Reaper leaned back against the vinyl and took his time. That was the thing men like Frank never understood — hurry was a kind of fear, and Reaper had stopped being afraid of men like Frank a long time ago and had never picked the habit back up.
"Let me tell you how the rest of your night goes," Reaper said, conversational, "because you're going to want to make a decision, and decisions go better with information." He ticked it off on his fingers. "One: every exit of this building has twenty of my people outside it, and every one of them has a phone pointed at the door. Two: the girl gave her statement to Deputy Ruiz at midnight, and then she gave it again at three, on the record, with an advocate present. Three—" he nodded toward the counter, where Roy Sutter sat hunched over nothing, talking low and fast while Ruiz wrote — "your friend Roy is giving his statement right now. Listen."
Roy's voice cracked across the diner, thin and frayed: "...I didn't — I told him we should let her go, I told him in Flagstaff, I told him—" He broke off into something that wasn't quite crying. Ruiz's voice, low and steady, answering. Roy nodded, and nodded, and put his head in his hands.
"Four," Reaper said. "The sheriff is twenty minutes out with warrants that already have your name on them. Deputy Ruiz has been on that radio all night, Frank. She doesn't strike me as the bluffing type."
Frank stared at him. "You think this scares me? A bunch of—" He stopped.
"I don't think anything about you," Reaper said. "That's the point. Nobody out there is thinking about you at all. They're thinking about her." He tipped his head toward the window, where Maya stood with Carol's hand on her shoulder, watching the river of headlights. "A thousand people rode through the rain tonight, Frank. Not one of them came for you."
Something moved behind Frank's eyes then — not fear, not yet, but the first cold edge of arithmetic. He looked at the door. He looked at the windows, at the bikes idled crosswise in the rain. He looked at Roy with his head in his hands. His own hands, Reaper noticed, had gone flat on the laminate, fingers spread wide, palms down.
"Here's your choice," Reaper said quietly. "It's the only one you get. When the sheriff walks through that door, you go with him with your head up, no scene, no brave last words — or you do something stupid, and you find out what a thousand witnesses looks like on the evening news." He picked up his mug. "I'd take the cuffs, Frank. Cuffs are quiet. Everything else tonight is loud."
He stood, leaving Frank staring at his own spread hands, and walked to the counter, and didn't look back.
At the counter Roy had stopped crying and was talking in a flat exhausted monotone while Ruiz wrote without looking up — dates, a motel name, the thing with the car keys, all of it spilling out of him like water from a split pipe. When he saw Reaper he flinched. Reaper just nodded at him, once, and Roy's face crumpled — but he kept talking. That was the thing about breaking: once it started, it wanted to finish.
Then Roy stood up.
Ruiz started to rise, but Roy held up a hand. "Please," he said. "Just — please." And he walked, unsteady, across the diner to where Maya stood at the window. Carol stepped half in front of her without thinking, and Maya put a hand on Carol's arm — it's all right — and faced him.
Roy stopped three feet away like there was a wall. "Maya," he said, and her name came out broken. "I'm sorry. God, I'm so sorry. I told him — in Flagstaff I told him we should let you go, and then I just — I got back in the car." His hands were shaking. "I'll tell them everything. I'll testify. Whatever they want. Just — please."
The diner went quiet. Even the radio seemed to hush.
Maya looked at him for a long time. Rain ticked against the glass. Somewhere outside, an engine turned over, low and patient.
"You stood between us once," Maya said. "In the parking lot. When he grabbed my wrist." Her voice was hoarse and level. "I remember that, Roy."
Roy made a sound like air leaving a tire.
"That's the only reason I'm still looking at you," she said. And turned back to the window.
Roy stood there a moment longer, and then he walked back to the counter and sat down and put his head in his hands, and Ruiz, gently, put her hand on his shoulder for exactly two seconds before she went back to writing.
Reaper watched all of this from the end of the counter with his coffee going cold in his hand, and then his gaze drifted back to the corner booth.
Frank Delinger sat alone with his hands flat on the laminate, fingers spread wide, palms pressed down — the exact posture Maya had held at midnight while he ordered her dinner without asking her, while he told her what she wanted, while the booth closed around her like a lid. Trapped, then. Trapped, now.
The only difference, Reaper thought, was that now he knew it.
And Reaper turned away, because there was nothing left in that booth worth looking at.
Chapter 18
Sirens
Ruiz heard them before she saw the lights — sirens wailing down out of the gray morning, thinning as the cruisers slowed for the river of bikes. She stepped out onto the diner's concrete stoop and watched it happen: two county cruisers, a highway patrol unit, the transport van, rolling in slow behind a wedge of riders who parted for them without being asked, without a word, like a current dividing around a stone. Whoever was riding point lifted two fingers off his grip as he peeled away. Ruiz lifted two fingers back before she remembered she was on duty.
Sheriff Harlan got out of the lead cruiser with his hat already on, took one long look at the thousand bikes lining his highway in both directions, and said, "Well, Elena. You've had a night."