23. Everett
CHAPTER 23
EVERETT
E very now and then, when I woke up in the morning, I wasn’t sure whether I was still dreaming or not. This usually happened when I’d been in the middle of a really monotonous dream, like having to fold a ton of clothes that kept multiplying somehow. Or trying to make my bed, but the bed got bigger and bigger and I could never get the fitted sheet around the farthest corner. I’d wake up and for a while, never more than half a minute, I’d just try to keep doing what I’d been doing in the dream, only slower and more groggily, until I snapped out of it.
Staring around me now, I pinched myself so hard in the side that I felt the skin bruise.
Wake up, wake up, wake up!
Nothing happened, of course, except now my side hurt and I was kind of, sort of, hyperventilating. Luckily, Kyle was too wrapped up in talking to his brother to notice.
“They can’t do this.” Colin said it, but it was more of a whisper than a promise. “They can’t…just let me go and talk to them, I can straighten this out.”
“No!” Kyle grabbed for his arm and held on so tight his knuckles blanched. “You can’t go out there—they’ll shoot you!”
“They won’t do that,” Colin snapped. “These are my colleagues. They have no reason to shoot me!”
“Never stopped them before!” one of the Goth kids shouted over.
“Yeah, don’t bet on it, dude,” another said. “Wait for them to send a negotiator in. That’s what happens next, right? We negotiate for what we want?”
“I want pizza,” the first one said.
“We’re at freaking Waffles?, man, just order something on the menu.”
“I’m in the mood for deep dish, though!”
Clearly the kids weren’t going to be any sort of help or font of wisdom. Of course, neither was I. My body felt weirdly heavy, like I was surrounded by invisible sand and every movement meant sliding through layers of it to get any result. I stared at my hands and slowly flexed my fingers. Great, they still worked. And hey, I had a burner phone in the pocket that wasn’t occupied by a gun .
I had all my family’s numbers memorized despite the convenience of a contact list, and it didn’t take long to mentally flip over to my sister’s. She was the best person for me to reach out to—the only one who, thanks to Theo, had any sort of idea about the true depth of the weirdness I’d found myself in. I didn’t call her—I didn’t want to be distracted from, y’know, breathing—but I managed to snap a photo through the restaurant window and text it to her with the caption, “We’re at Waffles and everything is fucked.”
Would that help? Probably not. Did it make me feel better to share my situation with someone who wasn’t trapped in it right along with me? Yeah, it kind of did.
“You won’t believe what’s happening to us at Waffles? tonight,” one of the kids was saying—straight to her phone. Was she…livestreaming us being surrounded by the cops?
Dude. Generation Z was fucked up. Sure, technically they were my generation too, but still.
“Colin, please.” It was the plea in Kyle’s voice that finally allowed me to focus. That wasn’t a good sound; I hated hearing him so upset. “Just wait with us until Dad arrives. He’ll be able to help, won’t he?”
“The longer I wait before going out, the tougher this conversation is going to get,” his brother said. “I won’t leave you. I’m just going to talk to them from right outside the door, okay? At the very least, someone needs to start responding to their questions before they decide to break through the front door.”
Questions? Oh, ha—yeah, there was someone with a loudspeaker out there shouting in at us.
“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” the cop holding the loudspeaker was saying. He was a portly, nondescript sort of guy, but right beside him was a man in a sharp suit instead of a uniform who nevertheless had an air of “boss” about him. The Chief of Police, maybe?
If he was, then he was the guy who’d inadvertently—no, totally vertently, and I didn’t care if that was a word or not, I was using it—had pushed us down this grim reaper of a rabbit hole by ordering his guys to kill Ricky and try to cover it up. This guy was the reason we were floundering, the reason that Kyle had to be separated from his fish and I had to be separated from my family. The reason we’d been shot at—and fuck whether Reardon was trying to kill us or not, we definitely could have been killed—and the reason we were surrounded with other innocent people put at risk.
“I’m not going back to prison!” Chet, the line cook, shouted, pulling away from Carol to run into the kitchen. I heard the rack of what could only be a shotgun before Chet reappeared, weapon in hand and a manic look in his eyes. “Get those bastards out of the parking lot before I let ‘em have it!”
