Page 24 of Forbidden Protector

"Sheriff will assign it."

"Deputy." I wait until he looks up from the clipboard. "The call. Landline or cell?"

"Ma'am?"

"Your dispatcher has a number on a screen. Which was it?"

He thinks about whether this is his to give away and decides, because I am federal and he is twenty-four, that it is. "Pay phone. There's one outside the Cenex on the north end. Only one left in town, far as I know."

Nobody uses a pay phone. There is no reason on this earth to use a pay phone except that you have thought carefully about what happens after you hang up.

"Man or woman?"

"Man."

"Did he sound drunk?”

“He sounded like he was outside.” Young shifts his weight and puts the hand that is not holding the clipboard into his armpit. “Traffic on it, maybe. Or he was cold. He said the room number and he said welfare check and then he was gone. Dispatch tried to hold him.”

“Say it the way he said it.”

“Room 6 at the Riverview, somebody needs to go check on her.” He hears himself doing it and his voice comes down. “Then he hung up.”

Her. Not somebody. Not a guest.

He knew who was in the room.

Off to my left, Holt Blackwater stands with his hands at his sides, looking at the tire tracks in the lot. The ones under his own and the ones that were there before.

He has not said a word to law enforcement in nine minutes. He’s not shifting his weight and he‘s not blowing on his hands. He’s standing in it the way the light pole is standing in it.

Once, while Young writes, Holt's eyes come up and find me across the lot and hold there half a second longer than checking on a witness requires. Then they go back to the tracks like they were never anywhere else.

Young's pen quits on him. He works it against the corner of the page, puts the barrel in his mouth to warm it, then gets three more words out of it before it quits again, and he says something under his breath and writes the rest in a hand that is getting worse by the line. Whatever is going on that page tonight is going to be short, and short is how a thing becomes an appliance.

I call Salt Lake standing in the lot.

I get the night desk, and then I get Tom, who is at home, and who listens to all of it without interrupting because he is good at that part.

"You're not hurt?"

"I'm not hurt."

"Mac." A long breath on the other end of the country. "I'm not going to be able to move anybody this week. You know what the staffing looks like."

"I'm not asking for a detail. I'm asking for one body who can sit in a car."

"I know what you're asking for."

"Tom, somebody called it in. Pay phone outside the Cenex, ten fifty-one, wouldn't give a name, and he said her." I hear my own voice climbing and take it back down. "That is a person who knows what was done to this room. Pull the line records. That is one subpoena and it has a name on the other end of it."

"On a pay phone that takes coins?"

"On a pay phone somebody drove to."

"Write it up as an attempt," he says. "I'll push it. But the county's calling it an appliance, and I'm going to need something on paper that isn't an empty detector and a dirty vent, or it's going to sit."

Five months, some cold little voice says. It sat then too.