"Understood," Hollis said, and hung up, and stood there in the closet with the Spider-Man pillow and the feed-store calendar and his heart doing something unpleasant under his breastbone. Forty minutes. Possibly longer.
When he came back down the hall the bell over the front door was ringing.
It was the older one. The bearded one.
He came in shaking rain off a Carhartt jacket, a man in his middle forties, heavy in the arms, with a short dark beard going gray at the chin and a green SHULER WATER & HAUL cap pulled low. He stood inside the door a moment the way men do when they come in from the dark, letting their eyes adjust, and Hollis watched him look around the room. The trucker woman, getting up from the counter. The old man in the wool coat. Renée at the coffee station. The empty booth by the window with Hollis's jacket hanging on the hook and his plate going cold.
And the last booth. Where Toby was not.
Hollis felt a cold plunge of fear, and then he saw the swinging door to the kitchen still moving on its hinge, just barely, and he let out a breath. Good boy. Good boy.
The bearded man's eyes went to the kitchen door too. They rested there for a second. Then they came down the hall, and found Hollis.
Hollis had been looked at by a great many men who meant him harm. He knew the look. This was not it, or not exactly. This was a man taking stock of an obstacle: the size of him, the age of him, the vest. Hollis watched the man's eyes go to the vest and stay there, and something moved in the man's face that Hollis could not read.
Then the bearded man walked to the counter and sat down on the stool the trucker woman had just left and said, "Coffee, Renée. Black."
So he was a regular. Of course he was. Renée said, "Hey, Dale," in a voice that was normal and friendly and a little tired, the voice of a woman who knew everybody's coffee order on the whole mountain, and she poured it. She did not know. She had no idea. Hollis watched her set the mug in front of the man who might have kicked Jesse Kline to death in her back lot and say, "You boys working late?" and he wanted to put his fist through the wall.
"Always," Dale said. "Wells don't sleep."
Hollis walked back to his booth and sat down. He picked up his fork. He ate a bite of roast beef, which had gone cold and tasted like salt and cardboard, and he chewed it slowly and looked at the back of Dale's head.
Dale. He turned the name over. He looked at the shape of the man's shoulders, the way he sat with one boot hooked on the rung of the stool, the thick neck. He thought about the way the man's eyes had stayed on the vest. And something old came up out of the silt of his memory, slowly, the way a sunk log comes up in spring.
The trucker woman was paying at the register. She was a broad, solid woman with short white hair and reading glasses on a cord around her neck, and while Renée made change she glanced back once at Hollis, and then at Dale, and Hollis saw her see something. Truckers notice things. It is most of the job. She took her change and her receipt and put on her cap, and then instead of leaving she said to Renée, loud enough to carry, "You know what, hon, I'm going to have a piece of that apple pie to go. And another coffee for the road. I'm in no hurry." And she sat back down. Not at the counter. At the booth across from Hollis, by the other window, where she could see the lot and the room both.