Silent Watch

I've been working the graveyard shift at the Omicron Conference Hotel for eleven years now. You'd think the novelty of an empty hallway at midnight would wear off, but it doesn't. There's something about a corridor after everyone's asleep that feels like backstage at a play. The set is still standing but the actors have all gone home.

My name is Maureen Hahn, I'm fifty-four, and I do the floor checks. Eleven o'clock, one o'clock, three o'clock. Walk every floor, eyeball every fire door, log anything weird. Most nights there's nothing weird. Somebody left a do-not-disturb sign up for three days. Somebody propped a stairwell door with a rolled up towel. The entire job, most nights, is that.

The data-security symposium had started on Tuesday. About four hundred IT people, all of them wearing lanyards and looking tired. The group had been quiet, honestly. No parties, no noise complaints. Just a lot of men in their fifties standing by the elevator banks comparing badge setups.

That's where I first noticed Byron Schultz. Not that I knew his name yet. Tuesday night he was in the lobby bar at ten, alone, reading something on a tablet. Wednesday night, same spot. He was maybe fifty-two, gray buzz cut, glasses, the kind of man who irons his shirts. He nodded at me when I walked my lobby loop. I nodded back. That was the extent of it.

By Thursday, I had his name off the conference roster, because part of my job is knowing who's in the building. Byron Schultz, freelance consultant, out of Milwaukee. Registered through Sunday.

Thursday night, eleven o'clock, I started my tenth-floor check. That's where most of the symposium folks were stacked. The hallway was its usual beige self, that carpet pattern that looks like someone spilled static. The vending machine at the far end hummed the way it always hums. Door after door, all dark.

Except one. Room 1019 had a strip of light under it. Same as Wednesday night. Same as Tuesday night.

Now, a light under a door at eleven p.m. is not a security issue. People stay up on business trips. But it had been the same light, in the same room, three nights running, and the man inside it had spent all three evenings alone in the bar first. I logged it in my head anyway. I don't know why. Habit, maybe. Or maybe I noticed because he always noticed me first.

I walked the rest of the floor. Twelve doors dark, one light. I went down to nine, did the same, came back up to ten to take the elevator, and as I passed 1019 the door opened.

"Ma'am? Sorry. Officer, I mean." Byron stood there in socks and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. "Could you help me with something? It's kind of silly."

"What have you got?"

"The desk lamp in here flickers. Been flickering since I checked in. I finally called down and they said maintenance would get to it in the morning, but it's driving me crazy. I thought maybe you'd want to see it, in case it's a wiring thing and not a bulb thing."

"A wiring thing," I repeated.

"You're security. You probably know more about buildings than I do."

I knew exactly nothing about wiring, but there was no harm in looking, and honestly, I was curious about the man who'd been awake under that strip of light for three nights. "Sure. Show me."

He stepped back and I came in as far as the doorway. Hotel rooms are all the same, and his was all the same. Bed made, suitcase open on the luggage rack, tablet on the desk, papers spread out next to the tablet. The lamp sat on the nightstand, a cheap beige thing.

"See? Watch." Byron flicked the switch a few times. The bulb buzzed and stuttered. "It does that. Then it settles down for a while, then it does it again."

"It's flickering," I agreed.

He stood there holding the lamp switch like he'd been caught doing something. He let go of it and wiped his hand on his pants. "Sorry. Like I said, silly."

"It's not silly. A flickering light in a hotel room would bother me too." I leaned a little into the room, looking at the outlet, not really seeing anything. "Bulb, most likely. Loose in the socket. I'll put in a work order for the morning, tell them to just swap the lamp out."

"Would you? That's great. Thank you." He rubbed his thumb along his jaw. "You know, I've seen you walking the floors every night. I don't know how you do it. This whole place is like a morgue after ten."

"That's the job. Quiet is good in my line of work."

"I suppose it is." He laughed a little. "I don't even know why I'm keeping you here over a lamp."

"You're not keeping me. It's a two-minute job to log it." I took my little notebook out and wrote the room number down, mostly so I'd have something to do with my hands. "There. Maintenance will have it before you're back from your sessions tomorrow."

"You're efficient. I like that." He said it fast, like it slipped out, and then he got a little red around the ears. "Sorry. That sounded strange."

"It's fine. Efficient is about the nicest thing anyone's said to me on this shift." I clicked my pen closed. "Anything else I can do for you tonight?"

He looked at me then, really looked, the way you look at a menu when you already know what you want and you're just checking the price. I knew that look. I'd gotten it once, ten years ago, from a salesman at a conference just like this one, and I'd frozen solid and let him walk away, and I'd thought about it ever since.

"No," Byron said. "No, that's everything. Thanks for the work order. Maureen, right? It's on your badge."

"It is. Goodnight, Mr. Schultz."

"Byron. Goodnight."

I walked the rest of my round with the lamp thing logged and my head doing more work than the pen had. There was nothing in what had happened. A man asked about a lamp. A woman logged a work order. End of story. Except my ears were warm and I could still feel that look, and the hallway felt different on the way back to the elevator than it had on the way to his door.

