On Thursday he took a personal day.
He told himself he was not going to do anything. He was only going to watch. He told himself that at noon, when he made a sandwich and ate it standing at the counter, and at two, when he showered and then stood in front of his closet for longer than he would have liked to admit trying to decide whether to put on his uniform. In the end he did not. He wore jeans and a gray Seahawks sweatshirt and his duty belt under his jacket, with his badge clipped to the belt beside the holster, because that was the rule for off-duty carry and because, if he was honest, he wanted the weight of it there. He was a police officer. If there was a crime, he acted as one. If there was not, he was a neighbor with a badge. He said it to himself in the mirror and it sounded, for the first time in three years, like something a person would say to talk himself into a thing.
At three-fifteen he went down to the lobby with a paperback and sat on the bench by the corkboard where people waited for rides. It was a gray, wet afternoon, and every time the front door opened a breath of it came in, smelling of wet asphalt and the pulp mill on the tideflats. He did not read the paperback. He watched the door.
The Fairmont Market van came at three thirty-one. It was a white Ford Transit with the Fairmont logo on the side, a green leaf over a red barn, and the driver was a heavy young man in a green fleece who came in with two insulated bags in one hand and a paper sack in the other and a handheld scanner hanging from his wrist on a lanyard. He nodded at Kurt without curiosity. He punched 4-2-4-2 into the keypad without looking at it and went into the package room and came out ten seconds later with empty hands, scanned something, and left. Kurt heard the van door slam and the engine catch and the tires hiss away on the wet street.
He got up and went to the package room and opened the door.
It was a narrow room, maybe eight feet by ten, with shelving units along both long walls and a folding table at the far end under a single fluorescent tube that buzzed. The shelves were crowded with boxes. The Fairmont bags were on the floor beside the table, where the driver had set them: two green insulated totes with zippered tops and a brown paper sack folded over twice at the top. Each one had a stapled receipt on the side, a long curl of thermal paper with the Fairmont logo at the top. DUNNING, C. — UNIT 2F — SEFTON COURT, SOUTH PINE ST. LEAVE IN LOBBY PER CUSTOMER.
He did not touch them. He looked at them for a while and then he went back out to the bench and sat down and opened the paperback to a page he did not read.
At three forty-four the front door opened and the girl came in.
She was smaller than he had pictured. Eleven, twelve; he was bad at ages, and kids now seemed both older and younger than he remembered being. She had on a purple rain jacket with the hood up and unzipped over a school sweatshirt, black leggings, sneakers that had been white once, and the backpack Mr. Eckles had described, a big gray one with a reflective strip down the middle and a little plastic keychain shaped like a strawberry hanging off the zipper pull. It was full. It sat on her back the way a sandbag sits on a levee. She pushed the hood back and shook rain out of her hair, which was pulled back in a puff with a yellow elastic, and she glanced at him on the bench, a quick, polite, incurious look, and then she glanced again, longer, as if she were trying to place him. He looked at his book. She went to the package room and punched in the code and went inside, and the steel door swung slowly shut behind her on its pneumatic arm, and stopped an inch short of the frame, the way it always did.
Kurt counted to thirty. He got up and walked to the door and stood beside it, and through the inch-wide gap he could see a slice of the room: the end of a shelf, a corner of the folding table, and the girl, kneeling on the floor beside the green Fairmont totes with her backpack open beside her on the linoleum. One of the totes was unzipped. Her hands were inside it. As he watched, she drew out a can, looked at it, and set it down on the floor beside her bag. Then she reached into her own backpack, and he could not see what she did there, because her body was between him and the bag, only the motion of her shoulder and her elbow, the rustle of plastic.