"I know."
"You know what that means? It means a state man looked at it and said it could kill somebody. There's three old men sleeping on top of it." He rubbed his face. "And I'm supposed to walk in there at eight in the morning with Stu and Carrigan and pretend I don't know? Or I tell Stu, and Stu tells Carrigan, and Carrigan calls the police, because what else is he going to do, and they come and put a blind man and a man with one leg and a man who can't breathe out in the street at forty below. Or put Tomo on a bus to Galen. That's my choices."
"Give me tonight," Lauren said. "Just tonight. I'll do the ten and the four. Tomorrow we'll go to Carrigan together, before Stu gets there. We'll tell him ourselves. Johanna was going to tell him herself. She said he's a good man."
"He is a good man. That's the trouble. A good man can't let that stand." Gordie looked up. "And what's Stu going to say when he finds out his guy knew? Laurie, Stu's the only one paying me. I've got Gillette on the third. We've got three hundred and eighty-six dollars in a coffee can."
"Three ninety-four," said Lauren. "I counted Sunday."
He almost laughed. He didn't.
"I'm asking you," she said. "I've never asked you for anything like this."
"No," he said. "You never have." He pushed his chair back and went and stood at the window over the sink, with his back to her, looking at nothing, because there was nothing to see through that frost. "I'm not going down there," he said. "I'm not going to be part of it. I'll stay with Mandy. And I'm not going to lie to Stu in the morning if he asks me straight. That's all I can give you."
"That's enough," she said, and did not know if it was.