The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Steve Almond Okay, Now Do You Surrender?

From Cincinnati Review

Loomis was headed out of work, or out of his workplace, which is what you were supposed to call it now, so that later when the TV vans showed up and disgorged their heartbroken androids they would be able to utter sentences such as “The suspect was a familiar and friendly presence in his workplace...” Anyhoo, he was done for the day — done whoring himself to the hipster lords of Marketing, done creating content — and just a few steps from his car when two men appeared in his path. They wore vintage suits. The larger of the two had a furrowed scar that curled across one cheek. “You gotta minute here?” he said.

“What?” said Loomis.

“We were hoping for a few words.” The men were suddenly very close to him, smelling of matches and Brut.

Loomis had taken off early to beat traffic and was parked in the back of the building. Bobito the Security Guard was doubtless sprawled out in the smoker alcove, flirting with HR specialists who were going to fuck him only if their lives took a harrowing turn.

“A few words about what?” Loomis said.

The pair scanned the parking lot.

“Are you guys FBI or something?”

The one with the scar winced. “Afraid not.”

“It’s about the thank-you notes,” said the smaller one. He had the velvety rasp of Tony Bennett and a Roman nose that had been derailed a few times.

“What thank-you notes?”

“For the kid’s party,” Scarface said.

“The kid?”

“Your kid. The older one. Isabelle.”

“Isadora?”

“Right.”

“How the hell do you know the name of my daughter?”

Scarface set a hand on Loomis’s shoulder. It was a tender gesture that suggested profound brutality. “Settle down,” he said. “There’s no reason for this to turn in the wrong direction.”

Tony Bennett patted his coat in the way of an ex-smoker. “Quicker we clear this thing up, quicker we’re out of your hair.”

“What thing?” Loomis couldn’t figure out how frightened he should be. He had to pee rather ardently.

“A beautiful day like this,” Scarface said. He gestured toward the sky as if the director of a community theater production had just stage-whispered at him to gesture toward the sky. “Who wants to be standing around in a parking lot? Not me.”

“To review,” Tony Bennett said. “You throw this party, what, two weeks ago? All these kids bringing your daughter gifts and whatnot. So then, just as a common—”

“How do you know what’s going on in my house?” Loomis said. “Have you been spying on us?”

Scarface exhaled through his nose, as if he’d been expecting Loomis to behave this way and it bored him. “Nobody’s spying on anybody. You’re missing the point, Mr. Loomis. Just listen.”

“As a courtesy,” Tony Bennett continued, “your wife went out and bought some nice thank-you cards. And you, Mr. Loomis, told her there was no need to waste good money on such an extravagance. Then you threw the cards straight into the garbagio.”

“I didn’t throw them in the garbage,” Loomis said. “I dropped them into a wastepaper basket. I was making a point.”

Scarface ran a thumb down his nose. “What exact point would that be, Mr. Loomis?”

“That it was overkill. We’d already thrown these kids a whole party with lunch and two art activities and gift bags, and I was just sick and tired of feeding into this never-ending arms race of bourgeois pieties.”

Tony Bennett yawned. “I don’t understand what you just said, Mr. Loomis. But I didn’t like the tone.” He stretched in such a way as to make visible the outline of something gun-buttish against his sport coat.

Loomis felt the flutter in his gut go spastic. The air took on a sour radiance. Scarface’s hand was on his shoulder again, again very gently. “Calm down, Mr. Loomis.”

“I feel like you’re threatening me.”

“Nobody’s threatening anybody.”

“We’re having a conversation.”

“Who are you? What do you want from me?”

“You don’t ask the questions,” Tony Bennett said quietly. “That’s not how this relationship works.” He slipped his hand inside his jacket and let it stay there. “How it works is you go get in your car there and drive home and kiss your wife and send those thank-you notes.”

“And you do one more thing,” Scarface said. “You play it smart and keep your mouth shut.”

Loomis drove straight to Taco Bell and ordered three chalupas and a Diet Pepsi and ate them in his car, like an American, then fished a Camel Light from the pack hidden in the wheel well. Later he would vomit or have the runs, perhaps both, perhaps simultaneously.

The police officer he spoke to on the phone was a female who sounded black, which was fine.

“When you say accosted, can you be more specific?”

“They approached me in a threatening manner. They spoke about my wife and daughter, about intimate details of our life.”

“Intimate details being what?”

