Chapter 4
Chapter 4
“What IN the hell,” Dan repeats under his breath, even though it’s clear what’s happening when the barrel end of a gun is thrust toward his face. Not why or how, but what. He’s seen enough Die Hard (that is to say, all of them) and James Bond and Homeland episodes to know—the restaurant is being taken over by terrorists.
Lucky for Dan, he has a plan for this precise scenario. He’s never fancied himself the hero—he wouldn’t go running toward the gunman or sacrifice his life to potentially save everyone else. He’s not a risk-taker by nature. Or prone to violence in any way. He’s not overly tall or strong or powerful (he has recently taken up jogging, but he’s still a bit more doughy around the middle than he’d like). In short, he knows his limits. But when imagining this situation or one like it, he always planned to run. Or duck. Or, if he was with someone he loved (his wife, children, etc.), he envisioned throwing his body over theirs, and then ducking.
As it turns out, he wouldn’t even do that. Instead of throwing himself over Jane or running for an exit or ducking beneath the table, he freezes, still as a statue chiseled from stone. Stares, with his mouth slightly open in confusion, his heart beating as loud as a thousand horses’ hooves galloping in his ears.
It shouldn’t really surprise him. At forty-three, he’s old enough to know most things in life don’t pan out quite the way you imagine they will, and you often end up with a feeling of vague disappointment: like the first time you have sex, or every New Year’s Eve, or when you try to change the oil in the car yourself rather than taking it to a mechanic, because how hard can it be?
Or marriage.
And yet, here he is. Shocked at his inaction. Disappointed, too. But also, it cannot be overstated how utterly terrified he is.
“Nobody move,” a large, chiseled man says—the last person to enter the restaurant. His voice is a deep baritone. Accented. Dan nearly laughs, as he’s established he couldn’t move if he wanted to. The man strolls confidently to the back of the room, in front of the expansive picture window, where the sun can be seen making its final descent—two more minutes, give or take, and it will slip below the waterline of the horizon. The sprawling beauty is nothing short of breathtaking, and incongruous with what is happening inside the restaurant. He’s wearing an army camo vest and khaki cargo pants, the arm holding his rifle bent at the elbow, his naked brown bicep bulging, the muzzle of the gun pointing at an angle toward the floor. He looks like a life-size G.I. Joe figurine, a proper military leader (or a Hollywood approximation of a proper military leader, anyway). Even more alarming? His face is bare, uncovered. He does not wear the matching black gaiter donned by his cohorts, and Dan thinks it’s either very cavalier, at best—or he plans to kill every single last one of them when he’s done with whatever it is he’s doing.
Regardless, Dan knows he will do whatever this man (these men!) holding the gun asks of him.
“Pardon the interruption to your meal,” the apparent leader of the group continues, and with his accent—German, maybe? Dan’s never had an ear for anything, music, accents—it almost sounds genial, gentlemanly. “My name is Brick and I’m going to lay down some ground rules. If everyone can kindly abide by them, we will be out of your hair and on our way and you can get back to eating your extraordinarily overpriced meal.”
Dan hears a “Ha!” from behind him and turns in time to see Jane quickly cover her mouth at the inappropriateness of her response. Dan understands. It feels as though they’re watching a performance and, as the audience, they should be fulfilling the duty of their role as polite spectators. Dan’s both comforted by the fact that no one else moved either—that they’ve all been shocked into submission as easily as he has been—and also equally discomfited by this fact. Who is going to save them?
The man in charge— Brick —uses the barrel of his gun to point it directly at Monica, as though he’s a CEO giving a speech at the company’s year-end meeting and pointing out the top salesmen—people, Dan chides himself. Sales people —of the group.
“You,” Brick says, and Monica flinches but doesn’t otherwise move. “Take that ice bucket and dump the contents.”
Again, the man gestures with the gun barrel toward a silver urn holding a champagne bottle on the table to his right. The two older women at the table flinch, too. Monica pulls the half-empty champagne bottle out of the bucket and then picks it up gingerly, as though it’s a live hand grenade. She looks at Brick, unsure what to do next. “Dump it out,” he confirms. She turns it over and dumps its ice water contents onto the floor, where they splash up on one of the female diners’ stockinged legs. The woman lets out a small yelp.
