"I know you didn't."
"And then you got put on it, and Mr. Vance was screaming every day, and I'm thinking, I gotta get it out of here, I gotta move it, but if I move it and somebody sees me on the highway—" He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "So I figured I'd give y'all something to look at. Just for an hour. Just till I got across the state line. I figured you'd go down there and it'd be his boat and you'd see it was his boat and that'd be it. Nobody'd get hurt. Nobody'd ever believe it was really him."
"Kyle," Wade said. "Listen to what you just said."
Kyle looked at him.
"You said nobody'd believe it. But that's not what you counted on. You counted on everybody believing it. You counted on me." Wade's voice was quiet, and very steady, and he was surprised by how steady it was. "You didn't call in and say a skinny white guy at the public ramp. You said an old Chinese man. You picked the one person in this whole town you knew the police would look at first and think about last. And you were right. That's the part I can't get past. You were right about me."
Kyle's face crumpled. He bent over his knees and cried the way he had cried when he was six and had fallen out of the pecan tree in Patsy's yard and broken his wrist, with his whole body, without any shame at all, and Wade put a hand on the back of his neck and kept it there.
"I'm sorry," Kyle said into his knees. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Tell him I'm sorry."
"You'll tell him yourself," Wade said. "Someday. When you can mean it all the way. That's on you, not me."
Reggie cuffed him, in front, loosely, and they walked him up the dock together, one on each side, past the men on the boats who had stopped pretending not to stare. Garrett Vance was standing on the porch of the marina office in a pressed blue shirt with his phone in his hand, and as they came up the gangway he stepped forward with his face arranged into an expression of grave civic concern.
"Officer Pruitt. I understand you've made an arrest. I can't tell you how relieved I—" Then he saw who it was, and the expression slid. "Kyle? Kyle works for me."
"Yes sir," said Wade.
"I don't understand." Vance looked from Kyle to Wade and back, and Wade watched him trying to work out the shape of this, which story it belonged in. "I was told—I mean, the old Vietnamese fellow—I was certain it'd turn out to be one of—"
He stopped. It was the stopping, Wade thought later, that told you everything. Not the words. The man had heard himself, a half second too late, the way Wade had heard himself at the stoplight at Front and Main.