At 3:40 PM the locker room smelled like bleach and thirty people's lunches.
Shift change.
Day crew pulling their uniforms off, evening crew pulling them on.
Everyone stopped when I came in.
Doug came in behind me with a gray plastic tray.
"Keys," he said.
"Room key and locker key, Josie."
"My room key's in the drop box."
"Since 11:04 last night."
"Evening keys die at eleven anyway."
"Then it's a short conversation."
I'd punched out at 11:04.
OUT 11:04 PM 11/11
The time clock prints it on a paper strip.
I'd dropped my key through the brass slot and caught the 11:15 bus.
I put my locker key in his tray.
Thirty women watched it land.
Manny Ruiz stood by the mop sink in his engineering coveralls.
Manny works nights.
He shouldn't have been in the building at 3:40 in the afternoon.
Doug set a single page on the bench in front of him.
SAFE LOG NOT RETAINED
There was a pen on it, and a line for Doug's signature under a line for Manny's.
"Sign it, Manny."
"Then we can all go home."
The door creaked.
Kendall stood in it with her phone up.
"Don't mind me," she said.
"This is for closure."
"Smile for closure, ladies."
Nobody smiled.
Ana from the fourth floor turned her back and kept buttoning.
Manny didn't pick up the pen.
"I read that safe at two-thirty," he said.
"You called me in to read it."
"And now I'm telling you what it says."
Doug tapped the page.
"It says the log wasn't retained."
"I'm not signing."
Manny slid the form back across the bench with two fingers.
It stopped against Doug's tray.
Kendall swung the phone onto Manny's face.
"Who's this guy?"
"Nights," Doug said.
"Nobody."
He folded the form into his jacket.
Denise Carver had been standing behind him the whole time.
Denise runs housekeeping.
She has printed my keys for five years.
She reached past Doug's elbow and took my locker key out of the tray.
She held it out to me.
"Get your mother's sweater."
Doug opened his mouth.
Denise looked at him.
He closed it.
Locker 22 sticks at the top.
I hit it with the heel of my hand, the way I always do.
Mom's cardigan was on the hook.
Moss green, wooden buttons, knitted over one whole winter of her watching Jeopardy.
I put it on over my uniform.
At 4:05 PM I went out the loading dock.
Manny was sitting on an upturned milk crate by the trash compactor.
He had a yellow box in his lap with a coiled gray cable.
It was the safe reader.
You plug it into a port inside the safe door.
The safe tells it everything.
He tilted the screen toward me.
"Don't read it here."
"Take a picture."
I took a picture.
My hands were cold, so I took two.
"Six months to retirement," Manny said.
"I'm not lying for him."
He tucked the reader inside his coat and went back in.
At 4:30 PM I stood at the bus stop on Michigan Avenue.
The man from Room 2201 came up the sidewalk in a charcoal coat.
He'd changed out of the gym clothes.
"I can drive you."
"I have a bus."
"It's cold."
"It's November."
"It's Chicago."
He almost smiled.
Then he took out his phone.
"Security owed me."
He held it so I could see.
The eighteenth-floor hallway, gray and grainy.
The timestamp said 1:49 AM.
A man in a grey hoodie walked into frame with the hood up.
He stopped at 1814.
He held a key card in his left hand and tapped the lock.
The lock blinked.
He went in.
"Play it again," I said.
He did.
Outside 1814 there is a brass sconce.
I dust it from a step stool, because I'm five-three and the sconce is six feet up.
The hood brushed the bottom of it.
He was a head taller than me.
At least.
At 1:55 the hoodie came back out, walked the other way and turned toward the service elevator.
No face.
Not once.
"That's not you," Room 2201 said.
"I know it's not me."
"I was asleep in Archer Heights."
He put the phone away.
"Does your manager know you have that?" I asked.
"He will."
My bus came hissing up to the curb.
He stepped back so I could get on.
He didn't offer the ride again.
I sat in the back over the heater.
My key had died at eleven.
His hadn't.
I opened my photos.
Manny's screen was a little crooked, a little glare in the corner.
The line was perfectly clear.
1814 — OPEN — 01:52 — GUEST CODE