Jill is back now, she puts the two creamers in front of Colley. He rips the foil top off one of them and pours the contents into his coffee. Jill reaches into the pocket of her uniform, takes out a package of cigarettes, discovers it’s empty, crumples it, and puts it in an ashtray. Then she comes through the break in the counter and goes outside to the cigarette machine. In the mirror, Colley sees her looking out at the parking lot as she rips the red cellophane strip off the top of the package. When she comes inside again, she says to the short-order cook, “Blonde sitting outside there in a red Pinto.”
“Yeah?” the cook says.
“That’s my wife,” Colley says immediately. “She wasn’t hungry.”
“She should come in, cool off,” Jill says.
“It’s cool in the car,” Colley says.
“Cool in here, too,” the cook says. “Except back there by the stove.”
“We didn’t know it was air-conditioned,” Colley says.
“Sign right on the door,” the cook says.
“We didn’t see it.”
He’s getting into an argument with the fuckin cook. What business is it of his whether Jeanine comes in or stays out or climbs up the OPEN 24 HOURS sign and throws a moon at the highway?
“You working half a day, or what?” the country-girl waitress says to the cook. She has just taken an order from one of the families at the other end of the diner, and she’s back with her pad now. The cook takes the order slip from her, and looks at it, and goes back into the kitchen. Behind the counter, Jill is smoking her cigarette with obvious pleasure. The other waitress goes over to her and says, “Let me have a drag, huh?”
As Jill hands her the cigarette, Colley swings around on the stool, facing the cashier, and steps out with his right foot, and with his right hand he reaches into the shirt where the two buttons above the belt are unbuttoned. He feels the stock of the Walther, it is familiar to his hand, he knows the Walther, he has owned many of them in his lifetime. He pulls the gun out of his waistband and thumb-cocks the hammer even though he knows it can be operated by pulling the trigger. The cashier is dialing the telephone, he figures she’s calling her dummy husband again to make sure he locked the oven. “Put that down,” he says, and she immediately puts the receiver back on the cradle. Her eyes are wide, her lip is trembling, he figures she is about to scream. He uses Jocko’s words. “See this?” he says, thrusting the gun toward her. “I’ll shoot your face off you don’t open the register fast. Now do it!”
The cashier is opening the register as he takes a step to the right, figuring to reach in over the counter and clean out the drawer. He catches her eye, he sees that her eye is looking past his left shoulder, and he whirls immediately and throws the gun on the country-girl waitress who already has the palm of her hand on the swinging door and is ready to push it open.
“Hold it right there!” Colley says, and the girl freezes, and now the place is deathly still because everyone in it knows there’s a gunman at the cashier’s counter. He reaches in over the counter and pulls stacks of bills from the cash drawer, one compartment at a time. Twenties, a good hefty stack, and then tens, and fives, and singles. He is reaching for the rolls of coins at the front of the cash drawer when the trouble comes. It comes from the least expected place; this weekend is just full of surprises. It comes from the old man.
He is standing, he is six feet four inches tall, the old fart, and he has the shoulders of a lumberjack and the chest of a wrestler and hands that could pull apart the jaws of an alligator, like that guy on the cover of the men’s magazine where Colley read about being lost in the jungle. The old man’s fists are already bunched, he is going to be a hero. He is seventy-five if he’s a day, but he’s still a big man who remembers when his enormous body surged with strength and power. His hands are shaking as he approaches, there are tears streaming down his face from behind the eyeglasses. He is crying for his lost youth and his lost power, he is crying because he’s lived honestly all his life and cannot now condone this criminal act, he is crying because he suspects his foolhardy intervention may well result in his death. He is maybe crying for any one of these reasons or for all of these reasons — Colley only knows the man constitutes a threat.
Colley has killed a cop.
This old fart coming at him with his fists clenched and tears running down his face, closing the gap between them, coming closer and closer as Colley stuffs three rolls of quarters into his hip pocket, this old fart means nothing at all to him, he will waste him without remorse if the man tries to stop him.
He says, “Hold it, mister!” and just then the country-girl waitress lets out a scream could wake the dead in every cemetery on Long Island, and Colley looks away for just an instant, and that’s enough time for the old man to clamp his fingers on Colley’s left wrist. “Let go,” he says to the old man, and the swinging door to the back of the place opens and out comes the sweating short-order cook, and he’s got a cleaver in his hand, he’s going to protect his turf, he comes out of the kitchen like a fuckin Chinaman waving a cleaver in a movie about gold-rush camps.
Colley does not want to shoot the old man.
But the old man is clinging tightly to his wrist and the cook is coming through the break in the counter now, the cleaver in his hand, and there are a lot of people making noise now — the old man’s wife in the booth next to the cashier’s counter yelling “Harry, no, please, Harry,” and down the aisle the girl with the teenage kid screaming like she’s at a Stones concert. Colley can see past the old man and down the aisle to where one of the families is sitting in a booth and he sees a little boy with brown eyes and blond hair and he remembers his mother telling him that when he was small he used to have blond hair, didn’t start changing to brown till he was five or six.
“Harry, let go of my fuckin hand,” he says to the old man.
The old man is surprised to hear his name. He lets go of Colley’s wrist and peers at him as though he’s possibly made a mistake — is this someone he knows? If not, why has the man used his name so familiarly? Colley swings away from him and toward the cook, who handles the cleaver like it’s a fly swatter, doesn’t the son of a bitch know it’s a deadly weapon? He’s bringing it up over his head to swat Colley dead, what he doesn’t know is that Colley’s killed a cop, Colley has nothing to lose. “Mister,” Colley says, and he is about to say “you are making a big mistake,” but the cook is upon him, and Colley fires the gun instinctively and reflexively.
The slug takes the cook in the shoulder, he spins around from the force of it, and slams against the counter. The old man’s mouth opens wide when he hears the explosion. He seems about to take a step toward Colley again, but he thinks it over and quickly changes his mind. Nobody’s moving. The cleaver is on the floor. The cook is bent over one of the stools now, and blood is streaming down his arm the way it was Jocko’s last night.
“Okay now,” Colley says.
He backs toward the door.
“Okay,” he says again.
He opens the door and runs outside. Jeanine has already started the car. He knows that what he should do is run for the car, get into the car. But the car is headed for Florida in the month of August and Colley doesn’t want that kind of heat, and he doesn’t want the kind of heat that will come the minute Jill tells the cops they’re driving a red Pinto, probably at the window right this minute copying down the license-plate number, he is tempted to turn and take a look. He does not want to be in a car that’s halfway or maybe all the way identified, and he does not want to be going to Florida in the month of August, but most of all, he does not want to be with Jeanine any more. Jeanine scares the hell out of him. Jeanine drives with her legs wide-spread, the pleated white skirt high on her thighs, and he can smell brimstone rising from her cunt, and the whiff reminds him of the devil’s laughter in the kitchen, Jocko bleeding out his life — no, he does not want to go with Jeanine to Florida or anyplace else on earth.