Ramona Read My License Before She Read the President's Complaint

Ramona Ortega laughed when she saw the warning about the truckload.

It was a bright, rolling laugh. A clerk at the next desk looked up.

"Sorry," Ramona said. "Bad timing. He thinks concrete beats a city record."

She was forty-five, a Mexican American woman with a practical streak that showed in everything from her scuffed boots to the tape measure clipped beside her city badge. As Bisbee's municipal preservation engineer, she had more use for a sound wall than a grand speech.

"Grout," I said.

"Even worse. Sit down, Nabil."

I placed my license on her desk.

It was a city inspection-access license for the courtyard's monitoring bay. It named me, gave the entrance location, and listed the narrow work I could do: check airflow, read gauges, and use the existing camera port. It did not allow mining, repairs, or passage beyond the locked barrier.

An access grant recorded with the property papers allowed the city and its licensed inspector through the courtyard hatch. Our association's rules could not cancel that grant.

"Still current," she said. "And your Monday work order was approved by my office."

"Tell my neighbors."

"First, show me what made you ask for the work order."

I gave her my air log. Saturday's reading was circled. Then I showed her the memory card.

The little camera belonged to me. Its use was listed in my license. It sat behind an old gauge plate, looking through a narrow borehole that survey crews had drilled years earlier. The hole reached the far side of the barrier. No person could fit through it.

I had installed the camera during my scheduled spring check and left it recording on motion. Nobody needed to see its housing to inspect the gauge. That had kept it safe from casual hands.

On Monday, I had retrieved the card after the strange airflow.

Ramona watched the clip without laughing.

A work light flicked on. A man in a brown cap knelt beside a stone wall marked with a white survey cross. He drilled beneath the cross. Another man carried away chunks in a bucket.

The camera clock read Saturday, 6:14 p.m.

"Clock checked?" she asked.

"At installation. I filmed my phone beside the unit. Kept the whole card."

"Good. We'll still compare it with outside records."

She called another employee in to witness the handoff. They copied the card, logged its number, and sealed the original in an evidence envelope. I signed a statement describing where the camera had sat and every time I had touched it.

"Don't trim anything," Ramona told me.

"I haven't. There's six minutes of a moth."

Her laugh escaped again. Then she covered her mouth.

She brought up the old survey on her screen. The white cross marked a protected support wall, a thick section left to help hold the roof beneath the courtyard's east edge.

"That hole changes the loads," she said. "It also changes where the air goes."

"That's what my thread said."

"Your thread got there before my inbox."

She issued a hazard notice stopping the grout work and barring all entry until her team checked the roof. The notice required the contractor to preserve the site. She sent it to Sterling, the contractor, and every association address on file.

My inspection license did not make me king of the mine. The new notice applied to me too.

I liked that. A rule that reached everybody felt like a rule.

Outside her office, my phone rang.

"You have embarrassed this association," Sterling said.

"Your work was stopped by an engineer."

"On your complaint."

"On a damaged wall."

His breath rasped against the phone.

"Voss has people booked. Equipment hired. If the bill rises, it comes to you."

Abel Voss. I wrote the name on the back of my envelope.

"Send the contract," I said.

"You do not give me orders."

He hung up.

Ramona found me sitting on the bench outside. She carried two paper cups of water and another file.

"Voss Site Works," she said. "They submitted a drainage application last week. It hadn't cleared review. They started anyway."

The application described clearing old rubble and sealing a nuisance opening. Its sketch left out the white survey cross and the protected wall.

At the bottom was a box labeled Technical Inspector.

My license number filled the box.

Below it sat a neat slanting signature that claimed to be mine.

"I didn't sign that."

"I figured. We need your formal statement."

I looked again. Whoever had written my name had spelled Khoury correctly. They had even copied the long tail on my final letter.

Ramona turned over the last sheet.

Attached was an authorization from Sterling, naming me as the person who had requested that the passage be sealed.