"Good choice. The coconut's from Tuesday." She wrote it down and went, and he heard her say something to the boy on the way past, low, and the boy said something back, and she touched the top of his head without looking and kept moving. So: her kid. A school night, eleven o'clock, a kid doing homework in the back booth of a truck-stop diner on a mountain. Hollis knew what that meant without anybody having to tell him. It meant there was no one at home to watch him, or no home worth leaving him in, and the mother had decided the safest place in the world for her son was within twenty feet of where she was working.
He had grown up with that kind of mother. He had not given her much reason to be glad of it.
He looked out the window. The rain was blowing across the gas canopy in sheets, and beyond the lights of the pumps the lot went to gravel and the gravel went to dark. His bike was a shape against the side wall. The road was empty.
Then it wasn't.
The gray pickup came back from the west, slowly, and turned in. It did not come under the canopy. It did not pull up to the pumps. It rolled across the gravel with its headlights on and then its headlights went off, and it parked at the far edge of the lot, beside the propane cage and the dumpster, nose out toward the road, where the light from the building just barely reached it. Hollis could see two shapes in the cab. He could not see faces. The engine stayed running; he could see the exhaust curling up white in the cold.
He set the mug down.
Well, he thought. Well, now.
He was considering it, the way you consider a sum you don't like, when the boy appeared at the end of his table.
He had not heard the boy come. The boy was standing very straight with his hands in the front pocket of his sweatshirt and his face very white, and he was looking not at Hollis but at the window, at the truck, and his voice when he spoke was quiet and fast and very careful, like something he had rehearsed.
"The two men who followed your motorcycle are outside," the boy said.
Hollis looked at him.
"The gray truck," the boy said. "It came in right behind you. I saw it. It went past and then it came back. They followed you." He swallowed. "I thought you should know. In case. I thought you should know."
There are moments in a life when a great many small things you have noticed without noticing them all line up at once, like iron filings when a magnet passes under the paper. Hollis had had a few of those moments. He had one now. He thought about the truck behind him on the road, patient, not passing. He thought about the truck going past when he turned in, not stopping, not following him in, not doing any of the things a man does when he is after a man on a motorcycle. A man after a man on a motorcycle stops at the pumps. A man after a man on a motorcycle walks in and sits at the counter and lets him see you, or waits on the road a mile up where it's dark and there are no witnesses. He does not go past and come back and park by the dumpster with his lights off, watching a building.
He thought about the boy looking past him at the lot the second he'd walked in. Before the truck had come back. Before there was anything out there to see.