The elevator lifted us hundreds of feet in the air, quietly and assuredly, and Frank studied the buttons in the small metal box as if they were a complicated code that needed to be deciphered. “Everybody knows the story of the experimental philosopher who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating,” Frank said, not to me as much as to the buttons in front of him, “and who demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if the horse had not died, just twenty-four hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bit of air.” The doors opened on our floor and I stepped out of the elevator, but not before noticing that Frank had pressed the button for the lobby. He didn’t say anything; I didn’t say anything. I would go to the room. Frank would go back to the horseless street.

I sat in the almost life-size armchair in the room and took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and looked at the penciled address on it. It’s where we were supposed to be. That had been our destination in the morning, and should be our destination now. I shouldn’t be sitting in a hotel room staring at an address; I should be at the address staring at the house it belonged to. We’d never had trouble with that part of the plan before. I wasn’t sure how to explain it to Froehmer. I was still hoping I wouldn’t have to explain it.

We had checked into the hotel the night before. We’d done a few jobs for Froehmer outside of town, but never this far. We drove down and parked in a public lot and walked to the hotel and waited for a line to form at reception, then checked in and went to the room. They hardly ever notice you when you’re at the counter, anyway. They say your name a few times and glance at you, but they hardly ever notice. You could ask them a few seconds after you leave to describe you and name you, and they couldn’t. They’ve already dumped that information and are on to the next. Still, we try to be as invisible as possible. We never order room service, rarely talk to anyone else in the hotel, and avoid the lobby and public places as much as possible. We take precautions, almost all of them unnecessary, but we take them anyway. “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation,” Frank had said, quoting another fortune cookie. I had that one in my pocket for a while. I fished around in my jacket and found one. “For success today, look first to yourself.”