Chapter 5
Chapter 5
Jane doesn’t need comforting—NOT from Dan and his pinky finger or anyone else. What she needs is someone to explain to her why the entire opening act of her novel is playing out in front of her eyes, like some fever dream come to life. Or nightmare, more aptly.
Of course, it’s not her book exactly , but still, what are the chances? She wrote a book about a hostage situation at a restaurant (well, technically a teahouse)—and is now in a hostage situation at a restaurant. If it weren’t so absolutely terrifying to be held at gunpoint, it might even be funny. As it stands, it feels surreal—and not just a little regrettable: if Jane knew life would imitate her art, she would have written about something more fun, like winning the lottery or being marooned on a desert island with a shirtless Hemsworth brother. (Or all three of them.) And perhaps it’s the shock that’s keeping her from being as frightened as she knows she should be. After all, this isn’t fiction. It’s not something she wrote. It’s real life! Those guns they are holding are real guns! With presumably real bullets! But the panic she knows she should be experiencing feels just out of reach. It’s a bit like the time she took Xanax before a root canal—as though everything happening around her doesn’t really have anything to do with her.
To be honest, what’s most amazing to her is how many things she got right. The way they burst into the restaurant with face coverings, collecting the cell phones, the zip ties. Even the words they used. The first thing the guy said when he came into the restaurant was nearly verbatim from her book: My name is Brick and I’m going to lay down some ground rules. (Of course, her antagonist’s name was Alek, not Brick, but on the whole she thinks Brick is probably a better name for a villain and she wishes she had thought of it.) She couldn’t help it; she laughed. Mostly because she immediately thought of that awful Goodreads reviewer Stephen (which is such a pretentious way to spell Steven) who gave her book one star ( one star! ) and said—among other criticisms—that her dialogue was “ludicrous and inauthentic.”
Though Jane probably gets more pleasure than the typical human from being proven correct (Dan always accuses her of that, anyway), she wishes she had her phone, if only so she could record the entire encounter and send it directly to that pompous asshat. This is apparently exactly how terrorists talk , Stephen.
Now she turns her attention back to Brick, who’s calmly questioning Mrs.St. Clair on the whereabouts of her husband. “Is he in the toilet?” he asks, but pronounces it in that European way: twal-lette .
Brick glances to his right at one of his cohorts standing in the doorway between the dining room and hallway, and the man gives his head one sharp shake. “Empty.”
Brick narrows his eyes. “Where is he? He was supposed to be dining with you tonight.”
“How do you know that?” Vaughn St. Clair shot back, with the kind of righteous animosity of a person who is not used to being spoken to with anything but deference. Which is to say, a person who has billions of dollars at their disposal, like Vaughn St. Clair.
Had Otto been with them, Jane obviously would have recognized him right away, and therefore Vaughn and her daughter—Paisley, was it? Jane wasn’t sure, but she had a mild recollection of it being a fabric pattern. As one of the wealthiest men in the world, and the founder of SierraX, one of the Big Five Silicon Valley tech firms, alongside Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, Otto St. Clair’s name constantly dominated headlines, and he was well known for his eccentricities—like buying a chain of exclusive uninhabited islands off the coast of Belize just so he could create his own country, Ottolaw. His latest venture, self-flying electric helicopters, had been in the news for the last month since one of his prototypes had crashed on a test run in the San Fernando Valley, taking out three houses in a suburban neighborhood. Fortunately, no one had been home at the time, but a fierce debate sprang up in the aftermath regarding the safety of this enterprise.
“Stand her up.”
Lyle grabs Mrs.St. Clair by her left upper arm and pulls her to her feet.
“Get your hands off me,” Vaughn practically spits once upright, shrugging her elbow out of his grasp.
“Brick?” the woman who was stabbed with a fork says. She’s older, tan, with sun lines on her face, her bleach blond hair cropped into a short pixie. “He’s not here. Should we just go?”
Surprised, Jane swivels her head back to Brick. Could it be that easy? Maybe they’ll leave as quickly as they came and she can throw back another gin, give her account to the police, and be in her bed watching an episode of Queer Eye by ten p.m.
Brick either doesn’t hear the woman’s suggestion or chooses not to. “Hey,” he says to Vaughn’s daughter. “It’s OK. I’m not going to hurt you.”
In that moment, Brick doesn’t seem evil or even scary, though he’s still clutching an AR-15 in his left hand. He almost seems… gentle ? He doesn’t want to hurt them; he’s said it over and over. Perhaps that’s a tactic: disarm your hostages with your accent and genteel, comforting demeanor. If so, Jane has to admit it’s working. Objectively speaking, he’s very appealing—more so than one would expect for a scary villain type, anyway.
But honestly, she’s always had a thing for bad boys, Dan notwithstanding. Perhaps that’s why she married him: not because he was nice, but because he was so different from what she was used to. It wasn’t just polite that he called when he said he was going to. It was novel .
After nineteen years with nice, the novelty now is the passion behind Brick’s calm demeanor. He means business. And Jane barely had the will to make it here for dinner. To be served. She can’t imagine the self-motivation it takes to plan a coup—or is that just a governmental overthrow? Jane supposes you can’t technically coup a restaurant. Although that Chef did seem to have some dictator-like tendencies, what with his no-cell-phones rule and all.
“Is a coup only when it’s overthrowing a government?” she whispers to Dan.
“What?” he says, and whether he can’t hear her or doesn’t understand the question, Jane is annoyed and doesn’t repeat it.
“Are you…OK?” Dan whispers.