“Just, you know, domestic issues between my wife and I.”

“Are you in the midst of a dispute with your wife?”

“No,” Loomis said. “That’s not the point. Wait a second. Are you accusing me—”

“Nobody’s accusing you, sir.”

“I’m practically gunned down in broad daylight by a couple of mooks who’ve been surveilling my family, and your response is to suggest that I beat my wife?”

The officer took some time to absorb this. “What do you mean by mook?” she said finally.

Loomis closed his eyes and whispered, just in his mind, Nigger, kike, spic.

“Did either of these gentlemen make an explicit threat?”

“They didn’t say, We’re going to kill you. We were in a parking lot. One of them had a gun!”

“Did he aim the gun at you, sir?”

“He stretched in a way that made it obvious he had a gun.”

“So you didn’t actually see the gun?”

“I saw the clear outline of a gun.”

“Did they demand money or property?”

“No.”

“What did they want, exactly?”

Loomis flashed to the thank-you cards, which were in the shape of little ice cream cones, no doubt hand-cut by an order of incorporated monks. Fourteen bucks for a pack of twelve — the sort of quaint corruption upon which American capitalism now relied.

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me everything, you know,” the cop said in her patient, insinuating tone. “Let me ask you this: Have there been problems in your marriage recently?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Loomis said. “I’m the victim.”

Kate had made her virtuous stir-fry. She was feeling fat, though she weighed only five pounds more than the day they married, whereas Loomis, upon reaching forty, had bloated up like a tick. He stared down the soggy broccoli florets and tempeh chunks and felt a surge of empathy for his children, Izzy, age ten, and four-year-old Trevor, who had once referred to this meal, in a phrase appropriated from Izzy, who had appropriated it from Loomis, as “Mommy’s shit-fry.”

Everything was fine. He was home, his drafty little home on the outskirts of Boston. Kate ate like she always ate, mauling her food, punishing it for her hunger. She asked everyone to say their Favorite Part of the Day. It was part of her Gratitude Agenda. Izzy said reading Harry Potter. Trevor said building a cave for his Uhmoomah. Kate said snuggling with her Uhmoomahs before school. Loomis said being here with all of you right now. He looked round the table and felt the truth of it punch his throat.

“Awwww,” Kate said.

“Dad’s being sweet,” Izzy said suspiciously.

Trevor farted. “Broccoli fart,” he observed.

They’d been married a decade: met in grad school for library science, danced to the wretched bands then being danced to, broke up, found new people, backslid. Then Kate announced her move to Boston, do or die, and Loomis did, in a small Vermont ceremony officiated by Kate’s best friend, The Lesbian Anita. It was a modern arrangement.

When Trevor came along, Kate quit her position at Widener Library to become a full-time mom, and Loomis was suddenly the sole breadwinner. He bid farewell to his post at the branch library reference desk and made for the ergometric wards of biotech, where remarkable things were being done to override our loser genetic material.

After dinner Kate read a story to Trevor while Loomis forked at the crud in the toaster oven and tried to figure his approach.

In the bedroom, Kate was rubbing coconut butter into her ankles. “What’s with you?” she said. “You seem tense.”

“What’s with me,” Loomis said, “is that your goons came and talked to me.”

Kate’s expression landed somewhere between bewilderment and mirth. “My what?”

Loomis saw his error at once. Kate didn’t hire goons to resolve marital issues. She communicated. She lit candles and acknowledged the underlying conflict, and sometimes later they screwed in some mildly raunchy yoga way, though not so much recently because Loomis was fat and often failed to be present in the moment.

“Did you say goons?”

“Did I say what?”

“Goons.”

“I said,” Loomis said slowly, experimentally, “that I’m sick of the balloons. I feel like they’re stalking me. We had this thing at work—”

“Balloons?”

“Just listen, honey. We had this thing at work, one of these team-building exercises, and they ordered everyone to blow up huge balloons with, like, foot pumps, and the balloons had all these, like, Buddhist affirmations on them, like Tranquility is the ultimate dividend. And after a while with these balloons, it was like they were stalking me.”

Kate stared at him for several seconds. “That’s not what you said, Todd.”

“Yeah, it is,” Loomis said. He despised his imagination; it was a retarded psychopath. “I’m sorry, sweetie. It is what I said. About the balloons. It was a strange experience. I don’t know if I can explain it, really.”

