Whether they had conspired in this beforehand or not, Travis was instantly on board with Cornell’s request. “We have to take him with us, Mom. Me and Mr. Jasperson, we’re going to Atlanta someday to see them bottle Coca-Cola.”
“The last couple days,” said Cornell, “the dogs touched me, but I always pretended like they didn’t, pretended really hard, and so I didn’t have an attack. Then after a while, I didn’t need to pretend anymore.” He reached down to touch one of the shepherds, and the big dog wagged its tail.
“You gotta let him come,” Travis pleaded. “He makes really good sandwiches and the best muffins ever. He’s got a fipaleen recipe for pineapple-coconut muffins, and he made them all millionaires.”
“Not the muffins,” Cornell explained. “I made the Filipino workers all millionaires. I can’t touch people because I’m a full-on Planters nutbar that way. Umm. Umm. But I can take good care of the dogs.” He looked down at his feet, as shy as a child, then raised his eyes to Jane once more. “Besides, if I stay here, sooner or later the bad people will come for me. Won’t they come for me?”
He was right. They would figure out where Travis had been kept, and they would take Cornell into custody if for no other reason than to bleed him of his fortune.
She said, “We don’t leave the wounded behind. Somehow we’ll fit you in.”
“He reads aloud better than anyone,” Travis assured her with a note of desperation, “and he was real nice about the toothbrush.”
“Relax, cowboy,” she said. “It’s already decided. You two wait here with the dogs. I’ll go see how Luther’s doing, and we’ll bring the Suburban over here to load up.”
9
IT WAS A SLOW DAY in the convenience store. Bipin Gaitonde, born in Bombay but a proud citizen of the desert for seventeen years, husband of Zoya, father of three, enterprising entrepreneur, attended the cash register in his store when customers were present, and when he was alone, he busied himself replenishing the candy racks.
He had just come out of the stockroom with a carton of PayDay bars when the Cadillac XT5 exploded through the big front window. A fierce horizontal rain of glittering bits of glass sleeted through the store, followed by a storm of Cheez Doodles shot from bursting bags. Potato chips expelled from their ruptured packages were cast through the air like a barrage of martial-arts throwing stars.
Insanely, the motorist accelerated upon entrance. The first row of displays came apart and toppled noisily into aisle two, and the Cadillac began to surmount the broken shelves and all the scattered merchandise.
Bipin dropped the PayDays. He leaped out of the way, scrambled onto the cashier’s counter.
The vehicle came to a halt mid-store, canted on rubble, two tires punctured, its windshield dissolved. Veils of steam rose around the edges of its buckled hood.
The driver forced open his door and bulled his way out of the Caddy, pressing aside parts of a shattered display, kicking angrily at obstructing packages of national-brand cupcakes and cream-filled baked goods that Bipin found tasteless but that sold well.
He knew this man. Buckley Tolbert. Founder of Heart of Home, the oldest restaurant in Borrego Springs. Sixtysomething white-haired sweet-faced soft-spoken Bucky Tolbert was a friend to everyone, generous and amusing.
Getting out of the Cadillac, Bucky fired off a fusillade of uncharacteristic vulgarities and obscenities, filth exploding from him like bullets from a machine gun.
Crouched atop the cashier’s counter, Bipin Gaitonde was shocked by those indecencies. Although he sold certain risqué magazines in his store, he displayed them in plain-paper sleeves that revealed only the name of the publication and prevented the magazine from being opened until it was purchased and removed from the premises.
“Mr. Tolbert,” Bipin admonished, “do you not hear yourself?”
As though he became aware of Bipin only then, the restaurateur began peppering his salty language with vicious threats, primarily involving Bipin’s emasculation. In spite of his age, and though as a hazard of his occupation he weighed perhaps forty pounds too much, Buckley Tolbert clambered over the wreckage, crossing the store and coming toward Bipin, with the alacrity and grace of a mountain lion.
Once an ardent hiker, Bipin had been high in the San Bernardino Mountains five years earlier when, late in the afternoon, he turned a bend in the trail and saw a four-hundred-pound mountain lion leap from an upslope stand of pines onto the back of an unsuspecting deer. The big cat drove its prey to the ground and tore out its throat before Bipin had the presence of mind to start shaking with terror. He had not gone hiking since that day.
Now it seemed as if some god of lions had descended to the earth and had come to Bipin in an avatar that had once been Buckley Tolbert. Reflections of the store’s flickering lights flashed in Tolbert’s eyes. The man’s face flushed and twisted with such insane fury that it seemed his rage alone ought to pop a cerebral artery or torture his aging heart into cardiac arrest. Bipin realized—almost too late—that he was the deer in this scenario, not entirely unsuspecting but paralyzed by disbelief.
As Buckley Tolbert approached the cashier’s station, shrieking now like some venomous spirit liberated from Hell, Bipin dropped from the counter into the space behind. He could hardly believe it was necessary to reach for the pistol that he kept on a shelf under the cash register, for he had obtained it to defend against total strangers who might enter the store with armed robbery in mind, which had not yet once happened in quiet Borrego Springs. He had definitely not purchased the gun with the expectation that he would need it to shoot a neighbor and friend, but he grabbed it anyway.
Buckley Tolbert vaulted onto the counter and stood up, and Bipin turned with the pistol in hand as his former friend towered over him. Tolbert’s white hair stood out from his scalp as if he’d received an electric shock. His eyes were pools of malice. A thick string of snot hung from his nose, quivering like an extruded worm. Blood slicked his chin, encircled his mouth, glistened on his lips, and misted on his exhalation when he hissed fiercely between his clenched and bloodstained teeth.
Somehow Bipin Gaitonde knew that this blood was not Tolbert’s, that it was evidence of an unthinkable attack on someone else before he had crashed his Cadillac into the convenience store. In the same instant, Tolbert plunged from the counter and Bipin fired. The big man fell past him, snaring a fistful of Bipin’s hair and pulling him off his feet.
They landed with Bipin on top. Although the space behind the counter was narrow, Tolbert rolled them and achieved the superior position, maybe wounded or maybe not.
Bipin still gripped the pistol in his right hand, but that arm was under him, crushed between him and the floor. Pain coursed from shoulder to wrist. Under his attacker’s bulk, he could draw only shallow breaths into his compressed lungs.
With inhuman strength, Tolbert—this thing that had been Tolbert—pinned Bipin’s left arm to the floor, incapacitating him. He lowered his florid face close to Bipin’s face, spraying him with spittle and blood. His left hand scraped at his captive’s brow, the fingers curved into a claw, and Bipin had no doubt that Tolbert was going to take his eyes.
He thought of his wife, Zoya, and their children being left alone in this dark world. The horror of failing them gave him the strength to heave up, not violently enough to throw Tolbert off, but enough to free his trapped right arm, in which the nerves were hot wires conducting a disabling pain through muscle and bone.
Maybe his arm was broken. Maybe he couldn’t grip the gun. But it was not broken. As he brought up the weapon, he fired, and the shot took off a piece of his attacker’s left ear.
Howling, Tolbert flinched back, clamping his hands over both ears, as though for an instant he couldn’t tell which of them was bullet-torn.