Bev was already pulling her cap down. "Hon," she said, "I'm sixty-two years old and I've got bad knees and I'm going to make it to that truck if I have to crawl."
"Lock yourself in. Get on nineteen. Tell everybody. Tell them everything Toby said. Say Jesse Kline's name. Say Shuler. Say the Hemlock. Say it over and over."
"Oh, I'll say it," Bev said, and went, through the swinging door and down the dark hall, and a second later Hollis heard the bell over the front door ring and then nothing but the rain.
Curt was hammering on the back door again. Something heavier now. A tire iron, maybe. The wired glass starred and held.
Hollis counted. He counted to thirty, the way he'd counted in the Buick on West Twenty-Sixth Street, and on thirty he went to the front and looked out the window, and through the rain he could see the big blue Kenworth at the edge of the lot with its dome light on and Bev's white head bent over the dash, and he could see the old Ford Ranger still sitting where it had sat all along, with the old man in the wool coat inside it, watching. And he could see the empty space under the gas canopy where the gray truck had been. And he could see Dale Rusk, standing by the corner of the building in the rain, not doing anything. Just standing there, with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at Bev's truck.
He was not stopping her. He had seen her go. He had to have seen her go. And he was not stopping her.
Hollis looked at him for a long moment through the glass. Then he went back to the kitchen.
"Renée," he said. "When the trooper comes, you tell him everything. You give him that case number. You show him that folder. You understand?"
"Where are you going?"
"Out to talk to an old friend's son."
"Hollis, no—"
"It's the only way it gets better instead of worse," he said. He looked at Toby. "Stay with your mother. Stay with Ferris. Don't open that door for anybody but a man in a gray uniform with a hat."
"Hollis," Toby said.