Arvel could hear the radiator. He could hear, faintly, through the floor above, a cart rolling between the stacks. He could hear somebody breathing on the other side of the door, and the sound of a hand that has taken hold of a cold doorknob and not yet turned it.
Then the door opened about a foot, and a voice said, much too loud for the room, "Hey. Hi. Sorry. I'm just dropping this off. It's the second key for the Escape. Service finished it this afternoon and I said I'd bring it by, since I was—since it was on my way."
"That's kind of you," Arvel said. "Come in, son. I'll have to find my wallet."
"You don't have to tip me, Mr. Johnson."
"I know I don't." He did not move to look for the wallet. "Sit down a minute while I find it anyway."
There was a pause. Then the scrape of a plastic chair on the linoleum, pulled out from the table, and the creak of somebody young and too big for it lowering himself into it, the way you lower yourself into cold water. A key fob, set down on the laminate with a small click.
Starla did not say anything. She reached into her wallet, and Arvel heard the zipper, and then she slid something across the table. It made a whispering sound on the surface, soft, like cloth.
"You brought that back early," she said. "I said spring."
"I didn't bring it back. I'm just—" Kade stopped. "I looked at it all weekend. On the lot. In the truck. I kept it in my phone case. I can't get the third one. I can get the first one, I think, I think the first one's though, but the third one—"
"Nobody can get the third one," Arvel said. "Not the first night."
Nobody said anything for a while. The radiator ticked. Upstairs, the cart rolled on. Outside in the lot, in a silver car with the dome light on, a woman of seventy-one who had driven there herself was reading a paperback with her feet up on the dash, and did not know yet how long she would be waiting, and did not mind.
Arvel Johnson unfolded his hands from the stack of cards and laid them flat on the table, on either side of it, the way a man rests his hands on the edge of a porch rail at the end of a long route.
"Go on, then," he said. "Start with the first one. Take your time. We've got till nine."
Across the table, very quietly, a young man drew a breath, and began.