Chapter 10: No Angle

It started in his hands.

Cold, then wet. When he lifted his right hand off the A and flexed it, the key was shining.

Breakfast had been coffee. Lunch had gone by without him, and so had dinner, and it was coming up on nine.

Two meals, and it had been a long time since he’d skipped one on purpose. He had done that once — days of it, in a life that had closed behind him — but those had been his hands. These ran cold and sweated through the plastic of a keyboard, in a building where everything else was glass and quiet.

The roll-up sat open in front of him: a column of figures attached to a product he could not have described under oath. The folder had landed on his desk at four-thirty. It was eight forty-eight, and checking the totals had stopped being work a while back.

He went down the column again. Then he opened the file he had been comparing it against and went down that one too, a line at a time, the way you check a lock you already checked.

The phone buzzed against the laminate. He turned it over. The delivery app said his order had been picked up, and then, eight minutes later, that it had been delivered to the front desk, lobby level. There had been no line on the order form for a floor, and he had looked.

He pushed back from the desk and got his jacket.

The lobby at night was a different building. Two of the six lights over the elevator bank were out, and the marble went gray toward the doors. A man sat behind the security desk with a paper cup and a monitor. He looked up when Elliot came out of the elevator, and then he looked back down.

The front desk had a rack behind it with packages stacked into cubbies. Most of them were boxes. Elliot gave his name. The person at the desk checked a screen, reached behind herself, and handed over a paper bag stapled shut with a receipt stuck to the front of it.

The bag was warm. He carried it against his forearm, and the smell came up through the paper — salt, grease, something fried — and it made everything worse instead of better. His stomach turned over at it and then, a second later, informed him that it would take the food anyway, and would take it right now, and would not be discussing the matter further.

He pressed the call button.

The last car in the bank sat behind a brass plate with a card slot in it and no button he could see. He had been not looking at it for a week. He looked at it.

Then the floor went bright and very far away.

It started as a gray ring around whatever he was looking at. The ring got smaller. The marble and the panel with the numbers on it and the two dead lights over the bank all went backward, small and far, and there was a stretch in there, two seconds or five, that he did not have. He came back with his shoulder against the wall and his palm flat on it, holding himself up. The bag was still in his other hand, still warm.

He stayed there and breathed through it. His heart was going too fast for a man standing still in a lobby.

Low blood sugar. It was a real thing, he was almost sure — you didn’t eat, your hands went cold, your vision went dark at the edges, and the fix was boring and involved food. He didn’t know whether it applied to a body like this one. Nobody had handed him the rules for the one he had been dropped into, and he had stopped expecting them.

“Elliot.”

He turned.

Adrian Hale stood at the end of the elevator bank with his coat over one arm, closer than men got without making noise, which meant he had come around the corner while Elliot was on the wall and had stood there for some part of it.

“Mr. Hale.”

He had taken the name off a wall on the way in — HALE GROUP, four feet of steel letters over the reception desk — and he had used it once since, at the hospital, and nobody had corrected him. If it was the wrong name, there was nothing to do about that now but stand there holding a paper bag.

Adrian looked at the bag. “Working late.”

“Some things I didn’t finish.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.” He shook his head, which took more out of him than it should have. “Just hungry.”

Adrian looked at the elevator, then at the panel, then at the bag. The bag was going soft where Elliot’s arm was holding it.

“Come up,” he said.

And Elliot didn’t hesitate. There was nothing in that lobby to sit on, and the man at the security desk was watching. Mostly it was this: he had told everyone he was fine all week, and Adrian Hale had looked at him for two seconds and asked if he was sick.

He followed Adrian to the last car and stood while Adrian took a card out of his coat and held it against the plate.

The doors opened onto a car with different carpet and a clean smell — cold, like the inside of a new refrigerator — and a panel like the others except for the slot under the numbers.

Adrian put the card away. “Which floor?”

“Twenty-two.”

He pressed it.

That was all. The car started up, and the numbers climbed on the small screen like they had somewhere to be. Elliot looked at the slot under the panel and put it with the rest of the list — no paper, no heading, just the things he was keeping track of until he knew which ones mattered.

The doors opened on twenty-two. The overheads had been cut back to one in four, and past the first three rows the far end of the floor was mostly dark.

He got out. Or he started to. The dark came down again before he had his feet under him: the carpet tilted, the hallway stretched, and his shoulder went toward the man beside him and stopped an inch short. Then his hand was on the wall, his feet were under him, and the bag was still in his other hand, unopened.

Adrian hadn’t touched him. He stood with one arm across the door to hold it and watched, and that was worse than a hand would have been — a hand he could have stepped out from under.

Elliot straightened up and walked down the hall. Behind him the door slid shut.

He hadn’t landed on him, but he could see the shape of it, the way you see the shape of a lie you haven’t told yet: a new hire who couldn’t stand up straight, in a lobby, at nine at night, in front of a man with a car and a card that nobody else seemed to be able to call. And the story in that version wasn’t that he was sick. The story was that he had found the fastest way to make somebody like Adrian Hale slow down.

He would have believed it about himself.

The kitchen on twenty-two had a table with four chairs, a vending machine, and a coffee pot somebody had left on since morning. The switch was inside the door and Adrian found it without looking, which meant he had been on this floor before.