* * *

Friday night the symposium ran a late session, so the floors stayed noisy until nearly eleven. I started my tenth-floor check a little after, and the hallway was dark, all of it, except 1019.

Same strip of light. The man was keeping late hours again.

I did the floor, came back, and the door opened before I even got level with it. Byron, again, dress shirt, socks, looking sheepish.

"Officer. I hate to bother you again."

"The lamp again?"

"No, the lamp's fixed, actually. Maintenance came by. They swapped the whole thing." He held the door wider, like proof. "It's, uh. It's the thermostat. It's either an icebox or a furnace in here and I can't find a middle. I don't suppose that's your department either."

"The thermostat is very much not my department. But I can look at it, if you want, and I can tell maintenance you're cooking or freezing."

He stepped back from the door. I stepped in, same as the night before, and stood in the doorway while he fiddled with the little dial on the wall unit. It clicked and hummed and did nothing useful. He tried it twice, made a face, and gave up.

"I think it's broken," he said. "Or I'm broken. One of the two."

"I'll write it up. They'll bring you a space heater or a fan, one or the other." I wrote the room number again. Same room. Same pen. My handwriting looked different this time, looser, and I don't know why I noticed that.

"Thanks. Sorry. Two nights in a row, I'm your whole problem log."

"You're the interesting part of my log, if I'm being honest about it."

That came out of me before I thought about it, and then we were both just standing there, him by the wall unit and me in the doorway, and nobody said anything for a second. The vending machine hummed down the hall. The thermostat clicked off.

"Well," he said, and stopped.

"Well," I said, and didn't stop him either.

He didn't close the distance and neither did I. I want to be fair about that, because how the rest of the weekend went started right there, with two people not moving and both of them noticing they weren't moving.

"I'll get that thermostat report in," I said finally. "Try to sleep warm."

"Goodnight, Maureen."

"Goodnight, Byron."

The strip of light under his door was still burning when the elevator doors closed on my floor. I stood in the lobby for a minute, doing nothing, and then I laughed at myself out loud, because the lobby was empty and nobody was around to hear it.

Two more nights on this contract. Saturday and Sunday. He'd be gone Monday morning.

I wrote the thermostat report. Then I sat at the desk and thought about a salesman ten years ago and a strip of light under a door, and I did not think about either one very productively.

Saturday night the floors emptied early. Saturday night the symposium had a banquet downtown; tenth floor was quiet by 10 p.m. except for the vending machine doing its hum. I did my eleven o'clock check at eleven, like always, and everything was normal, and everything was dark, except 1019.

The door wasn't just leaking light this time. It was open. Maybe four inches. Maybe six.

I stood in the hallway for a good ten seconds, you know, doing my job, which is noticing things. The door was ajar. That's a thing an officer notices. Behind it, the lamp was on, and I could see the edge of the armchair, and I could see that somebody was sitting in it.

I should tell you now what this was about, since I've already told you about the salesman and the frozen-up feeling. Byron wanted to watch. I know that sounds like a leap, but it wasn't, not by Saturday. Two nights of questions I could've answered over the phone, two nights of that look. And me, standing in a doorway not moving, wanting to be looked at so bad my hands were shaky on my clipboard. He wanted to see. I wanted to be seen. Fifty-four years old and both of us were being very polite about it.

I knocked on the open door. Gently, with a knuckle.

"It's open," Byron said, from inside.

"That's a funny way to answer a knock."

He was in the armchair, fully dressed, facing the hallway. Shirt buttoned, glasses on, hands folded in his lap like he was waiting for a dentist appointment. The chair was turned so it looked at the door instead of the TV. The entire setup was that, and we both knew it.

"Officer Hahn," he said. "I was hoping you'd come by."

"Were you."

"I've been sitting here twenty minutes rehearsing this, and I still don't have a good line. So I'll just say it. Would you like to come in? And if you come in, would you like to, ah." He took his glasses off, wiped them on his shirt, put them back on. "I'd like to watch you. If you take some things off. Not all of them. Whatever you're comfortable with. And if the answer's no, I'll never mention any of this again, and I'll still leave a good review of the hotel."

I closed the door behind me. That was my answer, and he understood it, because his shoulders dropped about an inch.

"Comfortable with a lot," I said. "For the record. But we're going to talk like adults while it happens, all right? None of this pretending we're not doing what we're doing."

"Agreed. Absolutely."

I set my clipboard on the dresser. My radio I set next to it, volume down, because the floors were empty and because I wasn't going to be interrupted, and I state plainly that I made that choice on purpose, clear-headed, no wine involved, I hadn't had a drink all night.

Then I stood by the dresser and undid the top button of my blazer, and he watched me do it, and I watched him watch me, and I'll tell you, ten years of thinking about a salesman did not prepare me for how good this actually felt. It felt like putting down something heavy.

"You iron your shirts," I said. "It shows."

"I do iron them. That's the observation I get?"

"It's the observation you get. Keep still."

The blazer came off. I hung it over the chair back by the door, taking my time, and his eyes followed me across the room and back. Then the tie. I wear a clip-on, which is not a glamorous detail, but I pulled it off slow anyway