Objectively, transit time might have been nil; they might have gone from here to there instantaneously; but subjectively, she timed it at three or four seconds. Her feet slipped off motel-room carpet, the rubber soles of her athletic shoes stuttered a few inches across concrete, and she found herself standing with Dylan and Shepherd outside the front doors of a restaurant, a diner.
Shepherd had folded them back to the restaurant in Safford, where they had eaten dinner the previous night. This struck her as being a bad development because Safford was where Dylan had introduced the cowboy, Ben Tanner, to his lost granddaughter and, more important, where he had beaten the crap out of Lucas Crocker in the parking lot before calling the police to report that Crocker had been keeping his mother, Noreen, chained in the cellar. Even though the restaurant staff for the lunch shift probably didn’t include any employees who’d been at work late the previous day, someone might recognize Dylan from a description, and in fact at least one cop might have returned today to examine the scene in daylight.
Then she realized that she was mistaken. They weren’t all the way back in Safford. The establishment looked similar to the one in Safford because both shared the creatively bankrupt but traditional architecture of motel restaurants across the West, featuring a deep overhang on the roof to shield the big windows from the desert sun, low flagstone-faced walls supporting the windows, and flagstone-faced planters full of vegetation struggling to survive in the heat.
This was the coffee shop adjacent to the motel out of which they had just folded. Immediately south of them lay the motel registration office, and beyond the office, a covered walkway served a long wing of rooms, of which theirs was the next to last. Shepherd had folded them a grand distance of four or five hundred feet.
‘Shep is hungry.’
Jilly turned, expecting to find an open gateway behind them, like the one Dylan had described on the hilltop in California, except that this one ought to provide a view not of the motel bathroom, but of the empty bedroom that they had a moment ago departed. Evidently, however, Shepherd had instantly closed the gate this time, for only the blacktop parking lot shimmered darkly in the noontime sun.
Twenty feet away, a young man in ranch clothes and a battered cowboy hat, getting out of a pickup truck that boasted a rifle rack, looked up at them, did a double take, but didn’t cry out ‘Teleporters’ or ‘Proctorians,’ or anything else accusatory. He just seemed mildly surprised that he had not noticed them a moment ago.
In the street, none of the passing traffic had jumped a curb, crashed into a utility pole, or rear-ended another vehicle. Judging by the reaction of motorists, none of them had seen three people blink into existence out of thin air.
No one inside the coffee shop rushed out to gape in amazement, either, which probably meant that no one had happened to be looking toward the entrance when Jilly, Dylan, and Shepherd had traded motel carpet for this concrete walkway in front of the main doors.
Dylan surveyed the scene, no doubt making the same calculations that Jilly made, and when his eyes met hers, he said, ‘All things considered, I’d rather have walked.’
‘Hell, I’d even rather have been dragged behind a horse.’
‘Buddy,’ Dylan said, ‘I thought we had an understanding about this.’
‘Cheez-Its.’
The young man from the pickup tipped his hat as he walked past them – ‘Howdy, folks’ – and entered the coffee shop.
‘Buddy, you can’t make a habit of this.’
‘Shep is hungry.’
‘I know, that’s my fault, I should have gotten you breakfast as soon as we were showered. But you can’t fold yourself to a restaurant anytime you want. That’s bad, Shep. That’s real bad. That’s the worst kind of bad behavior.’
Shoulders slumped, head hung, saying nothing, Shep looked more hangdog than a sick basset hound. Clearly, being scolded by his brother made him miserable.
Jilly wanted to hug him. But she worried that he would fold the two of them to a better restaurant, leaving Dylan behind, and she hadn’t brought her purse.