Company policy said valets retrieved all vehicles. Company policy also said the customer was the priority, and Teo had never in his life seen a customer who was more of a priority than a man whose granddaughter was being born.
"First row, right by the gate," he said, and punched his code into the Snitch. The cabinet beeped and the door unlatched. He reached in, took the fob off hook fourteen, and put it in Ashby's palm. The lens at the top of the cabinet blinked once. "Go. Go. Congratulations."
"God bless you," Ashby said, and pressed a folded bill into his hand, and was gone, walking fast along the brick toward the side lot, the tails of his tuxedo jacket lifting a little in the wind.
Teo did not look at the bill until later. It was a hundred. He would remember that afterward, too, with a strange shame, as though the money had been payment for what happened next.
He turned to the next stub. A woman in silver sequins was telling him her husband had a heart condition and couldn't stand for long. He said yes ma'am, of course, ma'am, and reached for the board.
Under the porte-cochère, eight feet away, Hollis Brandt stood with an unlit cigar in one hand and his phone in the other, and he had watched the whole thing.
* * *
Russell Dacey's phone buzzed against his thigh at 10:40 p.m.
He would say later, in the first version of his report, that he had not received any information from any civilian before the encounter, and that he had "independently observed suspicious activity in the hotel's secured parking area." He would say, in the second version, that he had received "a tip from a hotel guest" but had "independently corroborated" it. He would say, in the third version, under oath, that he did not remember exactly when he had looked at his phone.
What the phone said was this:
Black guy in a tux just took a key off the valet board himself. Walking to the side lot. Green Maybach. Not his car. Check him.