Page 26 of Rooster's Remorse
Her head comes around. "You didn't open it?"
"I've opened it." My voice comes out flat and I let it. "I've had it for months, and it's been open more than it's been closed. Dates, dollar amounts, initials. There's a column on the right I can't read, and I've had ages to learn how."
Amara's hand goes flat on the desk beside the book. "What's in the column?"
"Numbers between one and twelve." My hands stay where they are.
Nobody says anything.
Razor gets there first. His mouth comes open and shuts again, and he looks at the notebook on the desk like it moved.
Dante's still against the wall and his eyes have gone to the floor.
Amara doesn't move at all.
"There are twelve rooms," I say.
The heater's the only thing in the room making a sound.
Razor's hand comes up over his mouth and drops. "So it's useless."
It comes out with nothing behind it.
"It's useless to me." I look at him. "I'm one woman with a book. You're a motorcycle club with a cartel."
One corner of Amara's mouth pulls and she puts it away. She picks the ledger up off her desk, finally, and holds it without opening it. “What's the property?"
Here we go.
There's no good order. I've run it in my head every night since I escaped, and I've tried every arrangement, and they're all wrong, so I'm going to say it the way you'd read a chart.
Facts. You give them facts and you stand behind them.
"About six hundred acres. Maybe more." My hands are in my lap. "There's a house, a client building, an equipment shed, a pole barn, a water tank, and two bunkers."
Amara stops turning the ledger over in her hands. "Bunkers?"
"Underground. Eleven feet down. I know it's eleven because a man told another man in a hallway once and I heard it through a vent."
Dante hasn't moved off that wall since I sat down.
"Twelve rooms in the one I was in. Seven feet by nine." My thumbnail's found the seam of my jeans and I stop it. "A mat. A bucket. A light somebody else controls. A slot at the bottom of the door for the trays. The doors are steel core with a wood veneer and they're not from a prison, they're from a hospital. I've spent a lot of time on that."
Amara's hand comes up and I stop talking. "How many stairs?"
"Ma'am?"
"From the bunker to the yard. How many stairs?"
She's looking straight at me and her face is empty.
I understand exactly what she's doing, and I answer before I've decided to.
"Fourteen. There's a landing at nine and it turns left."
"Which way does the door open?"
"In. It opens in, toward the stairwell, and it drags on the bottom left corner where the frame's dropped."
