"Your twenty?"
"Tollis. West path."
"Be advised, Mr. Stolte's party has moved up to twelve-thirty. They'll be entering from the courthouse side. I'll meet you at the fountain." A pause. "You copy?"
"Copy."
He let go of the mic. He reached up and turned the volume knob on the radio down until it was barely a whisper, a thing he had not done on duty in twenty-four years, and he heard Lucia notice it, a small intake of breath.
"You have eleven pages left," he said.
"Yes."
"You said you've been waiting a long time to get to them."
"Since last night. I stopped on purpose. I read the rest of it on the bus this morning, and at home, and I made myself stop right before Book Twenty-Four, because I wanted to read the end here. At ten o'clock. On the bench." She looked at her lap. "I got here at nine-fifteen. I sat down at ten. I started it at ten exactly, I checked on the clock on the courthouse. But it's hard to read sometimes when you're—" She made a small gesture at her own face. "It goes slow. And then you came."
"And then I came," Lloyd said.
He looked out at the square. It was ten minutes to eleven. The man in the business suit had resigned to Cornelius and was shaking his hand. Lavonne was asleep sitting up on her bench under the copper beech with her chin on her chest and one hand on the handle of her cart. Somewhere behind him a car door slammed and someone laughed.
"Would it be all right," Lloyd said slowly, "if I sat here while you finished? I won't talk. I won't — you can tell me to go. If you want me to go, I'll go, and I'll stand over by the coffee cart, and I won't come back. But if it's all right, I'd like to sit here."