Chapter 5

The records office was in the basement, past the boiler room, and it smelled like paper and dust.

Nadine Pruitt, the records supervisor, was a brisk woman in her sixties who kept a desk fan running in November. She pulled up the county’s citation system and turned the screen so Curtis could see.

“We changed software in April,” she said. “New system pulls badge numbers off the old personnel roster. Retired numbers sit in the roster as placeholders until somebody reassigns them.”

“Placeholders,” Curtis repeated.

“Right. So the citation books print whatever number they’re opened under. It’s a clerical thing, Mr. Mabry. Every county that switches systems gets a year of this.”

He wanted to believe her. He wanted it so badly that his shoulders came down an inch.

“Then why all the same number?” he asked. “Forty-seven of them, all 1147.”

“The placeholder repeats until it’s reassigned.”

She said it fast, and she said it without looking at him.

“Has anyone else complained?”

“Not one,” Pruitt said. “Every one paid. That tells you something, doesn’t it? People get a ticket, they know if they earned it or not.”

He asked one more question, because Ruth had always said he was too stubborn to know when to stop. “Is the number closed with the state?”

Pruitt blinked. “The state never closed it. It’s still open in their system.”

“The department retired it in perpetuity.”

“The department can write whatever letter it wants.” She shrugged. “The state system is the state system. That’s why it kept printing.”

Curtis drove home with the heater on and the radio off, and by the time he turned onto his road he had talked himself into it. A machine had done this. A machine, a roster, a book opened under the wrong number. Somewhere in a basement a woman with a desk fan was fixing it right now.

He got out the checkbook and wrote a check for one hundred ten dollars, and dated it, and set it on top of the citation.

Then somebody knocked on his door three times.

Opal Kerns stood on his porch in her housecoat with her gray hair loose and an envelope in her hand. She had driven a school bus in this county for twenty-nine years and she had never once been in a hurry.

“Curtis,” she said. “Did you get one of these too?”