Rats crawled behind the dumpster. Rick heard them scratching and squeaking as he stood in the restaurant alley, waiting for Banque’s side door to open. The noises set his skin ablaze. In the dim light, it seemed that the vermin were climbing up his pant legs or scampering down the neck of his shirt. They’d become more aggressive since the shutdowns. Starved by a dearth of overflowing restaurant dumpsters, they’d begun venturing out in daylight and invading apartments. Eating each other. He would swear that he felt their claws.
“Will you stop that?”
Frank hissed at him from the opposite side of the alley. They’d chosen their posts with care. Rick was directly in front of the exit, as his job was to call for Philip’s attention as soon as he appeared, distracting him from Frank at the door’s side. Before Philip could run, Frank would have the pistol pressed into the chef’s left flank along with wire instructions for the $350,000 that Philip owed them.
“What am I doing?” Rick spat.
“Scratching.”
Rick wanted to ask how Frank could see him that well. The only light in the alley was a diffuse glow from a sidewalk streetlamp and a window several stories up in the neighboring building. Frank was shrouded in darkness. Rick had thought that he’d been as well.
“Every second you’re pawing at something,” Frank continued, silencing Rick’s question. “The back of your neck. Your sides. Your hair. Stop being so freaked out. You’re giving me the jitters.”
Rick took offense at the characterization of him as the nervous Nellie. Frank liked to pretend that he was the big man, the guy with the gun ready to play real-life cops and robbers. But Rick was the brave one. What had Frank done when Rick had thrown a tire iron at Philip’s window? Peel off in the Porsche. That was what.
“You try standing next to Ratatouille’s extended family and see if you don’t itch,” Rick said.
Frank chuckled. “That was a decent payday.”
“Yeah. Brad turned out to be quite the voice actor, huh?”
“Well, he was always better suited for cartoons than romance flicks. I told him when we signed him that he could clean up as the heavy. But it’s too out of character for him. Audiences can’t buy it after seeing his comedy.”
“He’s too nice a guy,” Rick agreed. “No one believes he’s going to blow anyone’s head off.”
As soon as he said it, Rick regretted it. He worried that Frank would take the statement as a challenge, a sly suggestion that Mr. Brand-New Revolver didn’t have the guts to fire at anyone. Shooting someone didn’t take courage, in Rick’s opinion. It took fear and anger. A lack of control.
He still didn’t know whether Frank’s emotions had gotten the better of him when talking to Nate about their failed restaurant. Rick hadn’t asked his partner point-blank because he didn’t really want to know. Better for him to continue operating under a cloud of plausible deniability, to be able to say that he hadn’t turned Frank in because he’d been certain that Nate had died after a marital dispute with his wife. She was probably the more likely suspect anyway. If Melissa had learned half the crap that Nate had pulled over the years—half the things that Rick had smoothed over and kept out of the headlines—then she would have had more than enough cause to shoot him in the face.
A rustling noise sounded from the opposite side of the alley, followed by a crack and a whoosh. Rick was still struggling to make sense of the noises when he saw Philip in the doorjamb, illuminated by the kitchen light behind him. He held a large, black plastic bag, near bursting at the seams.
“Philip,” Rick shouted, stepping into the center of the alley where the light reached. “We need to talk.”
Philip continued toward the dumpster as if Rick hadn’t just surprised him in a dark alley. As if he found his presence nothing more than slightly tiresome. “Money’s spent, man.” He flung back the dumpster’s metal lid with one hand and tossed the bag inside. “There’s nothing more to talk about.”
“Like hell.” The gun caught the light as Frank emerged from the shadowed area at Philip’s right, extending from the hand at Frank’s hip like a hook affixed to an amputated arm. “Your staff is working,” Frank shouted. “We watched them all come out. You’re paying them with our money.”
Philip spun to face Frank. As he saw the weapon, his hands rose in the air. “What’s with the gun?”
“You need one when dealing with a fucking thief.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Philip stepped toward the weapon, hands still in the air. “Coffre’s money went down with the restaurant. My staff is being paid off Banque’s receipts.”
“What receipts? You can’t have receipts when the restaurant’s closed.”
