“I know you can,” Grim said. “That’s not the point. The point is if anything happens to either of you in here tonight, it is on me, and I will not carry that. Please.”
Frank looked at him for a long moment with the expression of one man measuring another, then nodded once.
The kind of nod that means, I respect the reasoning, I am complying under protest, and we both understand this.
He took Dolores by the hand, and they moved to the far booth and got low.
The college kids, both pale and very still, were already on the floor near the jukebox without having been told.
Grim looked at Danny.
“How much time?”
“They’re not moving yet. Sitting in the trucks.”
“He’s waiting for something,” Grim said.
“Or someone.”
“The deputy,” Jesse said. “Clay won’t move without the badge present. It’s how he always does it. He needs the official cover close by. If something goes wrong, the deputy steps in, makes it a police matter, controls the narrative.”
“So the deputy is the anchor,” Danny said.
“The deputy is the anchor,” Jesse confirmed.
Grim turned this over.
“If the deputy leaves, Clay’s exposed,” Jesse said. “He doesn’t have the buffer anymore. Whatever happens is just him and his guys against…”
He gestured vaguely at the room.
“Whoever’s in here.”
The three of them were quiet for a moment.
Then Grim said, “I’m going outside.”
Danny said, “No.”
“Danny.”
“No. I’m not arguing about it. I’m just saying no. You go out there alone, and Clay puts you on the ground and takes the drive. This whole night means nothing.”
“I’m not going out there to fight him,” Grim said. “I’m going out there to talk to the deputy.”
The room was quiet.
“The deputy,” Danny repeated.
“He’s a small man,” Grim said. “Not Clay. Clay is what he is. He’s committed. He’s dug in. He has too much to lose to back away. But the deputy is hired help. He has a badge, a pension, a family somewhere, and a life he wants to keep living.”
Grim’s voice was calm and certain, the voice of someone who had made many assessments of many men in many difficult moments and had calibrated this one carefully.
“He doesn’t know what’s on that drive yet. He doesn’t know about the seven women. He doesn’t know I made a call to a federal contact two hours ago, and that call is already moving.”
He paused.
“But he’s about to.”
Danny stared at him.
“You’re going to walk out there and tell a corrupt cop the feds are already involved.”
“Yes.”
“And you think that’s going to make him leave?”
“I think it’s going to make him do the math,” Grim said. “A deputy who walks away from a parking lot tonight is a deputy who maybe, maybe, has enough distance from this to survive what’s coming. A deputy standing next to Clay Mercer when federal agents arrive is something else entirely.”
He looked at Danny steadily.
“He’s going to do the math, Danny, and the math is going to tell him to get in his car.”
Danny pressed his lips together.
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we have a different problem, and we solve it differently.”
Grim pulled on his jacket, the heavy leather cut, the Hell’s Angels patch, thirty years of road and consequence worked into every seam.
“But I think it does.”
“What do you want me to do?” Danny said.
“Stay here. Keep everyone calm. And if you hear anything that sounds like it’s going badly…”
He stopped.
“You’ll know.”
He went to the front door.
He put his hand on it.
Behind him, the diner was very quiet.
Even the buzzing of the overhead light seemed to have lowered itself by a degree, the way sounds do when everyone in a room is holding their breath at exactly the same moment.
Millie said from behind the counter, “Grim.”
He turned.
She was standing straight, the shotgun in the crook of her arm, and her face had the look it had when she was saying something she had already decided to say regardless of consequences.
“You come back inside,” she said. “You hear me? Whatever happens out there, you come back inside.”
He looked at her for a moment.
Then he opened the door and walked out.
The cold hit him first.
Then the light, or the lack of it.
The parking lot’s single working lamp threw a circle of yellow that did not reach the trucks at the far end.
He could see them.
Shapes and shadows.
The occasional cold red of a cigarette.
He counted the vehicles again himself.
Four trucks.
One cruiser.
Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw the figure leaning against the cruiser with his arms crossed.
A man in uniform.
Medium height.
The posture of someone trying very hard to look casual and failing at it in the specific way guilty people fail.
Grim walked toward him.
He walked at a normal pace.
Not slow. Slow would read as hesitation, and hesitation was a language men like these translated as weakness.
Not fast. Fast would read as aggression, and aggression at this particular moment would collapse the window he was trying to open.
He walked at the pace of a man who had somewhere to be and had decided this was on the way.
He stopped six feet from the deputy.
The deputy’s name, Grim knew from Jesse, was Holt.
Gary Holt.
Fourteen years on the force. Two commendations. A wife named Linda. A son in middle school. A second mortgage on a house he probably could not actually afford.
“Deputy Holt,” Grim said.
The man’s jaw tightened.
“You know my name.”
“I know a lot of things,” Grim said.
He kept his hands visible, loose at his sides.
“I know your badge number. I know the account number Clay uses to make deposits to your account on the fourteenth of every month. I know the routing number of the bank.”
He paused, letting each piece land.
“I know about the Bullhead City girl and the six others.”