Register open. You, lady. You open that register right now or I swear to God. Meanwhile, Corey was already moving toward the counter, revolver out, swinging it back and forth like he'd seen people do in movies.
His jaw tight, his breathing ragged and audible. Brenda didn't scream. She had raised three kids, buried a husband, and worked the night shift in a desert diner for eleven years. She was past screaming.
Her legs started shaking and she gripped the counter harder and sshe thought with a clarity that surprised her, I am not going to die over a cash register. Harold the cook, 64, with bad knees and a worse back, heard the crash from the kitchen. He pressed himself against the wall beside the griddle, picked up a cast iron skillet, then put it back down, then picked it up again. Dave Pelman, the traveling salesman from Albuquerque, who sold commercial kitchen equipment and had stopped for coffee and a piece of pie before pushing on to Victorville, was sitting at the counter when the door came in.
He went sideways off his stool so fast he hit the floor before he was even consciously aware of falling. He was under the counter in less time than it takes to tell it, his tie flung over his shoulder, his heart hammering at what felt like 200 beats per minute. And in booth nine, nobody moved. Leo swept the room.
Old woman at the counter, good. She looked compliant. Kitchen was quiet. The cook had run.
The salesman was gone, probably under the counter, not a threat. He moved his eyes to the far end of the room, to the shadowed booth, and his brain did that thing that brains do when they encounter unexpected information. It faltered, recalibrated, and then very quietly sounded an alarm that the rest of him wasn't quite ready to hear yet. Four men, big, still, all of them looking directly at him.
Not with fear, not with anger, with something he couldn't immediately name, and the inability to name it frightened him more than anger would have. "You," he called out, pointing the Mossberg toward the booth. "Everybody in that booth, hands on the table right now. I want to see hands." Nobody moved.
"Did you hear me? I said hands." "Son," Mike Callahan's voice was quiet. Not soft. There was nothing soft about it, but quiet in the way that a river is quiet right before it drops over a falls.