"Something happened tonight. I want to tell you about it, but I don't know where to start." "Start anywhere," Carol said. "I'll keep up." So, he told her. From the gravel lot and the two men with guns to Brenda and the Louisville Slugger, from booth nine to the patches, to Mike Callahan's voice saying things at a frequency that Dave was still processing at 6:00 in the morning.
He told her about Torres in the doorway and the phone call and the tail lights going west. He told her about Harold's eggs and the discarded tie and Garrett's laugh filling the room. He talked for 31 minutes and Carol did not interrupt once, which was, he would later tell people, one of the most loving things she had ever done for him. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"Dave," she said. "Yeah." The camera was still recording the whole time. "Yes." "And nobody took the footage?" "No, Mike said leave it." Another pause, different quality from the first. "That footage is going to come out," she said.
"I know." "When it does," "I know," he said again. "That's the thing. That's what I keep. That's why I can't sleep.
Not because I'm scared, because I keep thinking about what Mike said. He said the story the tape tells is the story of two men who made a wrong choice and then made a right one. And he said don't be ashamed of it." Dave looked at his hands. "And I keep thinking the tape also tells the story of four men in a booth who could have done anything and chose the thing that cost the least.
And I was there. I saw it. And nobody's going to know I was there unless "Unless you say something," Carol said. "Unless I say something." The silence between them was the kind that married people develop over years.
Not empty, not uncomfortable, but full of the other person's thinking, which you can hear if you've been listening long enough. "What do you want to do?" Carol said. Dave looked at his phone. He had, without fully planning it, already pulled up the Barstow County Sheriff's non-emergency tip line and the website for a local news station in San Bernardino, both open in his browser tabs.