THE NAMELESS MARSHAL

Mop Depreciation

On his third night in the tower, Dane found the watch.

It was in his locker, number 117, at the back of the staff room on the thirty-eighth floor, wrapped in a gray cleaning rag and tucked behind his spare shirt. Even through the cloth it felt expensive. Heavy, cold, perfectly balanced. He peeled the rag back and found a pale blue dial and a gold case, the kind of watch that arrives in a velvet box and costs more than the building’s annual cleaning budget.

He did not linger over it. He looked at the locker instead.

The door had hung a fraction too loose when he opened it. Someone had worked the lock with a key that was not his. On the paint above the handle was a faint, greasy smear: a thumb, pressed hard. And on the bottom shelf, beside his boot, lay a small crinkled square of cellophane.

A peppermint wrapper.

Dane looked at it for a long moment, and for the first time since he’d come home, something very close to joy moved through his chest.

Anyone could build a trap. The art was in learning who had held the hammer.

He lifted the watch out, left the rag where it lay, closed the locker exactly as he’d found it, and went to work. He mopped the thirty-eighth floor and the thirty-ninth. At eleven fifteen, while Pruitt was downstairs scolding someone in the loading bay, Dane went up to the little glass-walled supervisor’s office at the end of the corridor, which he had been told never to enter. The cardigan hung from the back of the chair, a shapeless brown thing that smelled of mints and old coffee. He slid the watch into its deep left pocket and settled the fabric so that it hung straight.

Then he returned to his bucket, humming something tuneless, and mopped his way down to the lobby.

The search was set for ten the following evening.

He understood the choreography at once. A shift change, the largest audience available, the whole night crew gathered in the staff room under fluorescent lights. Rourke by the door with his arms folded. Pruitt at his side, pink with anticipation. And in the center, on the folding table, Dane’s open locker and the empty rag.

“It’s missing,” said Pruitt, in the voice of a man reading his own birthday card. “Mr. Gregory Crane’s watch. Taken from the executive suite two nights ago. The only people on that floor after midnight were cleaners. We’ve checked the cameras, and they happen to be out of service.”

There was a murmur. Thirty faces turned to Dane. A few looked away. A few watched with the bright, hungry curiosity people give to traffic accidents.

The far door swung open, and Barrett Crane came in with the ease of a man arriving at a party he had planned himself. Shirtsleeves, coffee in one hand, phone already raised in the other, the red recording light winking.

“Don’t get up on my account, Mr. Reeve,” he said brightly. “Actually, I think you should get down.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Of course you haven’t. The watch just wandered over to your locker on its own little feet.” A ripple of dutiful laughter. “Here’s how it goes. We open your locker, we find something unfortunate, and you apologize on camera. On your knees. It’s a gift, really. A second chance.”

Dane considered the floor. It was lino, gray, swept clean. He had knelt on worse.

He could have refused. He could also have taken the phone out of Barrett’s hand and snapped it in half, and then spent the next ten minutes explaining himself to six armed men. Neither served what he had come to do.

And there was a deeper reason, one he would have been ashamed to say aloud. He wanted Barrett to have a really good view.

He went down on one knee, then the other.

“Lovely.” Barrett sounded dreamy. “Rourke, if you would.”

Rourke crossed to locker 117 and pulled the door wide. He lifted the rag. He checked behind the spare shirt. He ran his hand along the back and along the shelves. He found one thing, and he held it up between two thick fingers with an expression of mild incomprehension.

A peppermint wrapper.

“There’s nothing here, Mr. Crane.”

The smile on Barrett’s face did not fall. It froze, which was worse.

“Then it’s on him.” He waved the phone. “Search him.”

Rourke patted Dane down from collar to boots, a rough, professional job that took him perhaps twenty seconds and did not turn up so much as a coin. He shook his head.

“Search the room,” Barrett said, with an edge. “Search everyone. The watch is in this building. Somebody put it somewhere.”

Pruitt began to say something about procedure. Rourke ignored him and walked toward the glass-walled supervisor’s office at the end of the corridor, because it was the only closed door left, and because Dane, with all the patience he had, had made it the only logical place for a cautious man to look next.

The cardigan hung from the chair.

Rourke lifted it by the shoulders. It swung. Something small and golden slid out of the left pocket, hit the carpet with a soft, heavy sound, and rolled.

The watch lay on its back at Barrett Crane’s feet, face up, ticking.

Nobody spoke. In the silence, Dane could hear the second hand.

“That’s not,” said Pruitt faintly. “I don’t… I never… Mr. Crane, you told me to put it—”

“Shut up,” Barrett said.

But it was too late for that, and he knew it. Thirty cleaners had heard it, and so had the phone in his hand, which had been recording the entire time, with the red light on.

Barrett looked at it. For the first time since Dane had met him, he had no smile at all.

“Fire him,” he said at last, very quietly, to Rourke. “Pruitt. Now. Take his keys.” He turned and walked out, and did not look back, and he took his phone with him. Dane hoped he would remember to delete the video. He hoped, even more, that he would forget.

Pruitt was escorted out, sobbing about peppermints. The room breathed out in a long, shuddering gust.

Dane rose and brushed off his knees. Thirty people were looking at him with a complicated expression, and with some surprise he recognized it as respect.

He was putting away the mop when he realized he was no longer alone.

Odessa Crane stood in the corridor with a tablet against her chest. She had not been in the staff room. She had been in the hallway beyond, and she had seen everything through the glass.

“At eleven forty-one last night,” she said, “the camera on thirty-eight recorded a man with a mop bucket entering the supervisor’s office. The cameras weren’t out of service, Mr. Reeve. Pruitt only said that. I checked.” She tilted her head. “You moved the watch.”

Dane considered denying it. Then he considered her face.

“Yes.”

“How did you know it was Pruitt?”

“Peppermint,” he said. “There was a wrapper in my locker. He smells like a pharmacy.”

For the first time, Odessa Crane almost smiled. It reached about a third of the way across her mouth and then stopped, as if embarrassed to be seen. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. And it’s correct.”

She slid a small white card between two fingers and held it out. On the back, in neat, sharp handwriting: 52nd floor. Sunday, 2 a.m. Bring nothing.

“I need someone who notices things,” she said. “I’m tired of being the only one.”

She walked away before he could answer.

Dane stood in the corridor holding the card and thought about Barrett’s face when the watch hit the carpet. It had been, without question, one of the five best moments of his year.

But somewhere under the satisfaction, a cold little voice was counting. It said that a rich man who has just been humiliated in front of thirty witnesses does not give up. He gets serious.

And that tomorrow, instead of a watch, Barrett Crane would go looking for something he could not deny.

He would go looking for Lia.