Chapter 13: The Chisel

I answered Colt at four in the morning, because I had not slept anyway.

I typed: Yes. Six. You do it alone.

He wrote back one line: I'll be there.

I drove to the Pavilion in the dark with the windows down and my father's thermos between my knees.

The lobby lights were on when I got there.

So were two more lights I had not expected, the white ones on tripods.

A news van sat at the front doors with its mast up.

Two photographers stood by the limestone with their cameras already raised.

Colt was in his shirtsleeves in front of the stone with a stepladder, a mallet and a cold chisel.

"You said alone," I said.

"I know what I said."

"There is a television crew in my lobby."

"I called them at midnight," Colt said.

He did not look away from me.

"I decided the city should watch the name come off, and hear from me why it went up."

I stood there with the thermos in my hand.

"That's a decision," I said.

"Yes."

"Without asking me."

"Yes," Colt said. "It's the fourth one on your page."

A security guard by the doors looked at the floor.

The reporter had the sense to say nothing at all.

"Say it, then," I said. "You've got your audience."

Colt turned to the camera.

He had not shaved, and the scar through his eyebrow was white under the lights.

"I hid a theft and called it kindness," he said. "I put a thief's name on a wall so nobody would look behind it."

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