The bank installed a new night depository in the second week of November, a different model, with a camera in the faceplate and a rotary drum instead of a hopper, so that the bag went into a pocket in a cylinder, and the cylinder turned, and there was no chute you could reach into at all. Dorrit was still in Indianapolis, interviewing general managers over the phone from the hospital cafeteria, and so on the Thursday the new drop went in it was Lorenz again, walking down Broadway at twelve-forty in the morning with the bag flat against his ribs inside his too-big jacket and the night cold and clear and the leaves mostly down now, lying in drifts along the curb.
There was a cruiser in the gas station lot down the block. Its lights were off. He could see the shape of a man behind the wheel, and the small orange glow of the laptop on its mount.
He did not stop. He walked to the corner of the tan brick building, under the floodlight, and took the key out of his pocket, a new key, a different shape, and put it in the new lock and opened the new door, and laid the bag in the drum the way the bank had shown him, and closed it, and turned the handle, and the drum rotated with a smooth mechanical hum, and he took his hand away and stood there in the floodlight and waited.
Half a breath. A real pause, long enough that he began to be afraid.
And then, from somewhere deep in the wall, far below, a heavy soft thump, like a sack of rice dropped into the hold of a ship.
He let his breath out. He stood there a moment longer, his hand flat against the cold brick beside the faceplate, the way you rest your hand on the side of a ship when it finally comes in, to feel it. Then he turned and looked across the lot toward the gas station.
The cruiser hadn't moved. The man behind the wheel hadn't moved either. And then, after a long moment, the man raised two fingers off the top of the steering wheel, the way men in Indiana greet each other from passing pickups on county roads, and held them there.
Lorenz didn't know what the gesture meant, exactly. He didn't know whether the man in the car had gone to see Jazmyn Haddix, or whether he ever would, or what he would say if he did, or what she would say back. He knew the man had loosened one cuff by one click, and written NO CONSENT GIVEN in Dorrit's green ledger and signed his whole name under it. He didn't know what those two things added up to. Maybe nothing yet. Maybe they were just the first two numbers on the tape.
He lifted one hand, not a wave, just a hand, open, palm out, and held it there under the floodlight long enough to be seen.
Then he zipped his jacket up to his chin, and put his hands in his pockets, and walked home the long way, past the church and the laundromat and the house on Wildwood, where the dog came running to the fence in the dark, and barked at him, and wagged.