Is everything all right? Fine, fine, Gerald Foss said. He cleared his throat in the way of a man approaching something he'd been working up to. I was in the back room last night during whatever it was that happened. I could hear some of it and I saw some of those men in the parking lot on my way out.
A pause. I was in the insurance business for 37 years, Mr. Decker. I spent a lot of those years watching people get hurt by the kind of people your situation apparently involves. People who didn't have anyone in their corner. Cole was very still.
My retirement means I have time, Gerald Foss said. and 40 years of contacts in the legal and financial infrastructure of this state. He paused again. I don't know exactly what you're building, but I heard enough last night to understand the shape of it, and I'd like to be part of it if you'll have a 70-year-old retired insurance man." Cole looked at the phone.
He looked at Darnell, who was watching with the expression of a man who has learned to stop being surprised by how things arrange themselves when a person finally stops running from them. Mr. Foss, Cole said. Can you come by the Rusty Spur this afternoon? I can, Gerald Foss said. Patrice makes excellent chili.
I'd be glad of a bowl. 3:00. Cole said, "Come in the back entrance." He ended the call. Darnell was looking at him with deep, undisguised satisfaction. "
You see, you didn't even have to go looking. It comes to you." " It's "one phone call,"," Cole said. " It's the first one," Darnell said. Cole sat with that for a moment.
Then he stood up from the stool, Darnell's stool, "The center stool, the one that looked at the door, and he went behind the bar because it was almost 9 and Patrice had the morning open to run. And Kira was still learning the inventory system, and there was work to do. But before he picked up the dish towel, he looked at the back room door. The one with its own entrance, the one that had been empty too long. He walked over and opened it and looked inside.
It was the same room Gerald Foss had used for his retirement party. Same tables, same chairs, same phone on the wall. It smelled like the bar, like cedar and coffee and something older. It was the right size for the right purpose. It had a window that looked onto the side street, not the dumpster.
He stood there for a moment in the doorway with everything that had happened in the last 12 hours still settling into place and he thought about what he was going to put in this room and what it was going to become and who was going to sit at these tables and what was going to change because of it. Then Patrice said from behind him with her particular practical certainty, "You're going to need a coffee maker in there, a good one, and a whiteboard." Cole turned and looked at her. " Don't argue with me about it," she said. " I know what a room needs."
Cole looked back at the empty room, at the possibility of it, at the specific unsentimentalized hope of it. Not easy, not romantic, just real. The way real things are when they begin. A coffee maker and a whiteboard, he said. And decent chairs, Patrice said.
The ones in there have a bad leg. I've been meaning to replace them. Cole nodded. He was already thinking past the chairs and the whiteboard and the coffee maker, already thinking about the first conversation that would happen in that room. and the person who would walk through that back entrance, not knowing what help looked like, but knowing they needed it and finding it.
Tomorrow, he said, "Tomorrow." Patrice agreed. He went back to the bar and picked up the dish towel, and the morning opened up around him, the way mornings do in a place that has decided to be something better than it was with the particular brightness of things that are beginning rather than ending. And Cole Decker stood behind the bar in Harrisville, Tennessee in his leather vest with his real name and his real history and his real purpose finally in the same room at the same time and got to work. 3 weeks after Garrison went into custody, the noise started.
It came the way Reyes had promised it would not loudly, not directly, but through channels, through suggestion, through the particular kind of pressure that well-funded lawyers apply when they want a case to feel less solid than it is. A local paper in Clarksville ran a piece about the warrant application, sourced anonymously, raising questions about the information used to obtain it. A legal blog picked it up. Someone sent the blog post to a reporter in Nashville who called the Rusty Spur asking for a comment from Cole Decker. Cole was behind the bar when the call came in.
Kira handed him the phone with an expression that suggested she already knew what it was. He listened to the reporter's question, careful, professional, framed as an inquiry rather than an accusation. and he said clearly and without drama, I provided verbal information to a federal agent via telephone based on knowledge I had obtained legally. I stand by everything I communicated. If you have further questions, contact agent Reyes at the Nashville ATF office.
Then he handed the phone back to Kira and went back to what he'd been doing. Kira stared at him. That's it. That's it. Cole said he's going to write a story anyway.
Probably. Cole said that's his job. He'll write what he has, which isn't much, and it'll run inside the paper where nobody will see it, and Garrison's lawyers will clip it and add it to a file, and the file won't change anything because the evidence is solid. He looked at her. Don't answer the phone for the next week if you don't recognize the number.
Kira nodded slowly. You've done this before, she said. I've done a version of it before, Cole said. Go check on table three, she went. Cole picked up the dish towel and felt beneath the ordinary rhythm of the morning.
The specific alertness of a man who knows a threat when he hears it and has assessed this one accurately real but manageable. The kind of noise designed to wear you down rather than knock you over. Effective only against people who don't understand what it is. He understood what it was. He'd been educated on exactly this kind of legal friction by watching it be deployed against people who didn't have the resources to resist it.
And the understanding made him neither afraid nor indifferent. It made him careful which was the correct response. He called Reyes that evening from the back room. I saw the Clarksville piece. She said before he could speak and it's thin.