Читать книгу Whatever it takes - Paul Cleave - Страница 11

Six

It’s a big-city bar with neon in the windows and big-screen TVs on the walls. There’s a lot of blonde-colored wood around the bar, darker stuff on the walls, and a lot of character knocked and chipped and worn into all of it. There’s a jukebox in the corner that doesn’t play anything recorded either side of the seventies and a pool table that needs new felt after somebody spilled their drink on it a few weeks ago. We serve thirty different kinds of beer, thirty different kinds of wine, and spirits from all different countries. Friday nights we have a live band, Tuesday night is ladies’ night, and Sunday night — so it seems — is armed robbery night. I’ve been working here for the last twelve years and have been part owner for the last ten, and in that time we’ve been robbed twice and the guy in front of me is amping to make that a third, and every time it’s been a Sunday. His floppy hair is dirty and his face is covered in acne and he’s skinny and jacked, and if the gun accidentally goes off it could hit me or maybe it could hit something a mile to my left.

“This isn’t a bank,” I tell him, and my hands are out to my sides in a nice peaceful gesture because I’m a peaceful gesture kind of guy. “Why don’t you put the gun down and walk on out of here and we all go about putting this behind us?”

He looks left, then he looks right, and whatever he’s looking for he doesn’t see it. Or maybe he does. Pink Floyd is coming from the jukebox, the band singing about being comfortably numb, which sums up half of what I’m feeling.

“Just give me what you have.”

“I have some advice,” I tell him.

“I don’t want your advice.”

“It’s free. That and the peanuts, those are two things in here you don’t have to pay for, though if you’re going to have the peanuts it’s understood you’re going to have bought yourself a drink. We give away peanuts to everybody who doesn’t buy a drink, well, we’d end up not being able to afford peanuts anymore.”

He looks confused. He looks left and right again, and this time it’s only his eyes that move. The gun wavers a little.

I carry on. “And if we couldn’t afford peanuts, then we couldn’t afford a lot of other stuff too. You’d be wasting your time coming in here waving your gun around because there’d be nothing to steal.”

“Seriously? Dude? Seriously? Do you want to die?”

I shrug, as if it’s no big deal, but of course it’s a big deal. My heart is hammering but guys like this are like dogs — you show fear around them, they’ll use it against you. He’ll take the cash out of the till, then take my wallet, take wallets and phones and jewelry from everybody here, maybe take a hostage, maybe kill somebody. Of course guys like this are also unpredictable, so if you don’t show fear they’re equally likely to put you down for disrespecting them. The gun might be unloaded, or it might be he’s itching to shoot somebody today, or maybe it’s loaded and he thinks it isn’t. There’s no right or wrong. There just is.

I open the till. There are a dozen people in the bar, some of them watching and some unaware of what’s going on. Sunday-night crowds are generally low key. It’s why an hour ago I gave the other bartender the rest of the night off.

Pink Floyd ends and The Doors take over, playing something also recorded just in time to make the cut. The thing about small towns is I got used to dealing with small-town assholes — now living in a big city I have to deal with guys who asshole things up on a bigger scale. I rake out the cash and put it on the counter. There can’t be more than four hundred bucks. It’s not worth dying for. Then again, no amount is.

“The coins, man, the coins too,” he says.

“You catching the bus?”

“You want to catch a bullet?”

I scoop out the coins and put them on the bar and a couple roll off and land on the floor on my side and I go to bend down for them and he tells me to stop, which is a real shame because there’s a gun down there and it’s why I let a couple of nickels roll off the bar.

“Put them in a bag.”

“I don’t have a bag,” I tell him.

“Why not?”

“Do you have one?”

“No.”

“Then don’t give me a hard time for not having one. You’re the one who had all this planned out, not me.”

He grabs the notes and stuffs them into his pocket. “Give me your phone too.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“What?”

“I don’t have a phone. Look, buddy, you’ve got what you came for, so how about you leave while things are still good?”

“Just . . . just give me your phone, your phone, man, just . . . just hand it over without all your grief about, about not owning one, because everybody has one.”

“Not me,” I say, and then, right on cue my phone rings. Of course it does. Why wouldn’t it? “That’s not mine.”

He puts both hands on the gun to steady it. It rocks back and forth as he tries to draw a bead on my face. It’s unnerving as hell. “I can shoot you and take it from you,” he says.

I put the phone on the counter. It’s still ringing. Caller ID says it’s Maggie.

