His eyes met mine again. I gave him a calm stare. Back down, you son of a bitch, I thought. Just turn and walk away. Find me another day and I will oblige you. Not here. Not now.
I don’t know how long he stared at me before his eyes flickered. I was watching for that flicker and I hoped it was going to be a flicker of doubt. That it would flicker and then he would slink away and make up some story to tell his cronies about how he faced down a cop at the McDonald’s.
But it wasn’t a flicker of doubt.
“Fuck you, puto,” he said and pulled his hand out of his pocket.
He was fast but I was ready. I exploded from my seat toward him. Even so, it seemed like I was moving in slow motion. I saw the silver metal come out of his pocket surrounded by his tan hand. I recognized it as a gun. It could’ve been a.380 but at that moment it looked like a Dirty Harry Forty-four.
I grabbed onto that cannon with my right hand and squeezed as hard as I could. I could feel him pulling the gun away from me, but my grasp held. He reversed direction and tried pointing it at me. I forced the muzzle toward the floor.
Motherfucker was strong.
Stronger than me, I realized.
I evened the odds. I buried my thumb in his left eye and gouged like I was scooping ice cream.
He screamed out in pain and turned his head, but his grip on the gun remained firm. I pulled my left hand back and hit him in the throat with all the force I could muster. There wasn’t much on it because of the angle, but the throat is a vulnerable target.
He grunted and the gun went off. The blast shook my hand. I heard the loud thud of the bullet impacting.
I struck him in the throat a second time.
He began coughing.
I tore the gun from his grasp. Without thinking, I cracked him upside the skull with the handle. He collapsed like a tub of shit.
I dropped down onto his back with my knees, trying to drive him through the porcelain. I felt the breath whoosh out of him.
“Hands on your head, motherfucker!” I told him. I fumbled with the gun momentarily. Once I had a good grip on it, I jammed the muzzle behind his ear. “Do it, asshole!”
Reuben groaned but slowly moved his hands headward.
I glanced up at Rebecca and the kids. All three were staring with shocked expressions.
“Get to the back of the kitchen and call 911,” I told Rebecca.
She was a cop’s wife. She grabbed the kids, one by each hand and hurried toward the counter.
Rueben groaned again.
A man in a McDonald’s shirt was staring at us from behind the counter.
“Are you the manager?” I asked him.
He continued to stare.
“Are you the manager?” I asked again, louder. This time, he nodded back at me slowly.
“Get your people to the back of the kitchen. Call 911. Tell them that an off-duty officer has a suspect in custody for attempted murder. Tell them what I am wearing. Do you understand?”
He gave me a slow, frightened nod.
“Say it back to me.”
“Wha…?”
“Say it back to me. Say what you’re going to tell the 911 operator.”
“Oh. Uh, you’re an off-duty cop and you got some guy under arrest. And what you’re wearing.”
Good enough. “Do it,” I told him.
He turned and ran toward the back of the kitchen.
I took a breath and looked down. Rueben’s hands hovered next to his ears. I grabbed onto them and squeezed them together on top of his head. “You son of a bitch,” I hissed at him. “I should fucking kill you right here.”
Reuben coughed weakly and groaned.
“Oughta put a bullet behind your fucking ear.” I pressed the muzzle into his head for emphasis.
“Do it, pig,” he rasped. “Chinga tu madre.”
I almost did. I swear to fucking Christ I almost pumped some lead love behind his ear. Instead, I told him, “Forget it. I’d rather you died in prison of AIDS after getting raped by a bunch of Aryan Brothers.”
He laughed wetly, then coughed again.
“You ain’t got the cojones, pig. Don’t fool yourself.”
“Fuck you.”
He gave another gurgling laugh.
An eerie silence set in. I could hear the sizzling of meat back in the kitchen and the incessant beeping from the order screens. Someone was not getting their quarter pounder on time.
I listened for the sirens. Nothing yet.
I grabbed onto Rueben’s hands with my left hand. I kept the muzzle of that pistol pressed against his neck. I watched him. Dared him silently to move, to fight. Reach for a second gun. A knife. Give me enough of a reason to end your miserable life.
“Your brother cried all the way to jail, Reuben,” I whispered.
I felt his body tense.
“Cried like a little bitch.”
A twitch. Not enough.
“Once they booked him in, his broken nose kept him from being the prettiest one on the floor. He made up for it by giving the best head, though. Benito the Blowjob King. We even heard about him outside the jail, he was so famous.”
Another twitch. No fight.
“I hear that runs in the family. Cocksucking. Maybe you could get by throwing blowjobs in the cell bloc, too.”
I glanced over my shoulder at his feet to see if he was trying to get them underneath him. They were pointed harmlessly. The left one was twitching.
“I figure you and Benito learned how to suck cock from your mother, no? She was a real pro, I hear. Made a good living at it.”
Now he was shuddering. I could feel the anger radiating off his body. But that son of a bitch didn’t break. Unlike his dumb ass punk brother, he knew when to fight and when to wait.
“Someday, ese…” he rasped, “…you pay.”
I started to ask him why not today when I heard the wail of sirens.
Last chance.
I pressed the muzzle deeper into his flesh. My finger tickled the trigger.
Fuck. I couldn’t do it. And he wasn’t going to give me the justification.
I grabbed a handful of hair, pulled back and then smashed his face into the porcelain. He grunted. “Cocksucker,” I hissed at him again.
I glanced up and around the dining area, checking for latecomers. The elderly couple was staring at me, frozen. The two teenagers lovers were nowhere to be seen, but the polyester cow and her kids were all gazing at me with their jaws hanging open. One of the kids was moving his lips slowly like he was trying to say something, but no sound came out.
A siren approached. Tires screeched and the siren abruptly died. The slam of a door. Other sirens in the background, further away.
I took a breath, hoping I knew the cop that came through the door.
I watched as a head poked out from the threshold of the glass door and pulled back too fast to have seen anything.
Great. A fucking rookie.
I prayed briefly that those other cars hurried. The sirens yelped and wailed in the distance.
The head bobbed back past the edge of doorframe. This time, he took a look around. I didn’t know him. His smooth face looked about fourteen.
His eyes held excitement and fear. I vaguely remembered that feeling. I don’t think I could dredge it up for even a second, but I remembered that I used to feel it on every hot call I went to for the first year or two.
Would he be a cowboy, this kid? Or wait for back-up?
“Wait for back-up,” I said, barely above a whisper.
The glass door swung open violently.
Of course. He had to be a fucking cowboy.
He slipped right through the fatal funnel and advanced on me, his Glock pointed right at my head.
“Police! Don’t move!” he screeched at me.
Fuck. His voice was in the stratosphere and that forty caliber was looking like about a twelve gauge as it shook in his hand.
“Easy, man.”
“Put down the gun! Police! Put down the gun! Don’t move!” His voice cracked every second word. He licked his lip and I could hear his breath coming in short gasps. He reached for the microphone with his left hand, then changed his mind and went back to two hands on his gun.