"She's fine. She had pie."
"I radioed Washoe from the turnoff. They tell me the mother called them twenty minutes ago and said she's on her way down here herself. Said a waitress phoned her." He looked at Coralee a long moment. "I could put Mr. Kroll in the back of my car right now and run him in to the jail on A Street and call the county for the girl, and nobody in the State of Nevada would say I done wrong."
"I know."
"So tell me why I shouldn't."
Coralee thought about it. She had decided, in the course of the night, that she was through lying to Thane Stamper; he had earned that much, sitting in her kitchen in 1979.
"Because she's coming," she said. "Her mama. And when she gets here, the first thing she ought to see is her little girl asleep in a warm booth with her granddaddy sitting across from her sober. Not in the county's car. Not in the back of yours. She's got a hundred and five days, Thane. She ought to see that the bad thing she's been sitting by a phone all night waiting for didn't happen. That's all. I'm not asking you to let him go. I'm asking you to let her see it."
Thane looked at her. Then at the old man, who had not said a word and did not now.
"I took my first child out of a house in 1962," Thane said finally. "Out by Luning. I've took maybe forty since. I never yet took one out of a pickup at four in the morning that had meringue in her eyebrow." He stepped back from the door. "We'll go inside. Mr. Kroll sits where I can see him. If the mother wants him charged, he's charged, and Washoe may want him charged regardless, and that's not up to me and it's surely not up to you. But we'll wait."
So they went inside. Ozias carried Dovie, and laid her back down in the rear booth under the corduroy coat, and drew the boots off again and set them toes-together under the table. Then he went and sat on a stool at the counter, the second from the end, and Thane sat on the third with his Stetson upside down beside him, and Benicio came out of the kitchen without a word and poured three coffees and put a cinnamon roll on the grill.
Coralee worked. She filled the sugars and married the ketchups. At ten after six the sky behind the cafe went gray and then the color of the inside of a shell, and across the road the lake came up out of the dark, and the snow on Mount Grant went pink at the very top. At six-fifteen a long brown Pontiac station wagon with fake wood on the sides came in off the highway too fast and stopped crooked, and before it had quite stopped the passenger door was open.