Jane tears her eyes from Brick and looks at Dan. In a hushed voice that matches Dan’s, she holds up her bound wrists and says: “Just ducky.”
He frowns and she immediately regrets her sarcasm. It’s become her default for talking to him ever since she found the text messages, and even though she keeps telling herself it doesn’t bother her—that his cheating was a good thing, a relief—deep down, she knows she’s hurt. How could she not be? Nineteen years of marriage. And this is what it’s come to? A sleazy affair with a woman named “Becca”? He didn’t even have the decency to change her name in his phone. So when he was in the shower one evening and it pinged on the counter, her first thought was Who’s Becca? Out of curiosity, she picked it up, and the message— Will I see you tonight? —made her think Becca was a new colleague and she must be referring to an event, some podiatrist conference or dinner Dan had forgotten to mention. But as she scrolled up, it quickly became apparent with the You were on fire last night and the kicker even farther up: When are you going to tell your wife? To make matters worse, that evening, Dan put on his T-shirt and shorts, grabbed his keys, and said he was going for a run in the park. Who showers before a run? Jane couldn’t decide if she was more upset by the affair or by how dumb Dan apparently thought she was.
“I mean…you don’t seem frightened,” he says now, his voice still low.
Jane considers this. She is scared—or at least knows she should be. But he’s right. Fear is not her foremost emotion, and she tries to analyze why.
“I don’t think they want to hurt us,” she whispers slowly.
Dan raises his eyebrows. “I think the multitude of weaponry they’re holding suggests otherwise.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t shoot him.”
“What?”
“That guy with the fork. She hit him in the face with the butt of her gun instead of shooting him.”
“And?”
“Ergo,” she whispers, “they don’t intend to hurt us.”
“Ergo?”
Jane’s skin pricks with irritation. She hates when Dan picks apart her words. She tries to ignore it. “Anyway, don’t you think it’s strange?”
“That we’ve been taken hostage? Yes. It’s not how I anticipated our night going.”
“No, I mean, how it’s so much like my book.”
“Your book?”
“Yes, Dan. The one I wrote and published six years ago?” Her aggravation grows.
“I know your book,” he whispers.
“Don’t you see the similarities? The face coverings, the guns, the zip ties…”
“Yes, I see the similarities,” he says. “To your book and Die Hard and Mission: Impossible and Inside Man and every other movie where a group of people takes another group of people hostage.”
Jane stiffens. “Yeah, but what about what he said when they first came in—about laying down some ground rules? It’s what the leader in my book said, too!”
Dan raises his eyebrows, but it’s a look more of pity than understanding. “Jane, I get that it’s ironic, but—”
“Coincidental,” Jane interrupts.
“What?”
“It’s not ironic. It’s coincidental.”
“Really, Jane,” Dan says, annoyance lacing his words. “Now’s the time to be pedantic?”
Heat fills Jane’s entire body, radiating from her belly outward, and it quickly dawns on her why she’s not frightened—she’s too angry. She thinks of the text messages. Of Dan lying to her. Of stupid one-star Stephen. Of her meal being so rudely interrupted by these gun-wielding maniacs, just when she was starting to enjoy the buzz from her gin and the surprisingly delectable goose barnacles. And suddenly the anger is all-compassing. It’s all she can feel, all she can see.
“Pedantic! Oh, I’m pedantic now. Fantastic. Is that why you cheated on me?” She’s not sure when her voice turned from a whisper to a full-on yell, but she can very clearly hear the overwhelming silence after her outburst and knows before she turns her head that every single pair of eyes in the restaurant is going to be squarely directed at her.
She slowly turns.
Yep. Every. Single. Pair.
Including Brick’s.
“Are we interrupting something?” he growls.
“Um…no,” she says, and then adds: “Sorry.”
“Wonderful.” He turns his attention back to the St. Clairs. “Now, when exactly will he be here?”
“I don’t know,” the girl says calmly, the tears on her face already dried and gone. “He just said after his meeting.”
Brick nods. “Then we will wait for him.” He claps his hands together, causing his biceps to twitch.
God , Jane thinks. The man really is unnaturally attractive. Maybe that’s why she’s not frightened. And then she remembers Patty Hearst. Isn’t this exactly what happened to her? Jane’s pretty sure Patty had sex with the man who took her hostage, and if he looked anything like Brick, Jane can see why! But maybe she’s misremembering the whole Hearst situation. She would ask Dan, but she’s still too angry to speak with him.
Even more irritating, she knows he’s right, even if he used the wrong word. Face coverings and zip ties aren’t unique to Tea Is for Terror —they’re universal hostage-taking basics. Besides, in her book, the terrorists burst into the teahouse and shoot a patron right off the bat, to prove they mean business and subdue the other hostages. These captors haven’t even used their guns for a warning shot, underlining her belief that there really is nothing to be frightened of. Maybe there aren’t even real bullets in the guns!
Jane feels Dan shift beside her, and she turns as he dips his head closer to her ear and whispers: “For the millionth time, Jane, I am not ch—”
POP-POP.
The deafening crack of gunshots explodes in the kitchen, stealing the rest of Dan’s sentence and startling Jane so much she nearly jumps out of her own skin. A loud bellow immediately follows. A woman screams, and Jane has no idea where it came from. It could have been her, for all she knows. Her heart suddenly feels like it’s relocated to her throat, and her brain scrambles as though she can’t quite piece together what’s happening—but one thought is as clear as the glass window she’s leaning against: Jane is scared now.