Federal investigators call Omar's legal name fake the same week they open a probe into her $174,000 salary.

…(cont) The basement had yesterday's clippings on a chair. One was from the 17th — a case being built, people familiar with it telling a reporter so. Under it was the 13th, a fundraising letter over the raid on the same house, asking for money because of it. By the time I found my own form, I had four other people's facts and none of mine, which happens more at that building than I think they'd like printed.

Here's where I have to go back, and I'm sorry, because it's the same number every time I open the book: $174,000. That's what I wrote down first, under the clipping from today — the 22nd — where she's quoted saying she lives paycheck to paycheck. I want to be careful with the date, so I checked it against the court feed's own stamp: same day as the filing on the name. I'm sorry, I keep circling this, but I want the date to hold.

I'm not accusing the arithmetic of anything. I wrote the weekly number under the yearly one and looked at both for a while.

I went back a third time because of the garage. I keep a coffee can out there for the parts counter, cash, maybe four hundred dollars in a good month, and I carry it in from wherever I was keeping it when the truck needs something it didn't need last week. I thought about what it is to carry a number from one place to another — the can to the counter, the disclosure form to the file — and the number on that form, carried the same way, was $174,000, sitting next to four words on the page: paycheck to paycheck.

I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this one, but there's a reason, and it's the fourth time, so I'll say it plainly: the financial question gets paycheck to paycheck every time it's put to her. I don't have a word for two different questions getting answered the same careful way except to write them down next to each other, which I did, in the book.

I had my form. I was nearly to the door when somebody came out from behind the second window and said, excuse me, before you go — did you get the part about the warrant itself. The one on the name. The U.S. Attorney is asking the court to keep that one sealed. I hadn't written that down yet, so I did, and then I had a question I didn't have an answer to, which is the only kind I'm allowed to leave here: if the warrant on what her name is has to stay sealed from the rest of us, is the number on the disclosure form open, the one that sits beside those same four words, paycheck to paycheck.