The judge had told him, on the phone on the third day, what the favor actually was.
He needed Holder to deliver something at the journey's end. A document. To a man who would be waiting. The man would know Holder by the van. The exchange was simple, the judge said. Nothing illegal. Nothing that put Holder in any real jeopardy. Just a piece of paper that needed to move from one hand to another in a way that could not be traced back to the judge.
Holder had listened. He had said nothing. He had hung up and driven another sixty miles before he let himself think about what he had agreed to by not refusing.
He knew what the document was. The judge had not told him but he was not stupid and had not spent three years around people who knew things without being told them without learning something. The document was the kind of thing that ended careers or saved them depending on which end of it you were on. The judge was not corrupt — Holder believed that, genuinely — but the judge was doing something that operated in the space between what was legal and what was right, and he was using Holder to do it because Holder was the kind of person who could be used that way without official consequences.
The man was waiting in the parking lot of a gas station near the coast, as described.
Holder pulled in. He sat in the van with the engine running. The four women — three of them now, and the absence of the fourth was always present — were at a rest stop across the street.
He had the document in the glove compartment. He had only to walk it over.
He sat. He thought about Jazzy walking up a path to a door she had been avoiding for thirty years because she had convinced herself she didn't deserve to try. He thought about Lillian setting something down on a dark highway and sleeping like a person who had finally been freed from something. He thought about Elda in a motel room in the early morning, hands folded, face at peace, and the thing she had said on the porch: He brought you to us. Like he was the answer to something.
He thought about the man he had gotten into that van as, and the man who was sitting here now.
He took the document out of the glove compartment. He looked at it.
He called the judge.
"I can't do it," he said when the judge answered. "I'm not going to do it."
Silence on the line. Then: `"Holder."`
"I know what it is. I know what you're doing. And I know you think you're doing it for the right reasons. But I can't be the vehicle for it. I just — I can't be that anymore. The vehicle for things that feel necessary but aren't right." He paused. "I'll deal with whatever that costs me. But I can't do it."
The judge was quiet for a long moment.
"All right," the judge said finally. His voice had something in it that Holder didn't expect. Something that sounded, if he was reading it right, like satisfaction. "All right, Holder. You deal it however you need to."
He hung up.
Holder sat in the van. The man across the parking lot waited a few more minutes, then drove away.
The cost was unclear and would become clearer over time. It was not his freedom. It was not his safety. It was the loss of a certain convenience — the judge's goodwill, the easy road, the comfortable arrangement of owing someone who had power. He had traded easy for clean.
He had never made that trade before. It felt different than he expected.
It felt, unexpectedly, like arriving somewhere.
He drove across the street to pick up the women.
Jazzy was already at the curb, hand on her hip, looking at her watch. "We said ten minutes. It's been fifteen."
"Sorry," Holder said.
"What were you doing over there?"
"Nothing," he said. Then: "Something I should have been doing a while ago."
Jazzy looked at him. She had the eyes of a woman who had spent her life reading rooms.
"Good," she said. And got in the van.