"It's four in the morning," Coralee said. "It's not too late for anything. That's the one thing I know for sure about four in the morning. I was there for a lot of them."
And that was when the headlights came, from the highway, slow, and turned in, and did not swing across the front of the cafe and stop in their usual place, nine steps from the door. They came on, past the front windows, along the length of the building, all the way to the end of the lot, and stopped, and sat there with their high beams on, shining full in through the back window of the old Ford pickup so that the whole cab filled up with white light and the shadow of the camper shell and the shadows of the three of them were thrown huge against the side of the propane tank.
The lights went off. A car door opened. Boots on gravel, slow. Not nine steps. More than that.
Thane Stamper came up on the driver's side with his Stetson on and his flashlight in his hand, not lit, held down along his leg, and he stood outside the window and looked in, first at Ozias Kroll and then at the little girl asleep with her head on the old man's leg and then, for a long moment, across the cab at Coralee. Then he knocked twice on the glass, politely, with one knuckle.
Ozias rolled the window down.
"Mr. Kroll," Thane said. "I'm Deputy Stamper, Mineral County. I'm going to need you to hand me your keys."
Ozias Kroll took the key out of the ignition and put it in the deputy's open hand, and Thane closed his fingers over it and put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
"Trucker," Thane said, across the cab, to Coralee.
"I lied to you, Thane."
"I know it. I knew it when I seen the straw." He sounded tired, not angry. "Truckers don't drink their water through a straw. I got down to the Thorne turnoff and helped the Lekumberry boy run two heifers back through a fence and the whole time I'm thinking about that straw." He looked down at Dovie. "She all right?"