You hear the absence of sound, and your body knows before your mind catches up that something significant is about to change. "Put the gun down." Leo's mouth went dry. "What?" "I said put it down. You don't want to do this." Something in Leo's chest lurched sideways.
He pressed forward anyway, because what else could he do? He was already in the door, was already broken. Corey was already at the register, demanding Brenda open it, and you couldn't unring a bell. "You don't tell me what I want, old man.
You put your hands on that table, or I will" "You'll what?" The question hung in the air like smoke. Leo opened his mouth. Nothing came out. From behind him, Corey's voice.
"Registers locked." "Lady, I need you to open this register, right?" A crash, a clatter. Corey had knocked over the tip jar. He swore loudly, and the sound broke the spell just enough for Leo to take two more steps toward booth nine, shotgun leveled. "I'm not going to ask again," Leo said.
His voice had dropped. He was trying to sound dangerous. He was not entirely sure he was succeeding. "Hands on the table right now." Mike looked at him for a long moment.
Then very slowly, very deliberately, he reached up with both hands and unzipped the front of his outer jacket. The patch was red and white and black, and it was the size of a man's chest. And even in the dim light of the flickering overhead fluorescent, Leo could read every word of it. He read it.
He read it again. The alarm that had been quietly sounding in the back of his brain was no longer quiet. Bobby set down his coffee cup. The sound of ceramic on Formica was the loudest thing in the room.
Declan Reed looked up from the remains of his apple pie and his eyes met Leo's. And in those eyes Leo saw something that a man only sees a handful of times in his life. If he's unlucky, the absolute unambiguous confirmation that the person looking at him has been in situations far worse than this one and survived all of them and is not even slightly concerned about surviving this one, too. Garrett Hayes put both hands flat on the table and tilted his head slightly to one side like a dog hearing a frequency it finds interesting.