Chapter 27
Chapter 27
The thing is, Dan absolutely does not have a plan. He doesn’t know why he told Jane he did, except maybe the carnal activity in the van triggered some latent part of his caveman brain and, like some twenty-two-year-old lothario, he wanted to impress her. Now he stands in the empty kitchen, his eyes darting to all the corners and tables, half hoping Sissy’s hiding behind one, will materialize, and they can run out together, join up with Jane, and go straight to the police.
And then home . As someone who is naturally a homebody anyway, Dan has never wanted to be safely in his own house with his family more than he does right now. Why did he think this was a good idea? A stupid, overpriced restaurant an hour and a half away from home. If they had just gone to Macaroni Grill, they’d be in bed by now, Jane reading by the light of her Kindle, Dan drifting off to sleep beside her, receiving a sharp elbow in the back every now and then when his deep breathing bordered too closely on snoring.
Loud shouting from the dining room startles him. He leans forward, straining to hear. It’s Brick’s deep voice, but the only two words that come through crystal clear are bomb threat . And then a clatter as if Brick has thrown the cell or something else—a fork or spoon maybe—onto the ground, where it skidded across the floor.
The mention of the bomb reminds Dan of the one—and only—part of the plan he was sure of. He scans all the pots and pans in the kitchen, looking for the pressure cooker—and suddenly realizes he has no idea what one looks like.
Shit . Don’t they have buttons or something? A timer? As quietly as he can, he tiptoes around one of the metal tables and into the main space of the kitchen, where he spies his sports coat on the floor in front of the refrigerator. He picks it up, causing his keys to jangle, and he freezes, holding his breath, his heart tap dancing as he waits for someone to burst in and catch him. When no one does, he slowly digs out his keys to the Subaru from the inside pocket, and then, holding all the keys tightly together so they can’t clink, transfers them to his pants pocket, feeling at least a small sense of accomplishment or relief to have them once again in his possession.
Then he turns to the large range with its multiple burners that have long been shut off, pots half-full of congealed food, and he tries to determine which of the many stainless steel cooking vessels is the pressure cooker. He nearly resorts to Eeny meeny miny moe , when out of the corner of his eye he sees a large stainless steel pot on the counter that looks slightly different from the rest because its lid has brackets. Yes! The lid would need to be secured to the pot for the pressure to build up. That must be it. Excitedly, he picks it up, but it’s much lighter than he anticipated, and he realizes too late—the top isn’t firmly fastened. It slides off and Dan doesn’t have a free hand to catch it. In what feels like slow motion, he watches helplessly as the pot lid falls, then hits the ground in a cacophony of clanging, whirring round and round like a spinning top until it finally comes to a stop, the sound echoing through the still kitchen like a cymbal hit by a drumstick.
He feels rather than hears the dining room door swing open behind him, and, standing with his shoulders so tense they’re nearly up to his ears, eyes closed, he waits for the inevitable.
“What the hell?” Great. Dan recognizes Isaac’s voice. “Pot down, man.”
Dan slowly lowers the pot to the counter and turns to find, as expected, Isaac’s gun pointed squarely at him. “Hands where I can see them.”
Dan sighs a deep, world-weary sigh, cursing himself for his ridiculous mistake, and then, on Isaac’s order, raises his hands to the ceiling and walks back through the dining room door toward his table and his plate of cold barnacles. Heads swivel toward him, and Dan briefly meets Sissy’s eyes, where he glimpses a mix of surprise and concern before she drops her gaze. He slides into his seat in silence, shoulders drooped, until Brick finally says: “What are you doing here?”
“I…uh, came back,” he says, slightly embarrassed.
“I caught him messing with the pans,” Isaac says.
Brick tilts his head, digesting this information. “I thought you locked them in the van.”
“I did.”
Brick turns back to Dan. “Where’s your wife?”
Dan sees no reason to lie. “Probably halfway down the hill on her way to talk to the police.”
“Huh,” Brick says, and whether he’s taken aback at Dan’s honesty or Jane’s actions, Dan’s not sure.
“Want me to go after her?” Isaac says, a little too eagerly for Dan’s liking.
