Chapter 6

Opal sat at his kitchen table with her coat still on and laid her citation flat beside his.

Same form. Same county seal. Same badge field: 1147.

Hers was dated six weeks earlier, at 6:05 in the morning, on a road called Marsh Cutoff that she had driven exactly once in her life, in 1994, in a truck she no longer owned. Her car was gray. Her citation said blue.

“I paid it,” she said. “Eighty-five dollars. My grandson said fighting the county costs more than the ticket, and he’s got a job in Clarksville and he’s always right about money.”

“You kept the envelope.”

“My mother kept everything. It’s a sickness.” She folded her hands. “Curtis, why is my ticket number the same as yours?”

He told her about the fines window. He told her about forty-seven citations in one quarter, all paid, none contested. Opal listened with her chin down, and when he finished she said a word he had never heard her say.

Then she said, “That’s not a machine. Machines don’t mail tickets to two people who were both asleep in their own houses.”

He drove her home and came back and sat in his truck in the driveway with the engine off.

A placeholder in a basement prints one number on one book. It does not print forty-seven citations over three months, all at dawn, all on roads nobody drove, all paid quietly by people who did not want trouble. That is not a machine. That is a man choosing the hours when nobody is awake to argue.

Thursday morning he went to the cemetery office before his shift and made a photocopy of the sign-in sheet - his own handwriting, 4:10 a.m., initialed by the board secretary. He folded it in his coat.

Then he sat in the truck and called the courthouse and asked for the fines window, and Verna Talley answered on the fourth ring.

“Miss Talley, it’s Curtis Mabry. I need to ask you something you shouldn’t answer.”

A pause. “Go ahead.”

“How many citations does a deputy file in a quarter? Your best one.”

“Thirty, maybe. Thirty-five if he lives in his car.”

“And the plaque they’re giving out tomorrow. Do you know what it says?”

He heard her breathe. He heard paper move.

“I typed the engraving order myself,” Verna said. “Forty-seven traffic stops. Officer of the Year.”

Curtis closed his eyes.

“Thank you, Miss Talley.”

He hung up and looked at the citation on the seat beside him. Forty-seven in the system. Forty-seven on the plaque. One number, printed under a name that had been in the ground for three years.

He went home and laid all three things on the end table - the citation, the letter, the badge in its frame - and stood over them.

One of them was going to have to go.