Kate inspected her buttered ankles. The room smelled like a Caribbean island they would never visit for ethical reasons. “Why are you smoking again?”

“I’m not smoking. I had one cigarette. It was a long day.”

“What with the balloons and all?”

Kate was being an asshole, but only because he had been an asshole first. This was their dynamic.

“Hey. Remember those thank-you cards? For Izzy’s party?”

Kate closed her eyes in forbearance. “We settled that. She’ll make homemade cards next time and put them in school cubbies.”

“Right. No. Of course. That’s a great plan. I meant the ones for the party we just had.”

“Do we have to go over this right now?”

“No. We don’t have to.”

“Good.”

Izzy appeared in the doorway. “Why are you guys fighting?”

“We’re not fighting,” Loomis said.

“Yes, you are. I heard you.”

“Nobody’s fighting, sweetie. I promise you.”

“You better not be,” she said.

Kate rose from the bed and hug-steered their daughter back toward her room. She was a tough kid, beating boys in soccer and letting them know about it. But she was in a fragile phase. Kate said it was because her best friend, Maya, had moved away after her parents split. Loomis was putting his money on early puberty and bracing himself.

Later, in the dark, Loomis said, “I just wondered if those cards ever got sent out. Because I’d be cool with that. I’d even send them out myself. I feel like I might have overreacted before.”

“Are you trying to apologize for throwing the cards in the garbage?”

“More or less.”

“Which is it?”

“I’m apologizing.”

He reached out and touched his wife’s hip.

She hummed noncommittally. “I already sent them out.”

After lunch Loomis did a cigarette consult with Bobito the Security Guard.

“Hold up, chief,” Bobito said. “Someone stepping up on you with heat? In my parking lot? That shit is gangfucked.”

“Pretty gangfucked,” Loomis agreed.

“That shit is raped, man. What was they hassling you about?”

“Some fight I had with my wife.”

Bobito rapped his skull (shaved, bluish) with his knuckles; this was how he applauded. “Oh, shit. You got a pig on the side, chief? That what this is about? I ain’t making value judgments, man. Shit. I fucked half the bitches in this building on my fianceé’s futon.”

“There were two of them,” Loomis explained. “Sort of Godfather types. Like the movie.”

“ ‘Take the cannoli,’ ” Bobito said. “That shit is classic.”

“One had a huge scar on his cheek.”

“Naw. That’s a fake. Ain’t nobody profiling you with some scar.”

“It looked real.”

“That’s how you know it’s fake.” Bobito scratched his neck tattoo with a scythelike pinkie nail. “I’ll make sure they’re not creeping round here. That’s the easy part, chief. What I’d be asking is who hired them.”

“Yeah?”

“Mos def. Villains gotta make rent in a recession too, bro. Now along comes the Internet, Angie’s List, all that direct-sales shit. It’s got so easy to bring heat a fucking bonobo could do it.” Bobito held his cigarette like a dart and poked out little rings of wisdom. “You gotta think about your enemies, chief. ’Cause they’re sure as shit thinking about you.”

Bobito now began narrating his own criminal record and the various OG motherfuckers with whom he had compiled this record.

“You’ve been in prison?” Loomis said.

“Oh, hell yeah,” Bobito said. “I’m a ex-con. Did a dog’s year in Pondville. That’s like seven on the outside, chief.”

“What’d they get you for?”

“Felony two. Check fraud. Tried to buy some body spray for my boo at Bed, Bath & Beyond, where, by the way, I fucking worked. The whole thing was a reverse sting. These corporate lawyers do not fuck around. They flat-out gangster.” Bobito finished his cigarette and flicked the butt into the koi pond. “I been thinking about your situation,” he said. “I’m prepared to help you out in the form of personal security services.” He produced a crisp business card with the image of a rooster in boxing trunks. “Check out the website.”

“Thank you,” Loomis said. “I’ll do that.”

“Cheap and deep, chief. That’s how I do what got to get done.”

Loomis spent the afternoon compiling suspects. He came up with two: his father-in-law, Kent, and The Lesbian Anita.

Kent was a soft-spoken Kansan who sang in a barbershop quartet and had the mustache to prove it. He had grown up on a farm but worked at a car dealership now, sweet-talking gullible sophomores into sleek Korean shitboxes. Kate was his only daughter; she looked almost exactly like his late wife, Mindy. He’d called her “Mindy” the previous Christmas, then wept without embarrassment, a practice endorsed by his men’s group. Kent despised Loomis in that affable midwestern manner that often passed for affection on the coasts.

