"Don't get used to it."
He walked out past the shoe chairs at the end of the screening lanes, and there he stopped.
At the far end of the checkpoint, where Dolores Lindqvist had sat crying over a blue velvet bag, a man in a teal vest was crouched beside a wheelchair. The vest said DEN CONCOURSE COMPANION across the back in white letters. It was the airport's volunteer program, retirees mostly, people who gave a few hours a week to walking the lost and the frightened and the slow through the maze of the terminal. The woman in the wheelchair was Black and very old, in a church hat with a small spray of silk violets on the brim, and she was trying to find something in a large handbag while a TSA officer waited, and the man in the vest was not touching the handbag. He was not touching anything. He had his hands resting on his own knees, and he was down low, below her eye level, and Desmond heard him say:
"Would it help if I held the bag open, ma'am? Or would you rather I didn't?"
The woman looked at him and decided something.
"You can hold it open, baby," she said. "Don't you go digging in it."
"No, ma'am. I wouldn't."
Curtis Lindqvist held the handbag open with both hands while the old woman rummaged through it, and she came up with her ID, and the TSA officer nodded, and Curtis stood up and moved around behind the chair and took the push handles, and only then did he look up and see Desmond standing by the shoe chairs, in uniform, watching him.
He went very still. Then he nodded, once. It was not a greeting, exactly. It was more like a man reporting in.
Desmond nodded back.
Neither of them said anything. There was nothing that needed saying. Curtis turned the wheelchair carefully toward the trains and began to push it, slowly, at exactly the pace of a woman in a church hat who was in no particular hurry, and the woman began telling him something about her granddaughter in Tacoma, and Desmond watched him lean down to listen, his head tilted, really listening, the way a man listens when he has finally figured out that the listening is the job.
"Saturdays and Sundays," said a voice behind him. "Since February."
Wendell Price was standing beside the trash cans with a broom, grinning.