Except for the lock on the door. That lock was brass, and it looked shiny and new.
I smiled to myself as I got the number off the side of the truck, feeling pretty pleased at having noticed that detail. Happy about having gotten—guided by the ATM receipt—to the bank, to the Catholic community center, to Ruben, to the door. Happy with all I’d done even before Bridge and his people managed to get me the full file. I was feeling the pleasure of discovery, the pleasure of the job.
That’s the problem with doing the devil’s work. It can be pretty satisfying now and again. Pretty goddamn satisfying.
I had with me in Indianapolis all my usual equipment. Some of it was in my room at the Capital City Crossroads, some of it was stashed in the trunk of the car. A variety of costume pieces—some wigs, some fake jewelry, and various basic elements of facial camouflage: a tube of spirit gum, a few shades of foundation, an eyebrow pencil. I had six different pairs of clear-glass spectacles and six different sets of colored contact lenses. Other tools, too: a set of picks and rakes for cracking locks, plus a backup set. Lanyards with name tags, fake badges in fake badge holders. Clothes and shoes. My phone and its charger and its various accessories; the computer. Paperwork for Jim Dirkson, and three more complete sets on three other names, all of it comprehensively backstopped, every phone number connected to a real phone, a real person who knew what to say if somebody called. Cash, too, of course—rolls of bills in rubber bands, available for my use for incidental expenses, all of which were to be reported at the completion of each assignment.
I had a gun, but it stayed in the hotel. Almost all the time, that’s where I kept it. I am an undercover operative in a dangerous line of work, but understand that I am also an African American male living in the United States of America. There are going to be checkpoints. I am going to get stopped. Every once in a while I’m going to have to dump out my bag under the watchful eye of some kind of lawman. Sheriff’s deputy, patrol officer, state trooper, what have you. Might just be some shopping-center wage-slave shithead rolling up on his Segway, flashing his costume-shop tin, wanting to prove his cock size to the girl at the sunglasses kiosk.
When that sort of BS happened I had no choice but to submit. I had no badge, no ID. I was true undercover, right down the line. If you saw the way I traveled, if you went through my suitcase or the trunk of my car, you’d think I was a thief, some kind of con man.
Which I was, of course. Really, that’s exactly what I was. I was a thief. I was some kind of con man.
When I got back outside, I found a police car parked right alongside my Altima, just outside the cemetery gate. I stopped and I stared at it for a second: an IMPD black-and-white, with the stenciled letters on the side and the sirens on the roof and the long radio antenna sticking up stiff and proud from the rear. I glanced up and down the street to see if the owner was around, but it was just as quiet as it had been before. Even the sky, still gray and cool, the clouds right where I had left them. Everything same as it was, except for the marked car.
I bounced on my heels a couple times, as if my body were getting ready to take off running. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, looking at the rear bumper of that police vehicle, looking at the gravestones, at the houses down the street, an uneasy feeling gathering and drifting in me like mist.
I was thinking that there had been two cops in the Fountain Diner last night, a black one and a white one, a couple tables over from the priest and me, looking at something on one of their phones, laughing and carrying on. Slowly I approached the parked police vehicle, listening to the distant, indistinct sounds of the city. Someone honking somewhere. A doorway gate rattling up, maybe Steak & Lemonade or The Big & The Tall opening for the day.
I committed the number to memory. Car number 101097. Big city, I was thinking. Big city, full of cops. That’s all.
7.
“What is this? What is this, now?”
I was standing on the hotel room’s rickety wooden chair so the top of my head grazed the ceiling. I had a halfway decent printer, government-issue and portable, but it worked just fine, and when a file came in it was my practice to print it and lay the sheets out on the hotel bedspread in a grid and study them from above, as though I were doing helicopter surveillance on a city block.
The full file was a goddamn mess, and I was not pleased. I hate mess. I hate unevenness and uncertainty, and that’s what the full file was—it was uneven and uncertain.