Erdedy waits for the pot delivery (p. 17)
He sat and thought. He was in the living room. When he started waiting one window was full of yellow light and cast a shadow of light across the floor and he was still sitting waiting as that shadow began to fade and was intersected by a brightening shadow from a different wall’s window.
Context
The book's second scene opens on Erdedy frozen in his condo, waiting for the woman who said she'd come with 200 grams of marijuana, and the only clock the prose gives you at first is this one: sunlight crawling across the floor, one window's shadow fading into another's. Time is measured entirely by what it does to the room — the waiting man as the gnomon of his own sundial. The same instrument comes back, 900 pages later, as shot Gately's only clock on the Trauma Ward (p. 922).