“Well hello there, stranger,” he said when Loomis greeted him. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

“No reason. Kate mentioned you had a little surgery.”

“Oh, jiminy. I wouldn’t call a colonoscopy surgery. They just run a thingamabob up your bottom and broadcast your guts on a little TV.”

“Still.”

“There’s only three things that can kill a farmer,” Kent said. “Lightning. Rolling a tractor. And old age.”

Loomis wanted to say, What about cancer? This was how his mind worked. It had made him popular in college. “Hey, by the way, thanks for sending Izzy that birthday check. It was very generous.”

“Nonsense.”

“Between you and my mom she’s gonna bank her first million by twelve.”

“It’s a good thing to save with the economy the way it is.”

Loomis cleared his throat. “I hope you got the thank-you card Izzy sent along.”

“I did. Lovely. I’m going to put it on the wall here.” Kent gestured at his wall over there in Kansas.

“Good,” Loomis said. “Because I wouldn’t want you to be angry on account of a thank-you card.”

After a pause, Kent said, “Why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?” Loomis said.

“Like a dimwit. Like someone sounding out the words.”

“I’m just saying that I hope you’d tell me if you were angry at me, Kent.”

“For what?”

“Or disappointed.”

“I don’t get it. Is everything okay with you and Kate?”

“Why? Did she say something to you?”

“This is a very odd conversation, Todd. I have to wonder if you’ve been drinking.”

So this was Loomis now: sowing panic among the elderly. The beers had been a mistake — the last two, anyway. “I’m sorry. Work’s been tough. They’re downsizing our group. I’ve lost a lot of buddies.” He was thinking about Kent, alone in his ranch house, tying bass lures, making cups of Maxwell House. It was some ginned-up notion he had about loneliness, being left behind. He heard Kent release a half sob into the phone, then realized it was him.

“I understand,” his father-in-law said. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I hear on the lot.”

“Don’t say anything to Kate. It’s just nice sometimes to talk to another dad, you know?”

Downstairs, Izzy was caressing her iPad like a lover. Kate was at a spinning class.

“Where’s Trevor?”

“In the bath,” Izzy said.

“The bath?”

“Don’t stress. I’m monitoring him. You smell like beer. Are you, like, an alcoholic now?”

And what if he was? He wasn’t. But what if? It wasn’t every day that a guy’s persecution complex came true.

After Kate and the kiddies conked out, he paced the perimeter of his darkened home debating the merits of gun control. He scanned the street for suspicious vehicles. A red Scion had tailed him home from work. Possibly twice. Later that night a loud thumping bolted him awake. “What the hell was that?”

“Trevvie,” Kate murmured. “Kicks the wall.” She laughed drowsily. “You’re so jumpy. It’s cute.”

Jumpy? Cute? He felt like slugging her in the kidney, wherever that might be.

On Saturday she returned from her weekly sojourn to Trader Joe’s with nine recyclable sacks full of festive yuppie kibble: tandoori chicken skewers, chipotle hummus, trail mix brimming with mystical Mayan seeds intended to charm his cholesterol. Loomis was busy thrashing Izzy at Monopoly, which would eventually build her character. He had no intention of wandering into the kitchen to audit his wife’s purchases. That was something the Old Loomis would have done, a petty pleasure wrung from the fluke of his economic prerogative.

No, all Loomis wanted was to see if there might be a little something he could nosh on while Izzy was in the bathroom. He even offered to help Kate put the groceries away, an offer she politely declined, a declination he politely ignored. Loomis was going to be helpful because it was the right thing to do. He held to this conviction until the precise moment his eyes fell upon a small container of Greek yogurt.

He and Kate had discussed this product at length. They had agreed it was an unnecessary luxury. He tamped down his urge to speak, then realized he was tamping down his urge to speak, then glared at Kate, who was reaching into the fridge to put the almond milk away and humming — humming, of all things! Her ass looked delish. This made Loomis wish he had not seen the yogurt. But it was too late. He was going to say something now, something awful and thrilling — he’d had enough of muzzling himself, of kowtowing, of groveling, which is probably how Kate had got the idea that the fucking Greek yogurt was back in play. She turned from the fridge. Her eyes followed his. He suffered an exquisite moment of pre-regret, of wanting to fall to his knees in some kind of spiritual silence. Then his vile mouth began to speak.

