Getting no reply, she calmly began to broadcast:
“All units, all units, I have a possible ten-thirty-three at the Denny's off 287, there at Maurine Street, can somebody please verify.
Possible Signal thirteen.” Signal thirteen meant 'Officer down, assistance required immediately.”
Lamar knew none of this, of course. He turned from his murder to face what he did expect, utter incredulity. Everywhere he looked he saw slack mouths and gaping eyes as the echo of the shotgun blast seemed to rattle around in the still air and the gun smoke drifted into layers.
Then the stupidity broke like glass into fear: Lamar could almost feel it shatter through the room. A child began to cry; moms squirmed to draw their children in to them, and dads put out their hands to calm the older kids, though their faces drained of blood as the great possibility of death dawned on them. The airmen at the far table were sheet white, almost pissing in their fancy blue uniforms. The gun smoke spread through the room like vapor. It was incredibly quiet except for the sudden clickety-click as the spent 12-gauge shell hit the floor and rolled.
Quickly Ruta Beth had pulled Bud's Mossberg from under her coat and vaulted the counter to chill out the nigger boys behind the Dutch door and the two waitresses behind the counter. O’Dell had the AR-15—two feet of black plastic Colt assault rifle—and waved it toward the seated citizens, who immediately melted under its threat. Though it was a semiautomatic, Lamar knew its power for crowd control was awesome, for anyone who’d watched TV would assume it was a machine gun.
“Y'all stay seated and we won't hurt you none. We come for Denny's money, not yours,” Lamar yelled in a loud, unhurried, almost country-and-western voice. Witnesses would later say he sounded friendly-like, sort of like Travis Tritt or Randy Travis.
His eyes caught on Richard at his window table. The boy looked almost as scared as the square Johns.
Then he pivoted his attention to the short, pimply boy at the register.
He closed quickly, put the 12-gauge at the youngster's chin.
The boy's mouth was working dryly. He looked like a fish Lamar had caught during one of his infrequent stays in society. His jaw seemed to twitch as he sucked for air.
“Don't hurt me,” he said.
“I will kill you if you don't gimme what I want.”
The boy's fingers flew to the computer register and he punched a key and it flew open.
“Take it, sir. Take it all.”
“That's smalltime shit, boy. In back. The safe. You open it or by God, you'll wish you had.”
Using the gun as a prod, Lamar pushed him along. They stepped over the dead cop, whose eyes had glazed like marbles.
He lay in a satiny pool of his own blood, legs akimbo, head bent in an unnatural way, both hands almost delicately relaxed. He looked like a fallen angel. Lamar dipped down and with one hand removed the SIG from a safety holster.
Lamar knew how to bypass the fake thumb-break and find the real one further down the strap. It was a P220, in .45.
That made him happy. He liked .45s. He slid this one into his back waistband, right next to the holstered long-slide dark Colt.
In the office the safe was a small Sergant & Greenleaf model, an eight-digit multiple-tumbler combination variant, sunk in the wall behind the manager's grimy desk. He pushed the boy over to it.
“It's a time lock,” the boy lied badly.
“Do you think I'm dumb, sonny?” Lamar asked. This was the dicey part. He really only had but a minute to break the boy down. It's funny the reservoirs of courage and sheer cussed orneriness you find in the most common people.
Maybe the boy would be a surprise hero, giving up his life to save Denny a few grand. It bothered Lamar that he was so young. An older man would roll over in a second, having the wisdom of witnessed pain in his time and knowing nothing was worth a squalid death in the back of a cheap restaurant.
Lamar walked around behind the boy and suddenly smashed him with the shotgun, driving him to the earth.
The shudder of the blow resounded satisfyingly through the weapon. The boy, leaking blood, lay on the floor, dazed.
When his senses returned, his eyes bulged with animal fear.
Lamar bent and, with one quick movement, he trapped the boy's little finger in the fulcrum of his fist.
He broke the little finger.
The boy yowled in pain. He began to weep. He blubbered and was attempting to request mercy when Lamar stilled him by thrusting the shotgun muzzle into his larynx.
“I ain't got no time. You open the safe or I'll break all your fingers. You won't never play the piano again. Then I'll gut-shoot you to die slowly. You think I won't? You want to try me? I will as sure as rain.”
He stood back. The boy regained some composure and crawled to his feet. Snot ran down his swollen face. He applied himself to the combination lock and had it opened in a second.
“You shouldn't have lied to me,” Lamar said, like a stern father. He fired once into the boy's chest, blowing him out of the way. He wasn't sure why he'd done it. It just was there for the doing, and without a conscious decision having been reached, he did it.
From the floor, the boy gurgled and mewled and began to address a speech to someone named Andy, but Lamar paid no heed. He stepped over the fallen boy and leaned inside the safe. Pay dirt! Fourth of July!
A little stab of elation jerked through him. Swiftly enough, he pulled the locked cash bags off the shelf, knowing they could be easily enough cut open later, and dumped them into a laundry bag he had purchased that very morning. He took a last look around, noted nothing, and stepped out into the restaurant proper.
It was as if he'd never left: It was like a still photo called the Robbery. Ruta Beth and O’Dell held the public and dispirited staff at bay. A couple of the waitresses were weeping, one almost hysterically.
The square Johns just looked up in horror, afraid to disobey, afraid to do anything, afraid to exist. No heroes in this crowd, no sirree. It was going swell. Plus, he'd got to whack a Smokey!
“Okay, boys and girls, time to—” The sound of a siren rose, and then another.
It froze them. Lamar turned, Ruta Beth turned, even O’Dell turned.
Watching them, Richard turned, too.
Oh no!
He felt the panic flap through him, and though he struggled to control it, he could not. His mind was full of spiders and firecrackers. A squad car, its flashbar pumping electric light into the bright air and its siren howling like a wounded animal, sped toward them, followed by another and another.
He knew he had to get out of there. The police would kill him! He jumped to his feet blindly, and then confronted his next most devastating horror. A woman had risen from the table across the aisle with a small automatic pistol in her hand. She was aiming at Lamar.
Richard's hand flew to his gun, but he couldn't get it out. He screamed as loud as he could.
The woman fired.
The bullet missed.
She fired again, and missed again, as Ruta Beth fired.
Her double-ought buck, delivered from a range of about twelve feet, drove into the woman, punching her backward into another booth, containing old people, who like atoms liberated in a chain reaction began to race toward the exit.
Plates and glasses spilled to the floor and coffee spewed across the tables.
Lamar screamed, 'The cops are coming. They going to shoot y'all dead.”
He raised his shotgun and fired two fast blasts into the ceiling.
It was too much, the noise, the death, the seething gun smoke. Someone threw a chair through one of the big windows and then through another one, and the square Johns, like rats on a ship, began to pour out into the parking lot, leaping the three-foot drop to the earth just as the first two cars pulled up. A cop emerged from each, shotgun ready, but could find no targets in the human tide that gushed from the restaurant.
Quickly Lamar threw his shotgun away and handed the money bag to O’Dell, taking the ARI'll cover, you git yourself out.” He grabbed O’Dell and gave him a kiss on the mouth, then turned to Ruta Beth.
