Joseph Finder - Power Play

Bodine let out a terrible, agonized yelp, and collapsed to his knees.

Blood sluiced from his nose. It looked broken. One hand flew to his face; the other flailed in the air to ward off any further blows.

The reaction around the table was swift and panicked. Some seemed to want to come to Bodine's assistance but didn't dare. Some screamed.

Cheryl kept calling for the manager.

If he could have come, he would have.

"God's sake, somebody do something!" Lummis gasped.

I sat there, mind racing. The second hunter, the one with the blond crew cut, hadn't moved. He was speaking into a walkie-talkie.

The goateed man, muttering, "Call me a goddamned no-brainer," held the weapon high in the air. It was, I noticed, a hunter's handgun, a.44 Magnum Ruger Super Blackhawk six-shooter. Gray wood-look grips and a barrel over seven inches. A big, heavy object. I'd never used one: I didn't like to use handguns for hunting.

Then he slammed it against the other side of Bodine's face. Blood geysered in the air.

Bodine screamed again: a strange and awful sound of vulnerability.

He fluttered both of his hands in a futile attempt to shield his bloodied face. He cried hoarsely, "Please. Please. Don't." Blood gouted from his nose, seeping from his eyes, ran down his cheeks, spattering his shirt.

I wanted to do something, but what? Go after the guy with a steak knife? Two armed men: it seemed like an easy way to get killed. I couldn't believe this was happening; the suddenness, the unreality of it all, froze me as it must have done everyone else.

"Buck!"

A shout from the front door. The black-haired man paused, handgun in the air, and looked. A third man entered, dressed like the other two, in camouflage pants and vest. He was tall and lean, sharp-featured, a strong jaw, around forty. Scraggly dark blond hair that reached almost to his shoulders.

"That's enough, Buck," the new man said. He had a deep, adenoidal voice with the grit of fine sandpaper, and he spoke calmly, patiently. "No unnecessary violence. We talked about that."

The goateed one-Buck?-released his grip on Bodine, who slumped forward, spitting blood, weeping in ragged gulps.

Then the long-haired guy pulled a weapon from a battered leather belt holster. A matte black pistol: Glock 9mm, I knew right away. He waved it back and forth at all of us, in a sweeping motion, from one end of the table to the other and back again.

"All right, boys and girls," he said. "I want all of you to line up on that side of the table, facing me. Hands on the table, where I can see 'em."

"Oh, sweet Jesus God," Hugo Lummis said, his voice shaking.

Cheryl said imperiously-or maybe it was bravely-"What do you want?"

"Let's go, kids. We can do this the hard way or the easy way, it's up to you. Your choice."

We gonna do this the hard way?"

Dad's shadow fell across the kitchen floor. He loomed in the doorway, enormous to a ten-year-old: red face, gut bulging under a white sleeveless T-shirt, can of Genesee beer in his hand. "Genny," he always called it, sounded like his mistress.

Mom standing at the kitchen counter, wearing her Food Fair smock, chopping onions for chili con carne. His favorite supper. A snowdrift of minced onion heaped on the cutting board. Her hand was shaking. The tears flowing down her cheeks, she'd said, were from the onions.

I didn't know how to answer that. Stared up at him with all the defiance I could muster. Mother's little protector.

"Don't you ever hit her," I said.

She'd told me she'd slipped in the shower. The time before that, she'd tripped on a wet floor at the Food Fair supermarket, where she worked as a cashier. One flimsy excuse after another, and I'd had enough.

"She tell you that?"

Blood roared in my ears so loud I could barely hear him. My heart was racing. I swallowed hard. I had to look away, stared at the peeling gray-white paint on the doorframe. It reminded me of the birch tree in the backyard.

"I told him it was an accident." Mom's voice from behind me, high and strained and quavering, a frightened little girl. "Stay out of this, Jakey."

I kept examining the peeling-paint birch bark. "I know you hit her. Don't you ever do that again."

A sudden movement, and I was knocked to the floor like a candlepin.

"Talk to me like that one more time, you're going to reform school."

Tears flooding my eyes now: Not the onions. What the hell was reform school?

"Now, say you're sorry."

"Never. I'm not."

"We gonna do this the hard way?"

I knew what he was capable of.

Through eyes blurry from tears, I examined the ceiling, noticed the cracks, like the broken little concrete patio in back of the house.

"I'm sorry," I said at last.

A few minutes later, Dad was lying back in his ratty old Barcalounger in front of the TV. "Jakey," he said, almost sweetly. "Mind fetching me another Genny?"

Slowly we all began to gather on one side of the table. Except for Bross and Rylance, I noticed. They both seemed to be edging away, as if trying to make a sudden break.

"Where's Lampack?" Slattery said.

"Let's go, kids," the long-haired man said. He pointed the Glock at Bross and Rylance. "Nowhere to run, compadres," he said to them. "We got all the exits covered. Get over there with the rest of your buddies."

Bross and Rylance glanced at each other, then, as if by unspoken agreement, stopped moving. I looked for Ali, saw her at the far end of the table. She appeared to be as frightened as everyone else.

Was this guy bluffing about having the exits covered? How many of them were there?

And what were they planning to do?

The man took out a walkie-talkie from his vest, pressed the transmit button. "Verne, you got the staff secured?"

"Roger," a voice came back.

"We got a couple of guys itching to make a run for it. You or Travis see 'em, shoot on sight, you read me?"

"Roger that."

He slipped the walkie-talkie back into his vest, then held the gun in a two-handed grip, aiming at Kevin Bross. "Which one of you wants to die first?"

Hugo Lummis cried, "Don't shoot!" and someone else said, "Move, just move!"

"Don't be idiots!" Cheryl shouted at the two men. "Do what he says."

"Makes no big difference to me," the long-haired man said. "You obey me, or you die, but either way I get what I want. You always have a choice." He shifted his pistol a few inches toward Rylance. "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo."

"All right," Bross said. He raised his hands in the air; then he and Rylance came over to the table.

"What do you want from us?" Cheryl said.

But he didn't reply. He wagged his pistol back and forth in the air, ticking from one of us to the next like the arm of a metronome. He chanted in a singsong voice: "My-mother-told-me-to-pick-the-very-best-one-and-you-are-not-it."

His pistol pointed directly at me.

"You win."

I swallowed hard.

Stared into the muzzle of the Glock.

"It's your lucky day, guy," he said.

My reaction was strange: I wanted to close my eyes, like a child, to make it go away. Instead, I forced myself to notice little things about the gun, like the way the barrel jutted out of the front of the slide. Or the unusual keyhole-shaped opening machined into the top.

"Huh," I said, trying to sound casual. "Never seen one of those up close."

"It's called a gun, my friend," he said. His eyes were liquid pewter. There seemed to be a glint of amusement in them. "A semiautomatic pistol. And when I pull this little thing here, which is called a trigger-"

"No, I mean I've never seen a Glock 18C before," I said. "Pretty rare, those things. Works like an automatic, doesn't it?"

Humanize yourself. Make him see you as someone just like him.