Go to Stockton. Leo closed his mouth. He looked at Corey. Corey was already standing, already reaching for his jacket, already moving with the direction of a man who has found his heading and intends to keep it.
He held out his hand to Leo. Leo took it. Not a handshake, just held it for a second. The way you hold the hand of someone who has been with you through the worst and the best of the same night and come out with you on the other side.
Then they walked out through the empty doorframe and into the Mojave and the gravel crunched under their feet and the car started on the second try and they pulled out of the lot and headed east toward San Bernardino and Ruben's shop. And beyond that north toward the 99 and Stockton and a seven-month-old girl named Rosie who did not yet know that the night had just turned in her direction. The Pioneer Wells Diner stood on the edge of Interstate 40 in the deep dark before dawn door open to the desert air lights on Monitor Recording, and inside it a 60-year-old waitress and a 64-year-old cook and a traveling salesman from Albuquerque sat quietly with their coffee and their eggs in their separate silences, each of them turning over the same thing from their own angle, the way you turn a stone in your hand to see how it catches the light. What had happened here tonight, what it meant, what you did with a story like this once you had it.
Dave Pelman posted the video at 6:47 in the morning from a motel room in Victorville. He hadn't planned to. He had driven the 40 miles from Barstow in a kind of suspended state, hands on the wheel, audiobook off the particular silence of a man who has too much to think about for sound to fit alongside it. He had checked into the first motel he found, taken off his shoes, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at the wall for approximately twenty minutes.
Then he had called Carol. She picked up on the second ring, which meant she'd been awake. Carol was almost always awake when Dave drove late. She didn't make a production of it.
She didn't wait up dramatically, didn't call him repeatedly. She just stayed close to the surface of sleep on the nights he was on the road available, the way people are available for the things that genuinely matter to them. "Hey," she said. "Hey," he said.
A pause. Carol read pauses the way musicians read rests, not as absence but as information. "You okay?" "I'm fine," he said. "I'm yes, I'm fine." He rubbed the back of his neck.