“Can you hold it, honey?”
“No.”
“Dana-I mean “Bridger”-got you some” nice éclairs. You want an éclair?"
“I have to pee.”
He was staring straight ahead, absorbing Marley, but he could feel her turning her face to him. “We must stop. Next exit.”
Softly, because he didn't want to spoil the mood, he let out a curse.
“I know,” she said, “but what can we do-wet her pants?”
“Mom-“my”!”
He said nothing, but already he was flipping the turn signal, looking for the next exit, even as Natalia added, “And she will need to eat something.” To Madison: “You want eggs, honey? Scrambled eggs and sausage, your favorite? With ketchup? All the ketchup you want?”
There was no answer, no answer was immediately forthcoming, but the whining struck a new note of urgency and he gave it up, merging smoothly with the line of cars pulling off the highway and into the lot of Johnny Lee's Family Restaurant, Open 24 Hours. “Hey, Mister Cop / Ain't got no birth cerfiticate on me now.”
“So,” Natalia said, leaning into him with the sway of the car, her voice rich with satisfaction, as it always was when he did what she wanted him to, “we must forbear your filet mignon in Rancho Cordova-”
“Forgo.”
“Right, forgo. And instead we dine at the family restaurant. How is it you say? No big thing, yes?”
He took the exit ramp maybe a hair too fast and something-a toy-skittered across the dash, struck the window and caromed to the floor at his feet. He gave her a look-he was irritated, despite himself, but he wasn't going to show it. “No big thing,” he said, and he even managed a smile.
It was worse than he'd expected, one of those hokey theme places (wagon wheels on the wall, sepia photographs of prospectors and the hind ends of their mules, waitresses in cowgirl hats and outfits that could have been lifted out of the Dale Evans Museum). Natalia took the kid straight to the restroom while he put in their name with the hostess and then they had to wait fifteen minutes in line with an assortment of copper-haired old ladies and clowns with bolo ties and checked shirts while Madison squirmed and jerked at her mother's hand and fell to the floor and refused to get up because she was hungry, the non-stop chant of “When, Mommy, when are we going to get a table?” rising up out of the forest of old people's legs like the squall of some misplaced sylvan thing that was dying or about to be killed. The buoyancy he'd felt earlier, the high that was compounded in equal parts of relief at getting out of Shelter Bay Village before things went disastrously and irreparably wrong and the anticipation of kicking loose on the road, was gone now. Breakfast on the road was always the weakest link in the culinary chain, a kind of deprivation of the senses that reduced every possibility to a variant on eggs/sausage links/silver-dollar pancakes and maple-colored Karo syrup. It bored him. Made him angry. Even in a decent hotel, where you could get quiche, eggs Benedict, a crab-and-feta omelet, fresh-squeezed orange juice, the meal was still a bore. But this-he looked round him with a sudden cymbal-clang of hate-this was the worst.
“Martin?” the hostess called out, and the line stirred, heads swiveling round, feet shuffling impatiently, and for a moment he didn't realize she was summoning him till Natalia nudged him and he raised his hand like a third grader in the back of the classroom. By the time they were sliding into the booth with its butt-warmed benches and the red Formica tabletop strewn with the refuse of the previous party, he was feeling murderous.
“I want a sundae,” Madison announced, her face composed, eyes wide and unblinking and perfectly serious. “Like that girl.” She pointed to the next booth over, where a whole rat-pack of kids-six or seven of them-dug into various ice cream concoctions while their parents, two interchangeable couples with porcine faces and a lack of style that was nothing short of brutal, roared over their coffee and grease-spattered plates as if they'd been drunk for days.
“No sundae,” Natalia said automatically. “Eggs.”
Madison repeated her demand, her voice pinched higher.
“Shut it,” he hissed, leaning into the table, because you could only take so much shit in this life, one dried and cubed block of it stacked atop another till the whole thing came tumbling down, and he'd been under some pressure lately, he realized that. “And because he realized it, he was able to restrain himself from reaching out for her boneless little wrist and giving it the kind of squeeze that would have opened up a whole new world for her. But he didn't have to get physical-one look, the look he'd laid on Stuart Yan on the courthouse steps-was enough to silence her. It was a look he'd practiced, the don't-fuck-with-me look he'd worn for eleven and a half months at Greenhaven. ”You'll eat what you get."
The compromise was something called Pancakes Jubilee, three rubbery thin wafers of griddle-compacted dough buried under a mound of strawberries and about three feet of whipped cream. Natalia, whose appetite always astounded him, had the Cattleman's Breakfast, four eggs sunny-side up with a sixteen-ounce steak, ranch beans, pico de gallo and a basket of flour tortillas. He had coffee, black.
“Do you not want to try a bite of my steak?” Natalia kept asking him. “Did you not say you wanted a steak? Here, try. It's good.”
He was furious-acting like a child himself, he knew it. “No,” he said, “I don't want your steak. Tahoe. I'll eat in Tahoe. Okay?”
Across the table, Madison wore a beard of whipped cream, whipped cream to her nostrils and beyond. Her eyes were glazed with the sugar fix and the fork was stuck to her hand. Breakfast was over.
Outside, where people stood around on the faux ranch-house porch picking their teeth and grinding mints between their molars, the heat seized him. It must have been a hundred already, though his watch showed just past nine-thirty in the morning. The sun was a hammer. It wanted to take everything down, flatten it right to the ground. There was a smell of incineration, of grease blown out through the kitchen fans, of the kind of death that mummified you before you hit the ground. He watched a crow, its feathers the color of coal dust, dance around something crushed on the pavement as he shrugged out of his sport coat and folded it over one arm. Jesus. How could people stand this shit? How could anybody actually live here? he wondered, tensing up all over again, and no, the coffee hadn't helped, not a bit. He took Natalia by the arm. Down the three bleached wooden steps they went, to the burning lake of the parking lot. Predictably, Madison said, “Mommy, I'm “hot.””
It was then, at that precise moment, that the black Jetta pulled into the lot and he saw the two faces suspended there behind the sunstruck windshield. “A man and a woman.” Everything went silent, the speakers hidden up under the support beams piping out a thin tinny jangle of country guitars, the whoosh of the traffic on the highway, the jet poised overhead. He'd trained himself to stay cool, be cool, to hide the least tic of emotion behind an immobile face and the stark stabbing outraged sheen of his eyes, pure aggression, and he stared right at them, stared hard, though he was scared, afraid they might swing out in front of the restaurant and try to run him down, and spooked on a deeper level too: how in Christ's name did they know he was here? Here, of all places? Even he hadn't known he was going to be here.
Seconds, that was all he had, because the woman-Dana Halter, Dr. Dana Halter-was bent over her cell phone and if the cops stepped in and checked his ID against hers “or his, Bridger's,” there was no hope of talking his way clear of this. Even as he increased the pressure on Natalia's arm, even as she said, “What is the hurry?” and he silenced her with a look, snatched up Madison as if she were an overnight bag and set a brisk pace for the car, it came to him that they must have been hidden somewhere in the lot and followed him when he pulled out of the condo. He cursed himself. He was lax, he was stupid. All of this shit-and he was so wired suddenly it was as if he'd grabbed hold of a high-voltage cable with his bare hands-all of it, all of it, he'd called down on his own head.