“What’s your name?” Quinn asked.
“No,” the man said. “You don’t need that. Just let me go, okay? Do whatever you want. I don’t give a shit.”
“What’s your name?” Quinn repeated.
The man looked at Quinn for a second, licked his lips, then said, “Al.”
“Al what?”
More hesitation. “Al Barker.”
“Okay, Al Barker. What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” Al said as if it should have been obvious.
“No one lives here,” Quinn said.
Al’s gaze flicked beyond Quinn at Nate and Orlando. “Do you have to shine that thing in my eyes?”
The beam of Orlando’s flashlight moved off the man’s face and onto his chest.
“Better?” she said.
“Shit, man, you guys got guns!” Al had apparently just noticed the pistols in Orlando’s and Nate’s hands. “What the hell are you pointing guns at me for?”
Quinn squeezed Al’s chin and turned it to the right. “Over here, Al,” Quinn said. “What are you doing here?”
Al glanced back at Orlando and Nate, then refocused on Quinn. “I told you. I live here.”
“The building’s empty, Al.”
“You don’t have to keep saying my name.”
“I just want to make sure you know I’m talking to you.”
“I know you’re talking to me,” Al said. “And I do live here. The owner pays me to stay in one of the rooms upstairs. A couple hundred bucks a month, and I get the place for free.”
“So you’re the caretaker,” Quinn said.
“I guess. Yeah, sure. The caretaker.”
“So if you’re the caretaker, where have you been all day?”
“I was upstairs … listening to the radio … building’s got no electricity, so no TV.”
“You were upstairs all day?”
“Sure.”
Quinn stared at him for a moment. “Al, where were you today?”
“I was he—”
“Don’t lie to me,” Quinn cut him off.
Al licked his lips again. “I left, okay? Went for a walk.”
“All evening?”
“Yeah. Okay? All evening,” Al said.
“Why did you leave?”
“I can go out when I want,” he said defensively. “I don’t have to be here all the time. Mr. Monroe told me that when he let me live here.”
“Who’s Mr. Monroe?”
“He owns the building.”
“Why did you leave today, Al? Did you hear something you didn’t want to? Then decided it was better to find something else to do?”
The caretaker’s pause was all the confirmation Quinn needed.
“Tell me the truth, or I’ll have my friend here, the one you hit with your head, shoot you someplace that won’t kill you, not right away, but it’ll hurt like hell.”
Al took another look at Nate. The sight must have been enough to convince him.
“I heard her come in, okay?” he said.
“Her?” Quinn asked.
“A woman. It was around sunset.”
“How do you know it was a woman if you only heard her?”
“I, eh, snuck downstairs. Sometimes we get kids in here. You know, try to trash the place. If I surprise them, it scares the hell out of them, and they leave. So I come down to do the same thing, okay? Only when I come down to the basement and peek around the corner, it’s not kids. It’s a woman. And she looks like she ain’t here to trash the place. But she got that door open, you know? That door you’re not supposed to go through. I was going to warn her, but she was already stepping inside. Then … boom.”
