In the class-action civil lawsuit of Eliot&Sprain, LLC, Eliot, Sprain, Bricklings-Young, et al., vs. Pine City, LLC, the court requested on Friday, July 22, to examine the artwork in question. Judge Elaine Rafferty has issued a subpoena for the “DROP OUT” artwork. She requests that it be delivered to her chambers by Thursday, July 28. All parties are to bring any associated material, including but not limited to notebooks, film negatives, film reels, reproductions of film negatives or reels, writings, letters, images, digital or electronic files or any manner of documentation that may be pursuant to the decision at hand. All documentation is to be submitted to the court in perpetuity, and as such must be made accessible to the court. The court has requested prompt compliance and Judge Rafferty has made strong assurances that a lack of compliance will result in search of the Pine City property, immediate charges of contempt of court and possible jail time.

Please advise us of your decision. Copies of this letter have been sent to all voting partners of Pine City, LLC.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Cartwright, Esq.

Cartwright, Benson and Pendergast, LLC

I looked at the calendar on his wall. Today was Monday, July 25.

Everything was in motion.

*  *  *

The row of metal lockers, padlocked one after another, were easy enough to open, steel doors clanging as I flipped their latches.

Mostly they contained the paperwork of his own practice. He documented the acquisition of every organ in those same black Academy notebooks, his handwriting always tidy, if small and a bit hard to read. Everything was anonymous. Names were truncated to initials; meeting places were coded; hospitals were all simply called “hospital.”

Many of the organs seemed to come from donors who had been in accidents, people whose organs were pulled but not used for one medical reason or another. Tyler managed to inject himself along the black-market chain to intercept these lesser, second-rate body parts as they moved from unscrupulous hospital orderly to foam cooler to someone’s car trunk to hopeful line-cutter.

Met Orderly K at a Sunoco for a cup of coffee, he wrote. He makes 8/hour and doesn’t have healthcare. He’s been at the hospital for two years. F told him about outside opportunities. He wants in. I have to think about it. He seems desperate. Too—too interested.

I read through a handful, then kept looking.

Box, after box, after box. I rifled through them carefully but found nothing that belonged to Carey. One plastic container was filled with hard drives, and I set it by the door so that when I found a computer, I could connect them.

When I was done I set a piece of masking tape on the locker that the hard drives had come from, and carefully locked the rest, wiping my fingerprints away from the steel with a rag. Then I turned to the chest freezer.