Vince finally cleans his plate for the last time, having announced he’s left room for pie, even though I find that difficult to believehaving just watched him eat. But once he does push his plate away, I tell EJ to stay right where she is, that Abby and I will clear the table.
“We just need a break,” I tell Abby over at the sink. “And I’m talking about a big break. The kind I used to say in football might not just turn a game around, but a whole season sometimes.”
I hear Vince and EJ laughing behind us at something she just said to him, completely inappropriate, I’m guessing.
“You need to be careful, Silas,” Abby says, lowering her voice now.
I lean down as a way of getting closer to her. She closes her eyes as I do, as if she thinks I’m about to kiss her, even with EJ and Vince right over there at the table. And in that moment, I almost do. Like we really are back in high school, in the front seat of EJ’s Suburban, when she’d loan it to me for a car date, even when it was brand new.
But I just don’t want my grandmother to hear what I’m about to say, knowing it would make her really mad.
“Think about it, Abs,” I whisper into her ear. “At this point, what do I have to lose?”
SIXTY-SIX
TO BURT WEBB, coffee is coffee.
He’d never admit it to his wife, but he’s fond of the coffee they serve at the McDonald’s a few miles from their house, where he stops sometimes on his way to work when he’s too lazy to drive over to Scobee’s. He’s just as fond of the sausage and egg McMuffin—or two—he orders there, not that he would ever admit to cheating on Bess Scobee, who’d want to arrest him if she ever found out he was greasing up somewhere else at breakfast time.
This morning he’s choosing to sit at a table inside, greeting all the locals who recognize him before he goes back to checking Helene Mayes’s online tip line.
But even as he does, Burt is aware—a heightened sense of awareness—that he’s about to follow up on a tip of his own this morning, one reinforced on his cell phone late last night.
“It’s about the white van,” the voice at the other end of the call had said when Burt had stepped all the way outside so as not to wake Taylor. “But I gotta ask you, like I did the first time I called you, if you can protect me if I tell you everything I’ve got on the Crocketts.”
“Long as information is good,” Burt said. “We went over that already.”
“It’s good.”
“Then I can protect you. And will.”
“Swear?”
And Burt said, “Everyone who knows me knows my word is good.”
Now they’re set to finally meet face-to-face, at a truck stop just off the highway in Old Mill. Burt picked the location. Before he’d ended the call, he’d asked the man, “How will I know you?”
The man said, “I know you, trust me.”
“We’re going to have to trust each other,” Burt said. “Because it’ll be worth it if you give me something I can use.”
“Well, trustmeon something,” the man said. “Itisworth it, because itisgoing to help you take down those no-account pricks once and for all.”
It’s one more thing Burt is trusting with his gut. Silas kept saying, over and over, almost every time they were together, that they needed a break. And this might be it.
Burt Webb orders a second cup of coffee. Thinks about taking another sausage sandwich with him for the road. Smiles to himself. What Tay doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
He’s in the parking lot, fairly empty this morning the way the McDonald’s is, and ready to make the ride to Old Mill when he hears a car so loud it sounds as if it belongs at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, blasting its way down Old Cross Highway. Only it’s not a race car, Burt can see when it gets close. It’s a red-and-white Ford Fairlane with those classic tail fins. Burt knows a fair amount about cars, has since he was a boy, when he’d briefly dreamed about racing them when he grew up, wanting to follow in the footsteps of one of his uncles, the one who’d raced on dirt tracks all over the Carolinas.
But whoever is behind the wheel of this classic car is ruining it and pissing Burt off royally in the process. Ruining it by having itmake this kind of noise, drawing attention to it for all the wrong reasons and not for the beauty and lines of the car.
It flies by him now, clearly way over the speed limit.
Burt has half a mind to jump in his car and turn on the lights and siren and go right after it. Back when he first started with the Cross Rivers PD and was out patrolling the roads, he wouldn’t just pull cars over for speeding, he’d do it for excessive exhaust noise like this.
Sometimes he’d hit what he liked to think of as the triple crown, clipping them for not having their emissions sticker, too.
But he has somewhere important to be, in less than an hour.
