Page 11 of A Friend in the Glass

Chapter Seven

It took them two hours to shake off Weaver. Once they managed that—and it wasn’t easy, because the detective hadn’t been pleased to find them in the room, and he’d been even less satisfied with the story they’d been able to give him—the walk was short. Short, but miserable in the late-December wind howling through the city.

The Javits Center was an amalgamation of see-through boxes, all glass and steel supports bristling on the bank of the Hudson River. Slush gathered at the base of the walls, but the rest of the sidewalk had been shoveled and salted, the granules crunching under Sam’s boots as they approached. Flags snapped restlessly, a reminder of how civic and patriotic the Javits Center was. The whole thing reminded Sam of a greenhouse taken over by Young Republicans who were also undergrad architecture majors.

Inside, a wall of warmer air met them with the smell of wet winter gear, a cocktail of colognes, and overheated bodies. Voices echoed from the high, open spaces, rebounding off glass and cement. Every sound seemed amplified, in spite of the crush of bodies as people zipped back and forth through the concourse.Sam stepped to one side to clear the doorway, unzipped his coat, and rubbed his mouth.

“Jesus Christ. And I thought the subways were bad.”

“It’s definitely busier than I expected,” Rufus agreed as he took off his sunglasses. “The name made me think, like, eight old guys in a musty room.” He glanced at Sam. “Are you going to be ok in here? If you want to wait outside….” Rufus trailed off at the suggestion.

Sam released his breath slowly. Then he shook his head. Pointing at a banner over the escalators that announcedMoDe US Expo, he asked, “Do we just walk in, or….”

Rufus made a humming sound while looking around the expansive room. “Oh, it looks like those ticket booths over there are open. Did you want to actually check the conference out?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Well. No. Not really.”

“Neither do I.”

Sam plunged into the maelstrom of bodies. A woman in stiletto heels, with a dog riding in the massive bag she carried, glared at Sam as she shrieked something into her phone in what sounded like an Eastern European language. An older man in a pinstriped banker’s suit shouldered past Sam, raising a hand as he bellowed “Roderick” at someone across the room. A pair of middle-aged twins in matching trench coats and, underneath, sagging rainbow spandex, waved batons at Sam as though directing traffic.

When he got to the ticket booth, he was sweating.

“May I help you?” She was petite, young, her hair in tight cornrows, her eyes wrinkled with amusement.

“You can get me out of this puckering anus of a city,” Sam muttered as he took out his wallet.

The girl made a noise that left no doubt as to its meaning, which could mostly be summarized asThis guy is an asshole and every assumption I made about him has just been proven right.

Sam chose to ignore the communication. “Two for the MoDe Expo.”

“That will be five hundred and forty-five dollars.”

“Is that some kind of joke? Two hundred and seventy something dollars for a fucking convention?”

“No, sir. That’s five hundred and forty-five dollars each. There’s also an add-on option for two dinners and a meet-and-greet luncheon, plus the early morning and midmorning kaffeeklatsches and—”

“Is there a sale? A discount? What about veterans?”

Rufus, having kept up well enough when Sam had barreled his way through the crowds, was now doubled over at Sam’s side, hands on his knees. “I can’t pay that. It’s giving me the shakes.”

“Active-duty—” the girl began, arching her elaborately done eyebrows.

“Never mind,” Sam said. “For fuck’s sake, this fucking city.” He didn’t have that much cash, which meant using a bank card, which he liked even less than paying full price for this fucking debacle whose sole purpose, he imagined, was for old white men to give each other handjobs. That was only partially figurative, he decided. But since Shareed Baker had tracked him down, he figured he wasn’t giving too much away by using the card now. He paid. He scribbled his name on the receipt hard enough to tear the thermal paper. And then he took the badges that the girl slid under the partition and passed one to Rufus.

A guard—if you could call a middle-aged woman in an ill-fitting blazer and a Mary Tyler Moore wig a guard—checkedtheir badges and waved them onto the escalator. They rode down to the exhibition hall in silence. Relative silence, anyway.

“Any ideas on how to figure out who Shareed wanted to track down?” Sam asked as the hub of voices faded above them and the softer babble from the hall below swelled.

Rufus absently worried the plastic edge of his badge with a fingernail. “Maybe we should find a schedule. They list exhibitors on that, I bet.” He glanced up at Sam before adding, “Maybe someone’s here from Benning?”

After a moment, Sam jerked his head in a nod. “Do they have a program with a list of people? Or do we just wander around?”

“Hang here for a second.” Rufus patted Sam’s arm as they stepped off the escalator. He slipped into the sea of people, heading toward a small booth off to the left with a banner overhead reading: WELCOME.

Rufus talked to a very blonde and very perky woman, took a handful of printouts she politely forced into his hands, and made his way back to Sam. He sifted through the pile, leaned to one side of the escalator wall to dump what he apparently deemed to be junk into a trashcan, and ended up with a fully colored program listing events, speakers, locations, and times.

---