"You can't prove any of..." Holt started.
Six of the deposits are in the drive, Grim said simply.
Wire transfers with your account as the destination. Clay's name as the origin.
He watched the man's face. Jesse Tarant recorded four conversations.
Two of them include you by name discussing specific details of specific situations. He let the silence sit for a moment.
How much of that needs to be proven when the FBI gets here? How much of it do they need to prove before your name is in the first paragraph of every report?
Holt looked past him toward the diner, then toward the trucks, then down at the ground. "He's going to know I left," Holt said very quietly.
"Yes," Grim said. "He is.
He'll come after me." "Deputy Holt."
Grim's voice dropped to something almost private just between the two of them. "With what's on that drive, Clay Mercer is not going to be in a position to come after anyone.
Not in the next 48 hours. Maybe not ever.
He paused. But that only happens if the federal people who are already moving have room to move.
If tonight becomes something else, if tonight becomes a situation that has to be explained and contained and managed, it slows everything down. And in that window, things get lost.
Evidence gets lost. He let that land.
I'm not asking you to be a hero. I'm asking you to get in your car.
A long silence. The trucks at the far end of the lot hadn't moved.
Grim could feel the weight of the men in them, the waiting, the specific pressure of Clay Mercer watching this conversation from 60 yards away and not being able to hear it and hating that. Holt said, "If I do, if I leave, I'm going to need whatever you need."
Grim said, you take it up with the federal people, not me.
I'm not in the deal making business. He looked at the man steadily.
I'm just the guy telling you the train is moving. Whether you're on it or in front of it is entirely up to you.
Another silence. Then Gary Holt pushed off the cruiser.
He didn't look at Grim again. He didn't look at the trucks.
He got in his car and the engine started and the cruiser pulled out of the parking lot and onto Route 66 and its lights disappeared around the curve. The trucks stayed where they were.
Grim turned and looked at them. He stood in the middle of the parking lot alone in the circle of yellow light from the single working lamp and he looked at the trucks and the men in them and he thought about Clay Mercer sitting in one of them watching his deputy drive away and he understood what that moment felt like for Clay, the sudden exposure, the removal of the buffer, the realization that the architecture he had built over years, the careful layering of money and loyalty and official protection had just lost a critical piece.
He stood there and he let Clay feel it. A minute passed.
Nothing moved. Then a door opened.