Chapter 26. I don't know why it should surprise me that there are now high-rise buildings made for nothing but parking cars in, but it still does.

I know of three of them, in fact, the one out behind the City Hall administration offices being the tallest of them,

seven stories of artificial road

inside the building, with row after row of nearly identical cars parked by equally identical civil

servants. The wave of the future. This kind of place is tough to get into if you aren't in the

right car with the right pass to display to the little man in the peaked cap who sits

at the entrance and works the barrier. Show him the correct piece of paper from your driver's

side window and he will smile and admit you into the paradise of multi-level parking.

Fail to do so and he will scowl and point you away as if you were an insect.

Oddly enough, if you aren't in a car at all,

you can just walk past him as if he wasn't there.

No one else seemed to be doing it,

but if he didn't come to park,

he didn't compute to the little man.

Blackjack and I strode past him

and walked around the faceless gray mass of concrete

until we found the plates that we were looking for.

It was half past four.

Hopefully Roger Mayfield would not decide to work late, but even if he did, old square jaw and I seemed almost invisible to the pedestrians who entered from the covered walkway

on the level above and searched for their own cars with the same bleary-eyed determination

with which we had found Mayfields.

Between 10 to 5 and quarter past, the floodgates opened and the parked cars up and down the seven levels

...