One of the Wichita men laughed softly through his nose, and Danny saw something happen in Royce Hadley's face, a little tightening at the hinge of the jaw, the way a dog's ears go back.
"Fire code," Royce repeated. He turned to the Wichita men. "You hear that? Kid's worried about the fire code. In a building where the roof's about to come down on his head." He turned back. "Son, I am going to own this building by Christmas. I'm not paying three dollars to walk around in my own building."
"It's three-fifty," Danny said, and immediately wished that he had died.
What happened next took perhaps four seconds, though for years afterward Danny could replay it at any speed he liked, frame by frame, like a print run slow through a projector gate. Royce Hadley's right hand came up and closed on the front of Danny's maroon jacket, on the collar and the shirt underneath and a fold of skin at the base of his throat, and lifted. Not all the way. Danny was five foot nine and Royce was six foot three and outweighed him by eighty pounds, but it was enough to put Danny on his toes. Royce walked him backward two steps into the glass case where the one-sheet for Cocoon hung, coming soon, three old men in a swimming pool lit from below. The glass shuddered. A girl in the line outside screamed, short and sharp, like a whistle.
Royce leaned down until his face was six inches from Danny's. His breath smelled like bourbon and Certs.
"I'll show you who runs this place!" he screamed.
He actually screamed it. Not a growl, not a threat muttered for Danny alone. It was a scream, high and cracked at the top, louder than it needed to be by a factor of ten, and it went out across the lobby and bounced off the gilded ceiling and the mirrored pillars and the Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga cabinets blinking in their alcove by the restrooms, and out through the open doors onto the sidewalk, where a hundred and fifty people stopped talking all at once.
And Danny did nothing.
That was what he would remember. Not the hand, not the glass at his back, not the bourbon. He would remember that his own hands hung at his sides like things he had borrowed and didn't know how to use, and that his mouth was open, and that nothing came out of it. Not "Let go." Not "Help." Not anything. He froze the way a rabbit freezes in the headlights on the county road at night, the way he had frozen in the fourth grade when Curtis Moberly took his lunch money every day for a month, the way he had frozen at the kitchen table when his father said, "It's not forever, Danny, it's just till the rigs pick back up," and Danny had wanted to say you're lying and instead had said, "Okay."
He heard Lupe say, "Hey. HEY," from behind the candy counter. He heard someone on the sidewalk say, "Somebody get a cop." He heard the woman with Royce laugh, a terrible little half-laugh that didn't know where to go. And then he heard a voice he didn't recognize at first, because in eleven months he had never once heard it raised above the level of a man asking you to pass the salt.
"Royce."