Friday
The fish fry at St. Vincent de Paul was monthly now, not just in Lent, because the parish needed the money. Folding tables, paper boats of cod, a sheet cake with a Little League team's name half eaten off the top. The TV over the coffee urn was on the state lottery channel because Fermín had asked the custodian. The custodian had looked at him like he'd asked for a priest at a wedding.
At 21:59 three white balls came up in a clear drum in a studio on Washington Street. Four. Zero. Seven.
Nobody in the hall cared except the four people at the back table. Fermín wrote 407 on a napkin. Aurora Benítez wrote it in her paper ledger. Isaac Tso photographed the screen for a supervisor who wanted proof he'd been there. Lourdes did nothing, because the protocol note said the proponent did nothing, and she had written the protocol note.
Records ran the script at ten, seeded with the published digits and the date. At 22:11 the list went up on the 49-007 docket page: forty tile IDs in draw order, and under each one a parcel drawn at random from inside it. No names. Numbers.
Fermín read them out with his mouth full. One through five were his. Six through eight were Aurora's. Isaac scrolled for tracts on the county's resilience list and found three between nine and twenty and a fourth at thirty-one.
Lourdes read the list looking for something else.
Position four was tile 1188. Two of her own 2046 certificates sat inside it, the Arviso house and a duplex on 63rd Drive. The drawn parcel was neither of them. It was next door to the duplex, a stucco house with a carport, certificate 2044, issued by a notary who had retired to Prescott.
So her work would be beside the test and not in it. She felt relieved, and she didn't trust the relief.
She wrote on the back of a raffle ticket before she could talk herself out of it. Tile 1188 (pos. 4) contains two certificates issued by the proponent. Drawn lot is not one of them. Proponent has no role in its re-occupation.
"Nobody would've noticed," Aurora said.
"Records would. In a year. And then it'd be the only thing anybody remembered about the draw."
Somebody won the cake. The custodian put the Suns back on.
407. 40 DRAWN, 12 FUNDED. POS 4 = MY TILE, NOT MY LOT. DISCLOSE ANYWAY.
Saturday
Fermín called at twenty to eleven. Behind him there was a dog, a big one, and a television through a screen door.
"Position one. Owner's on the porch. He says no."
"Then he says no."
"Listen first." He lowered his voice, not by much. "Ignacio Salcido. Drove a Valley Metro bus thirty-one years. Across the street let a Desert Mutual crew in last week, one of their forty. Thursday the neighbor got a letter asking to update contact information. He says when an insurer wants your phone number, a bill is coming."
"Is one?"
"I don't know. He doesn't either. That's his point." The dog barked. "Lot next door's empty. Gate's open. No dog. I could have the head on the pad by midnight."
"No."
"I'm asking you as the protocol."
"Then the protocol says a refusal is an outcome. You write REFUSED and his reason in his words. You go to position two, not next door. An empty lot with an open gate isn't random. It's the easiest one on the block."
Somebody inside told the dog to hush, in Spanish.
"His words," Fermín said, "are 'You people measure and then we pay.'"
"Write that."
"It'll look bad. Our refusals in a column next to the insurer's forty with none."
"Their forty have none because they swapped. I'll bet you a burrito."
He said good night to Mr. Salcido. She heard the old man say it back, no warmth in it, no anger either.
She sent Haas one line before bed. Pilot 40: when a policyholder refused, what happened?
At 01:30 he texted again. Pos 2 done. Blind. 6 posts. No move. Then, a minute later: Salcido's dog followed us to the truck. Friendlier than him.
She lay awake with the phone on her chest and thought about the empty lot with the open gate. In four years every walking hold she'd ever been offered had come with a lot like that, the easy one next door, the one the tablet would route a crew to if you let it. That was how the forty had been picked. Nobody had needed to cheat.
5/22 POS 1 REFUSED. 'YOU PEOPLE MEASURE AND THEN WE PAY.' NEIGHBOR GOT A CONTACT-INFO LETTER. ASK HAAS: SUBSTITUTIONS?
Tuesday
Fermín's crew had run position four on Monday night, blind, no prefill, eight posts around the carport and the back block wall. His text came at 04:10.
1188-R: band moves, LOW to MODERATE. DTW 31 m. Legacy cert assumed shallow table. Not my opinion. The head's.
She hadn't meant to go. She wasn't crew, payer or picker. But the owner had called the number on the St. Vincent's consent form, and St. Vincent's had given out Lourdes's number, because Lourdes had written what the form said.
Esperanza Ruelas was in her sixties, in scrubs from a dialysis clinic on Indian School. She held the screen door against her hip with the evening heat coming off the stucco.
"The young man said it went up a band. What's a band?"
Lourdes told her. The 2044 certificate on this house had been read by an index that assumed water close under the lot, so small mass changes counted as noise. Fermín's reading stood on its own and put the water thirty-one metres down. With the water that deep, the same small changes meant the ground under the back wall had lost a little more than the paper said. Not a sinkhole. Not a crack. A different number in a column.
"And my insurance?"
"I don't know yet. The result goes in the report to the Board without your name. Desert Mutual reads the report."
Esperanza looked up the block, where Mr. Salcido's dog slept under a truck.
"I said yes because Fermín said it was for St. Vincent's. They paid my light bill in '46."
"I know."
"So I helped, and I pay."
"You might."
"Can you pay it?"
