Johanna let go of her wrist. She fumbled at the pocket of the cardigan, under the courthouse man's coat. It took her a long time. Her fingers wouldn't work. She got the pocket open and her hand went in and came out closed, and she reached out and took Lauren's hand, and turned it over, palm up, and laid something in it, and closed Lauren's fingers down over it, one at a time, and pressed.
Lauren opened her hand.
It was a key. An old one, iron, as long as her middle finger, with a round bow worn smooth and a single square bit at the end, the kind of key that belonged on a church or a jail. There was a loop of dirty white string through the bow, and on the string a little cardboard tag, the kind you buy at the dime store, and on the tag, in a faded brown ink, in a careful copperplate hand, one word:
BOILER
"What's this key for?" Lauren asked.
"The Carrigan," Johanna said. "The Carrigan Rooms. On Galena. It's the alley door, the iron door, at the bottom of the stairs. It's not the front. Don't go in the front, somebody'll see you."
"Johanna, I don't..."
"Ten o'clock at night, and four in the morning." The cough took her, and she bent with it, and fell back. "You shake her down, you open the door and you shake her down and you put on six shovels, no more than six, and you bank it to the back. You leave the damper a crack open. Like this. A finger." She held up a white finger. "And you watch the glass. The glass on the side, the water glass. It has to be half. You keep it half. She leaks, she leaks bad from the crack, you have to keep feeding the water in. There's a valve. The boys know the valve."
"What boys?"