The Day Pass

I've managed the Grand Meridian hotel for six years now. It sits right on the convention center, which means every October the Midwest Expo Extravaganza dumps four thousand people into my lobby. Tradeshow booths, fan stuff, cosplay, badge checkers, all of it. I'm 45 years old, I was married to a man named Dale for twelve years, and I've been widowed for two. Most days the Expo is just noise.

This year it wasn't.

It was a Friday afternoon and I was walking the lobby floor, which is what I do when the front desk is staffed and I have nothing better to do. That's when I saw him.

Guy in a blazer the color of a highlighter. Orange, maybe. He had a badge on a lanyard that looked important from ten feet away and like a laminated menu from three feet. He walked up to the VIP lounge entrance like he owned it.

The lounge door has a checker. Her name is Denise, she's 52, and she does not miss. I've watched her turn away men in actual suits.

"Hey, sorry, this is a gold tier area," Denise said.

"Oh, I know, I know," the guy said. He tapped his badge. "They moved me up last night. Systems team. There was a mixup with my tier, it's a whole thing, your ticketing vendor had a glitch. They said just show this at any gold entrance and apologize to me later."

Denise squinted at the badge.

"Apologize to you later," she repeated.

"I know. It's ridiculous. I've been fighting with their support line since seven a.m. You want to hear the ticket number?"

He said it fast. He said it like he was tired of the whole thing, like he was doing Denise a favor by not making her listen to it. I've been in hotels long enough to know that trick. The tired man is the trusted man.

Denise waved him through.

I stood there by the fake palm tree near the escalators and thought, huh. Because I had watched this same guy twenty minutes earlier get turned away from the vendor hall for the exact same speech, and he'd walked off shrugging as if he had four more doors to try.

He had three more doors. I watched him try the speaker green room and the sponsor deck. The sponsor deck worked.

Let me tell you where I went wrong. I should have radioed security. That's my job. That is literally my job.

Instead I followed him.

* * *

He went down a service corridor off the east wing. Guests aren't supposed to find that corridor, which meant he'd scouted it, which meant he'd been in my building before, which meant I was already annoyed before anything interesting happened.

I stayed far enough back to look like a manager walking somewhere with purpose. That's a skill. You walk fast and you frown at your tablet.

He ducked into the alcove by the freight elevator where we keep the recycling bins. I stopped at the corner and did the thing you're not supposed to do, which is lurk.

He had a bag open on top of a bin. Small bag, black. Out of it came a printer. A portable printer, the little photo kind. He also had a stack of blank badge stock and a lanyard pile that looked like it came from a craft store.

I couldn't believe what I was watching, so I watched it harder.

He printed a badge. It took maybe forty seconds. He held it up to the light, checked it, peeled it, threaded a lanyard through it, and stuck it in his blazer pocket. Then he printed another one. Then another.

Three badges. Then he put the printer away like it was a sandwich.

"Okay, so are you going to keep standing there or are you going to introduce yourself?"

I about jumped out of my shoes. He hadn't turned around. He was zipping the bag and talking to the wall.

"How long have you known," I said.

"Since you stopped pretending to look at your tablet, manager man. You've got the walk. You've got the frown. You've got the little radio." He turned around. He was shorter than me, dark hair going gray at the temples, and a smile like he'd already won something. "You want to see one? They're good. I'll show you the hologram."

"You're going to show me the fake badge."

"I'm going to show you the fake badge," he agreed.

And he did. He held it out and I took it because apparently I was the kind of person who takes counterfeit merchandise from a stranger now. It was heavy cardstock with a real-looking foil stamp. Gold tier. Name field said DANIEL PRUITT, SYSTEMS.

"That's not your name."

"That's not my name," he said. "Daniel Pruitt is having a real bad day somewhere in Ohio, probably."

"Give me one reason I shouldn't call security right now."

He looked at me the way you look at a vending machine that ate your dollar. Not scared. Slightly bored.

"Because you followed me," he said. "Nobody follows me by accident. Security doesn't lurk, security radios. You walked down here with your little tablet frown because you wanted to see how it works." He zipped the bag. "So. How does it work, Lloyd?"

