Chapter Two What Was Never Written Down
It was wrapped in a plastic grocery bag, the handles knotted twice, then again for good measure, like whoever hid it hadn’t trusted a single knot to hold.
Rome worked the knots loose with fingers still black from engine grease, and underneath the plastic was a second layer — a freezer bag, the kind people used to keep weed dry, sealed shut and gone cloudy with age.
Inside that: a notebook.
Not a phone. Not a gun. Not the brick of cash his mind had already halfway conjured up in the second between finding the cavity and pulling the bag free, because in Rome’s experience things hidden behind dashboards were usually one of those three, and a man could dream.
Just a notebook, the kind you’d buy for a dollar-fifty at the corner store — black marble composition cover, the corners soft and rounded from handling, the elastic band that used to hold it shut long gone brittle and snapped.
Rome sat up on the creeper too fast and cracked his head on the underside of the dash, cursed, rubbed the spot, and slid out into the bay with the notebook in his lap like it might go off.
The garage was empty. Nuck had left an hour ago to pick up his own kids, and the radio was still murmuring through its postgame wrap-up to nobody. Rome wiped his hands on a shop rag — didn’t do much, his hands stayed gray no matter how many times he wiped them — and opened the cover.
The first page had a date at the top, nineteen years back, and under it, in handwriting that leaned hard to the right like the writer had been in a hurry his whole life: a name, an address, and a single line — runs clean through the 2200 block, don’t touch, already paid.
Rome frowned and turned the page.
More of the same. Names — first names only, sometimes just initials — paired with addresses, dollar amounts, dates.
Some entries were a single line. Others ran half a page, dense with abbreviations Rome didn’t recognize, shorthand for something he was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be able to read.
A few pages in, the handwriting changed — a different hand, tighter, more careful, like someone had picked the notebook up years after the first writer put it down and kept going in their own style.
Then it changed again. And again. Four hands, maybe five, spread out over what looked like two decades of dated entries, each one taking up where the last left off like they were passing a baton nobody outside this book knew existed.
Rome had grown up two blocks off North Avenue.
He knew what a lot of the shorthand meant even if he didn’t want to.
CI wasn’t confidential information, it was confidential informant.
A string of numbers next to a badge-sounding designation wasn’t a phone extension, it was a badge number.
And near the middle of the book, in the tight, careful handwriting, was a page that made Rome’s stomach drop somewhere south of his boots — a name he recognized, a name that had been on the local news eight months ago standing next to the mayor at a press conference about a gang takedown on Milton Avenue, the kind of press conference where everybody in uniform got applauded and nobody asked who’d tipped them off in the first place.
Next to that name, in the notebook, in plain handwriting like it was nothing at all: 20% cut, same as always, don’t call the house.
Rome closed the notebook.
He sat there in the quiet garage with his heart doing something uneven in his chest, listening to the radio drone about a quarterback’s completion percentage like the world hadn’t just tilted six degrees under him.
He told himself, the way people do when they’ve stumbled into something too big to be real, that he was misreading it.
That it was somebody’s fiction, a rap lyric notebook, a screenplay some corner-store dreamer had been working on and hidden away out of embarrassment rather than fear.
But he’d seen enough real ledgers in his life — his mother’s, when she was juggling three jobs’ worth of pay stubs against bills that never stopped coming, the ones at Nuck’s garage when cash jobs needed to stay off the books — to know the difference between fiction and bookkeeping.
This wasn’t a story. This was somebody’s accounting, kept in the plainest possible language, the way you’d only write something down if you needed to remember it and never intended for anyone else to read it.
He opened it again, careful now, like the pages might bite.
Near the back, the entries thinned out, the most recent dates only a year or two old, the handwriting the tightest and most recent of the four or five he’d counted.
The very last entry had no name attached to it at all, just a short line that read: hold until told otherwise.
Under that, nothing. Blank pages for the rest of the book.
Rome sat with that for a long minute. Hold until told otherwise.
Whoever wrote that had meant to come back for it.
Whoever had hidden this book behind a dashboard panel in a Tahoe that ended up impounded and forgotten hadn’t planned on losing it.
