"Renée! Come on! He's been telling lies about me! You know what he's like! I just want to clear it up! My dad's going to hear about this, Renée, and he's not going to be happy, and you know what happens when my dad's not happy, you know what happens with your lot—"
"Go to hell, Curt," Renée said, not loud. Hollis didn't think Curt could hear her over the engine. But Toby could, and Hollis saw him look up at his mother with something like wonder.
Curt hit the glass again. Then he stopped and stepped back and looked up at the side of the building, at something above and to the left of the door, and Hollis knew what it was before Curt reached for it.
"Power," he said. "Get the boy away from—"
The lights went out.
Everything went out at once: the fluorescent tubes, the fryer's hum, the walk-in's compressor, the radio, the red glow of the flat-top's pilot. For a second there was nothing but the truck's high beams through the wired glass, throwing the shadows of all of them huge against the far wall. Then a battery emergency light over the swinging door clicked on, two little floodlights like the eyes of a frog, and the kitchen went sickly yellow.
"Phone," Hollis said. "Ferris, check the phone."
Ferris went down the hall in the half-dark and came back. "Dead," he said. "He pulled the line too. It runs down the same wall."
So. Hollis stood there in the yellow light and made himself think. The boy's story was on a tape in Coudersport. Three pictures were in the DEP's inbox and in a sister's email in Erie. That was something. That was a great deal. But Curt Shuler did not know any of it. Curt Shuler was standing in the rain in his good boots thinking that he had cut the phone and the power and that now he had a dark building on a dark mountain with two women, an old man, a sick old biker, and a little boy inside, and nobody coming.
Curt Shuler was the dumb man.
"Bev," Hollis said. "The CB. Does it run off the truck battery?"
"Course it does."
"He's back here now. Both of them, maybe, or maybe Dale's still out front. If you go out the front door, fast, right now, while he's busy with this door, can you make it to your truck?"