"How do you know my name."

"Your nametag," he said, and pointed at my chest, where my nametag was.

I looked down at it. LLOYD, GENERAL MANAGER. Then I looked back up and he was grinning.

"You're 45 years old and you run this whole place," he said. "You do this for a living, and one of us is embarrassed right now and it isn't me."

"I'm not embarrassed. I'm assessing."

"Assessing. Okay. Big word for a guy hiding behind a palm tree."

"I wasn't hiding."

"You were absolutely hiding."

I handed the badge back. He took it, and instead of pocketing it he threaded it onto a lanyard and hung it around his own neck, then put his hands in his pockets like we were two guys at a bus stop.

"Pablo," he said. "Pablo Roach. Yes, like the bug. My mother had a sense of humor and my father had no say."

"Lloyd."

"You said that. Your chest said that."

There was a silence. Down the hall, the freight elevator dinged and neither of us moved.

"So what's the play," I said. "You sell these?"

"Day passes, mostly. Expo's sold out since August. People pay stupid money for a sold out day pass, and the Expo pays me nothing, and I print the passes for about a dollar ten each." He shrugged. "I'm a small business. Very small. Pocket-sized, you could say."

"You were arrested for this."

He raised his eyebrows. "Look at you, doing homework. Once. Petty fraud, I was 28, I paid a fine and a guy named Benjamin laughed at me in holding for two hours." He tilted his head. "You looked me up. On your little tablet. While you were following me."

"That was a different frown."

"That was a very similar frown."

He was right, and I hated it. I had looked him up in the elevator bay, thumb typing faster than my brain agreed to. Pablo Roach, one old arrest, nothing since. Eleven years of nothing since, actually, which in con man years is either very good or very quiet.

"Here's what happens now," I said. "You walk those passes out of my building or you hand them to me, and either way you're gone by five."

"Or," he said.

"Or what. There's no or."

"There's always an or. Or I stick around, and you keep watching, and you figure out whether you're mad at me or interested in me, because buddy, from where I'm standing those look a lot alike on you."

I laughed. I didn't mean to laugh. It came out like a cough.

"That's the dumbest thing anyone's ever said to me in a service corridor."

"And yet you're still here," he said. "Corridor's got one exit, chief, and it's behind you. You've had four chances to walk to the security desk. You're on chance five."

I looked at the exit. I looked back at him. He had that badge on, the fake one, gold tier, DANIEL PRUITT, and he wore it like it was funnier on him than on anyone.

"Five o'clock," I said. "Lobby bar. If I don't see the passes, and I mean all of them, on that bar by five oh five, I call downstairs."

"And if I show up with them?"

"Then I buy you one drink and you tell me how the printer works."

"Deal," he said, fast, like he'd been hoping I'd say something dumb exactly like that. He picked up his bag. "One drink. I'm counting, manager man. It's gonna be a long afternoon for both of us."

He walked off toward the convention floor like he belonged there. Which, with the badge, he did.

I stood in the alcove for a minute with my tablet and my frown and my complete lack of a plan. Then I went back to the lobby and did my actual job for three hours, badly, thinking about a portable printer and a man named after a bug.

The bar at five on Expo Friday is a war zone. I got there at 4:50 and stood where I could see the door, which was stupid, because Pablo came up behind me.

"Watching for me or watching the door for me?"

"Both. Sit down."

He sat. He had the bag. He set it on the bar between us like it was a birthday present.

"Can I look at this," I said, "without the whole bar seeing it?"

"That's the spirit." He slid it over. I opened the flap maybe four inches. Badge stock, stacked neat. Lanyards bundled with rubber bands. A little foil stamp kit in a pencil case.

"You did this with a craft store kit."

"And a photo printer. Quality matters, chief. I have standards."

"You have a pending conversation with my security team is what you have."

He ordered a beer. I ordered coffee, because I was still technically on shift, and he laughed at me for a full minute.

Then I did the dumb thing. I said, "Show me."

"Show you what."

"How they go together. The stamp, the lanyard. I want to see how it works."