Frank’s voice called, “Shut up over there!”
As if in response, a grating loud voice, courtesy of a bullhorn, said, “Send the people out!”
“Fuck you!” Bud called.
I withdrew the late Halloran’s nightstick from my sweater sleeve. The mother look at me, and it, startled.
“What are you...”
I shushed her with a finger to my lips as I placed the baton on a shelf behind me, amid some bathroom supplies.
The bullhorn was barking: “You boys are going to have a world of trouble if you harm those people. Now, send them out, slowly...”
Frank didn’t bother to reply. But to Bud he said, bitterly, “World of trouble. We shot a cop. How the fuck can you get in more trouble than that?”
“You shot a cop,” Bud reminded him.
“You’re as dirty as me. Felony murder. We’ll both go down.”
“You gotta deal us outa here, Frank!”
I lifted a bottle of liquid drain cleaner off the shelf. Read the directions; savored the poetry of its warnings... “poison”... “burns on contact”... “harmful to eyes”...
The woman touched my arm; squeezed hard. She looked at me with wet, hard eyes and shook her head no, furiously.
“Don’t you risk my child’s life,” she whispered.
“I have a child at stake, too,” I whispered back.
“I said, shut-up over there!” Frank almost screamed.
The phone rang and everybody jumped. Me, too. Even Peter — I saw his head bob up.
On his hands and knees, the big revolver in hand, Frank scrambled over behind the counter, as the phone rang and rang, and he plucked the receiver off and was down behind the counter, where Peter was, as he answered.
“How many? I’ll tell you how many. We got a greaseball clerk, a mommy and her little girl, and a pregnant woman. How do you like our little party?”
I unscrewed the cap of the liquid drain cleaner; sniffed its harsh bouquet...
“What do we want? We want a jet! We want a car, and a police escort to O’Hare...”
I could guarantee them the police escort.
“...and then we want the biggest goddamn jet they got!... Where?” Frank paused, apparently thinking, then his voice called to Bud: “Where do you want to go?”
Bud seemed to think for a while, then his voice called: “Vegas?”
“You moron! Somewhere foreign! Some other country!”
“Alaska?”
I would have laughed, except the frozen little ballerina whose head was in her mother’s lap was looking at me with eyes that could not widen enough to express her fear.
Frank was saying into the phone, “Never mind where. Just have plenty of fuckin’ fuel onboard. We’ll tell the pilot where to take us... and we want money, too!... How much?”
Frank, despite the lousy luck of his last attempt, called out to Bud for an opinion. “How much dough should we ask for?”
Bud didn’t hesitate; he knew just the amount. “Ten million bucks!”
“Get real,” Frank snorted. Back on the phone, he said, “A million in cash. Small unmarked bills — nothin’ bigger than a fifty.”
Shrewd boy, this Frank.
“Okay,” he was saying. “Call back when you got an answer for me.”
Frank’s hand reached up and slammed the receiver on the hook.
I figured drugs were why this skinny pair was after the money — all but forgotten in the garbage bag, bills spilled out on the floor over by the counter, like discarded lottery winnings. But like a lot of addicts, for whom stealing was a job, they had apparently planned ahead, not waiting till they needed a fix, not wanting to go out on a heist in that condition.
Still, sometimes it pays to needle a junkie.
“You boys might be here a while,” I said to Frank as he crawled by. “Lining up that jet’s gonna take time. Getting the mayor to approve all that dough — and hauling some banker out of his country club dance to unlock a vault. We could be here for hours.”
Bud, from the next aisle, said, “Frank — I’m gonna need a shot before that!”
“Shut up, Bud,” Frank said; but he was frozen on his hands and knees, looking at me, thinking over what I said. “You got a point, lady?”
“Frank!” Bud yelled. “We can’t wait that long. I’m gonna need a shot! Ask for less money. Get fifty K or something.”
“Shut up! Lady — what’s your fuckin’ point?”
“Let this mother and her daughter go,” I said. “It’ll buy you some good will, and show the authorities you’re reasonable guys. Besides... you got me — a pregnant woman — what better hostage could you ask for? Nobody’s going to shoot at you guys if you’re walking behind a pregnant woman.”
Frank’s eyes were turning to slits as he smiled. “You could be right about that last part. I don’t know about giving up no hostages, though...”
“You’ll have the cashier,” I said, nodding toward the counter, where my purse sat, a million miles away, “and me. One hostage for you, one for your friend. You can take us with you in the car to O’Hare — which you can’t do with mommy and her ballerina, here. Let ’em go. You’ll be popular.”
“Don’t listen to her, Frank!” Bud whined. “I don’t trust her!”
Frank was studying me, like a lab tech studying a slide. “Who are you, lady? Why do you know so much? Why are you so fuckin’ chilled out?”
I shrugged. “My late husband was a cop.”
That seemed to satisfy him.
“Let the mother and her kid go,” I said. “You don’t need them. You didn’t mean for this to happen, did you, Frank? This is just something that got out of hand... let ’em go.”
Bud was sticking his head around the aisle to watch this conversation. He was on the floor on his stomach. He looked like a bug with a big head.
He said, “Don’t do it, Frank.”
Frank was thinking it over. Something had flickered in his eyes — traces of humanity, maybe? — as I’d spoken. Was he looking past me at the woman hugging her child? Was there something human or humane in this lost teenager’s white trash past?
He swallowed and said, “She’s right.”
“Frank...”
“Shut the fuck up, Bud. There’s only two of us... we can manage better with just her and the guy back of the counter.”
“O... okay, Frank,” Bud said, half-sticking out in the aisle on his belly. “But let’s shake it... I’m gonna need a fuckin’ shot before long!”
Bud did seem to be getting the shakes, and it wasn’t fear alone. The little hop-head, by his own admission, slammed his drugs — injected them — as opposed to smoking or snorting, which meant time was going to catch up with him.
Suddenly Frank yelled; it startled the mother, and the child, and me, too. Peter probably peed his pants.
“Hold your fire!” Frank was calling to the cops outside. “We’re sendin’ out some hostages!”
Frank crawled back around the counter, so he could get a better vantage point I guess — and it did give him an angle where the cops outside couldn’t see him, or get a bead on him — and he said to the mother, “Okay, you and your little girl get up and walk out. Real slow.”
The mother allowed herself the briefest smile, and glanced at me with an expression that might have been of thanks, as she helped her child up. She could spare me any gratitude, now or later: I hadn’t done this for her.
The little ballerina hung onto her mother’s waist as they slowly walked out of the aisle and past the counter where Frank held a gun on them. They walked by the aisle where Bud was taking cover, up to the front of the mini-mart where the mother gingerly opened the metal framework of the shot-out glass door and they were outside.