Page 25 of Rooster's Remorse
He turned when Amara said my name and he's looking at me the way a man looks at something on a highway.
I've been through worse than this, I've been throughsomuch worse than this, and there's no air getting past the top of my chest.
I get the zipper.
The composition book comes out and it's what it was.
Marbled black and white. Ninety-nine cents. The rubber band went brittle and snapped somewhere in Arizona and I've had it closed with a hair tie since.
I lean forward and put it on the president's desk. "That's a ledger."
Nobody touches it.
Amara looks at it and doesn't pick it up. "From where?"
"A property in Cochise County, Arizona."
"Whose property?"
"I don't know."
Her chin comes up that quarter inch. "You don't know?"
"No, ma'am."
"You brought me a book you can't tell me anything about."
"I can tell you a bunch of things about it." My hands go back in my lap because they've started and I can't have that. "It was on a desk in an office at the north end of the client building. There are more of them. There's a drawer, and there's a shelf above the drawer, and the shelf goes back four years at least, because I've watched the boxes come out. That one was on top because it's what they were writing in that night."
Razor leans forward and picks it up.
He takes the hair tie off and thumbs it open somewhere in the middle and reads for about six seconds.
Then he tosses it back on the desk. "This is nothing."
"It's notnothing."
"It's a kid's notebook full of chicken scratch." He's got his elbows on his knees now. "Dates and letters. There's no names in here. There's no addresses. There's not one thing in this book that says anything about anybody."
"There are twelve sets of initials that repeat more than forty times each."
"So?"
"So those are the ones who come back." I keep my voice exactly where it is. "The rest come once or twice. Those twelve come every month, some of them twice a month, some of them for four years running, and one of them has been coming since before I could count."
Razor sits with that. "It could be anything," he says.
"It could."
"Could be feed deliveries."
"It could be feed deliveries." I look at him. "Are you foolish enough to think it is?"
He doesn't answer. His thumb goes back and forth across his bottom lip.
"How do you know what's in it?" Amara hasn't moved off the desk.
"I don't."