Brick nods. “This waitress will be coming around with this bucket to collect your cell phones. As I’m sure you’re all aware, there is no cell service, so any attempts to make emergency calls or texts are futile, but you can understand—we need to cover all our bases. You will get your phones back when we are done here.”
As Monica begins to slowly move between the tables, performing her task as instructed under Brick’s watchful gaze, Dan takes the opportunity to glance around the room at the rest of the people holding guns and finds himself surprised at the…diversity. A white guy, the Black man in charge, an indiscriminate tanned man who could be Latino or Indian or Hawaiian (or just a really tan white guy, for all Dan knows), and a…woman (A woman ! White. Blond. How did he not notice her before?). Essentially, these terrorists are as diverse as the casting of an Old Navy commercial, and dressed similarly, too—all in browns and khakis and denim and greens, matching large hiking bags strapped to their backs—like as a group they were about to announce a sale on jeans for the whole family!
What could they possibly want? Dan wonders. If they’ve come to rob them, they’ll be sorely disappointed with the paltry thirty-five dollars in his wallet.
“Once you’ve handed over your phone, Lyle and Caden”—he nods in the direction of the two guys—“will escort you, one table at a time, to line up against the window here.”
As if to demonstrate, Lyle and Caden walk to the table with the two older women, who both stand up and walk toward the window where the female gunman (gunwoman?) stands guard, training a rifle on them. Once the women are seated with their backs to the floor-to-ceiling glass window, Lyle (or Caden? How is Dan to know?) kneels in front of the first woman and, with a practiced hand, zip-ties her wrists together and then her ankles. He repeats the process with her companion. One of the women is clearly terrified, her eyes round and wet, her face ashen, while the other looks simply irritated, wearing a scowl as though someone’s abruptly changed the channel on her favorite television show without permission. Once the zip ties are firmly in place, Lyle (or Caden) stands up, and with that, it’s as if a choreographed dance resumes. In an orderly fashion, Monica—who is visibly shaking so hard, the phones in the wine bucket are clattering—takes the phones from each table; Lyle and Caden ( Are those their real names? Dan wonders, and if so, isn’t that a bad sign? Like seeing a robber’s—or Brick’s—full face ) swoop in behind and escort those cell phone–free diners to the wall, zip-tying each patron’s wrists and ankles.
By the third table, it’s all going so smoothly that Dan’s heartbeat has slowed considerably and he’s waiting for his turn to drop his phone and get in line, until a sudden commotion grabs his attention from two tables over. He turns in time to see the man from the couple he met at the outset of the evening (Rahul, Dan thinks, recalling his name from the recesses of his brain as if they met years ago and not twenty minutes earlier) get knocked in the head with the wrong end of a rifle by the female member of the group, who is half his size. The man’s date screams, as his body flops like a rag doll back into his seat, then forward, the side of the table—and his bread plate—catching his head.
Dan winces.
Every person in the room—all ten other diners, two waiters, and three other gun-wielding men—freezes. Waiting. The silence that fills the air after the date’s scream is somehow louder than the scream.
“GOD DAMMIT,” the woman with the rifle yells through clenched teeth. “He stuck me with a fork.”
That’s when Dan sees the metal end of the silverware protruding from the woman’s thigh. She plucks it out of her flesh and throws it to the floor, where it clatters and skids across the hardwood.
“Is he alive?” Brick asks.
Favoring her leg and holding her rifle in one hand, the woman bends over and uses her free hand to place two fingers against the neck of the man she incapacitated. She nods once.
Brick nods back and then tuts loudly, taking one step forward. “That leads me to the third rule: Do not try to be a hero. There’s nothing to be heroic about. Appearances aside, we are not here to hurt anyone—though that gentleman will unfortunately have quite a headache when he wakes up.”
“Then why are you here?” one of the older women against the window pipes up—the irritated one—giving voice to not only Dan’s thoughts, but likely those of every person in the room.
Brick turns his head to look at her and then lets his gaze slowly span the room. If he’s trying to build suspense, it’s working. But it’s the woman with the buzz haircut who speaks: “We’re here to save everyone.”