“Whoa, whoa!” Colin immediately set about trying to defuse the new situation, while the Goth kids decided their best play was to try to make things worse.
“Yeah, you tell ‘em, Chet!”
“Don’t let them take you alive!”
“Omg, there’s seriously a standoff between a cook and the cops right now, you guys!” The girl with the phone grinned as she swung it around the room. “It’s giving total Tarantino vibes!” Her other hand was on Patches’s carrier, stroking the paw that had poked through, so at least she wasn’t a total psycho.
I got closer to Kyle, who seemed torn between helping his brother and addressing the worsening situation outside. “What should we do?” I asked him quietly, sliding one hand into the back pocket of his jeans—not to be a creep, but because I really wanted to hold him right now and wanted to do so without taking away his freedom of movement. “Should we…go out?” I glanced through the window again and, from what I could see, only a couple of police officers had their guns trained on the place. Surely they wouldn’t just open fire; that would be ridiculous.
“We can’t.” Kyle’ jaw was so tense, I worried he’d crack a tooth. “That’s exactly what Reardon wants. Look, there he is! You see him?”
Oh shit, Reardon was here. He hadn’t been for long, though. As I watched, he bulled his way through the crowd over to where the man I thought was the chief was and pulled him in close to talk.
“He’s probably telling them we tried to kill him,” I said. “Who knows how he changed things back at the trailer to support his story?” Not that these guys seemed to give a damn when it came to crime scene analysis, but?—
There was a brief scuffle, a shout from Chet, then all of a sudden Carol was in possession of the shotgun. She immediately set it down on the hostess stand, then turned and put her hands on her hips. “Chet, shut the hell up and stop swingin’ that thing around. You’ll scare the kids!” She pointed a finger at Colin. “You’re a cop, right, son?”
Colin straightened reflexively at the authoritative tone of her voice. “Yes ma’am.”
“Then get on out there and talk some sense into those fools before they do something dumb. Chet, get your ass back in the kitchen, y’hear me?”
“I want my gun,” he mumbled.
“Guns are for adults who don’t bust out swingin’ in front of impressionable youths. And as for you little shits.” She pointed at the Goth kids, who were snickering loudly. “If you were really to be trusted with those cats, you’d be sitting pretty and keeping quiet, not drawing attention to yourselves by cackling like a pack of hyenas.”
“Hey bitch, fuck y?—”
One of the girls slapped her hand over the boy’s mouth and hissed, “Don’t mouth off to the workers here, dumbass! You’ll get us banned for life! We already can’t go back to Denny’s!” She smiled brightly, showing the gray smear from her black lipstick on a few of her top teeth. “Sorry ma’am!”
Colin pulled himself together fast. He looked over at me and Kyle, eyes lingering on my hand for a second, then said, “You two, stay here and stay down. Let me handle this, but when I tell you to come out, come out, okay? I swear, I won’t let anything happen to you.”
You swore that the last time .
Our entire move to the safehouse had been predicated on the idea that we’d be safer there than staying at home. That hadn’t worked out, and while I was sure it wasn’t something Colin had done on purpose, the truth was he couldn’t say he was trustworthy because he wasn’t being given trustworthy information.
I opened my mouth to tell him as much, but Colin was already stepping outside. Kyle sat down, pulling me with him, and we watched as his brother moved slowly but confidently across the lot toward the Chief of Police and Reardon, his hands visible. Once he reached the nearest patrol car and greeted the officer standing behind it, a breath of relief left Kyle with a lurch.
“He’s okay,” he whispered.
“Yeah.” That was good—great even. Colin would be able to advocate for us a lot better out there, and—“Oh shit!”
“Colin!” Kyle pressed both his hands to the glass, eyes wide as his brother was tackled from behind, rolled onto the ground face-down, and cuffed in seconds. Neither of us could hear what he was saying, or shouting rather, but the guy on top of him clearly meant business.
I squinted at the cop’s shoes. They were black, with a familiar silhouette. Air Force 1s again. How many people were in on this conspiracy?
“They took out the cop!” one of the Goth kids shrieked.
“Pigs eating pigs!”
“Shit, we’re gonna die in here!”
