"Base to all cars," she said. "This is Harper. I've got the desk till morning. Gino had to go to his mother. Say a prayer for her if you've got one. Check in, please, by number, and tell me where you are and if you're loaded."
There was a pause, full of static. Then they came in, one after another, voices out of the dark.
"Four, Harper. Welcome back, honey. I'm at Sisters Hospital, empty, waiting on the shift change."
"Seven. Lenihan. I'm at Hertel and Delaware with a couple going to their daughter's in Kenmore and a ham in a roasting pan on the guy's lap. It smells unbelievable in here."
"Nine. Sobczak. I got rid of the fruitcake lady. She gave me a fruitcake. I'm parked at the Your Host on Main, eating eggs, feeling very sorry for myself."
"Eleven, Wisniewski the handsome one, at the Greyhound downtown, nobody's going anywhere, they canceled everything to Rochester."
"Fifteen. Dziedzic. I'm stuck on Elmwood. Not stuck stuck. Just. Thinking about being stuck."
"Seventeen. It's Cholewa. I'm by the Sisters of Charity on Main, I got a nurse who needs to get to Millard Fillmore by midnight and she's cutting it close."
And then, last, a voice so deep it seemed to come up out of the floor: "Fourteen. Hubbard. I'm sitting outside St. Francis Xavier on East Street with the engine running, waiting on midnight Mass to let out. Got three old ladies who'll want rides home and I already know where all three of them live. Merry Christmas, Miss Harper. Glad it's you."
"Merry Christmas, Mose," she said, and she felt her shoulders come down from around her ears for the first time all day.
She worked. That was what the next hour and a half was: work, steady and absorbing, the kind that leaves no room in a person for anything else. She had a pad of trip sheets and a stubby pencil and the pegboard, and the city of Buffalo in her head like a map in a lit window. The office telephone rang and she answered it and wrote down an address and moved a green tag from one hook to another and pressed the button and said a number and a street, and somewhere out in the white a man turned his wheel. A woman on Lafayette needed to get to her sister's on Grant because her furnace had quit. A busboy at the Statler needed to get home to Riverside. Two drunk Santas from a party at the Elks Lodge needed to get anywhere at all and were willing to pay double. The nurse made it to Millard Fillmore at 11:58 and the Cholewa kid radioed in to say so, triumphant, as if he'd delivered a baby. At midnight the bells of St. Francis Xavier came faintly over Mose's open microphone, and every man on the frequency went quiet to listen to them.