Dan stiffens. Save us? Oh God. Are they Christian extremists? After a particularly traumatic summer camp experience as a kid wherein Dan’s mom signed him up for what she thought was a regular sleeping-in-a-cabin-and-building-campfires-and-swimming-in-a-pond experience turned out to be that shoved in between a very evangelical church service thrice daily—and terrifying to an eight-year-old Dan, who was told more than once quite forcefully by the preacher and other children that he was going to spend eternity in a fiery pit of hell for not being saved—Dan’s since had a rather dim view of Christianity.
A small murmur passes through the group as people digest this news.
Monica approaches their table with the bucket, flanked by both Lyle and Caden. Dan’s heartbeat pounds in his chest like a bass drum. Jane takes her phone off the table and drops it in the bucket, but Dan hesitates for a second—what if he kept his phone? What if he could slip outside somehow? He wonders how far he’d have to run down the road until he was in cell service range. He curses himself for not noticing on the long drive up when exactly they lost the signal. Then he spies his fork and knife crossed over his plate. Could he palm the knife somehow? He certainly wouldn’t make the same mistake as the man now lying unconscious on the floor, but at least that guy did something instead of moseying along like a cow to slaughter. Maybe he could slip it up his sleeve to use later, catch one of their captors off guard, get ahold of the rifle—
“Dan!” He startles at Jane’s voice and sees she’s looking at him with part-exasperated, part-pleading eyes. “Give him your phone.”
Dan reaches into the front pocket of his coat.
“Hey! Slowly.” Lyle (or Caden) says, holding the gun muzzle inches from Dan’s face.
Dan obeys, lifting his left arm up in an I’m innocent motion. Feeling the sweat trickle from his armpit, adding to what is likely a generous pit stain on his shirt, he grasps his cell phone with his right hand, pulls it out, and drops it in the bucket Monica is holding.
“Stand up.”
Again, Dan does as he’s told, following Jane to the wall, a deep disappointment and shame nearly rivaling his fear. He glances at the man on the floor and swallows down a flare of jealousy.
Once they’re all seated, including Monica and Javier, backs against the glass window, ankles and wrists bound in front of them with white plastic zip ties, Brick walks methodically down the row, clutching his gun. He stops in front of the woman Jane pointed out what seems like hours ago, but somehow was only fifteen or so minutes. Time is funny like that.
“Mrs.St. Clair,” Brick says in his deep baritone. St. Clair! Jesus Christ. It’s a last name as recognizable to every American—heck, probably anyone in the world—as Bezos or Buffett or Musk.
Jane leans over and whispers in his ear: “I told you she was somebody.”
“Yes, because what’s important now is that you were right,” Dan hisses back. He doesn’t mean to be harsh with Jane, but he’s scared. He’s also concerned that Jane doesn’t appear to be. Maybe she’s had some break with reality, Dan thinks, what with the aloof divorce talk, as though she were talking about someone else—one of their couple acquaintances that always seemed doomed to failure, and the mention of that failure didn’t really have any impact on their own life. Oh, did you hear Larry and Denise are splitting? Pass the chimichurri, please.
But their own divorce? It would absolutely impact their lives, their children’s lives, and Jane is behaving as though it’s something as common and expected as brushing one’s teeth. (Although, to be fair, while it seemed monumental at the time, a divorce does seem inconsequential compared to being taken hostage while dining out.)
Then again, Dan always forgets how good Jane is at dealing with emergency situations. It takes him by surprise every time. Like when Sissy was a toddler and split her head wide open on a boulder at a state park and—blood gushing everywhere the way head wounds gush—Jane just scooped her up and carried her to the car. No gasping. No panicking. She just did what needed to be done. He’s never given her enough credit for it. She’s probably as terrified as he is right now, but relying on her preternatural ability to remain calm in the face of danger. He moves both hands—since they’re bound together at the wrists—and reaches for her pinky with his. He attempts to wrap it up, entwine it in his own like an octopus tentacle ensnaring a clam, to comfort her in some way, but she jerks her finger, shrugging him off.