He thought about how to answer. In Tagalog, in Kapampangan, in English. He found that he had no idea how to say it in any of them.
"Long night," he said.
She looked at him over her glasses for a while longer, and then she smoothed the envelope flat on the counter with the side of her hand, carefully, as though ironing it, and put it in the drawer, and counted the money again, and gave him his receipt.
Dorrit called on Saturday afternoon from the hospital in Indianapolis. Ruben was out of the ICU and complaining about the food, which the nurses said was a good sign. Kiet had told her, and the detective had called her, and then, she said, an officer named Brodersen had called her too, on his own, at eight in the morning on Friday, before she had even had her coffee, and had told her the whole thing from start to finish, including, she said, some parts that did not make him look very good, and then he had asked her to make sure Lorenz didn't lose his job over the torn bag.
"I told him," Dorrit said, "that if he'd met me, he'd know what a damn fool question that was." There was a pause on the line, and Lorenz could hear the hospital behind her, a cart rattling, a page over the intercom. "Honey," she said. "Rule six. If anybody asks for the bag."
"Give them the bag," he said.
"You gave them the bag."
"He didn't ask. He took it."
"Yes," she said, and was quiet a moment. "Yes, I suppose he did."
He heard later, from Aguilar, who called him twice more with questions about restaurant supply houses and day dots, that the white van had turned up abandoned on the Tuesday in a lot behind a shuttered Applebee's out on Coldwater Road, with two more hotel pans in the back, both drilled and hooked, and a ring of eleven night-drop keys from four different banks. He heard nothing about who had been driving it. He heard, from Kiet, who heard it from a bartender at the Copperline Tap, that Jazmyn Haddix's hearing had been continued, which might mean something and might mean nothing, and that Danko had called her and she had hung up on him. He heard nothing at all from Brodersen. He did not expect to.