“Nobody’s taking me without a fight!” That was Chet, charging out of the back again, this time holding a flaming bottle in one hand. “Open the goddamn door, Carol!”
She rounded on him, scowling. “Are you insane? Put that down!”
Things were spiraling faster than I could track. Chet charged, Carol shouted, and then, like it was slow motion, a series of shots rang out— bang, bang, bang. The glass panels in the front doors shattered, one of the overhead lights went out, and Chet went down like a ton of bricks. On pure instinct I fell backwards too, hauling Kyle down onto the bench seat with me until we were both prone. It was totally unnecessary, since no one was shooting at us , and yet?—
Bang bang!
The glass window right behind our table broke into thousands of pieces, and at least half of them rained down on us a second later. I rolled again, pulling both of us on the floor—right onto some of the shards of glass, ow —but the tabletop protected us from the worst of it.
I looked to make sure Kyle was okay. He seemed to be fine, apart from the glass in his hair, a cut on his lip, and damn, speaking of glasses, his were missing. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“No. Yes. I’m…yeah, I’m all right. I just…” He stared up at the broken window. “Why did they shoot at us? We’re nowhere near where Chet was standing.” And he was the only person who’d behaved threateningly in here.
That led to the very unhappy conclusion that someone out there didn’t care about who was actually a threat and who wasn’t, but instead had taken advantage of the situation to try to silence us before we could talk. That was awful, but also kind of a good thing. If Reardon and his boss were that anxious to silence us, then they had to know their case wasn’t strong. If the two of us were enough to spur them into behaving like idiots, then it wouldn’t take much for Theo to be able to find evidence to that effect.
I just hoped he wasn’t going to prove us innocent posthumously. Shit, if I died, would I be sent to Mulligan’s Mortuary? Would my own dad have to work on me? That didn’t seem fair, not after he had to handle Mom too. Of course, she’d been cremated, but it was still a fucked up thing to have to do for a family member. But?—
“Hey! I need some help over here!”
That was Carol. Kyle started to crawl out from under the table, then turned around, grabbed me by the face, and kissed me hard enough that I could taste the blood from where he’d hurt his lip. I didn’t care. I leaned into the kiss, not wanting to let him go, not for any reason. But when he pulled away, I didn’t stop him. I followed him instead, and we duck-walked across the glass-covered floor to where Carol was pressing her wadded-up apron to a groaning Chet’s shoulder.
“Damn fool,” she said, half to us and half to herself as she pulled off her jacket and ripped one of the sleeves from it. “Long as he’s stable, he can get through a shift okay, but throw a surprise at him and his common sense goes out the window faster than a cheating husband. You shoulda seen him when we changed the menu up for Valentine’s Day. Everything came out of the kitchen drenched in red food coloring thanks to the flashbacks.”
Kyle helped roll Chet so Carol could tie her apron to his wound with the jacket sleeve. He was bleeding pretty badly, but it seemed like the pressure was helping. I glanced over at the Goth kids, who had massed around the cat carriers like they were life jackets in the middle of a stormy sea. All of them were silent, even more so than when Carol scolded them.
“I’m sure an ambulance is coming,” Kyle said. “Don’t worry, Chet, you’ll be okay.”
I was going to nod encouragingly, but a sharp scent caught my attention. It smelled rank, like burning plastic. What…
Oh, fuck.
Chet had been carrying a Molotov cocktail, or something like it. He’d dropped it when he was shot, and it had rolled somewhere.
Oh, fuck . It had rolled back into the kitchen. A kitchen that was full of flammable things, not that it mattered, because from where I was crouched right now it looked like it wasn’t a bunch of oil or a hanging rag that had caught on fire. It was the floor.
The ancient linoleum floor that shouldn’t be flammable, but was coated with years’ of grease and foot traffic and probably didn’t even get glanced at by a mop more than once a decade. The floor was on fire, and it was spreading fast.
“Where’s the nearest fire extinguisher?” I demanded.
“In the kitchen,” she replied grimly. “We ain’t gonna be able to get to it now.”
The cats were meowing, the kids were starting to whimper… We had to get out of here, fast, but if we tried to walk out right now there was a decent probability that we’d be shot.
What did you do, when your choices were either death by immolation or by gunfire?