At times like this, Frank tended to see omens in the smallest accidents. He wasn’t exactly a superstitious sort, not the black-cat, broken-mirror, bad-luck type. He was worse than that in a way. He thought the world operated with an efficient underlying malevolency; it all operated according to a specific set of rules, and if you paid close enough attention you could avoid its damage. He didn’t believe in surprises or coincidences, each event was a gear in a large machine that rolled on and on, rewarding those who paid attention to its inner workings, and punishing those who ignored them. Once, when we were on a job not unlike this one, we were getting ready to go out in the middle of the night, when the hotel’s emergency lights began flashing and alarms sounded in every hallway. Frank wanted to stop right there and get back into bed. He refused to leave the room. He didn’t want me to leave either. I went anyway. We had a job to do. The elevators weren’t working and I had to walk down eight flights of stairs. There was a man in a wheelchair on the seventh-floor landing and he asked if I would help him.

“I can’t do it by myself,” I said. He was a big guy. “You can’t leave me here,” the guy said. So I stood and waited for a stranger to come along. Our good intentions were quickly overtaken by our incompetence. We struggled with every stair, negotiating the man and the chair carefully down and down, the uncooperative weight of him getting worse and worse every floor, while he complained every inch of the way.

—

“Watch it,” he’d say, convinced he was going to tip, but we had him. Unfortunately we had him. “What are you stopping for,” he said as we caught our breath on the fourth-floor landing. We looked like death, me and the stranger, in the harsh emergency light, and the pulsing of the alarms only made everything worse. My ears were ringing and my heart was pounding against my chest like it was trapped and I thought I should be the one in the wheelchair. But we went back to work and got the guy down. By the time we reached the ground level, the lights were back on and everyone was headed back to their rooms. The guy in the wheelchair was pissed off. At us.

“You should have left me up there,” he said. “I knew it was nothing.”