It was empty.
The brown corduroy coat lay on the red vinyl bench, flat, in the shape of nothing. The red rubber boots were gone from under the table. The notebook page was gone. The front door was swinging, very slowly, on its closer, and as she watched it eased the last inch shut and the bell over it gave a single small tink, the sound of a bell that somebody had reached up and held with his hand as he went out, and let go too soon.
"Come," Coralee said into the phone. "Just come." And she hung it up on the hook and went out from behind the counter without her coat, and Benicio, who had come to the kitchen door at the sound of the bell, said her name once, and she said, "Watch the pie," which made no sense at all, since there was no one to steal it, and went out into the cold.
It was the hour before the hour before dawn, the deepest and coldest of the night, and the air coming down off the Wassuks had ice in it. She went around the end of the building. She heard the engine before she saw the truck. The six-cylinder, the lifter ticking like a clock. It was running.
The truck sat in the shadow beside the propane tank with no lights on, an old Ford pickup, white over green with a camper shell, Nevada plates, exactly as Thane had said it over his cinnamon roll, and Coralee could see the shape of the old man behind the wheel and the white plume of exhaust going up behind him into the starlight. She walked toward it. She was not afraid of him.
He did not drive away.
She got to the passenger door and looked in through the glass. Dovie was asleep on the bench seat with her head on her grandfather's leg, still in her hunting vest, the red boots back on her feet. Ozias Kroll had both hands on the wheel at ten and two. The truck was in neutral. His foot was nowhere near the clutch. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield at the side of the propane tank, three feet away, as though there were a road there that went on forever.
Coralee opened the door and got in.
The cab smelled of old coffee and dust and engine heat and the particular sweet-sour smell of a child who had been in a vehicle for nine hours. There was an empty gas can on the floorboard and a library book about horses with a McGill Public Library stamp on the pages. Coralee moved a box of saltines and sat down and pulled the door shut beside her, gently, so it wouldn't wake the girl, and the old man did not look at her, and for a while the two of them sat there with the engine running and the heater blowing hot dust and the girl between them breathing slow.
"Quarter tank," he said finally. "I looked. Get me to Tonopah. Maybe Goldfield."