They simply turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction. The universal body language of people who have done their math and do not like the answer and are acting on it immediately.
Clay stood alone. He looked at Grim and something in him, some last residue of the man he had convinced himself he was, the untouchable man, the man who owned deputies and judges and whole categories of human silence.
That something looked out through his eyes for one final moment and then went away. And what was left was just a man on a street corner who had run out of options.
"I want a lawyer," Clay said. "That," Grim said, "is the first intelligent thing you've said tonight."
The federal vehicles came around both ends of the street simultaneously. The textbook pincer of people who know what they are doing and have had all night to plan it.
Clay Mercer put his hands up without being told because whatever else he was, he was not stupid and the moment for anything other than hands up had passed. Grim stepped back onto the sidewalk and let it happen.
It took less than 4 minutes. It was, after everything, almost anticlimactic, the formal procedural end to a night that had been anything but formal or procedural.
Men in jackets with three letters on the back, voices giving instructions, hands being guided, doors being opened and closed. His federal contact appeared at his elbow.
A trim man in his late 40s whom Grim knew well enough to trust and not well enough to call a friend which was exactly the right relationship for both of them. The drive held up.
The contact said, "Everything Jesse said was on it. It's all there."
"The seven women?" Grim asked.
"We're already working on it," the contact said.
The contact paused. "Two of the families are going to get answers today that they've been waiting eight months for.
That's..." He stopped.
"That matters."
Grim looked at Clay being guided into a vehicle across the street. The deputy, Holt, turned himself in at 4 this morning, the contact said, walked into the Nevada field office and sat down and started talking.
Apparently, someone had a conversation with him last night that clarified his options. He glanced at Grim sideways.
"I don't need to know what was in that conversation." "No," Grim agreed.
"You don't." The contact was quiet for a moment.
Then the contact said, "Hayes, I have to ask, what made you stay in a diner on Route 66? Two kids, a woman you'd never met.
Why did you stay in it?" Grim watched Clay's vehicle pull away.
He thought about Ethan asking the same question in different words 24 hours earlier.
He thought about the answer he had not yet given anyone the true one, the one that lived under all the tactical explanations and the practical reasons and the momentum of a night that had kept moving faster than his ability to reconsider it. "I'll tell you later," he said.
"Right now, I need to make a call." He called Marco, who answered on the first ring.
"It's done," Grim said. "Tell Sarah it's done.