You paid four hundred dollars for a padlock someone else stopped paying for. That's the whole business: units go to auction when the rent stops, and the rent stops for ordinary reasons — a move, a divorce, a death.
But standing in it now, under a light that buzzes, this one is wrong. Nobody abandons a unit they were using last week. There's a phone in here. There's a tracker still pinging.
Somebody stopped paying eleven days ago, and everything in here says they didn't mean to stop anything.
Everything you need is in this unit. Read what the data says — and what it doesn't.
You log the last place their data and the daylight agree on, and close the laptop on a stranger you now know better than some of your friends.
Eleven days. A phone left charging. A tag still calling out every ninety seconds to a network nobody's listening to. And a trail that goes sloppy right at the end — gaps, doubles, timestamps that run backwards — the way a careful person's trail never does.
You keep telling yourself that's what it is. Carelessness.