Forty Days To Testify

"Name?" The woman at the side door didn't look up from her clipboard. Sixty-ish, reading glasses on a beaded chain, a Hartford hockey sweatshirt older than I was. I shifted the duffel to my other shoulder and gave her the smile. I'd practiced it in three mirrors. "Gia Ross. I'm the auditor. The league sent me." "Ross." She ran a pen down the page. "There you are. Roz Delaney. I run the equipment room, which means I run everything." "Good to know." "Mm-hm." She finally looked at me, over the glasses. "You're smaller than your email." "I get that a lot." "That bag all you brought?" "I travel light." "Nobody travels that light, honey. Unless they're running from something or someone's paying them to look like they aren't." My smile stayed exactly where I'd put it. "Auditors don't run. We bill by the hour." Roz laughed, a short bark that echoed off the cinderblock. She pulled a key card from her pocket and held it just out of reach. "Office is on the second level. Books are in the back room behind it. Staff comes in at seven. Players at eight. If you're smart, you'll sleep first." "I'm not tired." "Everybody's tired." She dropped the card in my palm. Her fingers were warm and dry. Mine weren't. "Motel's two blocks down. Tell Marcy at the desk I sent you. She'll give you the good pillow." "Thank you, Ms. Delaney." "Roz." "Roz." She watched me a second longer than I liked. Then she tucked the clipboard under her arm and walked off toward the lockers, humming something tuneless. I let out a breath at the exit sign. Counted it. Two exits on this side. One camera over the door, angled wrong. Good. The motel pillow was fine. I never touched it. At 2:47 a.m. I stood outside the arena in a borrowed-looking gray blazer, a size too big, and swiped Roz's card. The lock clicked green. Nobody stopped me. Inside, the cold hit first. Rink cold, the kind that gets into your teeth. It smelled like wet concrete and stale popcorn. Somewhere deep in the building the Zamboni hummed to itself like a sleeping animal. "Okay," I whispered. "Okay, Gia." I stopped. Gia. Not Ross. My own name, out loud, in my own mouth for the first time in four months. It sounded like a stranger's coat that happened to fit. "Don't," I told myself. "Not here." My voice came back thin off the empty seats. I climbed the stairs two at a time and kept my hand off the rail. The second-level office was unlocked. The back room wasn't, but Roz's card didn't care. Inside: two steel cabinets, one desk lamp, and a ledger the size of a cinder block sitting open like it had been waiting for me. I clicked on my phone's flashlight and cupped my hand over it. "Come on. Show me something." Columns. Ticket revenue. Concessions. Merchandise. All of it neat. All of it too neat. Real money is messy. Real money has coffee stains. I started shooting. Page, flip, page, flip. My left palm stung where the old scar crossed it, the way it did when I was scared. "Four weeks," I muttered. "Four weeks until I'm on a stand in front of Carmine Marchetti. You can do forty pages in the dark." Flip. "Don't think about the courtroom." Flip. "Don't think about the judge." My thumb slipped. The phone dropped half an inch and caught. I stood very still, listening to my own heartbeat. The Zamboni hummed. Nothing else. "Fine. Keep going." One more cabinet. A second ledger, older, the cover cracked. I opened it flat and started over, faster now, because this was the whole job. One look at the books before the staff came in, before anyone had a reason to watch me. One slip and I was done. Not fired. Done. Page. Flip. Page. "Seven hundred dollars to a landscaping company," I said under my breath. "In a building with no grass." Flip. "And a thousand to the same landscaper the next week. Who are you, Green Thumb?" Somewhere below, a door closed. Soft. Not slammed. Careful. I killed the flashlight. The room went black except for the thin gray line under the door. My pulse was in my ears. "Roz?" I said, much too quietly. No answer. I slid the phone into my blazer pocket and eased the ledger shut, one inch at a time, the way you close a door on a sleeping child. Exits. One door. One window, painted shut, two floors up. Footsteps on the stairs. Slow. Unhurried. Heavy enough that I felt them through the soles of my shoes. Whoever it was didn't hurry. Whoever it was knew exactly where he was going. I made myself breathe. In for four. Out for four. Harlan taught me that, in the first week, in a safe house that smelled like microwaved soup. You're an auditor, I told myself. You got lost. You couldn't sleep. You wanted a head start. It's a little weird. Weird isn't dead. The footsteps stopped outside the door. Nothing moved. I could hear him breathing. Slow and even, like a man standing at the edge of a lake. "Hello?" I said, and I put the smile back on, though nobody could see it. "I'm so sorry. I'm the new auditor. I couldn't sleep and I thought, you know, get ahead. I should have asked." Silence. The knob turned. The door opened without a sound. He filled the frame. Six-three, maybe more, broad enough to block the hallway light, and the light behind him made him a shape before it made him a man. Close-cropped dark hair. A scar splitting his left eyebrow. Knuckles that looked like they'd lost an argument with a wall, and won. He smelled like cedar and cold air. He didn't shout. He didn't reach for me. He didn't even look at the cabinet I'd left open, or the phone bulging in my pocket, or my hand, which I realized was shaking against the ledger. He looked at my face. Not surprised. That was the part that rolled my stomach over. Surprised I could have handled. Surprised is a door you can talk through. "The books are on the second shelf," I tried. "I wasn't touching anything. I was just—" "Gia," he said. The room tilted. Not Ross. Gia. He said it low and flat, like a man setting something heavy on a table. My hand found the edge of the desk. "I'm sorry, who?" His gray eyes didn't move off mine. Storm-gray, steady, so calm it made me want to scream. A shout I could have survived. This was worse. He stepped inside. One step. The floor didn't even creak. Then he reached past me, slowly, so I could see every inch of it, and slid the old ledger from under my hand. He opened it to the last page I'd photographed. Ran one scarred finger down the margin. Closed it again and held it out to me. "You missed a page," Kane Reilly said.