Nobody is alone in this town after 3:00, he said. Not Emily Parker, not Patty Gould, not Tommy Reese. Tell me who needs covering and I put people on it. Will told him. Marcus pulled out his own phone and made four calls in six minutes.
Brief, specific, each one landing like a command that didn't need to be explained because the people receiving it understood the language without annotation. When he finished, he put the phone in his jacket and looked at Will. "Done," he said. Will thought about Emily and Maggie two booths away. Maggie now explaining to her mother why her green horse needed a hat.
He thought about Tommy Reese in his hardware store with the blinds up again because Tommy had opened them when he walked back from the diner. Will had seen it from the street. The quiet rebellion of a 63-year-old man reclaiming his own window. He thought about Patty Ghoul behind her counter and Lou Baitman at his pharmacy with a 12-minute video that had the potential to pull the whole thing down. Marcus, he said.
Marcus looked at him. Thank you, Will said. Just those two words, clean, direct, without qualifications. Marcus picked up his coffee mug and finished what was left of it and set it down. He looked at the counter for a moment.
I should have come to find you years ago, he said. Not for this, just to find you. I wasn't easy to find, Will said. You weren't trying to be found, Marcus said. That's different.
He looked up, but I should have tried anyway. The thing that had been in Will's chest since the phone call at 4 in the morning did something again. A complex motion of something long nodded beginning slowly to loosen. He didn't have a clean response to what Marcus had said. He looked at his coffee cup.
"I'm here now," Will said. "Yes," Marcus said. "You are." At 2:45, Hutchkins called Will back. "Decker came in," Hutchkins said.
The velocity was still in his voice, but it had a different quality now. The quality of a man holding something larger than he expected. 20 minutes ago, he walked in voluntarily, asked for me specifically, and for the last 20 minutes, he's been sitting in my office giving me everything. Will leaned against the workbench in his shop where he'd gone after lunch to work because work was how he managed time that otherwise would have been spent in his own head. Everything meaning what?
Everything meaning a complete account of every business. Keller extorted the amounts, the dates, the method, Hutchkins said, plus something I did not have and did not expect, which is a record of what happened in Billings 18 months ago. The assault charge that got pled down. Decker was there. He knows why the witness recanted.
Because Keller made them. Because Keller paid them. Hutchinson said Decker has the amount, the intermediary, the timeline. It's not Silver Creek's jurisdiction, but it's exactly the kind of crossjurisdictional information that Billings PD has been trying to get to for a year and a half. A pause.
Will, if this holds up, and I believe it will, because Decker is asking for nothing in return, just walking it in and putting it down, then what I have tonight is a case against Brandon Keller that didn't exist this morning. Will said nothing for a moment. He thought about Decker's voice on the phone 2 hours ago. The flat precision of it, the specific care of a man who wanted to be on the right side of the line before the line moved. He asked for nothing, Will said.
Nothing, Hutchkins said. I asked him why, and he said Hutchkins paused as though recalling the exact phrasing. He said he'd spent four years working for people who thought winning was the only thing that mattered. And he'd started to agree with them. And then he walked into a shop in Silver Creek and met an old man who wasn't afraid.
And 31 people who drove through the night for him and he decided he didn't want to be on that side of that anymore. Will stood at his workbench and breathed. "He said that," Will said verbatim, Hutchinson said. "I wrote it down while he was still talking. The shop was very quiet outside."
The November afternoon was tilting toward its early dark. "Dale," Will said. "When are you moving on, Brandon?" "I'm waiting for the footage from Lou," Hutchinson said. "Once I have it confirmed.
I'm getting a warrant." Tonight. He'll know it's coming," Will said. Decker wasn't subtle about leaving. Trace and the others will tell him Decker's gone and that something's wrong.
I know, Hutchinson said, which is why I want your people visible. Not at the warehouse, I'll handle the warehouse, but visible in town, because if Keller decides to make a statement before I get to him, I want there to be 31 witnesses and no question about what happened. Understood, Will said. I'll tell Marcus. One more thing, Hutchinson said, "The footage from Lou, it's clear.
12 minutes of explicit threat named parties named Consequences. It's the clearest piece of evidence I've received in 15 years as a sheriff." He paused again. Tommy Reese also called while Decker was here. Said he wants to give a statement.
Said his wife called him and told him to stop being afraid and he didn't have a good argument against it. Despite everything, Will almost laughed. Tommy's wife, he said. A persuasive woman, Hutchkins said. I'll be in touch.