Chapter 6

For a moment the only sound in the lot was the floodlights.

Pruitt smiled. It was a reasonable smile, a patient one, the smile of a man who had talked his way out of worse.

"That's my name because I bought one," he said. "My brother-in-law's truck, over in the next county. I paid him the same as everybody else."

Mabry looked at the page. "Then why does it say owe?"

"It's a notebook. He writes things down."

"He writes what he collected." Mabry turned the book around so the half-circle could see the column. "Sixty-two entries have a dollar amount. This one has a dollar amount and the word owe. That means you were on the other side of it, Dean. That means he owed you."

The smile stayed on a second longer than it should have.

"Sheriff. Let's take this in your office."

"Stand still."

Nadine had already gone back inside, and she came out with the evidence log in a plastic sleeve, and Mabry read that out loud too, because he read everything out loud that night.

"February eleventh. Two books of seized state inspection stickers, released to Sergeant D. Pruitt. Signature here. Purpose: transfer to the state for destruction." He looked up. "The state never got them. The box in the evidence room is two books short."

That was when Deputy Tanya Voss stepped out of the circle, took the cuffs off her own belt, and stood where the sheriff could see her, and waited to be told.

It came apart fast after that, the way things do when the room has already decided.

Trooper Grady Neff from the patrol pulled in at 6:31 - called in by Mabry before he'd even opened the notebook, because a sheriff's office cannot investigate its own sergeant and Mabry knew it. Reedy's badge and weapon came off his belt and went onto the hood next to the stickers, and he stood with his hands behind his back and said one thing, "I only did it because I couldn't make it on the pay," and nobody answered him.

Pruitt's badge came off last. Mabry took it off him personally, slowly, in front of the shift.

The count came to sixty-three stickers over eight months, forty of them still out there somewhere on Vine County roads. Beck and Renn had each bought one for a family truck and said nothing for months. That was their part, and they would answer for it, and both of them would say later that the worst ten minutes of their lives were the ten they spent looking at gravel.

It stopped at Pruitt. The state went through the notebook, the evidence log, the supply room and the sheriff's own signature files, and found nothing above the sergeant's pay grade. Not as far as the star on the wall. As far as the man who kept the keys.

"Everybody in this county riding on a forged sticker gets reinspected free," Mabry said. "Bell's will do it. I'll pay for the ones who can't."

Then he walked to his trunk.

Emmett had known what was in there since 5:52, and he still didn't want it. But Mabry brought the box out and opened it in the light, and the plaque inside carried forty-one years and his name, and Mabry held it up so the whole half-circle could read it.

"For forty-one years," Mabry said, "if Emmett Sorrell signed it, it was good. That's what got stolen out here tonight. Not money. His name. And I want the shift to hear me say the name is good."

Emmett took the plaque because there was no polite way not to.

"Ruth would've made me wear the good jacket," he said.

"She'd have made you take the plaque, too."

Tanya Voss walked out of the bay with a bulb and a screwdriver and a flashlight, and Emmett got down on one knee in the gravel - his bad knee, the one he'd been favoring all night - and did the job himself. His hands shook the whole time. The bulb went in anyway. The little white light came on over the plate and threw a clean oval onto the gravel, and Voss turned the flashlight off.

At 7:10 he drove out of the lot with the plaque on the passenger seat and the county behind him in the dark, and every mile of Route 9 was lit at the back bumper by one small lamp that worked.