Chapter 19
Date three started with Josie asking what she should wear, which was not a question I had a good answer for, because the honest answer was something that lets you sit still for two hours without complaining, and I didn’t think that was romantic enough to say out loud.
“Something comfortable,” I told her, when she opened her door. “We’ll be sitting a while. Nothing that stands out in a parking lot.”
“So not the yellow shoes.”
“Wear whatever shoes you want. I just mean the rest of it.”
“That feels like a challenge.” She looked down at herself, black jeans, a plain gray shirt that was almost aggressively unremarkable for her, and I understood she’d dressed for the job without being told the rules, which was either good instinct or three weeks of watching me closely enough to guess them.
I had a locate tonight, a case for a bonding company, a subject who’d missed a court date.
That was all Josie was getting. Not the name, not the bar, not the routine I’d already mapped over two prior nights of watching without her.
“You’re coming as an observer,” I said. “You don’t ask who he is.
You don’t take pictures. You don’t approach anyone, talk to anyone, or get out of the car.
If someone speaks to you, you don’t know me and you don’t know why you’re there. ”
“Understood.” She slid into the passenger seat of the sedan, not the van, because the van had a job attached to it and this one didn’t need a decal.
“I have questions about everything else, though. Starting with why you have three different phone chargers in this console and none of them match your phone.”
“Clients leave things in the car. I never clean it out because cleaning it out feels like admitting the case is over.”
“That’s either sad or extremely practical and I can’t decide which.”
“Both. Most things are both.”
We parked across the street from the bar at six forty, early enough that the lot was still mostly empty, which mattered more than people expect.
A car that arrives after the crowd looks like it belongs to the crowd.
A car that arrives before it looks like it’s waiting for something.
I chose a spot beside a dumpster enclosure, half in shadow from a dead streetlamp, angled so the mirror gave me the door without turning my head.
“This is it,” Josie said, looking around like she expected more. “This is surveillance. We just sit here.”
“We just sit here.”
“For how long?”
“However long it takes.” I settled back into the seat, weight distributed so nothing went numb, hands loose, nothing about my posture readable from outside the car as attention.
She pulled her knees up onto the seat, and I almost told her to put her feet down, then didn’t.
Nobody was looking at a parked car hard enough to catalog a silhouette. Not tonight, not here.
“You brought snacks.”
“Food that doesn’t smell and doesn’t make noise.” I handed her the bag, protein bars and pretzels and two bottles of water, the same rotation I’d been running for years. “Unwrap slow. Fast sounds like nerves, and this lot’s got smokers by the side door who notice more than they let on.”
She turned a granola bar over in her hands like she was examining a puzzle piece, then unwrapped it with theatrical, deliberate slowness, watching my face while she did it. “Like this?”
“Exactly like that.”
“You’re very serious about snack technique.”
“I’ve had six hours ruined by a bag of chips before. You learn.”
She laughed, low, and settled in, watching the door of the bar the way I was watching it, and for a while neither of us said anything.
Most people couldn’t hold a silence like this.
They filled it, out of nerves or boredom or the simple human need to be witnessed doing something.
Josie went quiet like she was still paying attention, her eyes moving between the door, the lot, the two men smoking near the side entrance.
“You do this every night?” she asked eventually, quiet, not breaking her focus on the door.
“Not every night. Enough nights.”
“Doesn’t it get lonely?”
I thought about lying to her, the reflex old enough that it came before thought. I didn’t. “Yes,” I said instead. “It’s lonely. It’s also the only kind of attention I ever felt like I was good at, so I stopped minding the lonely part a long time ago.”
She turned her head at that, just slightly, enough that I felt it more than saw it. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me tonight.”
“I’m aware.”
A man came out the side door of the bar around seven fifteen, wrong build, wrong walk, and I logged him anyway out of habit.
“You’re not even looking for him specifically,” she said. “You’re looking at everyone.”
“Everyone who comes out that door is a piece of information. Most of it’s useless. You don’t know which piece matters until you already have all of it.”
“That’s exhausting.”
“It’s a skill. Same thing, most days.” I kept my eyes on the door, on the mirror, on the two smokers who’d finished their cigarettes and were arguing lazily about something too far away to hear. “I learned to do it a long time before it was a job.”
“How long?”
I didn’t answer right away. “My father changed moods without warning, and there was usually a reason if you paid attention. Something small. The way he’d get too friendly right before he wanted something.
I started watching him before I understood what I was watching for.
I only knew that if I paid attention, I didn’t get blindsided as often. ” I stopped there. “That’s most of it.”
“Most of it,” Josie repeated, not a question exactly, more like she was setting the phrase down somewhere so she could pick it back up later.
“Most of it,” I said again, and she let it go, though I felt her decide to let it go rather than simply not noticing.
Our subject never showed. By nine we’d watched the bar fill and half empty again, watched a birthday party spill out onto the sidewalk in paper crowns, watched the same bartender step out twice to smoke against the brick wall like it was the only part of her shift that belonged to her, and none of it had been him.
I noted the time, noted the no-show, and started the car.
“That’s it?” Josie asked. “We just leave?”
“That’s the job most nights. You don’t force a sighting that isn’t there. You log the absence and you come back.”
“So this was a bust.”
“This was a normal surveillance night.” I pulled out of the lot slowly and merged into the thin evening traffic toward Rover Court. “You did well. You didn’t fidget, you didn’t ask questions about him, and you ate a granola bar like you’d trained for it.”
“High praise.”
“From me, yes.”
She was quiet again for a few blocks, watching the storefronts slide past, and when she spoke again her voice had lost the teasing edge it usually carried. “You watch me the same way you watched that door tonight. Every piece of information.”
“Yes.”
“But it’s not the same, is it? Watching him and watching me.”
“No.” I kept my eyes on the road. “Watching him is a job. I do it because someone’s paying me to and I stop the second the case closes. Watching you was never a job. I kept doing it after there was no reason left to, and I haven’t found the version of myself that wants to stop.”
She didn’t answer that right away, and I let her have the silence the same way she’d let me have mine outside the bar.
“Good,” she said finally, quiet. “Because I’d know if you were lying about that. I’ve gotten good at telling the difference.”
I pulled up outside Rover Court a few minutes later, the courtyard gate lit gold under the walkway lamps, and put the car in park without reaching for the door handle, the old habit of waiting to be told what came next.
“Third date’s over,” Josie said, unbuckling her seatbelt, but she didn’t reach for the door either. “You know what that means?”
“Tell me.”
“Front door.” She looked at me, steady, no joke riding along behind it this time. “You walk me up, and you use the front door, and when we get inside, you don’t leave. Not tonight.”