“No. We won’t be here much longer.” Dan wonders if it sounds as ominous to anyone else, or if it’s just because he knows what Brick plans to do. “It’s done?” he asks Tink.
“Done.” She nods, shutting the laptop with a click.
So that’s it, then, Dan thinks. His daughter has officially aided and abetted in the stealing of nine million dollars. The police are waiting just down the hill, and he has no idea how he’s going to get Sissy out of here, much less convince the police she was dining with them when every other hostage knows—and will likely attest to the fact—that Jane and Dan were alone.
An ear-piercing scream from one of the hostages, though Dan can’t tell which one, fills the air, and Dan looks in time to see Brick carefully pull something the size of a toaster out of one of the book bags and set it on a table.
“What is that?” Vaughn asks, panic in her voice. Dan strains his neck to see around Brick’s body, but fails. The cacophony of voices from the hostages sitting against the wall grows, and Dan looks at the fear on their faces, trying, like Vaughn, to determine what has them so on edge. And then his ear picks out three words that rise above the din: “It’s a bomb!”
Dan’s head jerks back to the table, and Brick, who has kindly stepped out of the way so Dan can see that what look to be two tan-colored bricks strapped together with duct tape, wires, and a digital wristwatch are now perfectly visible. Dan blinks and then nearly laughs at how it looks exactly like something Wile E. Coyote would use to ensnare the Road Runner.
“Brick?” Dan looks over at Sissy, the fear in her voice apparent. “Is that real?”
“Yep,” he says, pushing a few buttons on the watch. “Fifteen minutes ought to do it.”
“You said no one would get hurt,” she says.
“No one is going to get hurt.” He claps his hands together once. “We have fifteen minutes to get everyone out of this restaurant. Goldie, Caden, and Isaac, please cut the zip ties. When your zip ties have been cut, please line up at the front door. When Jeremy opens it, please run as far away from the restaurant as you can.”
Dan stares at Brick.
“You’re letting us go?” one of the elderly women at a table says.
“I’m letting you go.”
A murmur of voices fills the air, and Dan senses the disbelief he, too, feels. Is this really the plan? What’s the catch? And more important, how is Sissy going to get out without being caught?
“Please! Move. We only have fourteen and a half minutes.”
Tink shuts her laptop with a clack and stands up to stuff it back in her book bag, which sets off a chain reaction—Sissy, Caden, and Jeremy grab their book bags from the pile, and then Sissy and Caden fan out to a table to cut ankle zip ties while Jeremy goes toward his station at the front door.
The elderly women are the first to stand and walk to the door, with the four-top following, and then Vaughn and Paisley, but when Vaughn tries to usher her forward, Paisley stands rooted to the ground. “Dad?” she says.
“Yes, he’s coming, too,” Brick says.
Dan, who could stand at any time and move to the door, finds he’s as rooted to his spot as Paisley is, unable to leave his daughter behind. And he finally gives voice to his most pressing concern. “How are you getting out?”
He means to ask Sissy, but he’s staring at Brick, who tilts his head and grins. “Through the front door like everyone else.”
Dan stares at him. That’s the escape plan? Nothing about this evening has made any sense to Dan, but this makes the least sense of all. “But the police!”
“Will have no idea what’s going on in the chaos of people sprinting from the front door and then the subsequent explosion of two bricks of C-4. Should be plenty of cover for most of us to get away.”
Most? Dan’s eyes find Sissy, but she’s staring at the explosives. The timer reads 13:46, 13:45, 13:44…
“Jeremy, go ahead and let the first wave out.”
“No!” Isaac screeches, and that’s when Dan notices he hasn’t joined the others. Everyone looks in his direction, and Isaac, standing in front of the door to the kitchen, waves his gun wildly in an arc. “Nobody. Is going. Anywhere.”
“Isaac,” Brick says calmly, his voice low. “What are you doing, mate?”
Though Isaac’s hard, cold eyes are on Brick, Dan feels the chill in the air. His stomach hollows in fear as Isaac enunciates each word: “Finishing what we started.”
“Isaac, we got the money,” Brick says. “Put the gun down.”
