Brodersen looked past him at the rack. At the rows of shallow steel pans, gleaming under the fluorescent tubes, each one with its strip of blue tape and its date and its little colored dot. He looked at them for a long time.
"Huh," he said quietly.
They went into the office. Lorenz knelt in front of the safe and spun the dial, right three times, left two, right once, the combination Dorrit had watched him memorize, and the bolt threw, and the heavy door swung open with the soft sound that he loved, and there was the index card taped inside it. Two people count. Always two. Count it twice. Write it once. If anybody asks for the bag, give them the bag. Brodersen stood behind him and read it over his shoulder. Lorenz heard him read it; he heard the cop's breathing change at the last line.
He took out the green clothbound ledger and opened it to the last page and laid it on the desk. Bag number 4471-0938. Two thousand nine hundred fourteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. Ten-eight. 12:31 a.m. Kiet Lam. Lorenz Dimaculangan.
Brodersen counted the money one more time onto the desk, the fourth count of the night, and put it into a brown paper property envelope and sealed it and wrote across the seal and had Lorenz sign across it too, and then gave Lorenz the receipt. Then he took the torn deposit bag, the one with VOID printed all down it in blue, and set it on the desk beside the ledger, and he picked up one of the two pens that were still lying there from the count at midnight, and he looked at Lorenz.
"Where do I write it?"
"Under. On the next line."
The cop bent over the ledger. He wrote slowly, in square block capitals, the way men write who have filled out a great many forms, and Lorenz stood beside him and watched every letter go down.
10/9, 0322. BAG 4471-0938 SEAL BROKEN BY OFC. C. BRODERSEN #1147 FWPD, BROADWAY & TAYLOR, 0058. NO CONSENT GIVEN. CONTENTS COUNTED X4, $2,914.37 CORRECT. RETURNED TO SAFE UNDER FWPD PROPERTY RECEIPT 26-30891. DEPOSIT NOT MADE DUE TO TAMPERING OF NIGHT DROP BY UNKNOWN PERSONS. EMPLOYEE L. DIMACULANGAN ACTED CORRECTLY.
He stopped. He held the pen over the page for a moment, and then he signed it, Conrad Brodersen, his whole name, and put the badge number after it again.