“You hit… Mr. Conroy?” he asked, with a slight hesitation over the surname. “With your car?”
“No!”
“But you hit something?”
“Look at mycar.”
Martin scrawled a line across the paper, closed his notebook, and stood up. “Just give me a second,” he said and walked away.
The driver bent her head over her baby and hummed to it; the jiggling slowed now that she wasn’t trying to remember. Ledger drained the last of the coffee—it had not gotten better as it went along—and then looked around the room. He couldn’t hear all of them, but they looked like they were going the same way. The deputies were exasperated, the witnesses were frustrated, and people kept pointing at Ledger.
Now that it was empty, Ledger balanced the plastic cup on the arm of the bench.
He pushed his sleeve back against his thigh and checked the time.
It was getting close. He could still make it, but he would prefer to have a shower first. His clothes smelled of a dead man. A faint, dubious smell. Like ham that wasn’tofftoday, but if you made your sandwich with it, then it would be tomorrow.
Or, as Wren would call it: perfectly good.
“Somewhere to be?” Syder asked.
Ledger looked up at him. “Yes.”
“Where’s that?”
“None of your business,” Ledger said.
Syder looked down at his boots and shook his head. “You never make anything easy, Ledger. Your dad was the same way.”
Ledger took a second to gauge his response to that. It was obvious the sheriff wanted something, but Ledger wasn’t sure what. A headline for his next election campaign, justice for Bell’s victims, or something else. Whatever it was, Ledger didn’t want to be involved.
“Bell had something to hide,” he said after that pause. “I just don’t like you.”
“You know I’m your godfather? I’ve known you since you were that size.”
Syder nodded toward the baby in the driver’s arms. Martin was just letting the woman go, solicitous as he checked whether she needed a lift.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Ledger asked.
Syder turned his mouth down at the corners and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a packet of mints and ran his thumbnail around the crease in the paper to tear them open. Ledger watched as Syder flipped a white disk into his mouth.
“Give up the chewing tobacco?” he asked.
Because that was what Syder had pulled out of his pocket the night Ledger had come to him for help. Then he’d patted Ledger on the shoulder and let the doctors in to shoot him up and take him away.
Syder rolled the mint around his mouth the same way he had the wad of tobacco. He tucked it into his cheek as he offered Ledger the roll of sweets.
“I had cancer,” he said. “Turns out that shit’s bad for you.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Ledger said. He didn’t know why, really. It was pre-programmed. He shook his head to the offer of a mint. “Guess it’s going around. But I didn’t do anything. There was an accident, and next thing I know, someone said it was my fault.”
Syder meditatively crunched his sweet. “Everyone,” he corrected Ledger. “Everyone there.”
The chain of the handcuffs rattled as Ledger spread his hands. “How?”
“That’s the question,” Syder said. He peeled the paper back enough to thumb out another mint and feed it into his mouth. “It doesn’t look like any of them are sure, but I could probably keep you in anyhow. At least overnight. Or over the weekend if I couldn’t get a judge tomorrow.”
“Or?” Ledger asked.
