it to one of the rings already there. He cleared his throat and looked up at her.
“Audrey, I just want you to know I thought the world of your dad. He was a good lawman and a good man. When I lit out of here he didn’t hold any kind of grudge about it like some other man might have, and he didn’t say anything against me to Sheriff Gaines down in Iowa either, and I’ll never forget that.”
She said nothing, and Moran went on talking, but she was thinking about a time years ago when she’d run from her father in tears, because he’d snapped at her . . . and he’d snapped at her because she’d asked why Deputy Moran was leaving the department and he’d said it was none of her concern, which only made her more curious, of course, pestering him until finally he turned on her and said, What did I just say? and she’d run from him in tears. Because she was his deputy too, and she understood then that that was just for play and there were things she would never know about—grown-up things. Real sheriff and real deputy things.
“. . . so I just want you to know,” Moran was saying, “you need anything, and I mean anything, you give me a call.” He unsnapped a breast pocket flap and plucked out his card and set it on the table and snapped the button again. She saw the bright gold star of the card.
“Thank you, Sheriff. I will.”
He laced his fingers in the space between his knees and seemed to study them. Then he said, “Shoot, there’s just no good way to get into this, especially so soon after . . .”
“I’m all right, Sheriff,” she said. “You drove all the way up here so you might as well just say it. Is it about those boys?”
“It is. It surely is. It’s about one of them anyway.”
She waited. He looked up.
“Did you know your dad headed down there, two nights ago?”
“Down where?”
“Iowa.”
She shook her head.
“Well, he did. He went looking around, asking questions at that gas station, and then he spent the night in a motel and in the morning he went looking around some more.”
She watched him. Waiting.
“And so now I gotta ask you, Audrey: Did you tell your dad anything about that night, about those boys, that you didn’t tell me? Anything you might’ve remembered after I left the hospital?”
She knew what he was after and she didn’t pretend she didn’t. She told him about the backscratcher, and how she thought she’d scratched the one boy’s face with it.
“You said at the hospital you never got a good look at their faces,” he said. “That it was too dark.”
“It was. But I felt it when I got him. And he yelled, and yanked it out of my hand. So I knew I got him.”
He was watching her face, her eyes, her hands. As he would anyone he was questioning.
“Did he find it?” she said. “When he went down there?”
“No. It would seem not. If he had, he might not have shot that boy through the hand.”
Audrey said nothing. She knew at once that it was true.
Moran raised his own right hand and pointed at the palm with his opposite forefinger. “Right there. Close range. Then left him bleeding in a parking lot.”
She looked at the old .38 on the coffee table.
“He didn’t use that,” Moran said. “It was the boy’s own .45.”
Audrey was silent, staring at the .38. “Was it him?” she said at last.
“Was it who?”
“That boy. From the gas station.”
Moran watched her with those eyes of his. “How am I supposed to know that?”
She stared at him. She couldn’t think. “I mean—didn’t you talk to him?”
“I did. Talked to him this morning, but all he said was he wasn’t talking to any more cops without his lawyer. Said he knew who shot him and wanted him arrested. That’s why I was on my way up here.”
“To arrest him?”
“No, I couldn’t do that up here—I’d have to go through the whole extradition process and . . .” He waved his hand. “I was coming just to talk to him, to see how he wanted to go about it.”
Audrey began to get up but then sat down again. Her legs wouldn’t do it.
Moran stood and collected the tumbler from her and walked into the kitchen. The tap ran, and he returned and handed her the glass and took his seat