Dale stepped in. He did it fast and clean, the way his father would have done it, the way Hollis had seen Ray Rusk do it in a dozen parking lots thirty years ago: one hand on Curt's wrist, turning it out and down, the other on his elbow, a twist and a shove. The gun went off once, a flat crack that slapped back off the trees, and the bullet went into the gravel and threw up a spray of stones. Then the gun was in Dale's hand and Curt was on his knees on the wet ground, and Dale pulled the magazine out and racked the slide and threw the pistol, empty, into the dumpster.
He stood over Curt, breathing hard. Then he looked at Hollis.
"I'll wait for the trooper," he said.
Hollis nodded. He meant to say something. He meant to say Your father would be proud of you, which he was not sure was true, or Thank you, which was. But the stumble in his chest came again, and this time it did not catch. It was like the staircase in the dark had simply ended, and he stepped off into nothing, and he felt his knees go and the wet concrete of the step come up under him, and he sat down hard with his back against the diner door.
The world went far away. He could hear the trucks idling. He could hear Bev's voice on the radio, still going. He could hear somebody yelling for a medic, and somebody else saying the ambulance was coming from Coudersport, and somebody saying is he breathing, and the bell over the door ringing behind his head as the door pushed open against his back.
Small hands. Cold small hands, on his face, and then one of them finding his and holding on.
"Hollis," Toby said. "Hollis. Hollis, I'm here. I'm right here."
I told you to stay inside, he wanted to say. He did not have the breath. He opened his eyes instead, and the boy was crouched over him in the white glare of all those headlights, with his mother right behind him and Ferris behind her, and the boy was looking down at him the way that other boy had looked down, from that other window, and this time Hollis did not look away.
"Did they see you come outside?" he managed, finally, in a whisper.
And Toby Marsh, eleven years old, laughed and cried at the same time, and said, "Everybody did. Everybody saw."
* * *
He woke up in a room at the hospital in Coudersport with a tube in his arm and a monitor beeping and a state trooper sitting in the chair by the window doing paperwork on a clipboard. The trooper was a young woman with her hair in a bun, and when she saw his eyes open she put the clipboard down.
"Mr. Teague," she said. "You had us worried."