Seven

TEN minutes later, we were all downstairs, sitting around the coffee bar.

Actually, Matt and my staff were sitting. I was behind the counter, whipping up our Koko-Mocha Latte to warm Nancy up—and calm her down. And, boy, did she need calming.

Nancy’s eyes were giant saucers, her hands flying objects.

“After my Critter Crawl workout class, I checked my phone. When I saw the video, I freaked! Right there in the lobby of Equator Fitness! I couldn’t believe I was watching an active shooter on our very own second floor. I tried all your phones, to see if everyone was okay, but nobody answered.”

“We turned them off,” Dante said.

“Mostly because of Mr. Boss.” Esther jerked a thumb in Matt’s direction.

“Hey, don’t blame me! It wasn’t my idea.”

“Actually, it was,” I reminded him.

Dante nodded. “You said if we turned off ours, you would turn off yours.”

“Yes. But I didn’t want to.”

Esther glanced at her roommate and mock whispered, “He was phubbing us.”

Matt folded his arms. “I can hear you, you know.”

“Well, whatever the reason,” Nancy continued, “I was desperate to find out if you all were still alive. And you didn’t answer your phones, and I didn’t see anything on the local news.” Her eyes began to tear up. “You’re like my family here—you’re all I’ve got in this big city, and I was scared out of my mind, certain you were all shot dead!”

“Take it easy, okay?” I slid the Koko-Mocha across the counter and patted her hand. “We think of you as family, too. And you can see we’re all just fine.”

Nancy wiped her eyes and took a warming sip of the espresso mixed with our Dark Chocolate Syrup and infused with my lovingly steamed coconut milk. She thanked me with a shaky smile, but I could see she was still upset.

“She needs more carbs!” Esther pronounced.

Dante’s brow furrowed. “Carbs?”

“Yes, Baldini! Don’t you know what you get when you spell stressed backward?”

Dante scratched his tattooed arm. “Desserts?”

“That’s right! Carbs help raise serotonin levels!”

Esther quickly found a stray slice of my Amish Cinnamon-Apple Bread.

“Eat this!” she ordered with the fretting intensity of a mother hen. As Nancy obeyed, Esther turned to Dante.

“That’ll help her feel calmer and more relaxed.”

“So would a good stiff drink.”

“Please.” Esther showed him her hand. “The only thing worse than a hysterical Nancy is a tipsy Nancy.”

Nancy rolled her eyes. “Will you stop talking about me as if I’m not sitting right here!”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but there’s something I still don’t understand. Nancy, how were you able to view that video? Did one of our customers send it to you?”

Mouth filled with sweet cinnamon-apple bread, she shook her head, then swallowed and announced: “I saw it on Chatter. It’s a trending topic. It has a hashtag and everything!”

I rubbed my forehead. There were so many apps and online services, I’d lost track of keeping them straight. “I’m sorry. What exactly is Chatter?”

Nancy pulled out her phone and showed me a streaming timeline of posted comments with images, news stories, and videos.

“It’s a new global social networking board. See the Trending Topics here along the side . . .” She pointed to the topic tags #VillageBlend and #CoffeeShot halfway down the list. She clicked on one of the tags, and a stream of comments appeared about the video, which had been shared multiple times.

“Would you play the video for us?” I asked.

“Sure!”

Gathered around Nancy’s glowing screen, we watched the film begin—innocuously enough—as a video review of our coffeehouse.

“. . . and here we are at the Village Blend in New York’s West Village!” A perky young woman winked at the camera then turned the phone to pan our second-floor lounge. “Home of the famous Fa-la-la-la-Lattes and Billionaire blend!”

“But we didn’t get either,” said the filmmaker’s female friend. This second girl held up her drink. “I got their new Turtle Latte with their special house-made Chocolate-Caramel Syrup, topped with whipped cream and pecan praline syrup—it is soooo gooood!”

“And I’m trying the Cinnamon Dolce Cappuccino—cinnamon and vanilla bean syrups whisked into an espresso with foamed milk. They drizzled it with vanilla-caramel and sprinkled on Ceylon cinnamon. Super-mazing!”

“This place is even more super-mazing,” her friend pronounced. “They do open mic poetry slams here once a week. Cool musicians perform here. And the actor Tucker Burton has worked here forever. He’s had little guest parts in episodes of some of my fave TV shows!”

“He directs, too, mostly cabarets and Off-Off Broadway, but he uses this room for rehearsals, and they say famous actors sometimes stop by to—”

BANG!

At the sound of the first shot, the girl on the video looked confused. “What the—?”

“I SAID DON’T MOVE OUT OF THAT CHAIR. I MEAN IT!”

“Oh, wow,” said the girl holding the camera. “We got lucky tonight. Check out the performance art over there!”

As she turned the lens of her camera phone, Richard Crest came into view. There he was in his skinny suit and open-collared shirt, cowering in the high-back chair, hands shielding his face.

Standing in front of him was honey blond Carol Lynn Kendall in her white silk blouse and pink flowered skirt, waving her favorite semiautomatic handgun.

In the background, several customers were backed up to the wall; others had taken cover under tables.

“EVERYONE, LISTEN! I AM NOT GOING TO HURT ANY OF YOU! I’m here to make a point.” Carol fixed the gun on Richard. “This piece of garbage needs to stop abusing women. And I’m going to make sure he does! DO YOU HEAR ME, NOW, YOU PIECE OF TRASH? I’m sure you’ll hear this!” Pointing the gun at the ceiling, she pulled the trigger three more times.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

“Keep shooting,” a voice whispered. The command wasn’t for Carol. It was the girlfriend of the perky filmmaker. “If this is real, we could sell this footage!”

She wasn’t the only one who saw dollar signs in snapping crime.

Multiple camera phones began rolling, and as Carol Lynn continued to berate Richard, even the customers who’d taken cover came out, their curiosity overcoming caution.

In the next few minutes, I arrived on the scene . . .

I winced, seeing myself on camera, playing the bad boss and ordering Dante and the rest of the customers off the floor. The two girls shooting this video kept filming as they followed the customers down our stairs and out the front door, showing the small crowd that formed outside, staring up at the second-floor windows.

When police cars pulled up and two officers began moving back the crowd, the video abruptly ended, and I asked Nancy to send me and Matt the link to it.

“Wow,” said Dante. “That was intense.”

“Now do you see why I was freaking?” Nancy asked.

Esther patted her shoulder. “That video was harrowing. I would have freaked, too.”

“How many people could have seen it?” I wondered aloud. “Not that many, right?”

“Let’s find out.” Esther grabbed Nancy’s phone and tapped the screen a few times. “Just as I thought. This video was uploaded to YouTube and shared from there.”

“How many views?” Dante asked.

“Three hundred thirty in under an hour—and it’s going up really fast.”

I glanced at Matt and we both exhaled with relief.

“Thank goodness,” I said. “Three hundred thirty people isn’t that many.”

Esther, Dante, and Nancy all stared at me as if I’d lost all sense of reality.

“Boss, I didn’t mean three hundred thirty views period. I thought you understood—if it’s on Chatter with two hashtags, it would have to be bigger than that. It’s three hundred thirty thousand!”

“We’re viral!” Dante declared. “How cool is that?!”

As the three young baristas hooted and bumped fists, Matt caught my eye again, and I saw my own worries reflected there.

Notoriety like this was nothing to celebrate.

Like far too many posts on social media, those hashtags delivered only part of the story to the scrolling public. To them it was a minute’s entertainment, a momentary freak show.

To us—and our beloved century-old coffee business—I feared those hashtags meant disaster.