"I'll text you."
Kiet got into his Corolla and backed it out of the alley, and the headlights swung across the dumpster and the stacked milk crates and the back wall of the church, and then he was gone, his taillights turning left on Broadway, and Lorenz was alone.
He went the long way. Not because he was afraid, but because Dorrit had told him to, and because the long way went past the house on Wildwood with the dog that barked at him every time and then wagged its whole back half when he talked to it, and he liked that dog. Down the alley to Wildwood, left past the church lot, then up toward Broadway on the cross street, past a dark laundromat with the dryers standing open like mouths and the vape shop with its neon switched off but still faintly glowing pink, the way a coal glows. His sneakers made almost no sound on the sidewalk. The leaves were coming down from the maples in the parkway strips, and he walked through them, and they hissed around his ankles.
The dog on Wildwood didn't bark. Maybe it was inside.
He thought about his mother. He thought about her most on the eighth of each month, because of the envelope, and because the eighth of October was also the anniversary of the day he had first gone to sea, in 2006, from the port of Manila on a ship called the Ocean Laurel, bound for Newcastle in Australia to load coal. He had been so seasick the first four days he could not stand at the stove without a bucket beside him, and the Croatian chief cook, a huge, gentle, gray-bearded man named Zdravko, had laughed at him and fed him dry crackers and told him that the sea took four days to decide whether to keep you. On the fifth day it had decided. He had kept that bucket beside the stove for eleven years afterward, out of something between superstition and gratitude, and had never needed it again. His mother had come to the port to see him off and had stood on the quay in a yellow blouse with an umbrella against the sun, and she had not waved, because she said waving was for people who were not coming back, and she had only stood there, holding the umbrella, getting smaller and smaller and yellower and yellower until she was a single grain of yellow on the gray edge of the world.
She did not remember that day now. The dialysis had done something to her memory, or age had, or both. When he called her on Sundays she sometimes thought he was still on the ship and asked him what port he was in. He had learned to tell her. Rotterdam, Nanay. Santos. Qingdao. It was easier than explaining Indiana, and it made her happy to think of him moving.
He turned onto Broadway two blocks north of the bank and walked south on the east side of the street. At this hour Broadway was nearly empty. Across the street, in the lot of the auto-parts store that had closed at nine, a white van sat parked with its nose toward the street, a full-size cargo van with a ladder rack on the roof and no ladder on it, and its engine was running; he could see the exhaust feathering out white from under the back bumper in the cold. Its parking lights were on. He couldn't see whether anyone was in it. The windshield was black.
He noticed it the way he noticed everything, without deciding to. Eleven years in a ship's galley had trained that into him. On a ship you noticed. You noticed the oil in the fryer begin to lean before the ship began to roll. You noticed when the second mate had stopped eating, because a second mate who stopped eating was a second mate who had heard something bad from home, and you made him something soft that he could eat without thinking. A cook on a ship was the only man who saw every other man three times a day. He saw everything.
So he saw the van, and filed it, and kept walking.
Three Rivers Federal Credit Union occupied a squat tan-brick building on the corner of Broadway and Taylor, built in the 1970s with narrow vertical windows that made it look like a small fortress. There was a drive-through on the south side and an ATM on the front, and around the north corner, set into the brick under its own small floodlight beside a steel-framed glass vestibule, the night depository.
He knew it well by now. Seventeen nights. He had counted. The night drop was a rectangular stainless-steel faceplate the size of a large microwave door, bolted flush into the wall at chest height, with BUSINESS NIGHT DEPOSITORY stenciled across the top in black and a small keyhole on the right side and a long horizontal handle along the bottom. You put the key in and turned it a quarter turn clockwise and pulled the handle, and the whole front swung down and out toward you like the door of an oven, and inside was a tilted steel tray, the hopper, just deep enough to hold a deposit bag. You laid the bag in the hopper. Then you lifted the door shut, and as it closed the hopper tilted backward on its pivot and the bag slid off the back edge into the darkness behind, and fell.