"I figured."
"I don't know what I'll write," he said. "I want to tell you that. I don't want you to think—I'm not trading either. I don't know what I'll write. I'd have to read the report first. I'd have to read what I said." He looked at the red trees. "I'd want it to be true."
"Then make it true," said Antoinette Reddick. "That's all I ever wanted from you. Twenty-two years. Not nice. True." She unlocked the Corolla with a chirp. "It's a short form, Sergeant. One page. There's a box for comments. Most people leave it empty."
She got in. She started the car. She put on her reading glasses with the beaded chain to look at something on her phone, and took them off again and let them hang, and backed out of the space, and lifted two fingers from the steering wheel at him as she went by, and turned out onto Route 9 toward Framingham, and was gone.
Neal got into the truck. He sat with the door open and his feet on the asphalt. After a while he opened the glove compartment and took out the magazine and set it on the seat, and then he took out the plain white envelope that was under the registration, and held it, and did not open it. He put it back.
He took the three folded pages out of his inside pocket. He turned them over to the blank backs. He took a pen from the console, a cheap ballpoint from a bank, and he sat with the pages flat on his knee and the pen over them for a long time while the parking lot emptied out around him and the maples moved a little in the wind off Route 9.
Then he wrote, at the top of the first blank back, in his own slanted capitals: RE: PETITION OF ANTOINETTE L. REDDICK (JESSUP). And under it, after a while: On the morning of October 19, 2004, I executed a search warrant at apartment 3C, 211 Warren Avenue, Brockton.
He looked at the sentence. It was a fact. It was the kind of sentence he had been writing for thirty-four years, and it was true, and it was not nearly enough.
He put the pen down on the page. He unwrapped a stick of gum out of habit, and smelled the cinnamon, and sat holding it a moment, and then he folded it back into its foil, uneaten, and put it in his pocket, and picked up the pen again.