Darien Holt was not supposed to be inside the bid room after closing.
That was why he kept looking at the door.
The municipal projects office had already emptied for lunch, leaving only the smell of paper, and dust from the ceiling fan. Files were stacked along the wall in metal racks. A sealed-bid register lay open on the desk in front of him, and beside it sat the draft estimate for a drainage pump project that several contractors were fighting over.
Darien moved quickly.
He did not steal the whole file. That was how idiots got caught. He checked the engineer's estimate, copied the lowest safe number onto a small slip, then slid the slip between two pages of an unrelated maintenance file. If a contractor knew the hidden floor before bidding, he could submit just low enough to look honest and still win.
Numbers were always like that. They looked clean until someone knew where to press.
