Chapter Ten The Man Who Used to Own the
Truck
Rome and Tookie spent the night in a motel off Pulaski Highway that took cash and didn’t ask questions, the kind of place with a bolted-down television and a bedspread Rome wouldn’t let his brother touch without a blanket from the car laid over it first. He didn’t sleep.
He sat up in the room’s one chair with the notebook in his lap and his phone face-down on the nightstand, because the man in the gray suit’s deadline had come and gone hours ago with no call at all, which frightened Rome more than a call would have.
Silence from a man that patient meant one of two things — either he’d decided Rome wasn’t worth the trouble anymore, which seemed unlikely given everything that had happened on that dock, or he was simply waiting, confident enough in his own timeline that Rome’s fear didn’t require managing.
Around four in the morning, with Tookie finally asleep and breathing even under the blanket-covered bedspread, Rome opened the notebook to its very first page again, the one with the date nineteen years back and the hurried, right-leaning handwriting, and made himself read it slower than he ever had before, not for names this time but for anything that might tell him who these people actually were.
Rome thought about Nuck’s cousin’s Town Car ride two nights ago, the diner, the strange calm that had come over him standing on that dock with a nine-year-old boy’s life balanced against a stack of paper he never asked to find.
He thought about what Problem had said — every hand that book ever passed through has somebody left in this city who remembers — and understood that if he wanted any chance of surviving what was coming, he needed to stop being the person this book was happening to and start being the person figuring out what it actually was.
Which meant finding out who owned that Tahoe before it sat abandoned in impound for however many years.
He waited until seven, when Tookie was up and eating a vending machine breakfast Rome felt guilty about but had no better option for, and called Nuck from the motel parking lot, keeping his voice low even though there was nobody around to hear it.
“I need a favor and I need you to be careful asking for it,” Rome said. “Lot forty-seven, the Tahoe I bought Saturday. I need to know who it was registered to before impound. Original owner, not whoever last drove it.”
“Rome, that kind of pull’s gonna leave a trail. Somebody’s gonna notice a query like that.”
“I know. I need it anyway.” Rome watched a truck pull into the motel lot two spaces down, held his breath until the driver got out and turned out to be nobody, just a trucker in for the night, and let it back out slow.
“I can’t keep running blind, Nuck. Whoever hid that book in the dash meant to come back for it.
If I can find out who that was, maybe I find out why it’s still sitting unclaimed, and maybe that tells me something about who I’m actually up against.”
Nuck was quiet a long moment on the other end. “I got a guy at the DMV owes me from way back. I’ll see what he can pull without his name showing up on it. Give me a few hours.”
It took four. Rome spent them in the motel room with Tookie, running through math flashcards out of sheer stubborn habit, because some part of him refused to let one more piece of his brother’s normal life get taken away by any of this, even while another part of him sat rigid by the window every time a car door slammed outside.
Nuck called back a little after noon.
“Vehicle was registered to a Marcus Deluca, address out in Highlandtown, but here’s the thing — registration lapsed six years ago and the plates got flagged in a case file that’s sealed.
My guy couldn’t get past the seal, but he could see there was one, which by itself tells you something, because regular impound cases don’t get sealed like that. ”
“Deluca still at that address?”
“That’s the other thing. My guy pulled a public records search while he was in there — Marcus Deluca’s been dead four years.
Overdose, according to the obituary, out in the county.
But Rome—” Nuck’s voice dropped, careful.
“The obituary listed a wife. Denise Deluca. And there’s a Denise Deluca still showing an address in Highlandtown, far as public records go. Same house.”
Rome sat with that a long moment, turning it over.
A dead man who’d once owned the vehicle a notebook had been hidden inside, a sealed case file nobody could get past, and a widow still living in the same house six years after her husband’s plates got flagged for something serious enough to warrant a seal.
It wasn’t proof of anything. But it was the first thread Rome had that led somewhere other than another armed man waiting to take the notebook off his hands.
“I need that address.”
“Rome, I gotta say this even though I know you ain’t gonna listen — showing up at some dead man’s widow’s house asking questions about a notebook connected to two decades of city corruption is maybe the single most dangerous thing you could do right now.
You don’t know who’s watching that house.
You don’t know if she’s involved, if she’s scared, if she’s the one who’s gonna call whoever’s looking for you the second you knock on her door. ”
“I don’t have a better option.” Rome looked over at Tookie, who was watching cartoons with the sound low, doing his best impression of a kid who wasn’t listening to every word of his brother’s phone call.
