Grim said he's coming to make sure you don't use what's on that drive. Jesse said he knows I'm here.
He figured it out faster than I thought he would. Grim looked at him.
Does he know what's on it? He knows what I had access to.
So, yes, he knows. Jesse's voice dropped a fraction.
He'll do anything to keep that drive from going anywhere. Millie had come around from behind the counter.
She was holding the shotgun she kept under the register, a side byside 12 gauge that was older than most of the furniture in the room and had been used exactly once in 30 years on a rattlesnake that had gotten into the storage room in 1987. She held it with the practice comfort of someone who grew up with guns and has simply never been without one.
Millie Grim said, don't, she said without looking at him. I was going to say, put it behind the counter and stay low.
She looked at him then. I was not born yesterday, Victor.
Nobody in the room had ever heard anyone call him Victor. Danny blinked.
Even Grim seemed momentarily recalibrated by it. Behind the counter, he repeated more gently.
Please. She held his gaze for a long moment, then took a step back toward the counter, but didn't put the gun down.
That was apparently the compromise she was offering, and her expression made clear it was a fixed position. Frank stood up from his table.
He was 67 years old. Compact with the kind of posture that doesn't leave you just because you age out of the service.
What do you need? He said to Grim.
Direct, no preamble. I need you and your wife on the floor behind that far booth right now.
"I can..." "I know you can," Grim said.
"That's not the point.
The point is that if anything happens to either of you in here tonight, it is on me, and I will not carry that. Please."
Frank looked at him for a long moment with the expression of one man measuring another and then nodded once the kind of nod that means I respect the reasoning I'm complying under protest we both understand this.
He took Dolores by the hand and they moved to the far booth and got low. The college kids, both of them pale, both very still, were already on the floor near the jukebox without having been told.
Grim looked at Danny. How much time?
They're not moving yet. Sitting in the trucks.
He's waiting for something, Grim said. Or someone.
The deputy, Jesse said. Clay won't move without the badge present.
It's how he always does it. He needs the official cover close by.
If something goes wrong, the deputy steps in, makes it a police matter, controls the narrative. So, the deputy is the anchor, Danny said.