Elliot ate standing for the first thirty seconds, straight out of the container, and then sat, because his legs had narrowed it down to sitting or falling. Adrian took the chair across from him and didn’t eat anything.

There was a window behind him with the city in it — low and orange at the bottom, black above the orange.

The shaking stopped somewhere in the middle of the container, and the stopping felt like the starting had: something his body did to him while he watched. He was embarrassed, and he put that somewhere and didn’t go back for it.

“About the elevator.” He said it with his mouth empty, which had been drilled into him early and had stuck. “That was a fluke. There’s no angle. I just didn’t eat.”

Adrian said nothing.

He waited for the rest of it. The leg — the hospital, the wrap, the knee the color of a plum he had walked around on while telling everybody it was nothing. The story where he had done it then and was doing it now and wanted something both times. Adrian had been there for that, and for the part where Elliot had thanked him and asked him to leave. It was right there on the table between them.

Adrian didn’t pick it up.

“You didn’t eat lunch.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I wasn’t hungry.” He heard how that came out and did nothing about it. It was true. It was also irrelevant, and they both knew it, and only one of them was going to say so.

Adrian didn’t. “Work’s busy?”

The question made him blink, twice, before he could stop it.

“Some. I’m still figuring out where everything is.” A beat. “It’s the first week.”

Adrian nodded once and left it there. It was the most restful thing that had happened to him all week, and he was working out how to say something about that when the phone on the table buzzed and skated a quarter-turn across the laminate.

He turned it over. OSTROW, in caps, because the phone had decided that for him.

“Sorry. I have to.”

“Go.”

He answered. “Vance.”

Ostrow didn’t say hello, and his voice was loud enough to sit in the room with both of them. “The roll-up. Where is it?”

“I’m checking the totals. Twenty minutes.”

“It was supposed to go at six.”

“I know.”

“Then send it. Just the numbers. Don’t get creative.” A pause with something in it. “And read it before you send it. I’m not finding out from the client.”

The call ended.

Elliot sat with the phone in his hand.

“I have to get back.” He stood, gathered the bag and the container, and made himself look at the man across the table, which cost him more than standing up had. “Thank you for —“ he moved the bag a couple of inches, and the gesture covered the elevator and the card and the table and all of it, “— next time it’s on me.”

He heard himself say it. It was the thing you say. He had been saying things like it all week.

Adrian stood and pushed his chair in with one hand. For a second Elliot thought he was going to get the whole speech — the one about taking care of yourself, the one people gave you when they wanted credit for noticing. He braced for it.

“Get it done and go home.”

“I will.”

“There’s a security desk in the lobby. It’s staffed all night.” He said it flat. It sounded like a hall number. “Something happens, call the desk. Somebody always picks up.”

Elliot nodded.

Adrian walked back down the row toward the elevator bank, past the dark desks, and the car at the end of the bank opened for him before he touched anything, and he was gone.

Elliot stood there a second longer, holding the bag.

He hadn’t asked why Adrian had ridden up to twenty-two at all, or how he had come to the elevator with Elliot’s name when Elliot had nothing but the one he had read off a wall. That went on the list. The list was getting long, and sooner or later he was going to have to sort it.

Two people were still at the far end of the row, one with headphones and one with a lit screen and nothing else. Somebody’s little fan was still turning. The coffee behind him had cooked down to a smell that stayed in the room.

He sat and went down the column twice. It matched. He attached the file, checked the address, sent it, and then sat with his hands off the keyboard, which was a sensation he hadn’t had since Monday.

Then he walked the row and stood at the corner of Ostrow’s desk. “It’s sent.”

Ostrow didn’t look up. He scrolled something, clicked something, scrolled back. “Then that’s everything for today. Rest of it can wait till Monday.” He said it without warmth and without edge, a man reading off a decision he had already made. “Go home.”

“Thanks.”

Elliot went back and started packing. He’d budgeted until ten. The only figure he still kept track of was the last train out, which he had looked up on Wednesday and hadn’t needed yet.

He was pulling the zipper when Ostrow came up the row. He didn’t stop at the desk. He stopped a little past it and turned.

“Vance. Where are you living these days?”

“Student housing. Over by the university.”

“That’s on my way.”

“It’s fine — the train’s easy. I don’t mind.” He got his jacket off the back of the chair and put it on. “Thanks, though.”

“You can sit in the back if it makes you feel better.” Ostrow said it with his hands in his pockets and no particular expression, and then set the second half on top of it. “It’s on my way. And there’s something I want to run by you anyway.”

Elliot took half a step back. Not far enough that anyone would see it, unless the person was counting.

“All right,” he said.

He pressed the button and one of the regular cars came. Ostrow pressed the garage level and stood with his phone out, thumb resting on the screen, not moving it.

The car was mirrors and dim orange light. Going down, it showed Elliot his own reflection in the dark panel above the buttons, and then Ostrow’s, standing half a step behind him. Two men in jackets, one of them with a paper bag between his feet. He watched the numbers instead.

“Almost a week,” Ostrow said, as though Elliot had said something. “How’s it treating you?”

“It’s fine. I’m getting there.”

“That’s how it goes at the start. Takes a while.”

“I’ll get there.”

The car went past the lobby without stopping and kept going. The doors opened on the garage level, and Ostrow stepped out first. Elliot picked up the bag and followed him.