No way out

Chapter Four

Two women and a man were sitting at a corner table near the television. They had more on their plates than ribs. The man was facing us, the women giving us their backs; the other eight tables were empty. They gave off a vibe of bad news getting worse. I couldn’t help picking up on it, blaming too many years spent finding trouble before it started.

Their postures were stiff, their voices rising and falling, the buzz from the television muffling what they were saying. One thing was clear: They weren’t having a party.

The man’s totem head was square. His eyes were heavy-lidded, the left one lazy. His neck was short and squat, his shoulders rolled with fat. I put him at forty, maybe less. He drummed meaty fingers on the Formica tabletop, his lazy eye drifting my way, catching me watching them, his glare telling me to butt out.

The woman sitting on the end of the table pointed her finger at him. He grabbed her hand, squeezing until the woman sitting next to the wall pulled them apart, the man gritting his teeth, folding his beefy arms over his chest, the first woman slumping, elbows on the table, her face in her hands.

The woman who’d separated them came out of her chair like a charmed snake, the man flattening his hands on the table, staring up at her, his mouth a dumb scar. Purse on her shoulder, she turned and sauntered past our table, crossing the black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor, chewing her lower lip and glancing at me before disappearing down the narrow hall between the open kitchen and windows blanketed with wrought-iron bars, heading, I guessed, for the bathroom. She was young, early twenties, slender with a ropy muscular build, sporting a lip ring and auburn hair streaked with bright red and cut close to a face midway between pretty and incredible.

“I think she likes you, Jack,” Lucy teased.

“My lucky day.”

“What do you make of them?”

“From the looks of things, I’d say they aren’t having a good day, especially those two,” I said, aiming a rib at the man and woman still at the table.

The man leaned toward the woman, whispering, hunching his shoulders, his arms wide, making a plea, the woman crossing her arms, shaking her head. The man pressed, chopping the air with an open palm. He wasn’t asking; he was telling, his my-way-or-the-highway message plain enough. The woman pulled back, turning away from him and toward us, her eyes widening, her mouth locked in a tight grimace.

“Why’d they have to pick LC’s to have a fight?” Lucy asked. “The guy with the lazy eye makes me nervous. Angry, unhappy people do crazy stuff, and I’ve got a bad feeling about them. Why did you have to leave your gun at home?” she asked.

“You know why. I couldn’t take my gun into the Municipal Farm, and I don’t like leaving it in the car. Besides, you see the sign on LC’s door, the one with the gun inside a red circle and a line drawn through it?”

“You think they look like the kind of people who care about a sign on the door?”

Voices rose from the corner table, drowning out the static from the TV. The woman turned toward the man, reached across the table, and slapped him.

“I won’t have it, Frank. I’d rather lose everything!”

She knocked her chair over as she got up, the man she called Frank matching her move, grabbing her wrist. She gave him the back of her other hand this time, her ring cutting a bloody groove across his cheek.

He let her go, wiped his cheek on his sleeve, and reached inside his coat, pulling a gun. The woman skittered backward, her hands raised. Frank fired once and she crumpled to the floor, faceup and dead, laugh lines and crow’s feet soft and slack, her gray eyes open, locked and puzzled.

Lucy and I froze in our seats. There was nowhere to hide. Frank gazed down at the woman and then pointed his gun at us, his hand wobbling, waiting for something to happen.

“Goddamn it, Frank! What in the hell is wrong with you?”

It was the woman who’d left the table before the shooting started, her voice behind us. I stole a look over my shoulder. She was standing next to LC behind the four-foot-high counter, a drywall pillar obscuring her head and shoulders.

“It wasn’t my fault, Roni,” Frank said, his voice quivering. “She started yelling at me-then she slapped me. Slapped me twice and cut me too.”

“You could have walked away or slapped her back. Why’d you have to shoot Marie? And where in the world did you get a gun?”

He shook his massive head, blinking at the body lying at his feet as if it had fallen out of the sky. “I didn’t mean to. It just happened, that’s all.”

“Is she dead?”

He nudged Marie with his shoe. “I expect so. I shot her pretty good right in the chest.”

“Well, that’s just great, Frank. Really, it is. Just great.”

The big man heaved and rolled his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Roni. I guess we better get out of here.”

“And go where? Look around the room, Frank. There are three other witnesses besides me. How far do you think you’ll get?”

“A lot farther than if we stick around. Now let’s get out of here!”

She stepped away from the pillar into the open, raising a gun at him in a two-fisted grip, her voice strong and steady. “Don’t make me shoot you.”

“Aw, hell, Roni. You’re not gonna shoot me. You never shot anybody in your life.”

“Every girl dreams about her first time, Frank. I just never figured it would be you.”

Frank leveled his gun at her, no wobble in his grip, his lazy eye closed in a squint. Lucy and I were trapped in their cross fire.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” he said. “But I’ll do it if I have to. And them, too,” he added, tilting his head at us. “And the colored guy.”

“That’s a lot of killing to have on your conscience, Frank.”

He swelled up, stuck his chest out, stretching his gun hand toward her. “I can carry the freight.”

“Now, Frank,” she said. “I’m a much better shot than you. I work at it, and I’ve never seen you at the range, not one time. With that lazy eye of yours, you’re just as likely to shoot yourself as anyone else. Only reason you hit Marie was she was standing on top of you.”

“Don’t push me, Roni,” he said, his voice low and hard. “That’s what Marie did, and you see what it bought her.”

“She couldn’t protect herself. I can. Do you have the nerve to pull the trigger a second time when you know I’ll shoot back?”

Frank was sweating, his neck red, his face purpling, the gun now bobbing in his hand as he fought to breathe. “I come this far! Don’t think I won’t do it!”

“All right then,” she said, bending her knees slightly, lining him up in her sight. “You better not miss because I got you dead to rights.”

They stood like that for a few seconds, Lucy and I flipping back and forth between them until Frank relaxed, lowered his gun, and turned sideways and Lucy and I started breathing again. Roni straightened, easing her stance, when Frank jerked his gun hand up and fired, missing her. She ducked and pulled the trigger, hitting him in the thigh. He dropped his gun, clutched his leg, and twisted to the floor.

“You shot me!”

She ran over to him and picked up his gun, sticking both weapons in her belt.

“The moon is pink,” she said.

“I can’t believe you fucking shot me!”

“The moon is pink,” she said, pressing her hands over his wound.

“The moon is pink! What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you weren’t listening to a word I said, you dumb son of a bitch. I told you I would shoot you. I might as well have been telling you the moon was pink for all the good it did.”

“I heard you. I just didn’t believe you.”

“Same difference,” she said.

She looked at me, her brows raised, her mouth open, asking for help without saying it.

“I’ll call 911,” I said.

She nodded. “Appreciate it if you would.”

Lucy knelt next to Marie, checked for a pulse, and shook her head at me. She traded places with Roni alongside Frank, pressing her hands against his wound, stemming the blood flow to a trickle. Frank turned pale and laid his head on the floor.

Roni stood, wiped her bloody hands on her denims, and walked to my table as I closed my phone and stood.

“Help is on the way,” I said. “I’m Jack Davis. Who are you?”

“Veronica Chase. Everyone calls me Roni.” She reached for a cameo hanging from a gold necklace, rubbing the charm between two fingers, and looked at Marie and Frank, then at the blood on her hands and jeans, her face turning green. “Oh Lord, I think I’m gonna be sick.”

And she was.