She meant it as a joke, a small one. He didn't laugh. He picked up his coffee at last and drank it, the whole cup down at once, as if it were medicine, and set it down, and looked out the window again. Dovie had laid her head down on her arms on the table beside the empty plate. Her eyes were open but they had the glazed look of a child who has gone past tired into some country on the other side.
And Coralee stood there with the coffee pot and did the arithmetic. A little girl whose mother lived in Reno behind a yellow door, with a hundred and five days. A grandfather from McGill, three hundred miles the other way. Sixty-one cents. One in the morning on a Sunday night. Heading south, he'd said. South was Tonopah, and past Tonopah, Las Vegas, and past Las Vegas the whole rest of the world.
"Mr.—" she said, and realized she didn't know his name.
"Kroll," he said. "Ozias Kroll."
She would remember, afterward, that he gave it to her straight, without hesitating, the real one. She would think about that a good deal.
"Mr. Kroll, does her mama know where she is?"
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. The answer was in the way he moved his body, just slightly, an inch, so that more of it was between Coralee and the girl.
That was when the headlights swept the window.
They came in off the highway fast and turned in a wide arc across the front of the cafe, and for one second the whole booth was lit up white, the old man's face and the pie plate and Dovie's lifted head, and then the lights cut off and there was the shape of a car outside with a bar on the roof and the pale star on the door. Mineral County Sheriff. Coralee knew the car. Everybody at the Cattail knew the car. It was Thane Stamper's, and Thane Stamper came in every night between two and three for a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll, and he had done it for eleven years, since long before Coralee worked there, because he liked Benicio, and because the Cattail was the only place in Mineral County that was lit at that hour besides the depot gate and the El Capitan casino downtown, and Thane did not drink coffee in casinos on principle.
Ozias Kroll had stopped moving entirely. He sat like a jackrabbit sits when the hawk's shadow goes over, with every muscle in him locked.
"Where's your truck?" Coralee said, very low.