The room smelled of bleach and coffee and suspicion. The deputy named Mitch had the seat opposite Rodney, the chair turned backward between his legs. Like Rodney’s father had done that night, those suitcases of his sitting at his feet, the wash of surrender all down his face.
“Do we have any food in here, Holly?” Mitch asked.
“I could scare up something,” she said. She walked off to a back room and came back with a package of little donuts, laying them carefully on Rodney’s knee. She grinned back at him as he devoured them, those round apple cheeks of hers, her yellow hair—too yellow, really—piled on her head like a sleeping bird.
Mitch took the papers and rolled them up in his hand, picking at the edges, staring down at it as if he could read through the layers. It was Holly who had produced these, when Mitch had told her Rodney’s name.
“That’s you,” she’d said to Rodney. “Parents, Rose and Gilbert?” A question, testing him. The APB itself had gone missing, she explained to the deputy, lost under a handful of fresh Most Wanted bills, drug runners who were probably already halfway to Mexico by now. The kid should have stayed on top, she told him.
Mitch told her not to blame herself, that he was where he needed to be now. He unfurled the stack and began to thumb through them, his eyes clicking between Rodney and the papers. “What can you tell me about Otis Dell?”
The name was still rot, and it floated in the air as the sick stench that it was. Rodney felt himself melt into his chair, his head spinning with the downward slide. And then there came a flutter of images, of Otis walking away from him and folding over the ground, and falling from Lester down into the earth, legs tumbling like a rag doll’s. And there was the smell, the rotten stench from deep below, from where Otis now lay all alone in the dark, so far from the living.
Holly said, “I’ll go put a call into Wyoming.”
Mitch put a hand up. “Before you do that, check in with Lou.” he said. “Tell him I said Lester Fanning can wait till tomorrow.”
Rodney had not expected to hear Lester’s name like that, not there in that room, with these people. Not yet. And he had not expected the power it would have over him, safe as he was now, Lester on that mountain or wherever he was. His gut bobbed like a log in the water, and he leaned over his knees and gave up those donuts in one yellow heave, all over the linoleum floor.
Oh lord, Holly gasped, jumping back. She ran off down the hallway and back again, a fistful of paper towels waving in her hand like it was a fan. Taking the seat next to him, she pressed the towels to his mouth until he took them from her, and as he moved them over his face, she rested her hand on his back, moving it in little circles.
Mitch said, “Well, now. Something isn’t setting right with you. And I’m willing to bet it ain’t the donuts.”
Rodney wiped at his mouth once more and bunched the paper into his fist.
“Rodney,” the deputy said. “Tell me about Lester.”
“It’s okay, honey,” Holly said.
Rodney flashed on the hillside and the yellow spotlights that fell through the trees, and the smell of Otis as his body swung like a sack between Lester and Nadine. The way Lester swore at him and snatched that flashlight out of his hand like he might beat him with it. How he told him to move closer to the well. The sound of his voice calling from Otis’s Bonneville, the wash of light over the ground. Rodney, invisible.
“Lester,” he said, “put Otis down the hole.”
Mitchell looked to Holly, who swooped round the counter as if a starting gun had fired off, snatching the handset from the radio.