"Leila. I'm Marcus." He glanced out at the lot, where both cruisers still sat, Dale's by the ice machine and the woman's with its lights off now. "I'm not going to tell you what to do with it. It's yours. You were the one standing there. But please don't delete it. Not tonight."
"I won't."
"Would you write your number down for me? I may need to ask you something someday. You can say no when I ask."
She tore a strip off the receipt roll and wrote her number, and then, because it seemed important, her full name beneath it, carefully, the way she wrote on exams. He folded it into the pocket with the officer's card.
At the door he paused under the red sign. From his side it read the right way round. She watched him read it all the way through, PLEASE REMOVE HOOD & MASK, and something moved in his face that she could not name. Then he went out into the white light, got into the silver car, and drove toward Main Street with his turn signal on, at exactly the speed limit.
III
Lindqvist's Funeral Home was a white Victorian with a wheelchair ramp built onto one side like an afterthought. Howard Lindqvist was waiting on the porch in a gray suit. He glanced at his watch as Marcus came up the walk, then put it away as if embarrassed to have looked.
"Mr. Bellamy. I'm so sorry for your loss."
"I'm sorry I'm late."
"You're not late." Lindqvist's voice had been worn smooth by decades of speaking to people on the worst nights of their lives. His eyes went to Marcus's wrists, and Marcus understood that the marks showed—two pink bands, a darker line on the right where the edge of the steel had bitten. "Did something happen?"
"I was detained at the gas station. For a few minutes. It's handled."
Lindqvist asked nothing else. He held the door and said, "Take all the time you need. I'm not going anywhere tonight."
The viewing room had pale green carpet and a spray of white carnations with a card: FROM YOUR FRIENDS AT THE CO-OP. Leon Bellamy had been a big man, and death had made him smaller the way it does, but his hands were still big, folded over a navy tie Marcus didn't recognize. His hair had gone completely white. There was a scar on his chin Marcus didn't remember, and a pair of drugstore reading glasses in his breast pocket that someone had thought he would want.
Marcus had rehearsed the facts on the plane, the way he rehearsed bad news for a patient whose insurance had denied a drug: plainly, in order, no adjectives. Leon had left the house on Forty-Second Street when Marcus was fourteen. He'd gone south with a woman named Charlene; that hadn't lasted, but Merritt had. He'd loaded grain at the co-op and then driven a truck for twenty years. He called on birthdays and at Christmas, and sometimes in between at hours that meant he had been drinking. He came to Wendell's fifth birthday party with a wrapped remote-control truck and a pint in his jacket, and fell asleep in a lawn chair with his mouth open, and when Marcus woke him and asked him to go, he said something Marcus had never repeated to anyone, not even Celeste. Marcus stopped answering the phone after that. Eleven years. On Sunday a woman named Opal Hensley had called and said, "Is this Marcus the pharmacist? Your daddy had your number on his refrigerator."
That was the list. But the list didn't hold the Saturday when Marcus was twelve and his father came out to the driveway with a beer and said, "C'mere. Stand by the car." A police pull up on you, what do you do? Marcus hadn't known. His father set the beer on the hood of the brown Bonneville and showed him. Hands up to here—chest, not over your head, over your head looks like you're mocking them. Palms out. Fingers spread so they see nothing's in 'em. Say yes sir. Tell them what you're going to do before you do it. "And you come home," Leon had said. "That's the whole thing. You do it right, and you come home."
They had practiced. Leon played the police, swaggering up the driveway with his thumbs in his belt, and they both laughed, and then they did it again and didn't laugh. Three summers ago Marcus had done the same thing with Wendell in their own driveway, without the beer, and Wendell had rolled his eyes and then stopped rolling them.