On Monday morning, having forgotten to pretend to have an early meeting, Loomis walked Trevor to preschool. They bonded. This consisted of listening to Trevor hold forth on the Uhmoomah, a species of his own invention that appeared to embody all the vital Freudian archetypes. (Pale wormy body? Check. Damp cave habitat? Check. Humps that squirt white lava? Check.)

They passed all the landmarks Izzy had loved: the tree with the tiny door at the bottom, the doghouse shaped like an igloo. Trevor droned sweetly on. Loomis missed the days of one child. The math was so complicated now. Someone always had a cold. They all fought too much. Loomis was fat and unhappy and lonely in his unhappiness. That was why he picked fights. What did one do with such insights?

They were standing in front of the church basement where Trevor was being taught to clean up glue spills and use his words. Loomis crouched down to hug his little weirdo goodbye. Over Trevor’s shoulder he spotted a red Scion parked down the street. The vehicle pulled a U-ie and raced off. Loomis jumped up and waved his arms and started yelling, “Hey! Hey!”

A number of kids and parents were by now staring at him. Loomis fell silent. Trevor regarded his father with the solemn majesty of one burdened by too many secrets. He held a pink finger to his lips. “The Uhmoomah don’t like yelling,” he whispered. “It hurts their tentacles.”

The interview with The Lesbian Anita was brief. It had to be, because The Lesbian Anita was extremely busy. She was a rabbi and a tenured scholar of transgender literature, a kind of Venn-diagram celebrity. She had three offices, two secretaries, a solar system of overly sexualized graduate assistants. Loomis ambushed her outside her synagogue.

“Look at you,” she said. “You’ve gotten fat, Toddy. It gives me real pleasure. Your hairline’s fucked too.”

They stood, not hugging.

The Lesbian Anita wore a flowing white robe and Pocahontas braids. She looked like a Manson Girl back from rehab.

“I’ll cut to the chase,” Loomis said. “Two armed men approached me in a threatening manner regarding a dispute I had with Kate. I believe you hired these men because you’re in love with my wife and hope to drive us apart.”

The Lesbian Anita roared like a pirate. “Is this what happens when you turn forty and start turning tricks for the man?”

“If you come clean, I’ll let this go without involving the police.”

“Omigod! Let’s by all means involve the police. Let’s call them right now. I want to see how this plays out. It’s so awesomely unhinged.” She pulled out her iPhone and dialed 911.

On speaker, a dispatcher asked, “Is this an emergency?”

The Lesbian Anita stared at Loomis. “Yes.”

“Okay. Point made.” He tried to grab the phone, but The Lesbian Anita caught his hand and gave it a quick crushing. She’d been an Olympic finalist in the hammer throw.

Loomis looked around to make sure no one had seen him physically subdued by The Lesbian Anita. It had happened before, on a vacation to Squam Lake long ago. Loomis was the new suitor, seeking the approval of Kate’s brilliant best friend. They drank a lot and smoked weed and skinny-dipped, and somehow the subject of Indian leg wrestling came up, as it often does among the drunk and erotically agitated. So there was Loomis with a confused half-chub and a bota bag of sangria, slathered in mud like an Iroquois. He stepped forward to fell The Lesbian Anita. Down he went, like Foreman in Zaire.

He had squirmed in the muck, not unhappily. “Okay, now do you surrender?” he howled. Kate was doubled over on the porch. The Lesbian Anita cupped her mons pubis in a gesture whose precise meaning Loomis declined to interpret. Instead he adopted the accent of a Native American person imitating English. “I, Him Who Pisses Self at Dawn, bow down before you, the mighty warrioress She Who Munches Squaws!” and they all whooped and the loons whooped back and later, in front of the fire, Kate whispered that she loved him. Why not? He was man enough to take his licking with good humor, and he gave it right back that same night, between Kate’s sturdy thighs, the region he called Sweet Valley in tribute to her Kansan youth.

The Lesbian Anita had pocketed her phone. She squinted rabbinically. “Whatever you’ve gotten yourself into, get out of it.”

“I haven’t gotten into anything.”

“I’d hate to think I was right about you all these years,” The Lesbian Anita said. “Pull it together, Toddy. Have a little faith in yourself.”