“Everybody in this city wants something from me and none of them are telling me why. I need one person who might actually tell me the truth, even if it’s ugly. ”
Nuck gave him the address, and made Rome promise, twice, to call the second he left the house whether it went well or not.
He left Tookie with Otis that afternoon — a decision that cost Rome more than he let on, handing his little brother off to a near-stranger with a car service badge and a quiet manner, but Otis had proven himself once already and Rome was running out of people he trusted enough to ask twice — and drove to Highlandtown alone, taking the same paranoid, doubled-back route he’d started taking everywhere, checking his mirrors on streets he’d never once needed to check them on before this week.
The house was small, vinyl-sided, a chain-link fence around a yard with more weeds than grass, a wheelchair ramp built crooked over the front steps that looked homemade rather than professionally installed.
Rome sat in his truck across the street a full ten minutes before he made himself get out, running through what he’d even say to a woman he’d never met about a dead husband he knew almost nothing about.
She answered the door on the third knock, a heavyset woman in her fifties with tired eyes and a cardigan pulled tight against the cold coming through the open door, and looked at Rome for a long moment with an expression that told him, before he’d said a single word, that she already knew exactly why a stranger might show up at her door asking about her husband.
“You found it,” she said. Not a question. “Didn’t you.”
Rome’s mouth went dry. “Found what, ma’am?”
“Don’t.” Something hard came into her voice, grief and fear tangled together so completely they’d become the same emotion.
“Don’t stand on my porch and lie to me, son.
I’ve had four years of people not lying to my face because they think I’m too far gone with sorrow to notice, and I notice everything now, everything, because noticing is all I got left of him.
” She stepped back from the door, not quite an invitation, but not a refusal either.
“You better come in before somebody sees you standing there.”
Rome stepped inside, and Denise Deluca closed the door behind him, and threw the deadbolt, and stood with her back against it for a moment like she needed the wood at her spine to keep standing at all.
“My husband kept that book for eleven years,” she said, before Rome could ask a single question.
“Eleven years, and it ate him alive one day at a time, until the day he finally decided he couldn’t hold it anymore and hid it somewhere he thought nobody would ever look, and told me if anything happened to him, don’t go looking for it, don’t tell anybody it existed, just let it disappear.
” Her eyes, wet now, found Rome’s and held them.
“He died six months after he hid it. They said overdose. He’d been clean four years.
” She let that sit in the air between them a moment, heavy with everything she wasn’t quite saying out loud.
“Whatever they told you about that book, whoever sent you here — you need to understand something, right now, before you take one more step into this. Everybody who’s ever held it ends up the same way.
Dead, or wishing they were. There’s no version of this where you walk away whole. ”
Rome pulled the notebook from under his jacket, slow, giving her time to react to the sight of it before he opened it, and Denise made a sound low in her throat, half a sob, half something closer to relief, like she was looking at a photograph of someone she’d buried.
He turned to the first page and held it out so she could see the hurried, right-leaning handwriting without having to touch it herself.
“This the first thing in it,” Rome said. “Runs clean through the 2200 block, don’t touch, already paid. Mean anything to you?”
Denise didn’t answer right away. She reached out with two fingers and touched the edge of the page, not the writing itself, like even that much contact cost her something.
“That’s his hand,” she said quietly. “Marcus wrote that. First entry in the whole book, the day he started it, because the man who’d carried it before him died sudden and Marcus was the one who ended up holding it whether he wanted the job or not — same as you, seems like.
” Her voice cracked slightly on the last word.
“The 2200 block of Ashland was ours. Where we grew up, where his mother still lived at the time. He wrote that line first, before anything else, before any name or any dollar amount, because the very first thing he did with that book, the very first thing anybody who’s ever held it does, is protect what’s theirs.
He paid somebody, some captain, I never knew who exactly, to make sure that block stayed untouched no matter what else happened in this city.
Whole eleven years he kept that book, that block never had a single raid, not one.
He used to say it was the only decent thing he ever managed to do with something that ugly.
” She let go of the page, stepped back, wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself like the memory itself had let cold air into the house.
“So yes. It means something. It means the man you’re holding in your hands right now loved his mother enough to make one corner of this whole rotten city safe for her, and it still killed him anyway.
You understand what I’m telling you? Even doing the one good thing with it wasn’t enough to save him. ”