21

Howell huddled over the ledger sheets and studied them for some minutes. “Look at this,” he said to Scotty.

“You bastard. How could you leave my credit card there for Eric Sutherland to find?”

“Listen, Scotty, if you’d stayed with the boat like I told you to, it never would have happened. But no, you had to sneak up behind me and scare the shit out of me and make me drop the card. I might also add that if you’d done what I told you to, we’d have saved ourselves a cold swim in the wee hours.”

Scotty pouted. “You know, I think it’s extremely rude of you to point out a person’s little mistakes and make a big thing of them. That’s all in the past.”

“Good, now look at this.” He rattled the pages.

“Except my credit card isn’t in the past, it’s in Bo Scully’s pocket, and my charge account application is on its way to him!”

“Well, just intercept the goddamned letter, all right? Don’t you handle the mail around there?”

“Usually.”

“Well, just make sure you handle it every day until the letter comes. Now, for Christ’s sake, come here and look at these pages, and help me figure this thing out.”

Scotty heaved herself off the sofa and came to the desk. “What, then?”

“Okay, look. The letters LSCA and a number are written here alongside a date in the margin. There’s a long list of them. The dates go back for just over three years, and they’re numbered one through twenty-eight. Then, out here in the margin, there is another number opposite each LSCA. Now, I don’t think this is any sort of a code. I think it’s a schedule.”

“And the numbers in the right margin?” Scotty asked, pointing to a matching column.

“Well, they’re two-digit numbers, varying from fifteen to sixty, but always increasing or decreasing in increments of five.”

“Could be money. Add some zeros, and it would be a lot of money.”

“Good thought. So what have we got here? A schedule of deliveries and payments, maybe?“

“Sounds good to me. Deliveries of drugs.”

“We’ve nothing to indicate that, unless the right margin numbers are money. If he’s either paying or receiving sums from fifteen to sixty thousand dollars per shipment, it’s drugs.”

“That doesn’t seem so much. I thought drug deals went into millions.”

“Sure, but what if these numbers represent commissions?”

Scotty ran a finger down the pages, pointing out another series of letters and numbers. “What about these? They’re interspersed after every four or five of the LSCA dates.”

“I don’t know,” Howell said. “We’ve got an A and a number, an F and a number, Z, number, F, number, A, number. The numbers are all seven digits, group of three, group of four. There’s a date next to each letter, too. Probably some other sort of schedule, but not as frequent as the other one.”

“Could be. But a schedule for what?”

“Who knows? But it’s important enough for him to hide it very carefully. Tell me about your original tip, the one that put you onto Bo.”

“Not much to tell. Let’s just say that it was somebody in state law enforcement, who would be in a position to pick up some scuttlebutt.”

“Is somebody running an investigation on Bo, then?”

“Nope. That was his point. Somebody should be running an investigation, but nobody is.” She smiled. “Except me.”

“Somebody’s protecting him, then? Heading off any investigation?”

“My source didn’t say exactly that, but that was my impression. You think there’s some sort of organization?”

Howell shrugged. “We don’t know for sure whether there’s even a crime, let alone a conspiracy. But if you’re right, and there are drugs involved, then there would have to be. It’s a long way from South America to north Georgia, and to move anything in quantity would take all sorts of help.”

Long after Scotty had gone to bed and left him trying to work, Howell woke with his head on the desk. He had an awful headache. It was pitch dark, and only the glow from the word processor’s monitor screen lit the room. There was a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to the machine, and an empty glass. Howell poured himself a stiff drink.

Maybe it would dull the headache. He could not bear to look at the blank screen any more, so he walked out onto the cabin’s deck, taking his drink with him.

Scotty had gone to bed early, and he had determined to make a start on the actual writing of Lurton Pitts’s book. He had it outlined on tape and in his head. He knew where to begin. But he had not been able to.

The moon was low, making a long streak of silver across the water. It was very beautiful, he thought, and he should know. He had spent enough time looking at it instead of working. He wondered why he could not clear the hurdle of chapter one. Perhaps, he mused, it was because once he actually started to write, he was a hack, finally and confirmed; a man who would ghost write something he loathed, just for the money. He cherished the irrational thought that, until he actually wrote chapter one, he could give Pitts back his expense money and save his self-respect. But the more he thought about it, the more he understood that his point of no return had been reached when he had packed the car, left his wife, and come to this place.

He looked out over the lake. No hallucinations, no spirits, crickets chirping loudly, all normal.

It began to be chilly, and he went back into the living room to retrieve a sweater from the back of his desk chair. As he reached out for it, his eye traveled to the empty monitor screen. It was not empty. It was filled with words.

Puzzled, he sat down and read the heading. “CHAPTER ONE,” it read. “How I Found God.” He pressed the scroll button, and more lines worked their way up the screen, lines that were, somehow, familiar, but that he simply couldn’t remember having written. It was all there, eight or nine pages of it, the fruit of his outline, in a prose style close to the manner of speaking of Lurton Pitts. He read it to the end, then pressed another button, sending the text to be stored on a disk.

Could he have been so drunk that he had written that without remembering it? Was that possible? Maybe, but that drunk, and he wouldn’t have been able to write. Or would he? The last thing he remembered before resting his head on the desk was a totally blank screen, glowing eerily in the dark room.

He tossed back the rest of his drink and lumbered toward the bed, baffled and exhausted.

Scotty sweated out the mail for a week. Each morning, the postman arrived about nine-thirty, dumped the usual load of circulars and letters on the station counter, tipped his hat and went on his way. Each morning, Scotty contrived to be at the counter instead of her desk when the postman arrived, beating Sally and Mike to the mail. Bo never arrived before ten.

On the eighth morning, the postman was a little late, and Bo, inexplicably, was a little early. Scotty looked up from the counter and, to her horror, saw them practically bump into each other just outside the front door. The postman went on his way, and Bo walked in with the mail under his arm.

Scotty’s first impulse was to vault over the counter and wrest it from him. Stifling this urge, she walked back to her desk, to be more in his path as he went into his office. She could see the letter as he came toward her; it was the same watermarked gold of the envelope in which her monthly Neiman’s bill came. She tried not to stare at it, but she knew she was a minute or so from an extremely, perhaps fatally embarrassing moment. Bo stopped at the radio to talk with Mike.

Scotty sat down, then stood up and pretended to go through some papers on her desk. Bo started to walk toward his office. It was time to panic, Scotty thought. All she could think of was to faint.