I
The sky over Merritt was doing the thing Marcus Bellamy's mother used to call showing off.
Straight up, it was the deep blue of a pharmacy bottle cap, and it faded down toward the west into an orange so vivid it looked like something on the far side of the grain elevator had caught fire and was burning politely, without smoke.
Under the canopy of the Sunrise Fuel Mart none of that color reached the ground. The canopy lights were a hard, surgical white, and they made the concrete look scrubbed and the oil stains look like the shadows of things that weren't there.
He pulled the silver sedan up to pump four, turned off the engine, and sat.
Two hours and eleven minutes from the regional airport, past a water tower with MERRITT painted on it in letters that had once been red. The car still smelled like the last renter's vanilla air freshener. The seat was set for someone taller, and he had not adjusted it, because adjusting it would have meant admitting he was going to be in this town long enough to need to be comfortable.
The funeral home was eight minutes away. Mr. Lindqvist, the director, had said on the phone that he would keep the viewing room open until eight o'clock, "seeing as you're coming so far, and seeing as you're the only one coming far." It was 7:36. Marcus needed gas because the rental agreement said return it full, and he knew himself well enough to know that tomorrow, after the burial, he would not be a man who remembered to buy gas. He needed coffee because he had eaten nothing since a packet of pretzels somewhere over Indiana. And he needed—he could admit this to himself, alone in the car with the engine ticking—four more minutes before he walked into a room and looked at his father's face for the first time in eleven years.
He was forty-seven years old. He had been a pharmacist for twenty-one of those years. He was a man who counted things: tablets in fives on a blue tray, the days between refills, the minutes between here and the place he was dreading. Counting kept his hands steady.
He got out of the car.
The air smelled of gasoline and cut fields. He had on the light-blue polo Celeste had ironed for the flight, khakis, the brown shoes he wore to work. His clear-framed glasses had slid down on the drive and he pushed them up with one knuckle. He reached for the pump handle.
"Step away from that car. Hands where I can see 'em."
The voice came from his left and it came fast, and so did the man. Marcus had not seen the cruiser parked at the side of the building, nose out by the ice machine, and he had not seen the officer get out of it. He saw him now: white, mid-forties, bald head shining under the canopy, a thick brown mustache, dark aviator sunglasses although the sun was nearly gone. Navy short-sleeve uniform, a badge catching the light, a shoulder patch that read POLICE OFFICERS in a curved arc with VIGILANCE stitched beneath it. He was walking the way men walk when they have already decided how a thing will end.
Marcus's hands came up. He did not have to think about it. They rose to the height of his chest, palms open, fingers spread, the way he had practiced in his own driveway with his son watching, the way his own father had once shown him in a different driveway with a beer in his other hand. Slow. Visible. Nothing in them.
"It's my car," Marcus said. His voice came out level, and some distant part of him was proud of that. "My registration is inside."
The officer did not slow. He closed the last three steps and took hold of Marcus's right arm above the elbow, hard, and turned him the way you turn a stubborn door.