Page 20 of Rogue’s Mark

"That he was lost."

I look at Dex.

"Right?” he says, clocking my raised eyebrows. “I call bullshit. The man just happened upon a secondary service corridor? Don’t think so."

He has the flat delivery of a man who has been personally insulted by the quality of a lame-ass excuse. Seriously. He got lost behind a decommissioned food court, in a mall that's been closed for six years?" He laughs.

"And your guy bought that?"

"Hell no. My guy walked him back to the main corridor and pointed at the exit. He went. Didn't push back, didn't ask questions. Just went."

"Was he rattled?"

"My guy reported he was doing the thing where you work hard to not look rattled," he says finally. "Which is different."

"Yeah," I say. "It is."

I pick my cold coffee back up and look out the window to think all this through. First contact was a hub worker, a low-risk probe. Ask a question, see what you get, find out if anyone reacts. He got nothing useful and no visible reaction, which from his perspective probably looked like a green light. So he escalated. Went looking himself. Found the secondary corridor, which means he either has a partial layout of this building from somewhere, or he's been here long enough to have found it on his own, neither of which is a comfortable conclusion.

The lost excuse means he panicked when he got caught, which means he's not as controlled as he looked standing in the east corridor running his sweep pattern.

Good to know. But it doesn't change what comes next.

"He'll go further next time," I say. "He didn't get what he came for so he'll regroup and try something different. We may not have the window of time we thought we had. We’re gonna have to move faster. Figure out who the hell he is and what he wants."

Dex nods.

"Pull your rotation," I tell him. "We're done watching.”

Dex goes. I stay.

Seven in the morning is one of the quieter places in the Rot. Most people aren't moving yet. The building makes its usual sounds of pipes, generators, and the creak of walkways when the temperature changes. With Dex gone, it’s just me and cold coffee and the gap in the fence staring back at me.

I think about secondary corridors.

My father had a thing about back rooms. The shop on Delaney Street with its motorcycles, three generations of family, his grandfather's name still on the sign when I was growing up, had a back room that was more square footage than the front. Parts going back to the sixties. Tools my great-grandfather lugged over from Germany. A workbench that had been refinished so many times, the original wood was somewhere in the middle of about four inches of accumulated repairs.

He used to say you could tell everything about a person by whether they understood the back room. Not whether they liked it, because some people find old things depressing, and that's fine. But whether they understood what it meant. The front of Dad’s place was for customers. The back was where the actual work happened, where the knowledge lived, where the thing that made the business worth anything was stored and tended to and passed on.

That shop is gone. Burned to the ground.

Electrical, the fire marshal said. Happens to old buildings. Nothing suspicious, nothing to investigate, just one of those things.

My ass.

Earlier that year, my father had filed a complaint with the city about a development company trying to acquire the block, that was harassing him. The company had been quietly buying properties on Delaney Street for two years, one at a time, and Dad’s shop was the last holdout. My father had been there two-plus decades. His father had been there before him. He wasn't selling.

Shortly before the fire, a man in a good suit came to see Dad. Afterward, my father described the man as polite. Very polite. The kind of polite that's a front. The man suggested Dad’s complaint might not be worth pursuing, whatever that meant. My father walked him out.

The fire took everything. The tools, the parts, the workbench. The whole back room, which is where all of it was, because that's where things that matter were kept.

The development company got the block for a fraction of its value. A burned-out unit on the end tends to bring prices down.

My father told me the company's name once, that week. I wrote it down and lost the paper, and by then, Rothwell was already coming apart and he said it didn't matter, and that the whole city was going the same way and what did one more thing matter? He said he was tired and left town.

I think about that more than I used to. I think about my father’s visitor, what company he worked for, and whether the name on his business card would mean anything to me now that I have Fischer's intelligence and a trail seems to be leading somewhere.

I think about the man who tried to get my father to sell. About how polite he was. About how that kind of polite has a whole industry behind it, people hired to deliver messages that aren't quite threats, to smooth things over before they get messy.