last name. Emmanuel demands six dollars in cash, then points me to a grubby white wall. “Stand there. No smile.”
Emmanuel is a man of few words, but he gets the job done. There’s a blinding flash, and by the time the spots have cleared from my vision, two passport-size pictures are rolling out of his printer.
While Emmanuel cuts them into tiny squares, Jorge hands me a piece of paper and a pen. “Write down name, birth date, height, weight and address. You can use fake ones if you want.”
“Do your customers ever use real ones?”
He shrugs his linebacker shoulders. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”
I write Beth’s full name across the top of the paper, dredging up a middle name on the spot—Louise, a character from some book I just read. I give Beth two extra years, born on February 20, 1983. She’s my height, five foot eight, but I tack on a few pounds. The best way to hide in plain sight, I’ve decided, is to put some more meat on my bones with a strict pizza, doughnut, hamburger and french fry diet. Her address is the one for Morgan House.
I hand the paper back to Jorge, and he holds out a meaty palm.
“Three-fifty, right?”
He grunts. “Funny.”
I contemplate the wisdom of forking over the money now, before I’ve gotten my ID cards, but I’m not exactly in a position of power here. I slap the three hundred and seventy-five dollars I already peeled off my stash into his hand. Jorge counts it, then counts it again.
“What’s your number?” he says, pulling out his phone.
I open my mouth, then stop myself just in time. The only number I know by heart is my real number, for the phone sitting at the bottom of a trash can back in Arkansas. My new number, the one for the prepay phone in my back pocket, is a blank. I haven’t memorized it yet.
“I...I don’t remember.”
Jorge heaves a sigh that reeks of cheese and jalapeño, and the look he gives me says “amateur.” He rattles off a string of numbers that I realize too late is for his cell phone.
“Hang on, hang on.” I fumble for my phone, and he repeats the numbers, this time slower while I type them in. I hit Send, and his cell phone lights up in his hand.
He flips it so I can see. “Your number. I call you when ready.”
“How long?”
He lifts a meaty shoulder. “Thirty minute. Maybe more. Wait at Sonic up the road.”
It is seventy-three eternal minutes before a shiny black SUV rolls into the Sonic parking lot. I watch from my table by the window as a man who is definitely not Jorge—too dark, much too skinny—slides out. He looks up and down the parking lot like a villain on an episode of Cops, then tucks a manila envelope under the Buick’s windshield wiper and hustles back into his car. By the time I make it outside, the man is long gone.
I pluck the envelope from the windshield and drop into my car, my fingers shaking as I slide my nail under the flap. I jiggle the envelope upside down, and two small squares drop onto my lap. One is paper, a social security card with a bright yellow sign here sticker. The other is plastic, a driver’s license that looks as real as any I’ve ever seen. I examine it, turning it back and forth in a shaft of sunlight, and the hologram Georgia seal brightens and fades. The signature is not mine, but it’s generic enough that with a little practice, I can duplicate it. Other than that, it’s perfect. Beth Louise Murphy is legit.
My cell phone rings with a number I recognize as Jorge’s cell. I pick up to the sound of chewing.
“You get ID?”
“I did get ID, thank you.” I toss the cards on the passenger’s seat and start the car. “They look great. Totally real.”
He grunts, a sound I take to mean you’re welcome. “Listen, you have friends who need ID, you send them to Jorge. Fifty dollar every friend.”
And there it is, I think as I ease the Buick into traffic. What Martina wanted from me.
MARCUS
The Pine Bluff Police Department is housed in a squat, one-story complex on East Eighth Avenue, blinding white stucco against a sprawling green lawn. The place is a dump, dingy walls and scuffed linoleum floors, but on a bright note, we’re understaffed enough that the detectives get their own private rooms. They’re cramped and stuffy, but