"Don't you ever hit her," I said.
She'd told me she'd slipped in the shower. The time before that, she'd tripped on a wet floor at the Food Fair supermarket, where she worked as a cashier. One flimsy excuse after another, and I'd had enough.
"She tell you that?"
Blood roared in my ears so loud I could barely hear him. My heart was racing. I swallowed hard. I had to look away, stared at the peeling gray-white paint on the doorframe. It reminded me of the birch tree in the backyard.
"I told him it was an accident." Mom's voice from behind me, high and strained and quavering, a frightened little girl. "Stay out of this, Jakey."
I kept examining the peeling-paint birch bark. "I know you hit her. Don't you ever do that again."
A sudden movement, and I was knocked to the floor like a candlepin.
"Talk to me like that one more time, you're going to reform school."
Tears flooding my eyes now: Not the onions. What the hell was reform school?
"Now, say you're sorry."
"Never. I'm not."
"We gonna do this the hard way?"
I knew what he was capable of.
Through eyes blurry from tears, I examined the ceiling, noticed the cracks, like the broken little concrete patio in back of the house.
"I'm sorry," I said at last.
A few minutes later, Dad was lying back in his ratty old Barcalounger in front of the TV. "Jakey," he said, almost sweetly. "Mind fetching me another Genny?"
Slowly we all began to gather on one side of the table. Except for Bross and Rylance, I noticed. They both seemed to be edging away, as if trying to make a sudden break.
"Where's Lampack?" Slattery said.
"Let's go, kids," the long-haired man said. He pointed the Glock at Bross and Rylance. "Nowhere to run, compadres," he said to them. "We got all the exits covered. Get over there with the rest of your buddies."
Bross and Rylance glanced at each other, then, as if by unspoken agreement, stopped moving. I looked for Ali, saw her at the far end of the table. She appeared to be as frightened as everyone else.
Was this guy bluffing about having the exits covered? How many of them were there?
And what were they planning to do?
The man took out a walkie-talkie from his vest, pressed the transmit button. "Verne, you got the staff secured?"
"Roger," a voice came back.
"We got a couple of guys itching to make a run for it. You or Travis see 'em, shoot on sight, you read me?"
"Roger that."
He slipped the walkie-talkie back into his vest, then held the gun in a two-handed grip, aiming at Kevin Bross. "Which one of you wants to die first?"
Hugo Lummis cried, "Don't shoot!" and someone else said, "Move, just move!"
"Don't be idiots!" Cheryl shouted at the two men. "Do what he says."
"Makes no big difference to me," the long-haired man said. "You obey me, or you die, but either way I get what I want. You always have a choice." He shifted his pistol a few inches toward Rylance. "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo."
"All right," Bross said. He raised his hands in the air; then he and Rylance came over to the table.
"What do you want from us?" Cheryl said.
But he didn't reply. He wagged his pistol back and forth in the air, ticking from one of us to the next like the arm of a metronome. He chanted in a singsong voice: "My-mother-told-me-to-pick-the-very-best-one-and-you-are-not-it."
His pistol pointed directly at me.
"You win."
I swallowed hard.
Stared into the muzzle of the Glock.
"It's your lucky day, guy," he said.
My reaction was strange: I wanted to close my eyes, like a child, to make it go away. Instead, I forced myself to notice little things about the gun, like the way the barrel jutted out of the front of the slide. Or the unusual keyhole-shaped opening machined into the top.
"Huh," I said, trying to sound casual. "Never seen one of those up close."
"It's called a gun, my friend," he said. His eyes were liquid pewter. There seemed to be a glint of amusement in them. "A semiautomatic pistol. And when I pull this little thing here, which is called a trigger-"
"No, I mean I've never seen a Glock 18C before," I said. "Pretty rare, those things. Works like an automatic, doesn't it?"
Humanize yourself. Make him see you as someone just like him.
He smiled slowly. He was a handsome man, except for those eyes, which were cold and gray and didn't smile when his mouth did. "Sounds like you know your weapons." He kept his gun leveled at me, aiming at a spot in the middle of my forehead.
"Of course, seventeen rounds on auto won't last you very long," I said, then immediately regretted saying it.
"Well, why don't we find out?" he said in a voice that, in any other context, you might describe as gentle.
Everyone was quiet, watching in mesmerized terror. The air had gone out of the room.
"Do I get a choice?" I asked.
26
He looked at me for a few seconds.
Then he grinned and lowered the gun. I exhaled slowly.
"All right, boys and girls, here's the drill. I want all of you to empty your pockets, put everything on the table right in front of you. Wallets, money clips, jewelry. Watches, too. Got it? Let's go."
So it was a holdup. Nothing more than that, thank God.
"Buck, some backup over here," he said.
"Gotcha, Russell," said the goateed guy, taking out his.44. I noticed he was no longer speaking in that hillbilly accent. He'd been putting it on.
"When these folks here are finished emptying out their pockets, I want you and Wayne to search 'em. Pat 'em down."
"Gotcha."
Buck began orbiting the table, watching everyone drop wallets and money clips onto the table. Ali and Cheryl unclasped their necklaces and bracelets, took off their earrings. The men removed their watches.
Hugo Lummis, next to me, unbuckled his watchband and slipped it into the back pocket of his pants. I wondered if anyone else had seen it. I didn't think so.
I whispered to him, "Careful. They're going to search us." But he pretended not to hear.
Russell holstered his gun and began strolling nonchalantly around the room, picking up objects, examining them with idle curiosity, then putting them down. He walked with the loose-limbed stride of someone used to a lot of physical activity. An ex-soldier, I thought, but of an elite sort-a Navy SEAL, maybe, or a member of the Special Forces. There were crow's-feet around his eyes and deep lines etched in his leathery skin: He'd spent a lot of time in the sun. Not, I suspected, on the beach.
He stopped at a long table on which one of the hotel staff had stacked blue loose-leaf Hammond binders. He picked one up and leafed through it for a minute or so.
His two men were preoccupied, too-Buck was making a circuit around the table, his back to me, and Wayne was frisking Geoff Latimer. So for a moment, no one was watching us. I moved my hand slowly across the tablecloth, grabbed the handle of a steak knife, slid the knife along the table toward me.
Then I lowered it to my side, held it flat against my thigh.
I gripped its smooth black handle and ran my thumb along the knife edge. It would slice through human skin as easily as it dissected saddle of venison. Against a handgun it wouldn't do much, but it was the only weapon I had.
Russell ripped out a sheet of paper from one of the notebooks, folded it neatly, and put it in his vest pocket.
Hank Bodine was now struggling to get to his feet. His face was slick with blood; he was badly wounded.
"You can just stay put," Russell told him. "I don't think you're going to get up and dance anytime soon." He grabbed a handful of linen napkins from the table and dropped them in front of Bo-dine. They fluttered to the floor like bird's wings. Bodine looked at them dully, then squinted his bloodied eyes at Russell, not understanding.
"You got a choice, too," Russell said. "You can try to stop the bleeding or hemorrhage to death. All the same to me."
Now Bodine understood. He took a napkin, held it to his nose, moaned.