Marcus had wanted it to be something bigger, or uglier. Hatred would have been simpler. This was smaller and in its way worse: one man's pride standing on another man's wrists for a minute and fifty seconds while it searched for a way out.
"My right thumb is still numb," Marcus said, and held up the hand and turned it, though there was nothing to see. "It's called handcuff neuropathy. It has a name in the medical literature, which tells you something. It may come back all the way. It may not. I'm a pharmacist. For three months I've counted everything three times, because part of me no longer believes checking once is enough. I did everything right, and it wasn't enough." He set the hand down. "I have a son. Sixteen. I taught him to hold his hands up the way my father taught me. He asked me what the point is, if you do it right and it doesn't work. I didn't have an answer. That's what you took. Not the minute fifty. That."
"I know," Rusk said, so quietly the chief leaned in.
"I don't think you do yet. I think you might be starting to."
Rusk was quiet. Then: "A friend of mine was shot at that station in '06. Working the register. Two men in a light-colored car. Never caught." He stopped. "I'm not saying it's a reason. I've just been sitting on that corner twenty years waiting for that car to come back."
Marcus looked at him a long moment.
"I'm sorry about your friend," he said. "I mean it. I'm sorry nobody was ever caught. I wasn't there. I was in pharmacy school in Indianapolis. You waited twenty years, and the first man in a silver car who looked right to you, you made him pay for it. I didn't owe it."
"No," Rusk said. "You didn't."
Afterward, chairs scraping, Rusk came around the end of the table and stopped a careful distance away, the distance you'd keep from a man you didn't want to crowd, and held out his hand. A big square hand that had held a cuff key, and coffee it never paid for, and once, the zip-tied wrists of a girl in a van on Route 9. A hand a little like Leon's.
"Not today," Marcus said.
Rusk held it out a second longer, then lowered it and nodded, as though he'd been told a figure he expected. "Fair."
"Run the plate," Marcus said. "Next time. Every time. That's what you can do for me. Not this." He nodded at the hand. "That."
In the lot he sat in the Buick with the engine off for four minutes, counting, before he drove home.
X
In the first week of May, back on nights with his six months served, Dale Rusk watched a silver sedan go past the co-op in a hard spring rain with its left taillight out.