Chapter 2
Mullins took one half-step toward the podium. His shadow fell across the page.
"Let go of the book," he said.
I didn't.
He reached for it. I pressed both hands down flat against the podium wood and held the pages open. He pulled. The spine of the book flexed, the paper creaked, and I let it flex, and I did not release.
"Specialist Delgado," he said, and now his voice had dropped into that quiet register that senior NCOs use when they're about to give you an order they know you can't refuse. "Step away from the podium."
"I'm logging a discrepancy, Sergeant."
"You're what?"
"I'm logging a discrepancy."
He looked at me for a second like I'd spoken a different language. Then he laughed — short, one note, meant for the line behind him. A couple of drivers laughed with him. Not all of them. Not most of them. But a couple.
That's when I noticed the thing I already knew but had never seen from this close.
The signature was in his left hand.
Mullins is right-handed. I'd watched him sign entry books for a year. His pen clips to his right chest pocket. His thick stainless watch sits on his right wrist. He drinks coffee with his right hand, unlocks the shack door with his right hand, writes his own name on the maintenance roster with his right hand — block letters, hard downstrokes, the kind of writing you learn in a motor pool and never unlearn.
His right palm was bandaged. Two weeks ago he'd told everyone at the shack that he'd cut it on the shack door hinge. He'd been carrying that bandage like a prop, waving it around when he needed to look injured and hiding it when he needed to look serious.
Every page in that logbook going back months was filled with right-handed block letters. I'd flipped through them enough times in the early mornings, matching my pocket log, learning the shape of his handwriting the way you learn a suspect's walk.
This page was different. The signature was left-handed — slightly slanted, the downstrokes pulling the wrong way, the last letter of his name trailing off soft instead of hard.
The kind of signature you write when your dominant hand is wrapped in gauze and there's nobody at the desk to watch you switch.
I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. I just kept my fingers flat on the page next to that name, and I looked at him, and I watched him understand that I was seeing it.
His right hand came down on the podium, bandaged palm flat, and he leaned in.
"You want to explain to me what you think you're doing?"
"I want to know who signed this entry at 06:38," I said.
"I did."
"Right-handed or left?"
His mouth opened. Then it closed.
Behind him, the line was dead silent. Forty engines idling. The QRF vehicle ticking as it cooled. A driver two cars back had his phone out, not even pretending to hide it.
Mullins stood there with his bandaged hand pressed to the podium and his eyes moving from the page to my face to the page again, and I could see him building the next sentence. The one where he took the book out of my hands and wrote me up for insubordination and this whole thing went away.
That's when the shack door opened.
Advertisement