A young woman. Quick voice, already doing three other things. Mall. Food court. She needed a pickup after this drop. She would be by the doors. Light brown van. She knew the one.
“I got you,” Luis said, cheerful, already writing the next errand into the air. “Dropping a guy, then I am there. You stay put.”
She hung up. The phone screen stayed lit for a second, a map pin already thinking about the next body in the world, then went dark.
Mira. I did not know her name yet. I only knew the voice, and the doors, and the fact that a second person was now on a clock that included this van.
My stomach tightened. Not fear. The feeling you get when you stand up in a room and do not know whether you are about to speak. I asked myself if I could. The honest answer had always been no. Careful is a story you tell until the story gets bored of you.
Luis took my street without GPS. He knew the town the way a man knows a scar. He repeated my house number, got one digit wrong, laughed, corrected it. He pulled into the driveway too far, the way shuttle drivers do when they are already thinking about the next stop. The engine ticked. The sliding door was still locked from the inside with a child latch I had noticed and said nothing about.
Noon. Open sky. A neighbor’s mower chewing the same strip of grass it chewed every Saturday. If anyone looked they would see a shuttle making a drop. People see logos and stop asking questions. That is the whole trick of a uniform.
“This you?”
“This is me.”
He put it in park. He reached for the door handle with the same easy wrist he had used on the wheel. His phone sat face up, dark, cracked corner, a black rectangle that had just promised a woman at a food court that a van would come.
I did not get out.
The second stretched. Then another. Luis’s hand paused on the handle. The mower kept mowing. Somewhere a basketball hit a backboard and a kid yelled a word that was not quite a word.
He turned in his seat, still smiling, still a man finishing a courtesy.