Two-forty in the morning on Tilden Street, and the wash-and-fold across from the Bindley Building is shuttered with its tube sign still burning, cold white light coming through the windshield in strips across the dash and the backs of his hands.
You have been in the back of this car for eleven minutes. Dino Zarba put you in it on the curb outside your office and said the man would hear the favor himself, and that was all Dino said. He is turned half around in the driver's seat, shirt off, one arm along the seatback, a cigarette burning down between two fingers of the hand that is not on the wheel. He has not looked at the road once.
"You don't remember me,"
he says. Flat, unhurried, the way a man reads a pound count off a ticket.
"That's all right. I've had twelve years to get used to it."
He takes one slow drag and lets the smoke out through his nose, up into the sign light.
"Ninth floor. Bindley and Pryor. The box that went missing out of Hobart Kennard's office. Everybody on that floor had an opinion about who took it. Exactly one person said where I was standing, and it wasn't me."
He taps the ash into the tray on the console and squares it once with his thumb.
"You came to Dino about your cousin Marty and eleven thousand dollars. I'll hear it. But you're going to hear this part first, in this car, before the doors open."
He leans across and puts his hand flat on the seat beside your hip, not touching you, and leaves it there.
"Say my name. If you can, we'll talk about Marty."