Three Hundred Twelve Doors

Episode 2 of 3 of Cash on the Third by Paul Ridgway

Inside the fence I started at A-1 at four in the morning with the big light, and I did it the way we did a lien walk, because that was the only procedure the job had for making a door tell the truth. You lay the light flat on the concrete at the bottom seal and watch for the break in the line. You knock twice. You listen to a count of five. You mark the sheet.

It took two nights. A-wing was climate controlled and full of furniture. C had the boats and the two men who restored mowers. When I got to B-42 the light line broke all the way across, which meant the unit was packed to the door, so I wrote FULL on the sheet and kept walking, because a paying unit being full was the least surprising thing on the property.

In the back building an orange extension cord ran along the baseboard from a corridor outlet, the outdoor kind, and I followed it to D-9 and told myself it belonged to the mower men in C.

D-9 was a five by ten, listed vacant, and its light line broke in the middle. Inside there was a rug rolled out on the concrete, four water jugs, a camp cot, a hot plate, a reading lamp, and a milk crate with a pair of glasses folded on it. There was a county transit schedule creased into eighths. There was a feed store calendar with nothing written on it anywhere except a pen ring around the ninth of October. And there was a shoebox of pay stubs, WAKEMAN FEED AND GRAIN, W NANCE, and the newest one was three weeks old.

I put every item back where it had been and pulled the door down and sat in the office until the sky went gray.

Roxanne opened at eight and found me still there.

“You look like the inside of a thermos,” she said, and put her purse in the drawer and got straight to it, which was her way. “Did you initial the overlock book? Eleven units have locks hanging on them and no removal written down and Bernard is going to blame me at the audit.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You say that.”

The returned mail lived in a shoebox on the file cabinet that nobody had ever filed. B-42’s letter from March of 2024 was in it, still sealed, BOX CLOSED stamped across the front, which meant the code I mailed that account had never reached a human being.

“Could Bernard be running something out here off the books?” I said. I wanted it said out loud in daylight with a witness in the room.

Roxanne laughed at me. “Bernard charges his own mother for a twenty amp. He raised the church.” Which was true, and it was why I let it go, along with the fact that he had spent that entire week in Wakeman walking the lot with the insurance man. She went out back to complain about the recycling tote, which was overflowing again, and I pulled up camera six.

Beautiful dumpster. Out of frame behind it were the cut panel in the fence, the ditch, and the gravel pull-off where the church parked its van. Camera one watched the front gate and every vehicle that came off 41. Gate two had no camera at all, because a gate with no handle on the outside was not a way in.

I stayed past shift and got the day sheet and my deposit to agree, which took an hour, because Bernard comped balances in Ledgerline and forgot to tell me, and then my drawer was short on paper and fine in the safe.

The following Wednesday I stood at gate two from three o’clock until half past with my hood up and the tablet face down against my leg.

Nothing keyed. No chirp, no latch, no 4407, and the morning roll came off the Sentinel with a clean Wednesday on it for the first time in three years.

I had walked three hundred twelve doors with a flashlight and marked a sheet at every one, and the walk sheets hung on a clipboard under the office window where any tenant could read them while they waited for me to finish a money order. D-9 had a line on that clipboard in my handwriting.

So he could read, and he had stopped, and a man who stopped had somewhere he would rather be or something he was waiting on.

Thursday afternoon, instead of sleeping, I called Roxanne at home.

“Who cleaned out B-42 in 2019?”

She was quiet long enough that I checked the screen to see whether the call had dropped. Then she asked if I could come by the house in the morning.

She would not say it on the phone.

Cash on the Third · ← The Third of the Month · The Overlock Book →