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He puts the notebook away and his hands go back in his pockets.

“All right,” he says.

He walks four rows to a gray sedan and gets in.

I get into my car with the key in my hand. Roth backs out, then heads down the ramp toward the Corliss exit. I watch until he’s almost gone before starting the engine.

At the mouth of the structure, the road forks. Left runs down the quay toward the north end shipping office. Roth files with Vera in person at ten forty every Thursday. He has for years.

He goes right.

Right is the harbor side, nine blocks of one-way before a left onto Weyburn. Kieran’s eleven-story building is there, lobby lit. Arturo is sometimes at the front desk. Sometimes he isn’t.

I sit at the mouth of the structure with my turn signal clicking. The wipers scrape once across a dry windshield. A horn sounds behind me.

I take the left.

I have no standing to take the right. I’ve filed everything that’s required. Made every recommendation I’m entitled to make. Vera wrote Accepted Monday morning. Roth answers to her, not to me. Nothing about my job gives me the right to follow him to another man’s door.

Four blocks down the quay, I pull over on the loading side with the harbor on my right and the office two minutes farther on.

The report is done. There’s no reason to go in tonight.

I take out my phone, bring up his number. My thumb hovers over it. If he answered, I would say: lock your door. If a man in a gray coat is already inside your lobby, don’t get in the elevator with him. No financial manager says that to a client at ten forty on a Thursday night.

I put the phone in the cup holder, face down.

I sit there with the engine running, heater on my hands. Four blocks from an office I don’t need. Nine blocks from a building I’m not going to. I watch the tugs work a ship in. None of it helps anybody.

5

Twenty-six shots, and my knees are done. I come through the lobby door at four minutes past midnight with my bag on my shoulder and the cold still on my face.

There’s a man sitting in one of the two chairs in the vestibule.

Nobody sits in those chairs. They’re next to a glass table with a dead plant on it, in the six feet of space between the street door and the inner door. Couriers stand. Cab drivers stand. The chairs have never had a person in them.

He stands up when he sees me.

He’s heavy through the middle, gray coat, gray pants, and a face I won’t be able to describe tomorrow. He’s somewhere around forty-five, and he could be a plumbing inspector or a man waiting on his wife.

He doesn’t say anything.

I go past him to the inner door and put my fob on the reader. My hand is completely level, because that’s what my hands do, whatever the rest of me is doing. The reader beeps. I go through. The desk is empty; Arturo’s chair is pushed in and his radio is playing low with nobody there to hear it.

I press eight and turn around.

The man is standing in the vestibule watching me through two sets of glass with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, like a man at a bus stop.

The elevator doors start to close.

He turns and walks out onto the street.

I don’t remember the ride up.

I lock the deadbolt, then the chain. I stand there with my hand on the wood before carrying the near-side kitchen chair to the door and wedging it under the handle. Then I check the balcony slider on the eighth floor, which is absurd. I check it anyway.

My phone is in my hand.