A pause. "He's right here. I had you on speaker. I'm sorry, I didn't think—"
His son's voice, sixteen and cracking down the middle: "Dad? Did you do the hands thing?"
Marcus closed his eyes. "I did the hands thing."
There was a silence on the line that he would think about for a long time. Then Wendell said, very quietly, maybe not to anyone, "Okay," and gave the phone back to his mother.
IV
Dale Rusk sat in his cruiser by the ice machine for forty minutes after the Camry left, and he did not take off his sunglasses.
Santos had come to his window once. He'd rolled it halfway down.
"You didn't run it, Dale."
"I had eyes on a BOLO vehicle."
"You had eyes on a silver car." She waited. "I'm writing a supplemental."
"Write what you saw."
"I'm going to."
Then she went back to her car and pulled out, and he was alone.
Precaution, he thought. He thought it the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts.
He had grown up four blocks from this corner. When he was a boy it was a Clark station with one pump island and a garage bay where kids could fill their bike tires for free. His father had worked at the shoe plant until it closed in 1998, and then nowhere, and then as a greeter in a blue vest at the Walmart in the next county, which was a thing Dale had never been able to look at directly. Merritt had been eleven thousand people when he was born. It was six thousand now.
He had become a cop because of Ronnie Gaskill. Ronnie had been his best friend since fourth grade, and Ronnie had worked nights at this corner back when it was the Clark, and on the third of March, 2006, two men came in at 2:40 in the morning and one of them shot Ronnie in the chest over two hundred and eleven dollars and a carton of cigarettes. The only witness was a trucker at the pump who saw them leave in "a light-colored car, maybe silver, maybe gray." They were never found. Twenty years.