It came from the foot of the booth stairs, where a narrow door marked PRIVATE opened off the side of the lobby. Ansel Voss was standing there. He was seventy-four years old. He wore what he always wore, gray work pants and a short-sleeved white shirt with a pocket protector and a pair of white cotton gloves for handling film, and the gloves were on, which meant he had come down in the middle of threading the second reel. He was small and stooped and nearly bald, with a hearing aid in his left ear the color of a Band-Aid, and he was looking at Royce Hadley with an expression Danny had never seen on him, which was not anger, exactly, but something older and more tired than anger.
"Let go of the boy," Ansel said.
Royce's hand did not let go. But it stopped lifting.
"This doesn't concern you, old man."
"It's twenty-five years and you still haven't learned to buy a ticket," Ansel said. "Let go of him, Royce. There's a picture to run."
And then—Danny would think about this for weeks—Royce Hadley let go. He opened his hand as if it had been burned. Danny came down off his toes and his heels hit the carpet and his back slid an inch down the glass of the Cocoon case. Royce straightened his own sport coat with two sharp tugs, looked around the lobby at all the faces looking at him, at the sidewalk full of witnesses and the Lindahls and Lupe with a scoop of popcorn raised in her hand like a weapon, and he laughed. It was a good laugh, a big salesman's laugh, and it almost worked.
"Kid's fine," he said. "Aren't you, kid? Little misunderstanding. We were just leaving." He turned to the Wichita men. "You see the problem. You see what I've been telling you. Nobody's running this place. It's a museum with a candy counter."
He walked out. The others followed him. The woman looked back once at Danny, and her face said she was sorry and also that she would never think about him again. The Lincoln pulled out of the bus zone, and the line on the sidewalk closed up behind it like water.
Ansel was already gone. The PRIVATE door swung shut on its spring. A moment later, faint through the ceiling, Danny heard the clatter of the projector motor coming up to speed, and the overture of the trailers began, and the gold curtain parted on its motor, slow and dignified, to show the people of Merritt that something was about to begin.
* * *
"Are you okay?"