The small hand of the old clock moved through the eleven and started the crawl toward the twelve. Coach passed in and out of consciousness, though Estrella and Geoff had staunched the blood flowing from his torn feet. Geoff held the man’s hand and prayed silently. Ed recognized the focused expression that others interpreted as mere thoughtfulness.
In a moment of wakefulness, Coach saw the cat and began to tremble. Leslie apologized and explained why she couldn’t put the cat out. “He took a bullet to his paw, see?”
He saw. He frowned. He stopped shaking. And then he started chuckling. Ed watched, amazed, as the ailurophobe gestured for Leslie to bring the cat to him. Now it curled up in the warmth of Coach’s armpit, man and beast sleeping off their pain together.
Estrella talked Jack into letting her bring baguettes in for everyone to eat. They dried out untouched in a basket on one of the pantry shelves.
The cordless phone rang once, and Estrella reached for it. Jack snatched it first and hurled it out of the storage room and into the narrow mouth of the brick oven on the other side of the kitchen with startling precision. Ed heard it come to pieces against the inside wall before the residual heat of the morning fire began to melt its parts, crackling and popping like rice cereal.
Everyone but the coach looked toward their lost contact with the outside world, and Ed suspected they were all thinking what he was: now how would they know if Mrs. Mansfield was on her way back?
The detective’s loss of composure was all the evidence Ed needed to say that Jack believed his wife was already dead. Ed felt sick. How could his mother find a body that the entire police force couldn’t?
Jack was pacing, sweating. He stormed out of the pantry into the kitchen. Ed jumped up and went to the doorway.
It was not the first time Ed had wished he were a defensive tackle rather than a point guard. He knew how to steal a basketball, which was of course larger than a gun and less deadly, but the skill sets were transferable. He had long arms, speed, decisiveness, and in this case, youth on his side. The main problem was that Jack wouldn’t be doing any passing or dribbling with that firearm. In principle, though, any ball could be stolen if the ball handler was overconfident and distracted, and Ed thought Jack was, finally, both.
He watched Jack pace between the storeroom and the wood-fired oven. When the detective caught sight of Ed, he motioned with his gun for Ed to stay behind the doorframe, then continued pacing. Ed didn’t move. Jack didn’t notice.
When the time was right he couldn’t hesitate.
His game plan: act alone, use surprise. His dad wouldn’t support such a plan, and trying to explain a strategy to Leslie or Estrella would only catch Jack’s attention. It was his mistake to make, right? Ed prayed it wouldn’t get anyone killed.
Jack was walking directly toward him.
Ed would foul the detective with a body slam, force him to drop the gun, kick it away, and beat Jack to it. He wouldn’t kick it too far, because he needed to get control of the pistol before Jack had time to reach the backup revolver on his ankle. Train the gun on Jack, get Dad and the others to take the revolver.
If he had time he’d blow a window out to alert the SWAT units outside.
Ed hesitated about that. He’d shot a gun once or twice in his life, but what if he hit someone on the other side of the glass? And did Cornucopia even have access to SWAT?
No window shooting. He’d get Jack to disarm one of the doors.
Jack reached the pantry, eyes on Ed, and turned around. The timing wasn’t right. Ed couldn’t move until he was invisible to Jack, until Jack’s mind was overtaken by its own thoughts of disappointment and injustice.
The stainless-steel workbench in the middle of the kitchen stood to the height of Jack’s wrist, hanging at his side. He held the gun loosely in his right hand and came within a few inches of the table’s corner as he passed it. All Ed had to do was lunge and force the back of Jack’s hand into that sharp metal point. Jack’s fingers around the gun would open even if he willed them to stay closed.
The moment passed. Ed chewed himself out. Jack’s pacing could stop at any time.
Ed’s core muscles were vibrating by the time Jack turned around in front of the woodstove again. Ed crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe to hide his anxiety.
When the detective looked up, his eyes did pass right through Ed to some spot behind him, which Ed later realized was the spot where Coach lay, faceup on the ground with his broken feet propped up on bloodstained flour sacks, and a wounded cat tucked under his arm. But in that exact second his only thought was the fear that Jack was going to march straight back into the pantry without making another round through the kitchen.
Which is what Jack did. He stepped over Ed’s large feet and just out of Ed’s reach, pointed his gun toward Geoff’s chest, and cocked the hammer of his pistol. Geoff’s prayerful eyes stayed closed.
