Behind them came the cook, Ferris, wiping his hands on a towel. He was small and stooped and bald, with forearms like knotted rope and a pair of black-framed glasses held together at one hinge with fishing line. He looked at Hollis for a long moment over the top of them.
"Boy says you're all right," Ferris said.
"Boy's eleven," Hollis said.
"Boy's a good judge," Ferris said. "Better than his mother, no offense, Renée."
"None taken," Renée said, in a voice like broken glass. "I'm the one who poured that son of a bitch coffee for three years."
"Kitchen," Hollis said. "All of us. Away from the windows."
They went. The kitchen was narrow and hot and smelled like onions, with a flat-top and a two-basket fryer and a steel prep table and a back door with a push bar that opened onto the employee lot. There was a small window in the back door, wired glass, and Hollis looked out through it first. The Corolla. Ferris's old Buick LeSabre. The dumpster. Rain. No truck back there, not yet. But it would only take thirty seconds to drive around the building.
Toby sat on an upturned pickle bucket in the corner. Renée stood next to him with her hand on his shoulder like she was afraid he would float away. Bev leaned on the prep table. Ferris turned the flat-top down and stood in front of it with his arms crossed.
"Troopers are coming," Hollis said. "Forty minutes, maybe more. I called from the office."
"Forty minutes," Renée said. "Jesus Christ."
"We should go," Ferris said. "Now. Out the back. Renée takes the boy in her car, I'll follow in mine, we go to Coudersport and sit in the barracks lot until somebody does something."
"No," Hollis said.
They all looked at him.