Chapter 4

The lid came up and the contents slid out onto the wet concrete.

A laminated card on a lanyard. A fan of folded paper - some of it pink carbon, some of it white, some of it gone soft at the creases. And underneath, the corner of a spiral notebook, its cover stained dark with old water.

Sizemore picked up the laminated card first and turned it toward the last light.

For three seconds his face changed. Kelsey saw it from the truck, through the windshield, and she knew exactly what had gone through his head, because it had gone through hers once: a card. A card meant standing. A card meant somebody had pull, somebody knew somebody, somebody was about to make a phone call and this was going to become a problem for the officer instead of the citizen.

Then he read the whole thing, and his mouth flattened.

TURKEY CREEK KIDS' FISHING DAY. VOLUNTEER. UNPAID. EXPIRED.

"That's it?" he said. "That's what you've been sitting on?"

Hollis didn't answer.

Sizemore held the card up so the boy could see it. "You know what this is? This is nothing. This is a man who hands out hot dogs one Saturday a month and thinks it makes him somebody."

He tore it in half.

Eli made a sound - not a word, just a sound, high and short, the noise a boy makes when he sees something he can't stop. Hollis put his hand on the trailer tongue beside his knee, and that was all he did. He didn't stand. He didn't raise his voice. He watched the two halves of the card fall, turn on the concrete, and stop against his grandson's sneaker.

Kelsey's mouth was open. She closed it.

"Okay," Sizemore said, and picked up the notebook.

It was the kind you buy three for a dollar at a drugstore. Wire spiral, card cover, a rubber band around it that had gone slack with age. He snapped the band off with his thumb and let it drop, and folded the cover back.

The first page was handwriting. Blue ballpoint, small and square, the letters of a man who had spent forty-one years filling out route cards by hand.

Names. Ages. Dates.

Sizemore's eyes moved down the page, fast, hunting for something he could use, and the wet concrete gleamed under the ramp light, and the cicadas went on and on, and up at the top of the ramp Kelsey Rudd's phone kept recording in her pocket.