The deputy was a woman in her thirties with a dark braid pinned up under her campaign hat and a name plate that said RUIZ, and she took in the room in one long, unhurried look: the big man with his hand still half out, the gray-bearded biker standing in the aisle holding a coffee mug like a grenade, the lean man frozen halfway between the counter and the door, and the girl at the end of the counter with her fists full of forks.
"Afternoon," Deputy Ruiz said. "Everybody stay right where you are for me, please. Hands where I can see them. Nobody's in trouble yet. Let's keep it that way."
"Officer, thank God," Curtis said. His voice had changed completely; it was warm and wounded and a little breathless. "This guy's been acting crazy since he came in. Wouldn't eat, wouldn't drink, went in the bathroom for ten minutes, and just now he jumped up and got in my face. I think he's on something. My stepdaughter's scared to death."
Ruiz looked at Tom. "Are you the caller? Mr. Calloway?"
"I am."
"Would you put that mug down on the table for me, sir? Gently. Don't pour it out."
Tom set it down on the table, beside the ruined plate of chicken-fried steak, and stepped back, and put his hands where she could see them.
"He's lying," said a voice from the end of the counter.
Everyone turned.
Wren had put the forks down. She was standing very straight, with her hands at her sides, and her face was the color of chalk, but her voice did not shake at all.
"I'm not his stepdaughter," she said. "He's not anything to me. He was my mom's boyfriend. He put pills in that coffee. He crushes them up with a spoon at the coffee station when he thinks nobody's looking. The pills are in the storeroom, behind the flour bins, in a bottle with somebody else's name on it. And that's his cousin Darrell. He put a tracker on that man's motorcycle. He follows people to the rest area when they get sleepy and takes their bikes. They did it to a German man in June, and they did it to a man on a trike in August, and he crashed and broke his arm." She took a breath. "I wrote it down for him. It's in his pocket. I'll tell you all of it. All of it. I'm not scared anymore."
That last part was not true. Tom could see it in her hands. But she said it anyway, and he thought it was the bravest thing he had ever heard anyone say.
Deputy Ruiz looked at Wren for a long moment. Then she looked at Curtis, whose face had gone from red to the color of old putty, and at Darrell, who was edging, very slightly, toward the door.
"Sir," she said to Darrell, without raising her voice, "I'd stay put if I were you. Trooper Begay's a lot faster than he looks."
Darrell stopped edging.