I don't know that woman in the glass.
But I don't hate her, and that's new, and I carry it out the door with me like a coal in two cupped hands, careful, because I've learned not to trust good things to last and I want this one to last as far as it'll go.
Imani's at the corner table in the main room when I come out, the whole operation spread around her the way she keeps it.
The ledger. The legal pad. Her laptop, and beside it a stack of printed pages I haven't seen before, thick, stapled in sections, a federal seal on the cover sheet.
"Deposition came in," she says, not looking up. "First tranche. Rooster's father talked for six hours."
My chest pulls tight at that. Ollie. A man in a cell, talking six hours into a recorder so we can walk into that place knowing where the bodies sleep.
"You look like you slept," Imani says.
"I did."
"I can tell." She glances up, and there's a knowing at the corner of her mouth she's kind enough to leave there. "Sit down. I could use you. You know these initials better than anybody breathing, and now I've got names to hang on them."
I sit down next to her.
And for a while it's good. The same work we did before, except it goes somewhere now—she reads a name off the deposition, I find it in the ledger.
She reads a set of initials I've had memorized for eight months, I give her every date they appear, and she matches them to a name Ollie gave up.
The clean set builds itself out of the two halves, his knowledge and mine, the way the map did, and I'm fast at this.
There's a small ugly satisfaction in turning the book that held me into a noose for the men who did it.
"CR," Imani says.
"Third week of every month. Twice, some months. Goes back four years."
"Carl Reese." She writes it. "In Ollie's list. Ironwood, Tucson chapter, did five for aggravated assault." She keeps going. "DK."
"First weekends. Only ever first weekends."
"Dwight Koenig." She writes it. "Ironwood too. Ran a towing yard in Benson that Ollie says moved guns in the beds." She taps the page. "You see how they cluster? Same men, same weekends, year after year. This isn't a business that took all comers. This is a club that shared a toy."
A club that shared a toy.
I keep my face flat and I keep reading her the dates, because the alternative is to think about what she just said.
I was the toy, that I was a thing men passed between them on a schedule the way you'd pass around a cabin or a boat.
I’ve known that for years and I’ve never once heard it said out loud in a warm room by a woman with a pen, and it's different out loud.
Everything's different out loud.
"You okay?" Imani says.
"Keep going."
She keeps going.
Name after name, and every single one comes back to Ironwood.
A chapter, a sentence served, a front business with a real business running under it.
It fills in the way a photograph comes up in a developing tray—slow, and then all at once.