Faith. Right. That was what Loomis needed — a little taste of the ancient codes, the chance to maybe slaughter an animal with sanctioned hooves. He settled for the local Unitarian Universalist Church, tagging along with Kate and the kiddos. “My little atheist wingman,” Kate called him, and he pretended the “little” part didn’t offend him. He made fruit salad for the potluck, sang the ungendered hymns. It was nice: holding hands, participating in the sudden vulnerability of human voices lifted together, letting the ponchoed crones fawn over his kids. Later he wolfed French toast stuffed with cream cheese and tried to forgive himself.

He did his weekend time with the kids, the playground, the drop-offs, the dizzy itinerary of domestic duties that now passed for foreplay. Why was he so angry at his wife all the time? It was as if he’d come to the end of his decency. Kate herself was done arguing, into some ominous new phase.

“What?” Loomis found himself saying defensively, standing in the middle of an empty room with some useless implement in his fist, a paint scraper or egg whisk. Then, with a note of scorn, “What?” Trevor had spent weeks building an elaborate home for his Uhmoomah out of construction paper, glitter glue, Legos, popsicle sticks. He carried it to the back porch and stomped on it with a sudden al-fresco wrath.

Loomis burst through the back door. “What are you doing?”

“It’s ruined,” Trevor explained.

“It’s not ruined!” Loomis shrieked.

“Yes it is,” Trevor said calmly. “There was a volcano that exploded. Why are you yelling, Dad?”

A few days later Loomis was standing in back of the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street from Izzy’s soccer practice. She wouldn’t be done for another half hour, so he ordered a dozen Munchkins, half for the kid, but she didn’t need the sugar and he did, because he worked for a living and she didn’t. He finished the last one and sky-hooked the box into the dumpster.

“Those are gonna go straight to your breadbasket.” Tony Bennett had materialized beside him, spiffy as a dime.

Loomis felt the bolt of his hypothalamus. His bloodstream flushed with epinephrine. His soft muscles clenched. His plaqued heart thudded. A million years ago, or even, like, ten, he would have done something useful with all these panic hormones — fought, or more likely fled. But he was a modern domesticated human, a suburban kvetcher unversed in the protocols of genuine danger.

Scarface appeared on the other side of Loomis and set a paw on his trembling shoulder. “This is what I’m wondering, friend: if my wife, God rest her soul, if she came back from shopping—”

“Please don’t touch me without my permission,” Loomis managed.

“She finally gets everything unloaded,” Scarface said, unperturbed, “but here I come, Big Mister Hubby Man, and I see something I don’t approve of on that kitchen island. Does this give me the right to...”

“Demean,” Tony Bennett said.

“Right.”

“Insult.”

“Sure.”

“Hector.”

“Listen to this guy. Friggin’ Roget.”

“Is this about the Greek yogurt?”

Tony Bennett reached into his hip pocket and left his hand there. “Yeah, let’s address the yogurt thing.”

They were standing side by side, a brief, miserable chorus line.

“I have a right to know how my money’s being spent,” Loomis said.

“You don’t trust your wife?” Scarface made his tongue go tut. “The mother of your children?” He said something in Italian, and they both laughed.

“What do you want me to say? That I’m a tyrant? Okay, I’m a tyrant.”

“We don’t want you to say anything,” Tony Bennett said. “That’s the goal we’re pursuing here.”

Loomis needed to shut up. He knew that. But the portion of his brain responsible for shutting up had lost function. “A buck seventy-nine for a single yogurt,” he said slowly. “Eight fucking ounces. How is that in any way reasonable? They put a little pod of strawberry jam next to the yogurt, like it’s so fucking sacred it requires its own habitat, like American consumers are so stupid as to think, ‘Wow, in Greece they’re sophisticated about their yogurt! They don’t put fruit at the bottom! No, Greeks assemble each yogurt themselves, as in the days of the ancient Athenian democracy, when Plato sat upon the steps of the Parthenon and stirred a brace of fresh berries into his single-serving portion!’ ”

His interrogators said nothing. What could they say? Loomis had dazzled them into silence.

“You really think like this?” Scarface asked finally.

Tony Bennett turned to face Loomis. His breath smelled of sirloin and Altoids. “Do you work hard, Mr. Loomis?”

“I do,” Loomis said, though he wanted to say something a bit more elastic, something like Define hard. Because the truth is he had offered a single good idea early in his tenure, a phrase uttered in jest at the end of a brainstorm, which had become a slogan, then a logo, then a campaign. He was a one-hit wonder. He was Men Without Hats. Did Men Without Hats work hard? Define hard.

