Never the same route two nights running.
If anybody asks for the bag, give them the bag.
He had not always been the one carrying the bag. For the six years he had worked at Baird's, the general manager had done the deposit, a quiet, round, fastidious man named Elwood Ostergren who had been at Baird's longer than anyone but Dorrit and who had, two and a half weeks ago, in the middle of a full Saturday, taken off his tie and left it on the host stand and called Dorrit from the parking lot to say he was sixty-one and retiring to Florida, effective now. Three days later, her husband Ruben had had a heart attack shoveling nothing, just walking out to the mailbox, and had been taken down to the heart hospital in Indianapolis, and Dorrit had gone with him, and she was still there.
Before she left she had called Lorenz into the office, the cramped little room behind the kitchen with the safe and the filing cabinet and the old desk with the computer that ran the schedule, and she had sat him down in the one good chair and stood over him, which she never did, and she had written the safe combination on a piece of paper and handed it to him and then watched him memorize it and then taken the paper back and torn it into small pieces and put the pieces in her coat pocket.
"You and Kiet close," she said. "You count, he counts, you both sign. You take the bag. Not Kiet. Kiet's got a baby. You hear me? The bag goes in the night drop at Three Rivers on Broadway, the one by the church. Here's the key." She had put it in his hand, a heavy flat brass key on a ring with a red plastic tag that said BAIRD'S NIGHT DEP in Dorrit's handwriting, the letters gone pale from years of thumbs. "You know where it is?"
"I know where it is."
"Vary your route. Don't be stupid. Don't stop to talk to anybody. Don't stop for a cigarette."
"I don't smoke."
"I know you don't smoke, honey. It's a figure of speech." She had looked at him then with an expression he could not read. She was seventy-one years old, a tall woman with a long face and short white hair and big hands, a cook's hands, burned and scarred along the backs, with a wedding ring that had been resized twice. "I'm trusting you with my restaurant," she said. "You understand that? I'm not trusting you with the money. Money's money. I'm trusting you with the restaurant."
He had understood. He was not sure he could have said what he understood. But he had driven home that night with the key in his pocket and he had sat in the car in the lot behind the apartment building for a long time with the engine off, holding it, and when he finally went upstairs Analyn had been awake, sitting at the kitchen table in her scrubs with a cup of tea gone cold, and she had looked at his face and said, "What happened? What's wrong?" and he had said nothing was wrong and showed her the key, and she had not understood at all why her husband, who had once cooked through a typhoon off Taiwan with a cut on his forehead that needed nine stitches, had tears in his eyes over a brass key with a red plastic tag.
Now Kiet counted the drawer and Lorenz watched him do it. Then Lorenz counted and Kiet watched. Twenties in one stack, faces up, all facing the same way, which was another of Dorrit's rules, because a stack where all the faces looked the same direction was a stack where you would notice if one was wrong. Tens. Fives. Ones, which on a Thursday were endless because the bar ran on ones. Quarters in the paper rolls, the rolls stamped with the restaurant name. The checks, there were two, from old regulars who still paid with checks and always would. The credit card batch had already closed itself out on the POS and needed no counting, only the printout stapled to the slip. Kiet subtracted the three-hundred-dollar bank, which went back in its own pouch, and the paid-outs, which tonight were forty-two dollars to the produce guy for a case of calamansi he had driven over from the Asian grocery on Coliseum because the regular order had come in short, and Lorenz's eleven-fifty went in, and the tape ran out of the calculator with a little chattering sound and curled down over the edge of the bar.