"You should call him, Mr. Hollister. The deputy. You should go ahead." The boy's face in the dark was very young and very tired. "I've been waiting since May for somebody to. I'm just—I'm so tired of waiting."
Wade looked at him. He reached into his coat pocket and took out his phone, and the screen lit up the three of them in a cold blue light, and he stood there with his thumb over it. He had Tom Danner's cell number in his contacts. Tom would be at home in Lewistown right now, probably, eating supper with his wife and boys. Wade could call him and say, Tom, I've got your rustler, he's standing right here in my yard, and Tom would say, Hold on, I'll be right out, and it would take forty-five minutes, and then it would be over and out of Wade's hands, the way a thing was out of your hands when you'd sold it through the ring.
"If you call Tom," Claire said, "then you tell him about me too. Tell him I've known since the second of July. Tell him I'm the one who caught Danny and didn't call it in. Tell him about the ledger and the money I spent and all of it. Because I'm not going to stand in the sheriff's office and let them write it up like I didn't know. I won't let it be only him."
"Don't," Danny said. "Mrs. Hollister, don't."
"I mean it, Wade."
He stood there with the phone glowing in his hand. And it was then, before he had decided anything, that the back door banged again, lighter this time, and there were small boots on the frozen ground, running, and June came around the corner of the barn in her pink parka over her pajamas with her boots on the wrong feet.
"Danny!" she shouted, delighted, and she ran straight past her father and her mother and threw her arms around the boy's waist.