“So this hard work,” Scarface said, “it entitles you to a certain respect, am I correct?”

Loomis nodded wearily.

“And your wife, as the primary caretaker for your children, she works hard too, right?”

“I respect my wife,” Loomis said.

“Your behavior,” Tony Bennett said.

“Not respectful,” Scarface said.

“Because respectful would be to thank her for going shopping.”

“Give her a kiss. Say, Thanks, honey.”

“Then later, if you got a problem, away from the kids.”

“You find a nice way.”

“You don’t jump down her throat about the yogurt, the applesauce.”

“That fucking applesauce!” Loomis barked. “You tell me, you guys are so reasonable, does it make sense to put an ounce of fruit-based paste into a brightly colored polyurethane pouch with a screw top, a pouch no doubt assembled by underaged slaves on the outskirts of some toxic Asian megalopolis—”

Scarface nudged Loomis. He gestured with his chin toward Tony Bennett, who brushed open his coat to reveal an elaborate holster, out of which peeked the black butt of a pistol.

Loomis’s knees went to jelly. He tried to take a step and stumbled, and his brow struck something.

“You got a decision to make,” Tony Bennett said from somewhere up above. “We don’t want to have to keep doing this. It’s not to our liking.”

“A decision,” Loomis said woozily. Then he was on the ground next to the dumpster, and his ribs hurt.

Now many things were happening simultaneously, and Loomis was struggling to process each of them. Scarface stood over him, looking spooked. The scar itself — and this made no sense — seemed to be peeling off at one end. The red Scion was parked across the street, and a figure stepped out of it and began twirling a baton. Someone was yelling at a much higher, feminine pitch. Loomis could feel an itchy trickling down his cheek. It was unclear how much time had passed.

The scene began to resolve: The guy from the red Scion was Bobito. He was working a pair of nunchucks (not a baton!) and instructing Tony Bennett to “Step off.” Tony Bennett appeared unsure what to do. With some difficulty, he removed the gun from his holster, which brought Bobito up short. Scarface had his hands out, palms up. This was all taking place behind a Dunkin’ Donuts, in what one might call a low-traffic asphalt area.

Then a fourth figure became visible: his daughter Izzy in orange soccer shorts and shin guards; Izzy, who had inherited his big dumb nose — he felt terrible about it — what in God’s name had he ensnared her in? She was marching toward Scarface and Tony Bennett from behind, at such an angle that she couldn’t see the basic standoff scenario. “I told you guys, no being rough!” she yelled. Then, catching sight of the weapons, she shrieked: “Omigod-omigod-omigod!”

Loomis concurred. He did not ponder why his daughter had been shouting at Scarface and Tony Bennett. He did not think about anything but Izzy, who was still wearing her cleats, which he’d expressly told her not to do because nongrass surfaces wore the plastic down, but what did it matter, what did any of it matter? She was his baby girl, his number one; he had caught her at birth, her tender bluish body coated in hot slop. He rose up and staggered toward her, right through the line of fire. He was going to possibly die a hero, and this felt, for a gorgeous fraction of a second, true and good. He lunged and knocked Izzy to the ground and lay on top of her like a soggy rug, bellowing, “Please don’t shoot oh god she’s my baby daughter please don’t shoot I beg you oh god I’m begging.”

This went on for a while.

Scarface gestured toward Bobito. “Who the hell is this guy?”

“Mr. Loomis’s personal security detail is who I am, bitch.”

Loomis was too terrified to mention that this was not technically true.

“Drop the Chink sticks,” Tony Bennett said. He was trying to sound tough, but his voice strained for the effect, and Loomis, cowering below him, could see his hands trembling, as if the gun clasped between them weighed next to nothing.

“You first,” Bobito said.

“Please do it,” Loomis whimpered. “Please, Bobito. Please please.”

Bobito sneered and dropped the nunchucks. “For the girl.”

Tony Bennett had just lowered his weapon when a siren sounded. Suddenly all three men were yelling shit and fuck and glaring at Loomis as if this were all his fault. Bobito tossed his nunchucks in the dumpster. To Tony Bennett he said, “Ditch the piece, dammit.”

“Wait,” Tony Bennett said. “Wait wait.”

“Ditch it,” Bobito snarled.

