The Dock Door

I put my shoulder into the dock bar at 10:31, and the steel gave with a bang that rang down the whole service corridor.

I want to be honest about how I got there. I did not outsmart anyone. Yolanda Pike did.

Yolanda ran housekeeping on nights, sixty-one years old, five feet tall, and she had been waiting outside the audit office with a linen cart since Bernice's first text reached her. When Brannock told Dale to stand guard at the door, she rolled that cart into the doorway, wheels first, and said in her flat, Sunday-school voice, "Mr. Brannock, I need Dessa for a guest complaint in 214."

"There's no complaint in 214," he said.

"There will be if you keep me talking." She pushed. Two bellmen appeared at her back, Tomas Ibarra and a kid named Kyle whose last name I never learned, and the corridor filled with clean towels and witnesses.

"Go," Yolanda said, without looking at me.

I took the folder with me. I do not know why. It was on the desk, it was navy, and it was his. I tucked it under my coat beside my phone, and I ran the service hall past the laundry chute, past the trash room, past the freight elevator with its brass plate scarred by fifty years of carts.

The dock door was a heavy slab with a red bar across it. Behind me, Brannock's voice climbed. "Dessa! Dale, stop her!"

Dale did not stop me.

Cold air punched in as the door swung out. Sleet came sideways across the concrete apron and glittered under the caged bulb. I stepped into it with my coat open and my phone in my fist, and a woman's voice said, "Ms. Whitlock. Stay right there. Don't lock that phone."

Two people stood beside a gray sedan at the edge of the dock. The woman wore a navy parka with a badge clipped to the front. The man beside her wore a deputy's brown coat and had his hand resting, easy and careful, near his belt.

"Renee Castellanos, Attorney General's consumer fraud unit," she said. "This is Deputy Bledsoe. The bank's log put his phone in this building, and Bernice Talley called our tenant hotline about a crew on Wexford Street. We pulled up two minutes before you hit that bar, and I did not want to walk through a lobby with him in it."

"How do you know my name?"

"The bank told us." She stepped forward until the light fell across her face, and it was the calm of somebody who had already read everything I was afraid to say. "That transfer to your account was flagged at 9:41 p.m., three minutes after he sent it. The account it came from is under a court hold. Nothing can leave it. He moved money out of it anyway, and the bank's fraud desk called us, because our unit is the contact named on the hold order, before you had even finished reading the screen."

My phone was warm in my hand. The green banner still glowed across it, and I held it out.

"I need that screen," Castellanos said, "exactly as it is. Don't swipe, don't tap, don't let anyone touch it. Can you hold it for another hour?"