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bare arms, carefully placed his cheese sandwich on a white paper napkin and shook hands with Nudger. Everyone at the table was dressed in a workshirt and dark-stained jeans and was wearing a similarly soiled blue work apron. Picking up his coffee and sandwich, Sanders led Nudger to a table near the end of the long room, where they could talk privately.
    “You want a cup of coffee?” he asked Nudger, before they sat down at the gray Formica table.
    Nudger said no thanks, and they sat. Neither man said anything while a tall, redheaded woman in a business suit stalked into the lounge, deposited coins in a soup machine near the table, then cursed mightily because the machine hadn’t freed the little captive soup can from its glass cell but had kept the proffered ransom. The woman kicked the machine softly but precisely with the pointed toe of a high-heeled shoe, as if aiming for its groin, before moving down the lounge to another bank of machines that might prove more amiable.
    Nudger went through the routine he’d pursued with Gantner. The answers were the same. Sanders and Gantner had been in the rear of the store, heard shots, saw the old man on the floor, the old woman staggering around with a bullet wound in her head. Saw her fall, saw Curtis Colt run from the store, gun in hand, and get into a dark green car that screeched away. Sanders had only caught a glimpse of the car as it sped past the display window, and said he didn’t hear the shot Colt had allegedly fired from the speeding car.
    “Did you get a good look at Colt’s face?” Nudger asked, knowing Sanders had testified in court that he had.
    Sanders took a big bite of his cheese sandwich, chewing with his mouth open. His melancholy eyes were thoughtful. “Pretty good.” For a moment Nudger thought he was com menting on the sandwich, then realized Sanders was talking about the look he’d gotten at Colt. “All this takes a lot of time to tell, but it happened fast, only a couple of seconds. I got as good a look at him as I could have in that short a time.”
    Nudger shoved the lakeside photo across the table for Sanders to look at again, the one where Colt was holding a beer can high in a defiant toast. “And you’re sure this is the man?”
    Sanders gulped coffee, wiped his mouth as he stared down at the snapshot. “I don’t know that from this photo. You tell me it’s Colt, I believe you. I am sure the man I saw in the police lineup, the guy I saw in court, was the one that was in the liquor store with the gun. The one that blasted the old guy and his wife.”
    “But it’s the same man.”
    Sanders shrugged. “Hell, you know photos. You take my picture, I look handsome.”
    Nudger doubted that, but he nodded and put the snapshot back into his pocket. “Did you see the getaway-car driver?”
    “Got a glance, is all. Guy with long darkish hair, leaning over the steering wheel like he was trying to coax more speed outa the car.”
    “Colt had dark hair, wavy and almost shoulder-length.”
    Sanders grinned. “I know where you’re going with that one, Nudger. Colt’s lawyer tried it in court. Tricky little bastard; I gotta give him that. Full of more twists and turns than a double-jointed break dancer. But he couldn’t shake me. It was Colt I saw in that liquor store. No doubt whatsoever here. Curtis Colt.”
    “How do you feel about capital punishment, Mr. Sanders?”
    “I believe in it. Human life’s the most precious thing there is; you take somebody’s and you oughta die for it. And Colt took somebody’s life.”
    “But you didn’t recognize him positively in the photograph.”
    “He wasn’t in a photograph when he was in the liquor store.”
    That was a good point, Nudger conceded, looking at Sanders and thinking that with a wart on his cheek the man really would look like Lincoln.
    Sanders shot a glance at his watch. “I gotta get back and grade some tires or I get docked; we’re slaves here.”
    “I suspect someday you’ll do