The gun landed on the pavement with a hollow plasticky clatter. Loomis could see that the weapon, which lay a few feet away, had a tiny plug in back, to keep the water inside.

“What the fuck?” Bobito said.

“Here’s the thing,” Scarface said. His cheeks had become damp with sweat; the scar now dangled.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Tony Bennett murmured.

“Oh no you don’t,” Bobito said. “You been terrorizing my client. You ain’t going nowhere.”

“He was never in any danger,” Scarface said.

“Tell that to my man,” Bobito said. “He’s on the ground, crushing his little girl, his head all bleeding.”

“Bleeding?” Loomis said. “Crushing?” He rolled off Izzy and wiped his temple with the back of his hand. The red made him gag. Scarface hurried over and offered a handkerchief. “Direct pressure,” he said with genuine remorse. “Head wounds bleed.”

Loomis struggled to process the new data. The gun was a toy. The scar was a fake. He was not going to die heroically, which was great news, terrific really, but also a little disappointing. Izzy seemed to be in some kind of shock. She kept sobbing that she was sorry, which was not a word he associated with her. The cops, yipping through red lights, were closing in on all of them.

Tony Bennett and Scarface began walking backward, toward the alley behind the dumpster.

“Don’t you dare,” Bobito said.

“We were just doing a job,” Tony Bennett said.

“I got your license plate,” Bobito said. “I’ll track you down.”

“Cut us some slack,” Scarface said, sounding notably less Italian. “We got downsized. You got any idea how hard it is to find work when you’re over fifty and can’t operate Excel?”

“I got three teenagers at home to feed,” Tony Bennett said in an imploring tone. “Let’s forget this ever happened, okay? Okay?”

But no, it was not okay. A cop car pulled up behind them, and a black female officer stepped out, her stout partner emerging from the other side of the car. The officers spotted Izzy, Loomis, the blood, and drew their weapons. Everyone raised their hands in unison, like a dance troupe.

“This gentleman fell,” Tony Bennett called out. “He had some kind of seizure.”

“Is that true, sir?” the black cop demanded.

“My dad’s a diabetic,” Izzy said suddenly. “He gets dizzy when he gets low blood sugar.” She squeezed his hand and looked at Bobito imploringly.

Loomis made his head nod. “I came here to get a doughnut, but I got lightheaded. I guess I fell.”

“We got a report of a dispute,” the other cop said.

“That was me, officer,” Izzy said tearfully. “Because, you know, it’s my dad. These guys came by to help me. I was sort of panicking.”

The black cop lowered her weapon. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

“Omigod,” Izzy said. “Are you taking him to the hospital?”

“Please, officer,” Loomis said. “I’m fine. These gentlemen have been very kind. We’d really just like to walk home. It’s only a few blocks, and my daughter is quite upset.”

The officer cocked her head.

Loomis stood up and smiled and showed her that the wound was no big deal, just a small gash. The sun was drawing their shadows across the parking lot. Loomis felt a strange elation, a sense of things cohering, of some larger force having summoned him to this moment. It made no sense, but he wanted to thank everyone: Bobito for watching over him without his permission, Tony Bennett for keeping a cool head, Scarface for the handkerchief, the black lady cop for, in her own way, trying to warn him.

He lifted his daughter and hugged her to him as the others walked back into their own lives. But there was something amiss — a hard object pressed against his tender ribs, and he knew at once what it was: the toy pistol, which Izzy had stashed inside her shirt to conceal it from the cops. He thought of how she had spoken to Tony Bennett and Scarface when she first appeared, and he realized what she had done, and then why. Izzy must have sensed his revelation because she began to weep again. And then he was weeping too, because she was right, she had seen it more clearly than he had, how fragile their little family was, how easily daddies lost faith in themselves, and how this made families fall apart. And this made him think (for whatever blessed reason) of those first few seconds of her life, how slippery she had been, how easily he might have dropped her, and up above, Kate, her lovely face smeared red with joy.

They’d have to explain to her that he’d fallen and hit his head. Or maybe they’d confess to the whole crazy thing. It didn’t matter. He’d ask forgiveness too. But that was the easy part: finding the right words. The hard part, the part he’d been fighting all along, would be facing who he’d become. How did one find a way back to grace?

Loomis held on — to the memory of Izzy and the truth of her, lashed between rage and mercy like the rest of humankind, precious, alive, his number-one girl smelling of grass and bubblegum.