“No! You think this was about the stupid money? That money isn’t going to do anything. Not enough, anyway. The world is dying .” His face alternates between stone-cold steel and pain, like someone is sticking him with a hot poker. Dan’s never seen anyone have a mental break with reality, but he thinks it likely looks a lot like this. “In fifteen, twenty years, it’s not going to be recognizable. There will be mass famine, wars over resources, flooding, displacement, death, and destruction. And no one cares! You know why? Because it’s mostly the poor who will suffer. The people who no one cares about anyway. Well, maybe they’ll start to care if a bunch of rich yahoos die in a huge explosion in a rich restaurant in a rich California town.”
“Someone do something,” Vaughn hisses. “He’s not the only one with a gun!”
“No.” Isaac smirks. “But I’m the only one who has bullets.” He swings his gun, pointing it directly at Vaughn, who flinches.
“Is that true ?” She looks at Brick. “What kind of criminals are you?”
“Isaac, put the gun down,” Tink says. “The world is a mess, I agree. But killing a bunch of people? What’s that going to fix?”
“What does gluing your hands to famous works of art do? Or that man who set himself on fire on the Supreme Court steps. Sometimes you have to do something extreme to wake people up.”
“But those things don’t work. They didn’t actually change anything.”
“Because no one cares. But killing the wealthiest man on the planet? It will be the headline of every newspaper the world over. Bonus points that he’s enemy number one.” Isaac points his gun at Otto. “Killing the earth and making billions in the process.”
Dan stares in bewilderment at Isaac. He’s even more cracked than he thought. The hostages start to murmur and then one of them shouts: “Keep him, then! Let us go!”
Otto looks wildly around, trying to figure out who said it. “Oh, you think you all are so innocent?” he spits, looking almost as crazed as Isaac with his wild eyebrows and now-dried, crusted blood on his upper lip and chin. “Eating your two-thousand-dollar meals at La Fin du Monde. How’d you get here? You can’t all have electric cars. Did you walk? Ride a bike? And what are you doing to save the world? Taking cloth grocery bags to the store? Driving an electric car? Buying organic meat? All while you’re taking planes to see the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower. And buying clothes for a season that you’ll throw away the next. And the plastic! Good Lord, the plastic. You can point fingers all you want, but you don’t want your lives to change. Not really.”
Brick scoffs. “Yes, yes. Climate change is definitely the fault of individual Americans who simply don’t recycle enough and has nothing to do with the corporations who continue to make the plastic and the fast fashion and the airplanes. You must blame all the sea turtle deaths on third graders who aren’t cutting up the six-pack rings fast enough with their little fingers.”
“You joke, but it’s true! Look at your stock options,” Otto says, and he looks straight at Dan when he says it. “I bet all of you have SierraX and Exxon and Shell and every other company responsible for carbon emissions in your BlackRock portfolios.”
Dan blinks. Does he?
“Why? Because you want to get rich, too! You can make me the scapegoat all you want. But at the end of the day, you all want to be me. Or at least want to have the kind of money I have. Isn’t that what everyone wants? To be rich?”
“No,” Brick says. “Not everyone does want to be rich. Some of us just want to leave the earth a little better than we found it.”
Otto laughs. “Which is why you stole nine million dollars from me. Because you don’t want to be rich. Got it.”
“I’m just getting even,” Brick growls.
“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter now. Looks like we’ll both be dead in”—Otto glances at the timer on the C-4—“ten minutes and six seconds.”
Dan’s forehead pricks with sweat. Why isn’t Brick, anyone, doing anything? They need to tackle Isaac to the ground. Yes, someone may get shot in the process, but at least everyone else would be able to escape. His eyes dart around the room, hoping someone is going to step up, be the hero, but it becomes apparent that, like Dan, everyone is waiting for someone else to do it.
“Isaac, please!” Sissy shouts plaintively. “This isn’t what we planned. No one is supposed to get hurt.”
Isaac swings his gun to Sissy. “Everyone gets hurt, Goldie. That’s life.”
And that’s when Dan realizes the hero is going to have to be him. He doesn’t want to die. But he wants Sissy to die even less. Never mind the fact that he’d never forgive himself—he’d never be able to face Jane again.
He takes a deep breath.
And then he sees the swinging door fly open.
And that’s when he grabs a plate.