“He’s only ever seen people on the side of a road,” she said. “Afterward. When they’re trying to hold themselves together in front of a uniform. He thinks that’s who they are. He has never once heard what a person sounds like when they call for help. He ought to hear that before he decides anything else about anybody.”
The sheriff rubbed his jaw with one big hand.
“And he’s somebody’s boy,” my mother said. “I know whose.”
Tom Hanley looked at her for a long time. Then he turned to the deputy, and to the rest of us standing there in the heat, and he told it right there on the gravel.
“Let me tell you who you had standing on this shoulder,” he said. “March of ninety-eight. I was thirty years old, and I’d been a deputy five years. I’d pulled people out of cars. I’d seen things. I thought I was a pretty tough customer.”
