shouting.

"Penthouse," Jarek said to the panel.

The elevator rose two floors.

Then it jerked, made a grinding noise, and stopped.

The light flickered and went to a dim amber.