"There was a boy in the upstairs window," he said. "About your age. He was looking down at the car. At me. And I looked back at him, and I knew what was happening, and I knew he knew something was wrong, and I didn't do anything. I turned on the radio. And after a while the front door opened and my brothers came out with Lonnie Pruitt between them with a coat over his head, and they put him in the back seat, and I drove." He stopped. "Nobody ever saw Lonnie Pruitt again. Not his wife. Not his boy. Not anybody."
The kitchen was very quiet. The Clydesdale clock stuck at the six and went on.
"One of the men who went in that house was named Ray Rusk," Hollis said. "Dale's father. Ray told me years later, drunk, where they put him. I never told anybody. Not the police. Not the family. Not anybody. I told myself it was the rule. I told myself it was loyalty." He looked down at the boy. "It wasn't. It was being afraid. I've been afraid for thirty-two years. I sat in that car, and that boy watched me do it, and I've seen his face every day since."
Toby didn't say anything for a while.
"So you're helping me," he said slowly, "because you didn't help him."
"Something like that."
"That's okay," Toby said. "I don't mind." And then, with the terrible fairness of children: "But you should still help him too. If you know where his dad is. He'd want to know. I'd want to know."
Hollis opened his mouth to answer and the headlights hit the back door.
* * *
They came through the wired glass like a flashbang, white and blinding, and everybody in the kitchen flinched. The gray truck had come around the side of the building and stopped in the employee lot, ten feet from the back door, its high beams on, its engine roaring. Hollis put himself between the door and the boy without thinking about it, and through the glare he saw the driver's door open and a man get out.
Curt Shuler was younger than Hollis had expected, twenty-six or twenty-seven, lean and quick, in a hooded rain jacket and an expensive pair of work boots that had never done much work. He had a narrow face and a narrow mouth. He came straight to the back door and tried the push bar, and it was locked, and he hit the glass with the flat of his hand so hard the wire in it hummed.
"Renée!" he shouted. "Open the door, Renée! I just want to talk to the kid!"
Renée had Toby pressed against her in the corner behind the walk-in cooler. Ferris had a cast-iron skillet in his hand, and Hollis did not have the heart to tell him to put it down.