Lorna Brought A Contract For Cameras Already Taken Down

Lorna wore a soft tan coat that had never brushed a fence post.

“Mai,” she said. “We could have handled this at home.”

“Whose home?”

She looked toward Esther's office.

“There's no reason to be unpleasant.”

Esther opened the door before I answered. A county attorney joined us and asked permission to take notes. Lorna agreed, then slid her envelope across the table.

Inside was a two-page agreement naming Rim Draw as my maintenance subcontractor. It claimed the right to collect all county payments, pay expenses, and retain a management fee.

The fee was forty percent.

“You thought I would pay two thousand dollars a month for office work?” I asked.

“For keeping you afloat,” Lorna said.

Esther turned to the signature page.

“This is signed by Chue Yang as Mai Yang's authorized agent. Where is the document granting that authority?”

“He's her husband.”

“Where is the document?”

Lorna moved one hand over the other.

“He said she wanted it.”

“Did you ask her?”

“He managed everything.”

The attorney wrote that down.

The agreement wasn't even the same false signature used on the bank-change form. Chue had used his own name here, as if writing the word agent could make him one.

I took out my original award.

“I allowed him to upload bills. The county hired me. I never hired you.”

Lorna glanced at my blue box.

“He said you threw those things away.”

I thought of my mother's three white stitches. She had repaired the bag because something useful didn't stop being useful just because someone else was tired of looking at it.

“He said a lot,” I told her.

Esther set the agreement aside.

“Let's talk about services. Which sites did your company maintain?”

“All ten.”

“Who did the field work?”

“Chue supervised it.”

“Who touched the cameras?”

“I don't know every worker's name.”

I opened my field ledger to February twenty-eighth.

“Four cameras were removed that day. C-04, C-05, C-09, and C-10. A shoulder project required the posts to come out. The county decided not to reinstall them.”

I laid down the signed removal receipt, then the approved price amendment. Ten units became six. Five thousand dollars became three thousand, starting March first.

“Those might have gone back up,” Lorna said.

“Did they?” Esther asked.

“I wasn't there.”

I spread out dated photographs. Each showed a camera's serial plate, its empty mount, and the county employee receiving the unit. The employee's truck number appeared in the last frame.

“Why take so many pictures?” Lorna asked.

“Because equipment disappears. Then people ask who had it last.”

The county attorney asked Esther to locate the engineering copy of the amendment. She sent a message, then checked its document number against mine.

They matched.

“Finance kept paying the old rate,” Esther said. “Our review should have caught that.”

“So this is your mistake,” Lorna said quickly.

“Accepting an incorrect invoice doesn't make it correct.”

The attorney requested Rim Draw's work logs and bank records. He explained that further requests might come through formal legal process. Lorna put the agreement back in her envelope, but he asked to keep a copy.

“Chue has everything,” she said.

After she left, Esther turned the invoice screen toward me.

Each of the four removed units had a monthly box marked Inspected And Operational.

Six months. Four units. Five hundred dollars per unit.

Twelve thousand dollars for cameras that weren't there.

I checked the multiplication twice. It wasn't hard math. That was what made it hurt.

“I thought he was hiding my earnings,” I said.

“These records raise another question,” Esther said. “We need to confirm where those units have been.”

I drove my route along U.S. 191 afterward. The wind laid rabbitbrush almost flat. A loose gate chain tapped a post near the crossing, and I tied it back so its shine wouldn't keep setting off the motion sensor.

Split Ear passed through just after noon. I knew her from the little white scars above her knee before I saw the torn ear.

I wrote the sighting down.

Then I cleaned a film of road salt from the lens and checked the test frame. A crooked horizon could spoil a count. So could a loose clock setting. My work was mostly small things kept right, one visit after another.

That evening, Adam called.

“Dad says you're trying to put him in jail over a family bank account.”

“It wasn't a family bank account.”

“Can I see what you have?”

“Yes.”

Before he arrived, Esther sent a message of her own.

An auditor would meet us at the county equipment shed at eight. The four numbered boxes were still inside a locked storage cage.