Chapter 6

Sizemore walked up the ramp to the truck with the notebook under his arm and the radio in his hand.

Kelsey stood at the front fender. He didn't look at her. He leaned into the cab, keyed the radio, read the old man's name and date of birth off the license he'd already collected, and asked for a return.

While he waited, he put the notebook on the hood and opened it again.

That was when the receipts started falling out.

They were folded into the back pages, maybe sixty of them, creased so hard the ink had cracked. Kelsey saw the top one before he swept it up: a pink carbon from the county clerk's office, dated in March, marked PAID, with a name written in the memo line in the same blue ballpoint as the notebook.

"Registration renewal," Sizemore read. "License. Two rods." He flattened the next one. "Boat launch permit. Three kids."

He went through them faster. Same handwriting, same pen, different years, different names, all of them children's names, all of them small amounts - nineteen dollars, twenty-two fifty, eight dollars for a license and forty for a rod. The amounts were the kind that didn't hurt anybody.

But there were sixty of them, and sixty times twenty-five dollars was a number that didn't come out of a mail carrier's pension without somebody noticing.

"Who's paying for this?" Sizemore said.

Kelsey didn't answer. He hadn't been talking to her.

He turned back to the notebook and started flipping from the front, page by page, faster now, hunting. Not hunting for a name anymore. Hunting for the reason. Somebody had to be behind this - a church, a lawyer, a man with money and a reason to keep it quiet. An old man on a fixed income didn't buy sixty children fishing licenses out of his own pocket for sixteen years.

"You're the front," he said over his shoulder, toward the ramp. "Somebody's using you."

Hollis's voice came up from the concrete, calm and level. "Nobody's using me."

"Then who's paying?"

"I am."

"With what?"

The radio cracked. Dispatch came back with the return: RENFRO, HOLLIS W. - RETIRED USPS CARRIER - NO RECORD.

Sizemore stared at the radio for a second, like he wanted it to say something else. Then he looked up the ramp and said, "Rudd."

"Sir."

"Go sit in the truck."

She went. She got in the passenger side, closed the door, and sat with her back straight and her right hand in her pocket, and the phone against her leg was warm, and she understood that she was going to have to make a decision at some point, and that she had been putting it off for half an hour.

Out on the hood, Sizemore flipped to the middle of the notebook.

He had gotten about halfway.

He didn't turn the next page. He read the line he was on, and then he read it again, and the third time his mouth came open.