Carmichael handed her the change. “It was very nice to meet you, miss.”

Iris stood up from the booth and extended her hand to shake his. “I’m Iris. It was nice meeting you too, Carmichael.”

She headed out the door but stopped short.

Carmichael was behind the bar, rinsing out her glass. He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Did you forget something?”

“Yeah, sort of. I meant to ask when we were talking about the old bank. Did you ever know a woman named Suzanne Peplinski? I think she used to work there.”

“I can’t say that I did. Was she a friend of yours?”

“No. I just think I found something that might belong to her.” Iris shrugged and waved good-bye.

His voice stopped her. “You found something?”

Iris didn’t answer.

“There’s a saying where I come from, bella. Never steal from a graveyard. You might disturb the ghosts.”

CHAPTER 13

Behind the old bank, Iris pressed the worn white button on the squawk box and waited. It was nearly dark outside, and the streets were deserted. The words “you might disturb the ghosts” echoed in her ears, and she pressed the button again. She stared into the black, recessed lines of the speaker box as if it were a video camera and Ramone was watching. But he wasn’t.

She pressed the button again. Her car was trapped behind the metal door. After a solid two minutes had passed, she kicked the garage door and stomped to the front of the building to search the windows for signs of life.

The streetlights filled Euclid Avenue with a yellow haze. She pressed her nose to the glass next to a revolving door and peered into the main lobby. It was murky with shadows, and there was no sign of Ramone inside. She banged on the glass anyway.

“Shit!” she hissed.

She took a step back. The front of the building was clad with rough-hewn granite blocks. The street number 1010 was carved deep into one of the stone quoins above the sidewalk. Next to the address was a shadowy blank spot, where a large plaque had been bolted. Iris guessed that this must have been where the First Bank of Cleveland sign had been removed in the middle of the night. The hollow metal sleeves for the bolts were still embedded in the stone as if they were waiting for another sign to come along.

Iris craned her neck up. Red brick and sandstone stretched up to the chemical-orange sky. Each little window was topped with a stone crown, and all of them were dark. The roofline cornice hovered high over the sidewalk. Even in the near dark, its ornate brackets and stone flowers were majestic.

Headlights flashed three blocks down, reminding Iris it was too late at night to be walking alone on the streets of Cleveland. The traffic light at East Ninth and Euclid turned green, but no cars were at the intersection. An overweight woman was waiting in the corner bus shelter for her ride home.

“I cannot believe I’m taking the friggin’ bus home tonight,” Iris muttered to herself as she crossed the deserted five-lane road toward the shelter. She turned back and surveyed the old bank again. There were no lights on. “You just had to go get a beer. Great idea, Iris.”

She turned toward the bus stop when a flicker caught her eye. Squinting up at the fifteenth floor, she saw the flicker again. It was a flashlight. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs to Ramone but knew it would be a waste of breath. He wouldn’t hear her, and there was no way she would be able to throw a rock far enough to hit a nearby window.

A passing car reminded Iris she was still standing in the middle of Euclid Avenue. She ran back to the rolling garage door on Huron Street. Her smoker’s lungs were burning by the time she reached the call box. She pounded the white button three times. Almost instantly the door sprang to life. Iris closed her eyes in relief. Thank God. She could get home tonight. When she opened them, Ramone’s face was just inches away.

“Oh God!” she yelped.

Ramone just glared at her. Apparently, pounding the button on a speaker box could be highly irritating.

“Ramone! You scared the shit out of me!”

“Was you expecting someone else?” he said in his smoker’s growl. “Don’t ever bang on the button like that again, okay?”

“Sorry. I’ve just . . . How did you get down here so fast?”

“I was just around the corner.”

“No. I saw you. You were up on the fifteenth floor.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about?” He looked at her like she was on drugs.

“You. With a flashlight. Up on fifteen. I saw the light through the windows.”

His focus sharpened. “You sure about what you saw?”

“Yeah, there was definitely a flashlight moving around up there.”

“You stay there,” he said, motioning to her car. “I’ll go check it out.” He reached under his shirt to grab a humungous flashlight hanging from his belt. She caught a glimpse of a black gun in a holster next to it. That settled it. She scuttled over to her car like she was told and watched him disappear down the service corridor in her rearview mirror.

Iris locked her car doors and laid her seat back to hide. You might disturb the ghosts, Carmichael’s voice taunted her. “Shut up, Carmichael!” she whispered.

For the first few minutes, she sat frozen, fretting about what was happening up on fifteen. Then she picked her fingernails clean. She counted the cigarette burns on the ceiling of her car until she finally broke down and lit one. She cracked the window and listened for the sound of a gunshot or a flashlight beating someone over the head. The digital clock glowed 9:01 on her dashboard. Five more minutes, and then she was getting the hell out of there.

She turned her thoughts to who the intruder might be and came up with nothing. The bank had been shuttered for twenty years. Why the hell would anyone be skulking around now? It’s probably just Ramone’s girlfriend putting her pants back on. The thought made her chuckle, but nothing about the guard’s grizzled demeanor said he’d been laid in the last decade.

Her cigarette burned down to the nub. To keep from lighting another one, Iris pulled the plans for the second and third floors out of her purse and examined them again. There was the same number of columns running north to south, and the elevators were in the same location, but something was missing around the service corridor. There was no way she was going up there alone in the dark that night. The clock read 9:04. Two more minutes until she drove to the police station.

She was just about to turn the car on when Ramone came lumbering down the loading dock stairs in the rearview mirror.

“Whoever it was must’ve left.” He looked annoyed and tired.

“But who could it have been?” She couldn’t believe how nonchalant he seemed. He was a frigging security guard. Wasn’t he supposed to be in riot gear or something?

“Every once in a while a homeless person finds their way into the building. They’re harmless. Just looking for a place to sleep.” He lit a filterless cigarette with a paper match. Ramone may not have been much of a guard, but he was hard-core.

“But how do they get in?” She hadn’t noticed any broken windows or giant holes in the wall while walking around the building.

“Oh, you’d be amazed. They’re like rats. They find their ways. Mechanical ducts, roof hatches, tunnels . . .”

“Tunnels?”

“The old steam tunnels. They connect a lot of buildings downtown. This building is linked up to the whole block.”

“But we surveyed the whole basement. We didn’t see any tunnels.”

“I’ll show you ’em tomorrow. You should be gettin’ home.”

Iris nodded in agreement and then thought to ask, “How about you? Don’t you ever go home?”