Park stood over Hydo’s corpse, thinking.

He needed very much to not be there.

Quickly, and with a minimum of disorder, he needed to erase himself from the place.

He looked at the floor.

The room was always kept dim, minimizing reflection on the monitors as the guys plied their trade, but now the only light came from the one remaining corkscrew of energy-efficient bulb that hadn’t been broken and the one live monitor that had likewise been spared.

The light cast by the monitor flickered in various shades of green and blue: a forest at night, a dead body pulsing with an ectoplasmic glow in the foreground, a dismal zombie lurching about the edge of the trees. A haunted grove that one of the guys had been mining. Killing hordes of zombies, one at a time, harvesting their meager treasure, banking it all in an ever-growing account, waiting for a buyer.

He shined the beam from the Maglite over the floor, picked out a blood-free path, and stepped as close to the center of the room as possible. Standing there, he took his phone from his pocket and began to slowly turn in place, snapping a picture after every few degrees of rotation. Finished, he took a similar series of shots covering the floor and ceiling, all the time wishing he’d bought a phone with a better camera.

Done with his photo map, he knelt next to Hydo, found his BlackBerry, opened the contacts list, and deleted his own number and email before wiping the device and putting it back in the dead man’s pocket.

He looked at the ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to the coffin-space box. There was no one in the box now. No telltale feet sticking out from the opening. No trail of blood running down the wall. Park had been around when Hydo had told one of his guys to change a disk up there in the recorder for the security camera.

His face would be on several of those disks, but it would just be a face. In any case, there were far too many to go through now. His fingerprint biometric would be logged on a hard drive somewhere, but it would only be tagged to a JPEG of his face. Hydo might keep a record of his customers’ names, but he wouldn’t keep his dealer’s name anywhere but his own phone.