Something had happened — an arrest, a death, a disappearance, Rome had no way to know — that broke the chain between somebody putting this book somewhere safe and somebody coming back to retrieve it.
And now it was sitting in Rome’s lap in a cold garage bay on Biddle Street, and Rome was a twenty-seven-year-old tow truck driver with six hundred dollars’ worth of a bad decision parked six feet away and a nine-year-old brother waiting on a math quiz.
His phone buzzed in his pocket — Tookie’s school app, a reminder about tomorrow’s test — and the ordinary mundane buzz of it against his hip made him flinch so hard he nearly dropped the notebook.
He wrapped it back in the freezer bag, then the grocery bag, tied the knots the way he’d found them out of some instinct he couldn’t name, and stood there in the middle of the garage holding it, trying to decide what a reasonable person did with something like this.
Take it to the police. That thought lasted about four seconds before it collapsed under its own weight — half the names in the book, as far as he’d read, wore badges.
Burn it. Simple, clean, the kind of decision his mother would’ve made in about ten seconds flat, because she’d spent her whole life teaching Rome and Tookie the same lesson over and over: don’t touch what isn’t yours, and if you touch it by accident, put it down and walk away fast. She used to say the corner never asks permission before it takes something from you.
She’d have taken one look at this notebook and known exactly what corner it came from.
But some other part of Rome — the part that had watched men get promoted at press conferences for busts that never made sense, the part that had lost a cousin to a robbery case that closed with no arrests and no explanation, the part that had grown up watching the neighborhood get squeezed by people who always seemed to know exactly which corners to leave alone — that part of him wanted to know more.
Wanted to understand what he was actually holding before he decided to let it go.
He didn’t burn it that night.
He drove to his cousin Renata’s to pick up Tookie, the grocery bag stashed under the driver’s seat of his personal car instead of the tow truck, which felt marginally safer for reasons he couldn’t have explained to anyone.
Tookie came out bouncing, backpack half-open, already talking before he hit the passenger seat about a video some kid had shown him at lunch, and Rome nodded along and said the right things and felt the whole time like there was a second conversation happening underneath the first one, a silent one, just him and the bag under the seat.
“You good?” Tookie asked at a red light, sharper than a nine-year-old had any business being. He’d gotten that from their mother too — the radar for when Rome was carrying something he wasn’t saying out loud.
“I’m good,” Rome said. “Long day. Bought a truck at auction.”
“Nice truck?”
“Truck’s a mess. Might be worth something, though.”
That part, at least, wasn’t a lie.
They quizzed math flashcards at the kitchen table that night, Tookie getting long division wrong in the same specific way three times running until it finally clicked, and Rome made himself present for every minute of it, because that was the deal he’d made with himself ten months ago at their mother’s funeral — that whatever else fell apart, Tookie got a normal life, a fed life, a life where his big brother showed up for math quizzes and didn’t let anything else crowd that out.
It was only after Tookie was asleep, the apartment gone quiet except for the radiator ticking through its cycle, that Rome pulled the notebook back out at the kitchen table and read it again, start to finish, this time taking his own notes on a scrap of paper — names he recognized, names he didn’t, a running tally that grew longer and more frightening with every page.
By the time he closed the composition book for the second time that night, his own scrap of paper had eleven names on it.
Two of them were cops. One was a judge whose face he’d seen on campaign signs stapled to telephone poles all over East Baltimore for the last election.
One was a name that made him sit back in his chair and stare at the wall for a full minute, because it belonged to a city councilman who’d spoken at his mother’s church not four months ago, shaking hands, promising better funding for the rec center on Ashland.
Rome folded the scrap of paper into his wallet, wrapped the notebook back in its bags, and sat in the dark kitchen a long time before he finally found a place to put it — not the apartment’s one closet, too obvious, but taped inside the access panel of the water heater in the hall closet, a spot he only knew about because he’d replaced the unit himself two winters back.
He told himself it was temporary. A place to think, not a place to hide forever.
He didn’t yet understand that somewhere across the city, in rooms he had no reason to know existed, people were already realizing that a notebook which hadn’t been opened in over a year had just changed hands — because the last time anyone had gone looking for it, the Tahoe had still been sitting untouched in a police impound lot, and a phone call had just gone out asking why that was no longer true.