"It's one road," he said. "One road east and one road west, and nothing on either one but trees for fifteen miles. No phones. No lights. They'd be on your bumper before you made the first curve. And you've got a Corolla with," he looked out the wired glass again, "a bald front tire. And they've got a three-quarter-ton pickup. And it's the middle of the night and it's raining and there are cliffs on that road where Jesse Kline's truck went off into Pine Creek and they called it an accident." He let that sit. "In here there's light and witnesses and a phone. Out there there's nothing. We stay."
"So we just sit here and wait for them to come in?" Renée said.
"Ferris," Bev said, "you got anything in that Buick? For deer?"
"Thirty-thirty behind the seat," Ferris said.
"No," Hollis said again.
"Why the hell not?"
"Because I'm a felon and if I touch it I go back to prison," Hollis said. "And because if anybody starts shooting in a place this size, the one in the middle is going to be the kid. And because those two out there are not stupid. Dale Rusk is not stupid. I knew his father, and his father was a lot of things but he was not stupid. They haven't come in yet. You know why they haven't come in yet?"
Nobody answered.
"Because they're not sure," Hollis said. "They're not sure what he saw. They're not sure if he told anybody. Right now, the way they see it, there's one little boy on this whole mountain who might know what happened to Jesse Kline. One. And one little boy is a problem you can solve." He heard Renée make a sound and he made himself keep going. "That's how it works. I'm sorry. I know how it works because I used to be on the other side of it. A witness is only worth hurting while he's the only one. While it's a secret. A secret is something you can kill. But once it's not a secret anymore, once twenty people know, a hundred people, once it's on a recording somewhere, then hurting the boy doesn't fix anything. It just adds to it. It makes it worse. A smart man stops. A smart man runs, or he finds a lawyer."
"And a dumb man?" Bev said.
Hollis thought about Curt Shuler, who he had not yet seen, who was sitting in the driver's seat of that truck with his father's money and his father's name and, Hollis would bet, his father's temper.
"We'll see," he said.
Toby spoke up from the pickle bucket. His voice was small but steady.