Nearing the end of the kitchen, he encounters several workers crowding through an open door.
He considers following them before he realizes that they’re entering a walk-in cooler, apparently with the intention of pulling shut the insulated steel door. This might be a bulletproof refuge, or the next-best thing.
Curtis doesn’t want a refuge. He wants to find an escape hatch. And quickly.
Another door. Beyond it lies a small storeroom, approximately eight feet wide and ten feet long, with a door at the farther end. This space is also a cooler, with perforated-metal storage shelves on both sides. The shelves hold half-gallon plastic containers of orange juice, grapefruit juice, apple juice, milk, also cartons of eggs, blocks of cheese…
He grabs the handle on a container of orange juice, making a mental note to return to Utah someday — assuming he ever gets out of the state alive — to make restitution for this and for the hot dogs. He’s sincere in his intention to pay for what he takes, but nevertheless he feels like a criminal.
Putting all his hopes on the door at the end of this cooler, Curtis discovers that it opens into a larger and warmer receiving room stacked with those supplies that don’t need refrigeration. Cartons of napkins, toilet tissue, cleaning fluids, floor wax.
Logically, a receiving room should open to the outdoors, to a loading dock or to a parking lot, and beyond the next door, he finds logic rewarded. A warm breeze, free of kitchen odors and the smell of gunfire, leaps at him, like a playful dog, and tosses his hair.
He turns right on the dimly lighted dock and sprints to the end. Four concrete steps lead down to another blacktop parking lot, which is only half as well lighted as those he’s seen previously.
Most of the vehicles back here probably belong to employees of the restaurant, the service station, the motel, and the associated enterprises. Pickup trucks are favored over cars, and the few SUVs have a desert-scorched, sand-abraided, brush-scratched look acquired by more arduous use than trips to the supermarket.
With the container of Florida’s lines! in one hand, the package of hot dogs firmly in the other, Curtis clashes between two SUVs, frantic to get out of sight before the FBI agents, the hunters in cowboy disguise, possibly the juice police, and maybe frankfurter-enforcement officers all descend on him at once, blasting away.
Just as he plunges into the shadows between the vehicles, he hears shouting, people running — suddenly so close.
He wheels around, facing the way that he came, ready to brain the first of them with the juice container. The hot dogs are useless as a weapon. His mother’s self-defense instructions never involved sausages of any kind. After the juice, all he can count on is kicking their sex organs.
Two, three, five men burst past the front of the parallel SUVs, a formidable pack of husky specimens, all wearing either black vests or black windbreakers with the letters FBI blazing in white across their chests and backs. Two carry shotguns; the others have handguns. They are prepared, pumped, pissed — and so intently focused on the rear entrance to the restaurant that not one of them catches sight of Curtis as they race past. They leave him untouched, and still in possession of his dangerous jug of orange juice and his pathetic wieners.
Sucking in great lungfuls of the astringent desert air, giving it back hotter than he receives it, the boy weaves westward, using the employees’ vehicles for cover. He’s not sure where he should go, but he’s eager to put some distance between himself and this complex of buildings.
He rounds the tailgate of a Dodge pickup, hurrying into a new aisle, and here the loyal dog is waiting, a black shape splashed with a few whorls of white, like tossed-off scarves of moonlight floating on the night-stained surface of a pond. She is alert, ears pricked, drawn not by the frankfurters but by an awareness of her master’s predicament.
Good pup. Let’s get out of here.
She whips around — no older than she is yellow — and trots away, not at a full run, but at a pace that the boy can match. Trusting her sharper senses, assuming she won’t lead them straight into any associates of the cowboys who might be — surely are — in the vicinity, or into another posse of FBI agents bristling with weapons, Curtis follows her.
Chapter 17
To everyone but Noah Farrel, the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten was known as Cielo Vista Care Home. The real name of the establishment promised a view of Heaven but provided something more like a glimpse of Purgatory.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he had given the place another — and so maudlin — name by which he usually thought of it. Life otherwise had entirely purged him of sentimentality, although he would admit to an ever-dwindling but not yet eradicated capacity for romanticism.
Not that anything about the care home was romantic, other than its Spanish architecture and lattice-shaded sidewalks draped with yellow and purple bougainvillea. In spite of those inviting arbors, no one would come here in search of love or chivalrous adventure.
Throughout the institution, the floors — gray vinyl speckled with peach and turquoise — were immaculate. Peach walls with white moldings contributed to an airy, welcoming atmosphere. Cleanliness and cheery colors, however, proved insufficient to con Noah into a holiday mood.
This was a private establishment with a dedicated, friendly staff. Noah appreciated their professionalism, but their smiles and greetings seemed false, not because he doubted their sincerity, but because he himself found it hard to raise a genuine smile in this place, and because he arrived under such a weight of guilt that his heart was too compressed to contain the more expansive emotions.
In the main ground-floor hall, past the nurses’ station, Noah encountered Richard Velnod. Richard preferred to be called Rickster, the affectionate nickname that his dad had given him.
Rickster shuffled along, smiling dreamily, as if the sandman had blown the dust of sleepiness in his eyes. With his thick neck, heavy rounded shoulders, and short arms and legs, he brought to mind characters of fantasy and fairy lore, though always a benign version: a kindly troll or perhaps a good-hearted kobold on his way to watch over — rather than torment — coal miners in deep dangerous tunnels.
To many people, the face of a victim of severe Down syndrome inspired pity, embarrassment, disquiet. Instead, each time Noah saw this boy — twenty-six but to some degree a boy forever — he was pierced by an awareness of the bond of imperfection that all the sons and daughters of this world share without exception, and by gratitude that the worst of his own imperfections were within his ability to make right if he could find the willpower to deal with them.
“Does the little orange lady like the dark out?” Rickster asked.
“What little orange lady would that be?” Noah asked.
Rickster’s hands were cupped together as though they concealed a treasure that he was bearing as a gift to throne or altar.
When Noah leaned close to have a look, Rickster’s hands parted hesitantly; a wary oyster, jealous of its precious pearl, might have opened its shell to feed in this guarded fashion. In the palm of the lower hand crawled a ladybug, orange carapace like a polished bead.
“She sort of flies a little.” Rickster quickly closed his hands. “I’ll put her loose.” He glanced at the new-fallen night beyond a nearby window. “Maybe she’s scared. Out in the dark, I mean.”
“I know ladybugs,” Noah said. “They all love the night.”
“You sure? The sky goes away in the dark, and everything gets so big. I don’t want her scared.”
In Rickster’s soft features, as well as in his earnest eyes, were a profound natural kindness that he hadn’t needed to learn by example and an innocence that could not be corrupted, which required that his concern for the insect be addressed seriously.