“We’re doing a decent takeout business.”
“Thanks to us covering the rent, even though you know that was never the deal.”
Philip took another step toward Frank, his hands still in the surrender position. “Coffre was located inside Banque. It used Banque’s kitchen. Its staff. There was no Coffre if Banque went under.”
“Bullshit,” Frank said. “You should have prorated the cost of the space, and you know it. The deal was never for our money to bail out the bigger restaurant. Our investment was to make sure Coffre could run for twelve months at a loss. The bar was open for fucking four. You owe us two-thirds of the money that we laid out. At least.”
Rick agreed with everything that Frank was saying, but he didn’t like the way he was saying it. With every sentence, Frank seemed to raise the gun a bit higher until it was pointed, not at Philip’s legs, but at the man’s center mass. Because of the darkness still obscuring Frank, the weapon seemed to hang in the air, its metal slide catching the light from the above window. It vibrated as if on a string and not in his partner’s gloved hand.
“I should never have let you all into the business.” Philip took another step toward the hovering handgun. “You guys never got how restaurants work.”
The gun was nearly touching Philip’s chest. “You going to shoot me, Frank? That the plan? How are you going to make your money back without any food coming out of the kitchen?”
“You’re coming with us,” Frank said. His voice didn’t sound as confident as before. “You’re going to go to the bank, take out the money you’re running this shithole on, and wire it to our accounts where it rightfully belongs.”
“That a double-action pistol?”
Before Frank could answer, Philip’s right hand was gripping the gun’s slide and pushing it toward the floor. His body was wrenched back at a sideways angle, away from the weapon. Rick heard the pop of the gun firing and the sound of a bullet slamming into something hard, pavement or brick. Philip’s other hand covered the gun. Frank yelped as his body tilted in the direction of his sharply turned wrist.
Rick stepped forward, a calculated delayed reaction to Frank’s obvious need for assistance. His partner was not a marksman. He’d feared Frank accidentally shooting him while aiming for Philip. But he was more afraid of what Philip might do now that he had the gun.
He heard the click of the slide retreating and snapping back into place. One of Frank’s hands shot up in the air. The other remained wrenched at an unnatural angle by his chest. “Philip. Let’s talk,” he said. “That’s all we really wanted. We just need to understand—”
The gun rose. In the dim light, Rick could see not only the weapon but also the torso of the man behind it. His chest inflated and sank. Philip’s adrenaline was up. His blood was pounding.
Rick dropped to the ground. He tucked his chin to his chest and put his hands over his head, an instinctual hedgehog defense. Philip might still shoot him, but he wouldn’t be facing the bullet. He didn’t want to see his life end.
He fell over from a sharp pain in his side. The blow had come with a dull thud but not the click or pop of a firearm’s discharge. Rick remained curled up as another kick landed to his rib cage. “You come to my house, break my window, scare my wife, stalk me at my work.” Kicks punctuated each whispered phrase. Philip wasn’t raising his voice because he didn’t want the cops to come, Rick thought. He wanted to beat him to death in this alley.
“No. I—” Rick couldn’t complete the phrase. He was choking on fluids, blood or spit or tears, he couldn’t tell.
“Philip, stop. You’ll kill him. Stop.”
The kicks ceased. Rick moved the arm over his head to see Philip standing over a kneeling Frank, the gun pointed at his head, execution style.
“Get him and get out of here.” Philip sneered. “And don’t let me ever see either of you again.”
Rick watched Frank crawl over to his space. He felt his partner’s left arm slide under his armpit. The pain in his side became excruciating as he was half lifted to a standing position. Philip had broken one of his ribs. Maybe several, Rick thought. But he could breathe. He was alive.
He leaned heavily on Frank’s stocky body as they limped toward the light outside the alley. The gun was on them. Rick could sense its barrel aimed at his back, hear Philip’s huffed breaths over his own shallow ones. He refused to look back to verify, however. There was no need for any more confirmation or conversation. The money was gone because the man with the gun said so. It was a sunk cost. A loss. And he and Frank would eat it, no matter how bitter the taste. They were both done with the restaurant business.