“Yessir.”
“We’re going to ask you some questions,” Lucky says. “You’re going to come with us.”
Ricky goes still as prey caught in a hunting sight. Then he looks down—which, Dixon will later say, helps him know they’ve got the right guy. Guilty people, when they’re getting ready to admit it, look down.
Finally Ricky says, “I got a coat in there.”
“Inside the gas station?”
“Yes.”
“All right, we’ll get it.”
Lucky walks back toward the station for the coat and to pull the time cards, which will show what hours Ricky worked the day Jeremy disappeared. Dixon takes Ricky to the cruiser. He’d cuff him right there if he had to, but Ricky comes willingly, a few steps in front of Dixon. The men walk stiffly, each body both sprung and cocked, alert for different reasons. The February air is as cold and dry as an empty room. When they reach the car, Dixon leans down and opens the back passenger seat of the car, motioning for Ricky to slide in. Ricky does. Dixon fixes the seat belt and says, again, “You have the right to remain silent.” His voice is hard. Ricky’s head pops down again. “You have the right to an attorney.” Dixon goes through the whole thing a second time. He needs this arrest to be airtight. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”
“Yes,” Ricky says. He sounds miserable.
Dixon sits down in the driver’s seat. Through the rearview mirror, he looks at Ricky. Dixon takes note, as he’s been trained to, of the way Ricky’s jugular vein pulses light and fast beneath his lowered chin. The tension in the muscle cords at the sides of the neck. Ricky’s hands are balled into fists. He looks like a man holding something in. He looks like a man desperately wishing the moment were not real.
It’s time, Dixon decides.
He twists backward in his seat. “Now, Ricky,” he says. He can’t see Ricky’s face, just the top of his head, the mat of his dark hair. “I want you to look me in the eye, man to man.”
Ricky doesn’t move.
“Man to man, Ricky.” Dixon levels his voice, no bullshit. Someone like Ricky, someone who’s been thought weird his whole life, an outcast, a guy no one respects, Dixon knows the way to do it is to sound even. Sound like you’re taking him serious. “Look me in the eye, Ricky.”
For a flickering second Ricky looks up. When Dixon sees his eyes, he knows. Their pupils are as wide as buckshot. Dixon’s got him.
“I want you to look me in the eye”—Ricky looks away—“no, I want you to look me in the eye, Ricky, and tell me whether you know anything about Jeremy Guillory’s disappearance.”
A shudder ripples across Ricky’s shoulders. Like the rattle a body makes when giving up.
Then, suddenly: “I did it.” Ricky exhales. “I did it, I did it, I don’t know why I did it but I did it.” He drops his head to his hands. Just like that. That simple. Three days, and it’s over like that. Done.
“Where’s the body?” Dixon says.
“My closet. In my bedroom.”
Without a word Dixon turns and exits the car. Shuts and locks the door behind him.
Which leaves Ricky alone in the cruiser, having just confessed to murder.
What does he think of? That night—the night he killed Jeremy—when all of the parents had collected their children and gone home, and Pearl had told him that maybe he should leave town, her face turned down as if she couldn’t bear to look at him, and she’d gone to lie next to her husband on the mattress in the living room, Ricky went back up alone to his bedroom in the dark. Joey and June were asleep in their bedrooms across the hall. The house was quiet. Ricky sat on the bed and he listened to the quiet.
It was the first time in hours he’d been alone, the first time since Jeremy had rung the bell that afternoon. He couldn’t go to sleep—his heart was too keyed up for that—and he kept thinking of Jeremy. Thinking of how his eyes had been open when Ricky had grabbed him, and how they’d closed, as though on their own. He knew it was impossible, but sitting in his bedroom, knowing the boy was in the closet, he kept thinking he heard breathing. He kept imagining those eyes opening. Someone was watching him.
There was a staircase off the back of his bedroom that led twenty feet straight into the woods. If Ricky wanted to get rid of the body.
But instead, in the middle of the night, he crept downstairs to the kitchen and took a roll of aluminum foil. He taped and foiled his two bedroom windows, so the light was blocked.
He couldn’t say who he didn’t want to see him, why he needed those windows gone. It was just that he needed the world smaller, closed and tight around him.
That’s the feeling that must come back to Ricky now, in the cruiser, the clear bright winter sun beating through the windows, the inside of the car heating up. If the world could just stay this small, suspended. He stays inside the feeling for a long time, he doesn’t know how long.
Until Dixon returns and says, “We’re going to the house.”
*
For days the street has been crowded with people, with dogs and police troopers and truck hitches for the search boats. But when Dixon and Lucky pull the cruiser up now, the street is empty. Ricky’s cuffed in the back, his head still tucked forward.
“This is the house,” Lucky says. Dixon knows to stand down. This will be Lucky’s case after all. “The boy’s in there,” Lucky says. It’s not a question, but he looks at Ricky anyway.
Ricky raises his head slightly. Nods.
“All right,” says Lucky. “Let’s go.”
Lucky doesn’t call an ambulance. He doesn’t rush. Later he’ll bring this moment up on the witness stand, tell the jury that of course he didn’t rush, he knew the child was dead. Repeat it twice, as if he’s justifying the decision to himself. It’s an odd moment to thorn into him, an odd moment for him to come back to. The boy was dead. Rushing wouldn’t have mattered any. Lucky could’ve called an ambulance, he could have run right in, he could even have skipped hunting the day before, and it wouldn’t have mattered: Jeremy was dead. Funny where the mind wants to lodge. Funny where it wants to think it can make a difference.
Lucky gets out of the car.
*