"Then there's no reason for them to want you," he said. "That's the truth. I can't promise you what a scared man does. But I can promise you that if you tell it, you won't be the only one who knows. You won't be carrying it by yourself anymore. That part I can promise."
The boy took a breath. He let it out. He stood up off the bucket.
"Okay," he said.
Renée made a sound in her throat. Hollis looked up at her. "You go with him," he said. "Hold his hand. You'll want to hear it too."
They went down the hall to the office together, the mother and the son, and the door closed behind them. Hollis stood up slowly, one hand on the prep table, and his heart did a thing it had not done before, a sort of stumble and catch, like a man missing a step on a staircase in the dark. He stood there and waited for it to pass. It passed.
When he looked up, Ferris was watching him.
"You all right?"
"Old," Hollis said.
"Join the club," Ferris said, and then he seemed to hear what he'd said and looked at the vest, and Hollis laughed for the first time all night, a short hard bark of a laugh.
"I quit that one," he said.
The call took eleven minutes. Hollis knew because he watched the clock over the pass window the whole time, a Budweiser clock with a Clydesdale on it whose second hand stuck every time it passed the six. Out front, through the hall and the empty diner, he could see the gray truck in the lot with its exhaust still curling. Out back, through the wired glass, he could see the rain. Bev sat on the prep table swinging her boots. Ferris made a pot of fresh coffee because, he said, he had to do something with his hands or he was going to go out there with the thirty-thirty and felony or no felony he'd like to see a jury in Potter County convict him.
Renée came out of the office first. She had been crying again. She had a piece of paper in her hand with a case number written on it in Toby's handwriting, and she held it like it was a ticket on the last boat out.
"They heard all of it," she said. "She said a supervisor was listening in. She said a detective from the barracks is going to call back. She said the trooper's thirty minutes out now." She swallowed. "And the pictures. Three of them went. Three. Before the internet quit again. I sent them to the DEP address on their website and to my sister in Erie and to myself."