Chapter Eleven What Denise Knew
Denise Deluca made coffee neither of them drank, the ritual of it clearly more for her hands than for Rome’s benefit, and sat across a kitchen table scarred with decades of use, turning a chipped mug slowly between her palms while she decided, visibly, how much more she was willing to say.
“You want to know how it started,” she said finally.
It wasn’t a question. “Everybody who ever comes asking about that book wants to know how it started, like there’s some clean beginning to it that’ll make the rest of it make sense.
There isn’t. But I’ll tell you what Marcus told me, for whatever that’s worth. ”
Rome sat very still, the notebook back under his jacket, and said nothing, because he’d learned enough in twenty-seven years of hard conversations to know that silence pulled more truth out of people than questions did.
“Started with a cop, way back, before Marcus’s time even — this would be close to twenty years now.
A cop who got tired of watching every case he built collapse the second it touched somebody with real money or real connections behind them.
So he started writing it down. Not for justice, don’t go thinking that, nothing so clean as justice.
He started writing it down as insurance.
Every time somebody paid to make a case disappear, he wrote down who paid and who took it, and he kept that book close, because a man who knows where every body’s buried is a man nobody wants to make disappear himself.
” Denise’s eyes had gone distant, reciting something she’d clearly turned over in her own mind a thousand times in six years of grief.
“That cop passed it to somebody he trusted when he got sick, and that person passed it to somebody else, and on down the line, cop to dealer to cop again, whoever had enough weight in this city to keep it safe and enough reason to keep adding to it. Marcus got it from a man named Otis Renner, ran the whole east side before he got sent up for a fifteen stretch. Renner told Marcus the same thing everybody tells whoever comes next — that book isn’t a weapon you use.
It’s a wall you hide behind. The second you start using what’s in it to actually go after somebody, the second everybody whose name is in there stops being scared of what you know and starts being scared of what you’re willing to do with it.
And scared men band together against a threat a lot faster than they ever band together for anything good. ”
“Somebody’s already tried to buy it off me,” Rome said quietly. “Hundred thousand cash. Man in a suit, real polite about it.”
Denise’s mouth pulled into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“That’ll be Whitfield, or somebody working for him.
Man’s been the fixer for half the names in that book for longer than you’ve been alive — smooths things over, makes sure everybody stays quiet, makes sure the machine keeps running clean on the surface no matter what’s happening underneath it.
If he came himself instead of sending somebody rougher, that’s not kindness, understand.
That’s how much they want it back without a mess.
Whitfield only handles things personally when the stakes are high enough that a mess would cost somebody a whole lot more than a hundred thousand dollars.
” She wrapped both hands around the mug like she needed the warmth of it even though the coffee had long since gone cold.
“There’s a judge in that book, isn’t there.
I know there is, because there’s been one in every version of it since before Marcus even had it.
And there’s usually somebody a lot higher than a judge, too, if you read close enough — somebody whose name never shows up plain, just initials, just a title, because even a fixer knows better than to write a sitting official’s full name where anybody could stumble onto it. ”
Rome thought of the councilman’s name he’d found written out plain as day, no shorthand at all, and a chill went through him that had nothing to do with the cold coffee or the drafty little kitchen.
“How do I know if it’s safe to use it?” Rome asked.
“You said it’s a wall, not a weapon. But somebody grabbed my little brother out of a school pickup line two days ago.
If it’s not a weapon, then what am I supposed to do with it?
Just carry it around forever, waiting for the next person to come after him again? ”
Denise’s face crumpled slightly, old grief and fresh fear mixing together in a way that made her look, for a moment, twenty years older than she was.
“That’s the question that killed my husband, baby.
Sat right where you’re sitting some nights, asking himself the same thing, going back and forth between burning it and using it and just handing it over to whoever offered the most money that week, and never landing anywhere, because there isn’t a good answer.
Every choice costs something. Burn it, and you’ve thrown away the only leverage that’s ever kept some of these people honest even a little bit.
Use it, and you’ve made yourself a target nobody in this city can protect.
Sell it, and you’ve handed the whole machine right back to whoever’s cruelest enough to run it next.
” She reached across the table, took Rome’s hand in both of hers, her grip surprisingly strong for a woman who looked, in every other way, worn down to nothing.
“The only thing I know for sure, after watching what it did to Marcus, is that the book only stays a wall as long as everybody in this city believes you might use it as a weapon someday. The second you convince them you never will — the second you look weak, or scared, or like you’re just some kid who stumbled into something too big for him — that’s the second it stops protecting you and starts being just a very heavy, very dangerous object with your fingerprints all over it. ”
A sharp knock at the front door cut through the kitchen like a gunshot, and Denise’s whole body went rigid, coffee mug clattering slightly against the table.
“You expecting anybody?” Rome whispered.
“Nobody comes to this house.” Denise was already up, moving toward the front window with the careful, practiced quiet of someone who’d learned to move that way out of necessity rather than instinct.
She peered through a gap in the curtain and went very pale.
“Black sedan,” she said, voice barely above a breath.
“Two men. I don’t know them, but I know that kind of car, and I know that kind of standing-still-and-waiting they’re doing on my porch.
” She turned back to Rome, eyes wide with a fear that had clearly lived in this house a long time before Rome ever knocked on its door.
“Back door, off the kitchen. There’s an alley runs behind these houses, comes out two streets over by the church.
Go. Now. Don’t look back at this house, don’t come back here again — I mean that with love, son, but I’ve buried one person to that notebook already and I won’t survive burying a second. ”
Rome was already moving, notebook pressed flat against his ribs under his jacket, hand on the back doorknob, when Denise caught his sleeve one last time, her grip fierce.
“Whatever you decide to do with it,” she said, “decide it fast, and decide it like a man who intends to still be standing at the end of it. Marcus decided too slow, and it cost him everything.” She let go, pushed him toward the door. “Go.”
Rome went out into the cold alley behind the house at a dead run, the sharp knock on the front door already turning into something harder, more insistent, and didn’t stop moving until he’d put three full blocks between himself and the small vinyl-sided house where a woman was about to lie, again, to strangers about a book that had already taken everything from her once.