"Yeah?"
The boy didn't say anything else. He just looked at him, the way that other boy had looked at him, from the window, a long time ago. Only this time Hollis looked back. He made himself look back, and hold it, and nod. And then he went.
The rain had eased off to a hard drizzle, and the cold had come in behind it, the high-plateau cold that smells like snow a month early. Hollis walked out under the gas canopy and stood there a second, letting his eyes adjust, the way Dale had done coming in. The lot was dark except for the canopy lights, which ran on a different circuit, apparently, or which Curt hadn't found. He could hear the gray truck's engine idling behind the building. He could hear Curt's tire iron on the back door, a dull steady clang like a man splitting wood.
Dale Rusk was still at the corner. He watched Hollis come.
"You ought to have stayed inside, Tug," he said.
"Probably," Hollis said. He stopped six feet away. Close enough to talk. Not close enough to grab. "You let her go to the truck."
Dale didn't answer.
"She's on the CB," Hollis said. "Channel nineteen. Telling every driver between here and Wellsboro what happened to Jesse Kline. The boy already called 911 and told them all of it. They recorded it. There's a detective in Coudersport who's heard your name tonight, Dale. And pictures went out. The bore off Kettle Creek Road. The hose. The manifests that say Chapman." He let it sit. "It's done. It's out. There's nothing left in that building worth anything to anybody."
Across the lot, the door of the old Ford Ranger opened. The old man in the wool coat climbed out slowly and stood beside his truck in the drizzle, and Hollis realized he had left the door open on purpose, and that the radio under his dash was on, turned all the way up.
Bev's voice came out of it, rough and tinny and enormous in the dark.
"—the Hemlock, west of Galeton, I repeat the Hemlock. They cut the phones. They cut the power. There's a little boy in there who saw what happened to Jesse Kline, and Curt Shuler's beating on the back door right now with a tire iron. Jesse Kline did not fall asleep at the wheel. Jesse Kline did not drink. Any of you who knew Jesse, you know he didn't drink. Shuler Water's been dumping flowback down the old Bucktail bore off Kettle Creek Road since summer and Jesse took pictures and they killed him for it. This is Big Bev out of Johnstown and I'm sitting at the Hemlock and I'm not going anywhere—"
And then another voice, a man's, breaking in over her: "Copy that, Bev, this is Lumberjack, I'm eastbound at Denton Hill, I'm five minutes out." And another: "Bev, this is Hootie, I drove with Jesse, I'm at the Ole Bull turnoff, I'm coming." And another, and another, voices stepping on each other, a whole dark mountain full of trucks waking up.
Dale Rusk closed his eyes.