The first woman said, “Oh, God. Oh, no.”
Casper said, “Stay calm, ladies. This will all be over in a minute or two.” He pulled a green trash bag from the pocket of his leather bombardier’s jacket and tossed it on the bar in front of the bartender. “Fill it up. And don’t forget the money from the safe.”
“There’s not much,” the bartender said.
“Just get what there is,” Casper said.
Popeye, the crowd control, stood with his legs spread apart by roughly a foot and a half and bent slightly at the knees, his .45 steadily moving in an arc from left to right, right to left, and back again. He was about twelve feet from me, and I could hear his breathing from behind the mask, even and steady.
Casper stood in an identical stance, shotgun trained on the bartender, but his eyes scanned the mirror behind the bar.
These guys were pros. All the way.
Besides Casper and Popeye, there were twelve people in the bar: the bartender and waitress behind the bar, the two guys on the floor, Lionel, Angie, Ryerson, and me, the two secretaries, and two guys at the end of the bar closest to the entrance, teamsters by the look of them. One wore a green Celtics jacket, the other a canvas and denim thing, old and thickly lined. Both were mid-forties and beefy. A bottle of Old Thompson sat between two shot glasses on the bar in front of them.
“Take your time,” Casper said to the bartender, as the bartender knelt behind the bar and fiddled with what I assumed was the safe. “Just go slow, like nothing’s happening, and you won’t spin past the numbers.”
“Please don’t hurt us,” one of the men on the floor said. “We got families.”
“Shut up,” Popeye said.
“No one’s getting hurt,” Casper said. “As long as you keep quiet. Just keep quiet. Very simple.”
“You know whose fucking bar this is?” the guy in the Celtics jacket said.
“What?” Popeye said.
“You fucking heard me. You know whose bar this is?”
“Please, please,” one of the secretaries said. “Be quiet.”
Casper turned his head. “A hero.”
“A hero,” Popeye said, and looked over at the idiot.
Without moving his mouth it seemed, Ryerson whispered, “Where’s your piece?”
“Spine,” I said. “Yours?”
“My lap.” His right hand moved three inches to the edge of the table.
“Don’t,” I whispered, as Popeye’s head and gun turned back in our direction.
“You guys are fucking dead,” the teamster said.
“Why are you talking?” the secretary said, her eyes on the bar top.
“Good question,” Casper said.
“Dead. Got it? You fucking punks. You fucking humps. You fucking—”
Casper took four steps and punched the teamster in the center of the face.
The teamster dropped off the back of his stool and hit his head so hard on the floor that you could hear the crack when the back of his skull split.
“Any comment?” Casper asked the guy’s friend.
“No,” the guy said, and looked down at the bar.
“Anyone else?” Casper said.
The bartender came up from behind the bar and placed the trash bag on top.
The bar was as silent as a church before a baptism.
“What?” Popeye said, and took three steps toward our table.
It took me a moment to realize he was talking to us, another moment to know with a complete certainty that this was all about to go terribly wrong terribly fast.
None of us moved.
“What did you just say?” Popeye pointed the gun at Lionel’s head, and his eyes behind the mask skittered uncertainly over Ryerson’s calm face, then came back to Lionel’s.
“Another hero?” Casper took the bag off the bar, came over to our table with his shotgun pointed at my neck.
“He’s a talker,” Popeye said. “He’s talking shit.”
“You got something to say?” Casper said, and turned his shotgun on Lionel. “Huh? Speak up.” He turned to Popeye. “Cover the other three.”
Popeye’s .45 turned toward me and the black eye stared into my own.
Casper took another step closer to Lionel. “Just yapping away. Huh?”
“Why do you keep antagonizing them? They have guns,” one of the secretaries said.
“Just be quiet,” her companion hissed.
Lionel looked up into the mask, his lips shut tight, his fingertips digging into the tabletop.
Casper said, “Go for it, big man. Go for it. Just keep talking.”
“I don’t have to listen to this shit,” Popeye said.
Casper rested the tip of the shotgun against the bridge of Lionel’s nose. “Shut up!”
Lionel’s fingers shook and he blinked against the sweat in his eyes.
“He just don’t want to listen,” Popeye said. “Just wants to keep talking trash.”
“Is that it?” Casper said.
“Everyone stay calm,” the bartender said, his hands held straight up in the air.
Lionel said nothing.
But every witness in the bar, deep in states of panic, sure they were going to die, would remember it the way the shooters wanted them to—that Lionel had been talking. That all of us at the table had. That we’d antagonized some dangerous men, and they’d killed us for it.
Casper racked the slide on the shotgun and the noise was like a cannon going off. “Got to be a big man. Is that it?”
Lionel opened his mouth. He said, “Please.”
I said, “Wait.”
The shotgun swung my way, its dark, dark eyes the last thing I’d see. I was sure of it.
“Detective Remy Broussard!” I yelled, so the whole bar could hear me. “Everyone got that name? Remy Broussard!” I looked through the mask at the deep blue eyes, saw the fear in there, the confusion.
“Don’t do it, Broussard,” Angie said.
“Shut the fuck up!” It was Popeye this time, and his cool was slipping. The tendons in his forearm clenched as he tried to cover the table.
“It’s over, Broussard. It’s over. We know you took Amanda McCready.” I craned my neck out to the bar. “You hear that name? Amanda McCready?”
When I turned my head back, the cold metal bores of the shotgun dug into my forehead, and my eyes met the curl of a red finger on the other side of the trigger guard. This close, the finger looked like an insect or a red and white worm. It looked like it had a mind of its own.