“You lied,” he says.

“Please, I’m begging you, don’t take my phone. I need it,” I say, looking at the display. I haven’t spoken to Maggie in ten years.

The door to the bar opens behind him and my robber for the evening spins and around and takes a shot, the bullet lodging into the doorframe between a man and a woman walking in. They stare in our direction looking at the gun, then the man dives to the floor and the woman turns and runs back outside. I grab at the shooter’s arm but I’m not quick enough. He points the gun at my face.

“Don’t,” I tell him.

He pulls the trigger. The gun clicks and nothing happens, and he looks at the gun then looks at his hand and tries to figure out what the problem is, and whatever answer he comes up with he doesn’t share, because he grabs my phone off the counter and bolts for the door. I watch him go, unable to move, listening to the sound that gun made over and over inside my head, not just listening to it, but feeling it, the same way you feel a dentist drill you hear operating on another patient. I put both hands on the bar to keep myself from falling over. All the strength has drained out of my legs. He pulled the trigger. He tried to kill me. In another timeline right now another version of me is lying on the floor with a head that doesn’t look like a head anymore.

“You okay?” A guy has come up to the bar, but I can barely hear him because my ears are ringing loudly. I can’t answer him. The guy who dived for the floor a few moments ago gets up and dusts down his suit. He’s completely pale. His color and look reflect my own. In that other timeline he’s lying dead on the floor too.

“Hey, hey, man, you okay?”

I look at the man at the bar talking to me. Feeling comes back into my legs. I let go of the alternate timeline and focus on this one. “I’m fine,” I tell him, my voice low.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m fine,” I say, louder this time, then to prove just how fine I am, I say, “Drinks are on the house.” I say it loud enough for everybody to hear. I’m expecting everybody to woohoo, but nobody does.

Suit Guy looks at me, and says, “Okay,” either to this entire situation or to the free drinks. He looks confused. He jams a finger into his ear and waggles it back and forth as if he can pry out the ringing sound. I don’t see him being a repeat customer. “Did that . . . did that just happen?”

“It did.”

“I should . . . I should go find my girlfriend.”

We talk with loud voices so we can be heard. “That sounds like a good idea,” I tell him.

“I . . . I’m not so sure we’ll come back,” he says.

“I won’t hold it against you.”

He heads out in the direction his girlfriend went. I can see her across the street, standing in the doorway of a restaurant. She’s on the phone, no doubt to the police. The guy who approached me asks again if I’m okay. I tell him that I am. And I am. Now.

With the danger over and the police on the way, people go back to the business of drinking. Nobody leaves. Plenty of them have their cellphones out making calls. The ringing in my ears fades. I pour some beers as if what just happened is no big deal. I answer some questions about how scared nervous kickass I was, and then the police show up. They don’t come in guns blazing which means they know the perp has long since gone. It’s a pair of patrol officers, a guy and a woman, who look like they could be brother and sister. Not charismatic, but both nice enough, the kind of people you forget you ever met about fifteen minutes after they’ve gone. I offer them a drink and neither of them look tempted.

I go over the sequence of events. There isn’t much to say. A guy came in, he pointed a gun, and he left with money that wasn’t his. What did he look like? He was thin, wiry, ugly, he looked like he was high, he looked like an asshole, he looked like the kind of guy who’d say things like meth is the breakfast of champions. Could I be more specific? Yeah, he was really ugly. He really looked like an asshole. He was wearing blue jeans and a gray hoodie. Nothing more? No characteristics? How old was he? Did he have tattoos? Scars? I tell them everything happened so quickly and all I really saw was the gun. I tell them that the gun seemed like the biggest thing in the room. It had its own gravity. It was a black hole I couldn’t see beyond.

What about the security cameras? I shake my head. I tell them they haven’t worked in eighteen months. They tell me I should get them fixed. I tell them that’s the plan. They interview others at the bar and ninety minutes later they leave, telling me they’ll update me if they find anything.

I call final drinks and nobody complains because everybody is figuring I deserve an early night. Thirty minutes later I’m locking up the bar. In the office I watch the security footage I told the police I didn’t have and get another good look at the guy. Then I fire up the computer and log in to my phone account and a minute later there’s a blue dot on a map telling me where my phone is. It’s a mile away from here. A fifteen-minute walk, maybe twenty. The dot isn’t moving. I write down the address and grab the gun from under the counter and lock up the bar.