"He was breathing," he said. "When we put him in the truck. Jesse. He was breathing. Curt said we'd just scare him. Drive him around. Take his phone. I didn't know Curt was going to—" He stopped. "I followed him down to Blackwell. He said, wait here. And then he came walking back up the road without the truck. Soaking wet. Laughing." Dale opened his eyes. "Laughing, Tug."
"I believe you," Hollis said.
"It doesn't matter if you believe me."
"No," Hollis said. "It doesn't. What matters is what you do now." He took a breath. The cold went down into him and his heart did that stumbling thing again, and he waited it out. "Your dad told you about Erie. Didn't he? About Lonnie Pruitt."
Dale's face changed.
"He told me too," Hollis said. "Drunk. At a bar in Corry in '05, a year after I got out of Albion. He told me where. And I've been carrying it ever since, and so have you, I'd guess. And so did he. Right up until that room in Ashtabula."
"He used to talk about a kid," Dale said, very quietly. "When he was bad. At the end. A kid in a window. He'd wake up yelling about it."
"There was a kid," Hollis said. "I saw him too."
They stood there. Behind the building, the clanging had stopped.
"I'm going to Erie," Hollis said. "When this is done. I'm going to walk into the state police and tell them where Lonnie Pruitt is, and what I did, and let them do what they do. I should have done it thirty years ago. I'm telling you because you've got the same choice right now that I had in that Buick and that your father had in that house. You can be the man who tells what happened to Jesse Kline. Or you can be Ray, in a room, at the end, yelling about a boy."
Dale looked at him for a long time.
Then he looked past Hollis, and his face went flat and hard, and Hollis turned.
Curt Shuler had come around the corner of the building. He had dropped the tire iron somewhere. He had a pistol in his hand instead, a black semiautomatic, and he was holding it the way men hold guns who have seen it done on television, high and sideways, and his narrow face in the canopy light was white and wet and wild.