Chapter 8: Four Cameras

“Okay,” the tall one said. He didn’t leave.

He came in half a step. The other two came with him, and the space between them and Elliot went from four feet to two. The lobby kept moving on both sides of them — a woman with a stroller, a guy in scrubs on his phone, two old men arguing about where the parking garage let out — and none of it came inside the two feet.

Elliot counted. Three of them, every one of them bigger. One had the front doors behind him. Two had the hallway that ran back toward the exam rooms.

He pushed his glasses up with his knuckle and didn’t step back. He’d been the smallest person in every room he’d ever stood in. Give up the first step and you give up the room. There was sweat under the frames already. He kept his hands where they were, which took work.

“My brother’s in there getting scanned,” the tall one said. “He was out there working that bike at night, and now somebody’s paying for what they did to him. That’s the only thing we’re talking about.”

“Who went through the light?”

The man’s mouth changed shape. “What?”

“Your brother. Ask him which one of them went through the light, and ask him in front of the officer who took the report.”

Behind the tall one, the man on the left put his hands in his pockets. The man on the right didn’t. His hands were already closed, and they stayed closed, and Elliot watched them and didn’t look away from them.

“So that’s where this is going,” Elliot said. “Okay. Think about it first. There are four cameras in this lobby and I can see three of them without moving my head. There are forty people in here. You put your hands on me in front of that, you find out what happens next in front of all of it.”

The tall one laughed. The laugh was worse than the hands.

“You think I care about cameras.”

“I think you’ll care about them in four days. Right now I’m just asking you to look at them.”

Nobody moved. Behind him Sam’s chair creaked — the small sound of somebody moving a leg he shouldn’t have been moving — and Elliot didn’t turn around for it.

“Elliot,” Sam said, low.

He didn’t turn around for that either. The lobby came back up to full volume around them — the doors, the phone, the old men — and the three of them still hadn’t moved, and Elliot didn’t say anything else, because the next thing said in this conversation was going to be theirs.

Then, past the tall one’s shoulder, across the whole width of the lobby, Elliot saw a man standing still.

He had watched all of it from the middle of the walkway and hadn’t moved.

Adrian had been carrying one question about Elliot Vance since the elevator, at rest, the kind of thing you never end up spending a phone call on, and he took it out now and held it up against the last four minutes.

It didn’t fit anything he was looking at. He put it away.

Which left the rest, and the rest was this: a man with no reason to be in this building was holding two feet of hospital tile in front of three strangers and hadn’t once looked behind him to check that it was worth it.

Adrian walked to the desk by the north entrance. Two men from hospital security were behind it.

“Front doors,” he said. “Two of you. Now.”

They came.

He crossed the lobby again at his own pace and stopped at Vance’s left shoulder, close enough to be in the conversation and not close enough to touch him, and the three of them looked at him.

“What’s going on?”

He already knew what was going on. He asked anyway.

Vance turned his head. His face did something before it did anything else — the look of a person who has just watched a wall turn into a door — and then he said, “Mr. Hale.”

Adrian nodded once. He’d been called that by strangers who’d read it off the front of the building, and he let it stand.

“A scooter came out of nowhere and took his leg out,” Vance said. “He was crossing on the way back to campus. There’s a report. They want the money settled here, in the lobby, before anybody’s looked at anything.”

The security men arrived with their equipment and put themselves between the two groups, and one of them told the three of them that if they had a problem they could take it up with the police, and that the hospital did not host fights in its lobby. The tall one kept going anyway.

“I don’t care who you are. When my brother’s bill comes, it comes to him.” He pointed at Elliot. “You don’t get to walk out of here.”

“There’s a report,” Elliot said. He said it without moving his hands, at the same volume he’d been using, which was lower than everyone else’s. “When it comes back, they’ll call both of us. If we owe something, we’re not going anywhere and we won’t hide from it. But nobody hands you cash in a lobby before anybody’s found out what happened. Go get the facts first, then come collect on them.”

The man didn’t have anything to say to that. The security man at his shoulder turned him half a step, and that was the end of it.

“Let’s go,” Adrian said.

Vance turned. Somebody from the desk had rolled a wheelchair over while they’d been arguing, and it took him a moment to get Sam out of the chair and into it. Then he got behind it. The three of them started to follow. Adrian stopped where he was and turned his head and looked back at them, and they stopped, and stayed stopped.

The man didn’t know this building. Adrian took them the long way, past the lab corridor and the courtyard doors to the stretch by the north elevators where there was never anybody, and he slowed twice on the way without making a point of it.

“Thanks,” Vance said, when they were clear. “That could have gone a different way.”

