Chapter 5

"Bo R. - nine - license and rod. Mama cried."

Sizemore read it out loud. Then the next one. "Trey M. - ten - license. Grandma brought him."

He turned the page. More of the same. Thirty, forty entries, some in the same blue pen, some in a different one, dates running back years.

"What is this?" he said.

Hollis didn't answer.

"I asked you a question."

"I heard you."

Sizemore stood up with the notebook open in one hand. He looked from the page to the old man and back, and Kelsey could see him building it - she could see the shape forming behind his eyes, the ugliest shape available, the one that fit a man keeping a written list of children's names and ages in a locked box in his boat.

"You keep a list," Sizemore said slowly. "Names. Ages. Dates."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I don't want to forget them."

Sizemore laughed. It was a short, flat sound with nothing in it. "You don't want to forget them."

"No, sir."

"You know how that sounds?"

"I do."

Eli stood very still behind his grandfather, close enough that his shoulder touched the old man's back. He was eleven. He understood about half of what was happening and all of what it meant, which was that a man with a badge and a gun was saying something terrible about his grandfather in front of him, and nobody was stopping it.

Hollis finally looked up. "Those are children," he said. "That's all that page is. Children who didn't have a rod."

"Sure."

"You can believe whatever you like."

"I'm going to." Sizemore tucked the notebook under his arm. "I'm taking this. And I'm writing you up."

"For what?"

"Obstruction. Refusal to identify. We'll let somebody above my pay grade sort out what's in here."

And that was the thing - Kelsey knew there was no such charge. You could not cite a man for declining to open his own property on a public ramp, and the renewal card in the glove box said the sticker on that hull was paid through next March. She knew it because she had seen it twenty minutes ago, and she had already said so once tonight, and she had been sent to stand by the truck for saying it.

Sizemore pulled the citation pad out of his shirt pocket. He wrote standing up, the pad braced against the notebook. Then he tore the page out along the perforation, folded it twice, and slid it into his shirt pocket instead of back into the pad.

Kelsey watched him do it.

She had never in her life seen a citation folded and pocketed. They went in the pad. The pad went to the office at the end of shift. There was a carbon, a number, a log.

He had just written something down and made it disappear.

He put the pad away and pointed the pen at Hollis. "Sit tight. I'm going to run your name."