Can you say sitting duck?
Rooted to the blacktop by terror, temporarily us immovable as an oak tree knotted to the earth, Curtis expects to be immediately riddled with bullets or, alternately, to be maced, tasered, clubbed, handcuffed for interrogation, and at some later date, at his captors’ leisure, riddled extensively.
Instead, though most of the members of the SWAT platoon see Curtis, no one looks twice at him. Scant seconds after storming out of the semi, they’re forming up and hurrying toward the restaurant and the front of the motel.
So they don’t know everything, after all. Even the Bureau can make mistakes. The ghost of J. Edgar Hoover must be throwing fits somewhere in the night nearby, struggling to work up enough ectoplasm to produce a credible apparition and point at least a few of the SWAT agents toward Curtis.
As one, the customers exiting the building had been paralyzed in midflight by the arrival of this scowling strike force. Now, also as one, they spin into motion, scattering toward their vehicles, eager to clear out of the battle zone.
On all sides of Curtis, remote-released locks electronically disengage with sharp double-beep signals, like a pack of miniature dachshunds whose tails have been trod upon in rapid succession.
Old Yeller either reacts to this serenade of bleats or to an instinctive realization that time to escape is fast ticking away. The truck stop is a hot zone; they need a ride out to a more comfortable place where the heat isn’t blistering. She turns in a four-legged pirouette, with enough grace to qualify her for the New York City Ballet, considering her options as she rotates. Then she sprints around the front of a nearby Honda and out of sight.
Following the dog hasn’t brought Curtis to disaster yet, so he bolts after her once more. As he races down an aisle of parked cars and other civilian vehicles, he catches up with Old Yeller and comes upon a Windchaser motor home at the very moment when two loud beeps blare from it. The headlights flash, flash again, as though a vehicle this enormous could not be located at night without identifying pyrotechnics.
At once the mutt skids to a stop, and so does Curtis. They look at each other, at the door, at each other again, executing as fast a double take as ever did Asta the dog and his master, the detective Nick Charles, in those old Thin Man movies.
The owners of the Windchaser aren’t in sight, but they must be nearby to be able to trigger the lock by remote control. They’re most likely fast approaching from the other side of the vehicle.
This isn’t the ideal ride, but Curtis isn’t likely to luck into a cushy berth on another automobile transport any more than he’s likely to escape on a flying carpet with a magic lamp and a helpful genie.
Besides, there’s no time to pick and choose. As those SWAT agents help their more conventional brethren deal with the cowboys and secure the restaurant, they will hear about the kid who was the object of the chase, and they will remember the boy standing in the parking lot, clutching a half-gallon container of orange juice and a package of frankfurters, with a dog at his side.
Then: big trouble.
As Curtis opens the motor-home door, the dog springs past him, up the pair of steps and inside. He follows, pulling the door shut behind them, staying low to avoid being seen through the windshield.
The cockpit, with two large seats, is to his right, a lounge area to the left. All lies in shadow, but through windows along the sides of the vehicle and through a series of small skylights, enough yellow light from the parking lot penetrates to allow Curtis to move quickly toward the back of the motor home, although he feels his way with outstretched hands to guard against surprises.
Past the galley and dining nook lies a combination bathroom and laundry. The dog’s panting acquires a hollow note in this confined space.
Hiding in the tiny toilet enclosure is out of the question. The owners just came from the restaurant, and maybe they finished their dinner before the hullabaloo. One of them is likely to hit the John soon after they hit the road.
Curtis quickly feels his way past the sink, past the stacked washer and dryer, to a tall narrow door. A shallow closet. It’s apparently packed as full and chaotically as a maniac’s mind, and as he senses and then feels unseen masses of road-life paraphernalia beginning slowly to slide toward him, he jams the door shut again, to hold back the avalanche before it gains unstoppable momentum.
At the front of the vehicle, the door opens, and the first things through it are the excited voices of a man and a woman.
Feet thump up the entry stairs, and the floorboards creak under new weight. Lamps come on in the forward lounge, and a gray wash of secondhand light spills all the way to Curtis.
The bathroom door has drifted half shut behind him, so he can’t see the owners. They can’t see him either. Yet.
Before one of them comes back here to take a leak, Curtis opens the last door and steps into more gloom untouched by the feeble light in the bathroom. To his left, two rectangular windows glimmer dimly, like switched-off TV screens with a lingering phosphorescence, though the tint is faintly yellow.
Up front, the two voices are louder, more excited. The engine starts. Before either of the owners takes a bathroom break, they are intent on getting away from flying bullets.
No longer panting, the dog slips past Curtis, brushing his leg. Evidently the dark room holds nothing threatening that her keener senses can detect.
He crosses the threshold and eases the door shut behind him.
Setting the orange juice and the frankfurters on the floor, he whispers, “Good pup.” He hopes that Old Yeller will understand this to be an admonition against eating the sausages.
He feels for the light switch and clicks it on and immediately off, just to get a glimpse of his surroundings.
The room is small. One queen-size bed with a minimum of walk-around space. Built-in nightstands, a corner TV cabinet. A pair of sliding mirrored doors probably conceal a wardrobe jammed full of too many clothes to allow a boy and a dog to shelter among the shirts and shoes.
Of course, this is a little cottage on wheels, not a castle. It doesn’t afford as many hiding places as a titled lord’s domain: no receiving rooms or studies, no secret passageways, no dungeons deep or towers high.
Coming in, he’d known the risks. What he hadn’t realized, until now, was that the motor home has no back door. He must leave the same way he entered — or go out of a window.
Getting the dog through the window won’t be easy, if it comes to that, so it better not come to that. Escape-with-canine isn’t a feat that can be accomplished in a flash, while the startled owners stand gaping in the bedroom doorway. Old Yeller isn’t a Great Dane, thank God, but she’s not a Chihuahua, either, and Curtis can’t simply tuck her inside his shirt and scramble through one of these less than generous windows with the agility of a caped superhero.
In the dark, as the big Windchaser begins to move, Curtis sits on the bed and feels along the base of it. Instead of a standard frame, he discovers a solid wooden platform anchored to the floor; the box springs and the mattress rest upon the platform, and even the thinnest slip of a boogeyman couldn’t hide under this bed.
The motor-home horn blares. In fact the noisy night sounds like a honk-if-you-love-Jesus moment at a convention of Christian road warriors.
Curtis goes to the window, where the drapes have already been drawn aside, and peers out at the truck-stop parking lot. Cars and pickups and SUVs and a few RVs nearly as big as this one careen across the blacktop, moving recklessly and fast, in total disregard of marked lanes, as if the drivers never heard about the courtesy of the road. Everyone’s hellbent on getting to the interstate, racing around and between the service islands, terrorizing the same hapless folks who only moments ago escaped death under the wheels of the runaway SWAT transport.
Over bleating horns, screeching tires, and squealing brakes, another sound flicks at the boy’s ears: rhythmic and crisp, faint at first, then suddenly rhythmic and solid, like the whoosh of a sword cutting air; and then even more solid, a whoosh and a thump combined, as a blade might sound if it could slice off slabs of the night, and if the slabs could fall heavily to the blacktop. Blades, indeed, but not knives. Helicopter rotors.
Curtis finds the window latch and slides one pane aside. He thrusts his head out of the window, cranes his neck, looking for the source of the sound, as a slipstream of warm desert air cuffs his face and tosses his hair.
Big sky, black and wide. The brassy glare from sodium arc lamps under inverted-wok shades. Stars burning eternal. The motion of the Windchaser makes the moon appear to roll like a wheel.
Curtis can’t see any lights in the sky that nature didn’t put there, but the helicopter is growing louder by the
