Chapter 2

Sheriff Doyle Mabry got out of his car the way he did everything - slowly, and already decided about something.

He was fifty-eight, broad through the chest, soft through the middle, and he had worn a tie for the first time in a month. He looked at the truck, the ditch, the papers lying in the grass. Then he looked at Emmett Sorrell cuffed to his own door handle, forehead on green paint, and his face changed in a way Deputy Reedy did not notice, because Deputy Reedy was still talking.

"Plate lamp's out," Reedy said. "He got loud with me. I asked for his license and he started in with questions. He resisted."

Mabry didn't answer. He walked the three feet between Emmett's boots and the deputy's boots - three feet of dry grass, nothing else - and took a key off his belt.

"Emmett."

"Doyle."

The cuffs came off. Emmett straightened up slow, one hand flat on the truck, and rolled his shoulder twice. His knee clicked.

"You hurt?"

"No."

"You want to tell me what happened here?"

Emmett looked past him. Reedy had left the cruiser door open and the glovebox hanging down, and inside it, thick as a brick, sat a rubber-banded stack of blank inspection stickers.

"Not on this road," Emmett said.

"Why not?"

"Because out here it's an old man's word against a badge, and you'd have to decide it standing in the grass with your hands empty." Emmett rubbed his wrist. "I'd rather say it in your lot at six, when the shift is standing there."

Mabry looked at him for a while. Then he nodded, the way he did when he was about to regret something.

"Ride with me. Colton, you bring Unit Twelve in. Slow."

Reedy's neck went red again. "Sheriff -"

"Slow."

Emmett sat in the passenger seat with his cap in his lap and watched the ridge go by.

"You know what tonight is," Mabry said.

"I know."

"Forty-one years. County's never done one before. Ruth would've made you stand still for a picture."

"She'd have made me wear the good jacket."

They drove a mile without talking. The heater ticked. The last of the sun was gone and the sky had gone that flat pewter color it gets in late October.

"Junior Bell does the county's stickers now," Mabry said. "Has been since you quit."

Emmett said nothing. He looked out the window and put his cap back on.

They pulled into the gravel lot at 5:52. Sergeant Pruitt stood by the bay door with a clipboard. Reedy parked Unit 12 in the second slot and sat there with the engine running. Mabry reached for the trunk release.

"Leave it," Emmett said.

"Leave what?"

"The box in your trunk." Emmett got out. He crossed the gravel unhurried, the way he had crossed a hundred shop floors, and stopped in front of the cruiser's windshield. Then he looked back.

"Doyle. Bring your reading glasses."