2. From the Glove Compartment

"Qué es esto," Ervey, asked aloud. He looked up from the booklet and peered across the parking lot to see if, Chonito, his traveling companion, was coming out of the mega gasoline station and convenience store they had stopped at for fuel and a restroom break. He was sitting alone in the passenger's seat in a 16 ton Kodiak beside the last of eight fueling stations. From that point, the entrance to the store was a long distance. Anybody coming in or out was hard to make out, and there were a lot of customers coming through the door that afternoon. It seemed to Ervey that he had been waiting a long time. Chonito was nowhere in sight.
Ervey looked back at the open glove compartment to see if there was another receipt booklet where he found the other one.  It was jammed full of maps, brochures, crumpled papers, and a couple of other receipt books, but nothing with any hand writing on the back like the one he had just read. He picked up the booklet he had just read and studied the handwriting. It was traced onto the back of the middle pages  with carbon paper. The author used only capital letters, all of them clearly formed in level lines across the page. Ervey leafed through the booklet and saw that there was a section of carbon sheets bound into the booklet at the back immediately behind receipt #__50.  Ervey noted that only two of the five sheets of carbon paper were used, the middle ones. They had been neatly ripped out of the booklet such that it took more than a casual look to detect that any of them were missing. He flipped back to the front of the booklet and saw that about half of the receipt pages had been used. The handwriting was not the same. Many different hands had filled in the receipts. Some were in a hurried script, others in a deliberate elementary print. The writing utensil was never the same: ballpoint pens, fine point markers, and even lead pencils. The items were mostly the school and office supplies that Ervey and Chonito hauled in their truck with receivers signing off in the usual places in northeastern Mexico where they made their deliveries. The date on the receipt #0001 was June 12, 2010. The date on the last receipt slip that had been completed was September 1, 2010.


"It's been here only a couple of months," Ervey whispered to himself.


He looked over to the store entrance and saw that Chonito had come out and had made it halfway through the parking lot.