"Dale," he said. "Get in the truck. We're going in."
"Curt," Dale said. "Put that away."
"You hear that?" Curt waved the gun toward the Ranger and its open door and the voices pouring out of the radio. "You hear that bitch? We've got five minutes. We go in, we get the kid, we get the computer, we go. Nobody believes a fat old trucker on a CB. Nobody believes a kid. My dad'll handle the rest. He always handles the rest."
"Son," Hollis said. "It's over."
Curt swung the gun toward him.
Hollis had had a gun pointed at him four times in his life. It does not get easier. It narrows the world down to a hole about the size of a dime. He stood there under the gas canopy with the drizzle blowing in sideways and his heart beating wrong, and he did not move out of the way of the door, and he thought, very clearly, Well, this is a better place than most.
"Move, old man," Curt said.
"No," Hollis said.
And then the night filled up with light.
They came from the east first, over the hill from Denton: a log truck, empty, its air horn going in long blasts, its headlights and roof lights blazing. Then a water hauler from the west, green and white, SHULER WATER & HAUL on its side and the smiling cartoon drop, pulling straight into the lot with its brakes hissing. Then a pickup. Then another tanker. They did not park. They pulled in and stopped wherever they stopped, in a ragged ring across the gravel with their high beams all pointed in at the building, and the lot went from dark to bright as noon, and Curt Shuler stood in the middle of it squinting with his gun in his hand and nowhere to aim it.
Doors opened. Men got out. Big men in Carhartts and wool coats and blaze-orange caps. Nobody had a weapon that Hollis could see. They just stood by their trucks in the light and looked at Curt Shuler. A dozen of them. Then more.
"Curt," Dale said.
Curt looked at him. The gun wavered.