Adrian didn’t take it. He’d watched the whole four minutes. If he and two security men had stayed out of the lobby, the man would have stayed where he was standing and the three of them would have gotten bored and left, and it would have taken another ten minutes and ended the same way.

He looked at him. The glasses had slid down his nose during the argument and he hadn’t fixed them, and the skin under the lower rims was red and wet, and he was standing there with his hands at his sides, giving away nothing at all.

He was a good eight inches shorter than the one who’d been leaning into him. Adrian had spent his whole life in rooms where that number settled things before anybody opened his mouth — where the biggest alpha at the table said what happened and everybody else wrote it down. In that lobby it had done nothing. It hadn’t even slowed him down.

And he’d had him pegged as a beta the first time he’d seen him, and never gone back to check, and didn’t have a reason to now.

Vance had started scanning the walls, working out which way the front was.

“If the report says what your friend says it says, this stops being your problem,” Adrian said. “It isn’t yours to fix.”

“I know.”

His shoulders came down a notch. He probably didn’t know they had.

“Your leg hasn’t been looked at.”

Vance looked down at himself like he’d forgotten the leg was his. “It didn’t get done, but it’s fine.”

“Come with me.”

The north elevator took a card. Adrian used his on the panel and pushed a floor that wasn’t on the list over the doors, and neither of them asked about it.

The corridor up there was carpeted and quiet, and there was a desk with one person behind it, and the waiting area had six chairs in it and four people, and the four people were wearing shoes that cost more than the chairs. The person at the desk stood up when they came off the elevator.

“Wait here,” Adrian said.

He found Voss two doors down, and came back along the corridor with him, and picked up the tail end of the conversation on the way.

“—that’s not the point. I texted you for a charger.”

“You were sitting on the floor with three guys standing over you.”

“I was on a chair.”

“Chair,” Vance said. “Fine.”

“You didn’t have to—“

“I know.”

Voss came down the corridor with his hands in the pockets of his coat. He took one look at the two of them — the man in the wheelchair with his leg straight out in front of him, and Vance standing next to it with black dried on his sleeve — and then he looked at Adrian for a second and a half longer than he needed to.

Adrian had known what that second and a half was going to be, and let it pass. Voss had known him for eleven years and didn’t push it.

In the room, Voss said, “Let’s see it.”

The pant leg came up, and the room got quiet.

The fabric was black and it had been doing the work all afternoon: the blood had run down the inside of the leg and into the sock and dried there, and the knee underneath was purple from the bottom of his thigh to the middle of his shin, and at the center of that the skin was open and raw and a lot more than a scrape.

“This is going to sting,” Voss said.

He poured it on without waiting for an answer. Whatever was in the bottle went into the open skin like salt into a cut, and Vance got a hand into his own shirt and held on, and his breath came through his teeth twice and then went quiet, and he didn’t pull the leg back either time. Voss’s eyes went down to his wrist for half a second — the sleeve had come back when he grabbed at the shirt — and then went back to the gauze, and he didn’t say anything about it.

Voss wrapped it and told him two days without water and one change a day, and Vance said, “Thank you,” and his voice came out of him in two pieces, and his eyes went red and wet from the effort of holding still.

Adrian knew that sound.

He’d heard it once before, in a hotel room, on a night when his own body had been in the worst state it had been in all year and his head had been clear the whole way through. He remembered the hour, and he remembered that the other person in that room had been awake for all of it, and he remembered that noise.

So that was what it had been, then. It had hurt.

He stopped it there. Nobody in this room had asked him for anything — not that night, not since, not once — and he had no intention of going back over it, and it didn’t need going over.

“Where do I pay?” Vance said.

“You don’t.”

“I’d rather—“

“I know you’d rather.” Voss peeled his gloves off. “Thank him.”

Vance looked at Adrian. Adrian looked at Voss. “Thanks,” he said.

“Mm,” Voss said, and left.

“Let’s go,” Adrian said.

The knee didn’t seem to slow him down much, and the wheelchair didn’t either, and they got all the way back down to the ground floor and out through the north doors before the man in the chair brought it up.

“You should leave me here and let me find a set of crutches. You’re the one who can barely walk.”

“It’s a scrape. It doesn’t change how I walk.”

“It’s not a scrape. If I’d known you were going to come down here on that, I’d have called somebody else.”

Vance kept pushing. “How’s your leg.”

“It’s still attached.”

Somewhere behind them, past the glass, the lobby was still full of people and the two old men were still arguing about the parking garage.

Adrian got to the corner of the walkway and stopped, and waited for the wheelchair to come up level with him.

“How are you two getting home?”