"No. I wrote that I wouldn't. If I pay, the test is mine and nobody believes it."
Esperanza nodded, the way a nurse nods at a dose she doesn't like and expected. "Then write something so the next one doesn't."
Walking back to the truck, Lourdes understood that this was the only instruction in the whole docket from someone who'd actually been measured.
5/25 1188-R LOW TO MOD. RUELAS: 'I HELPED AND I PAY.' 'WRITE SOMETHING SO THE NEXT ONE DOESN'T.' CAN'T PAY. CAN ASK.
Wednesday
Haas had answered on Monday from a personal address. Pilot refusals: 3. Substituted with next policyholder on list per protocol. Report shows 40/40 complete.
Fermín's sheet came at 20:10. Nine positions reached. Two refused. Seven run, blind. One moved: 1188-R. Three not reached by morning. Desert Mutual's interim table showed thirty-eight run and nothing moved.
She did the sum on the oilcloth in grease pencil, where she did sums she didn't want to argue with afterwards. One mover out of forty-five lots run. If the seven and the thirty-eight were the same kind of lot, the chance the one mover landed in the seven was seven in forty-five. About one in six.
So it wasn't evidence. One in six happens every Saturday. Desert Mutual's counsel would say so in the morning, and they'd be right.
She wrote it before they could.
Interim, random check. Reached 9 of 40. Refused 2, reasons verbatim. Run 7, blind. Moved 1, LOW to MODERATE. Insurer pilot: 38 run, 0 moved, 3 refused and substituted. If both sets came from one population, a single mover would fall in the random set about one time in six. This does not show the pilot is biased. It shows the pilot cannot show it isn't. Substitution removes the owners who distrust measurement. The random set keeps them. Two of nine is not small.
Then she wrote the part she'd promised on the front step.
Request: that results from any lot in a Board-directed random check not be used to reprice that lot until the Board rules on the method under test. The owner consented to a test of the record, not to be the first one priced off it. If volunteers pay for results, the next draw will be all refusals.
The Board couldn't order an insurer to do anything. Pricing belonged to DIFI. She copied the DIFI docket anyway and added a last line, Esperanza's sentence with the edges filed down: The only owner whose lot moved asked that the next one not pay for helping.
Before she filed she wrote one more sentence and looked at it for a long time. The proponent asks that 1188-R be excluded from the report pending DIFI review. It would protect Esperanza through August. It would also take the only mover out of the only random set, and then the table would say zero of six against zero of thirty-eight, and Desert Mutual would read that aloud in the morning as agreement.
She drew a line through it in grease pencil on the printout, then deleted it from the file, and she didn't feel clean doing either.
She wrote 1188-R, not the name. Filed 23:47. The ruling was at nine.
5/26 1/7 vs 0/38, ~1 IN 6, NOT EVIDENCE. REFUSALS RECORDED vs SUBSTITUTED. HOLD-HARMLESS, CC DIFI.
Thursday
Room B had the same carpet and the same water pitcher with a lemon slice drowning in it. Thirty people sat in chairs for twenty. Raúl Lucero wore a sport coat. Haas was alone two rows back, which meant Legal had sent someone else to sit up front. Fermín stood by the door in a clean shirt, holding his hat.
Calloway read from paper. He always read from paper.
Item 7, re-occupation of legacy-only certificates before reuse, was not adopted. The record didn't establish its effect across 588 tiles. The Board noted the insurer's forty and the proponent's note on how they were selected, and found neither sufficient.
She kept her hands flat on her knees.
Part B: every certificate issued before 2047 and reused by the index would carry a depth-to-groundwater scope statement by 1 March 2050, filed by the issuer or by Records. The index would widen its uncertainty wherever it reused legacy-only paper without measured depth. Part C: a randomized re-occupation of forty legacy-only tiles under the protocol in the proponent's note of 18 May, refusals recorded as outcomes, funding requested from DIFI against index query fees, report by 1 December.
So they had taken her draw and left her rule.
Calloway turned a page. Records was directed to create a certificate event type, "Clarification (no new measurement)," on the September schema release. Someone behind her said finally, very quietly.
The hold-harmless request was outside the Board's authority. It went to DIFI with the Board's attention.
No questions. The pitcher sweated a ring onto the table.
In the hall Raúl caught her sleeve. "You got a lottery and a dropdown."
"I got forty lots measured by people who can't choose them."
"In December. 1188-R renews in August."
He was right, and he hadn't needed to say it.
Haas went past without stopping and spoke to the air next to her. "They'll fund C. It's cheaper than B's uncertainty." Then he was on the stairs.
Outside, Fermín put on his hat. "Forty in the fall. Blind. I'll bid."
"You'll bid. I won't."
The heat was already climbing at half past ten. On the back of the agenda she wrote: 5/27 ITEM 7 NOT ADOPTED. B: DTW SCOPE LINE, PRE-2047 REUSE, 3/2050. C: RANDOM 40, MY PROTOCOL, 12/1. CLARIFICATION TYPE, SEPT. HOLD-HARMLESS TO DIFI. RUELAS RENEWS AUG. THEY TOOK THE DRAW AND LEFT THE RULE.
Across Jefferson a city truck idled at the light with a lamp-post head strapped on its flatbed, going to be bolted somewhere new. It would weigh whatever it was pointed at. Somebody would still have to choose where to point it.