I had one paid errand left, and before breakfast I nearly spent it buying help. The borrowed sedan waited behind a shuttered tire shop, its windshield pearled with rain. In my pocket lay the receipt for my rent. It ought to have felt like something solid. Instead I kept touching the paper as though Dorn might take it back. I wanted to get the drive finished, collect my money, and find Eddie before another man decided where Ruth Bell should sleep.
The shopkeeper gave me the car key through a gap in his office door. He said the passenger would be waiting beyond the city, at a roadside lunchroom. Nothing about the errand required my knowing more. That had once seemed a considerable advantage in a job. Now it meant I could be driving toward anything while my own kitchen stood open to men who regarded a paid rent receipt as a scrap fit for lighting a stove.
A delivery truck stood across the lunchroom entrance when I arrived. Its rear wheel had sunk into the soft shoulder, and the driver was throwing broken boards beneath it. I helped push until mud reached my cuffs and the truck lurched free. By then the man waiting under the lunchroom awning had seen me arrive, struggle, and lose my temper with a slipping board. He was Alvin Karpis. I knew him from a few brief encounters around Eddie's business, never as a friend.
I opened the rear door. He got in without ceremony, and I put my wet cap beside me. Our meeting that morning, and the small business of that drive, belong to this story's inventions; they explain none of his recorded crimes. Even then I possessed no special account of those crimes. Hamm and Bremer were names I had encountered in newspapers. What I knew firsthand was narrower: a man sat behind me, and men like Eddie paid attention when his name entered a room.
The road took us past flooded fields and a brickworks with cold stacks. At a railway crossing I stopped behind a farm wagon. The horse shifted, the harness creaked, and I found myself shaping an appeal I had no business making. There was trouble at my address. Eddie would listen to somebody. A word from the back seat might spare me another night of guarding a staircase. I could almost feel the relief of turning responsibility over to a stronger pair of hands.
I looked into the mirror and saw only a passenger waiting for the train to pass. To ask for intervention I would have to name the building. Then I would have to explain the lodgers, the captive I had released, and the woman whose doorway Eddie's men had blocked. Ruth would become part of a conversation she had never agreed to enter. I pressed my tongue against a sore tooth and left her name where it belonged, with her.
The crossing cleared. I drove on. At the destination I carried one ordinary traveling bag to a covered porch and returned for my pay. No confidence passed between us; no explanation of larger affairs was offered. The private encounter ended with my hand closing around folded bills. For several miles afterward I felt foolish, as though refusing to ask had been pride rather than judgment. Only when I pictured Ruth hearing that strangers now knew her address did the foolishness ease.
Back at the tire shop, the shopkeeper asked whether I could take another drive the following afternoon. He already had the date penciled beside my name. I watched him hold the pencil over it. That little mark represented more dependable money than any promise I had made upstairs. I told him to cross it out. He looked at my muddy trousers, then at the money in my hand, plainly unable to see why a man dressed like me could afford a refusal.
I walked to Eddie's usual café and found him finishing a plate of beans. I stayed standing until he moved his coat off the opposite chair. I told him the rooms had to stop being crew rooms. He stirred his coffee instead of answering. When I said I would surrender my own use if the lodgers were left alone, he finally looked up. He wanted to know whether I had gone asking anyone else to carry my complaint.
I said no. That answer pleased him more than my offer. He pushed his plate away and said there could be a settlement, provided I came without making another performance on the stairs. Tomorrow, after the freight clerks had gone home, we could talk where nobody would interrupt. I asked who would be there. Eddie rubbed a crumb from the table with his thumb. Sutter, he said. We would settle it together in the closed freight yard.