And so Ed reacted without thinking, without deconstructing or reassembling the plan he had waited one beat too long to set in motion. He jumped at Jack’s arm, slapped at the gun as if it were an orange ball and the game clock were ticking off the final seconds.
The force of Ed’s hit pushed Jack’s aim sideways and downward as the gun went off. Jack kept his grip on his weapon. The silencer understated the gun’s damage and was upstaged by Ed and Jack falling into one of the freestanding metal shelf units. Jack grabbed hold of the frame with his free hand but Ed, carried forward by his own momentum, found his feet entangled with Jack’s, preventing the detective from recovering his center of balance. They collapsed to the left, Ed on top, the pistol pointing without aiming at the others in the small room.
When Ed landed, his face hammered Jack’s forearm and smashed the man’s elbow into the concrete floor. Jack’s fingers opened on the gun and Ed rolled off his body, reaching for it with his right hand.
Jack was fast. He locked his legs around Ed’s knees and used Ed’s body as leverage to haul himself up and over Ed’s back. They rotated as a single unit toward the gun, which Ed grasped first only because his arms were longer than Jack’s by fractions of an inch. He pulled the weapon to his chest and tucked into the roll, pushing off the ground with his left hand and hefting Jack into the wall. But Jack was an anaconda around Ed’s upper arms; he’d regain the upper hand quickly. Ed kicked out of the man’s leg hold and flicked his wrist to push the gun away, straight out the pantry door into the center of the kitchen. It glided like an ice skater across the smooth concrete much, much farther than he had intended it to go. He watched it slip under the wheeled wood bin that stood next to the brick oven.
“Get it!” he shouted to anyone who would know what he meant.
Leslie was hyperventilating in the corner. His father was bent over Coach, and Ed saw his hands slick with blood coming from the man’s thigh. Unbelievable. The cat was gone. Estrella darted out into the kitchen but hadn’t seen where the gun went.
If Ed were Leslie, he might have been able to calculate how much time it would take to give Estrella directions to the gun, and how much time it would take him to break loose and get it himself, or whether he should stay and battle the much stronger Jack for the revolver on his ankle, or how swiftly Jack, free of Ed, would shoot his father through the head. If he were his father, he might have been able to pray and get an immediate answer about the wise course of action. If he were Estrella, he would have known whether she knew how to fire the pistol if she found it, or whether Jack would be able to disarm her with a scowl.
But Ed was a man who saw his plays through. Nine times out of ten, changing course after a plan had been set in motion worked out badly for the team, and of the five hostages in the room, he’d just appointed himself the team leader.
Ed slammed his head backward into Jack’s nose, and Jack’s hold on his arms broke. Ed was on his feet and shooting out of the pantry while the detective was still howling. He pushed Estrella out of the way and crossed the kitchen in three strides, sliding into the wood bin and kicking it aside to reveal the gun. And then it was in his hands and he was back on his feet, having never stalled, flying into the pantry to find Jack crouching and fumbling with the holster straps. The detective’s nose was bloody and dripping on his shoes.
“Leave it!” Ed shouted.
Jack raised his hands away from his backup in time with the very slow breath he drew in through his mouth.
“Leslie, help Dad get Coach out! Do it! Do it! Estrella! Break a window!” Shouting wasn’t necessary, and yet he couldn’t speak at any other volume. He worried that he wasn’t holding the pistol correctly, that he would forget to shoot with both eyes open and his elbow locked. He believed Jack was even now evaluating all Ed’s inexperience and deciding how to best him.
Hurry, hurry.
Leslie and his father dragged Coach out by the armpits, not daring to spend precious seconds trying to stop that pumping artery.
That murderous emotion Ed had felt earlier had been washed away by real opportunity. Ed wasn’t at all confident, now standing with the barrel of a gun pointed at a man, with a finger on the trigger, that he could pull it. Surely cowardice was spelled out in neon all over his face, in each nervous inflection of his tone, in his very need to shout.
He heard someone rolling away the bread rack that had blockaded the kitchen and dining room. Seconds later there was a heavy thunking of an object pounding on glass, then the gradual cracking, followed by shouting, the voices of outsiders and authority coming to aid.
Jack lunged for him and Ed jumped away, fired. A box of yeast exploded behind the place where Jack had been standing in a harmless yellow poof.
Whether Jack had meant to merely test Ed, throw him off balance, or escape, he did succeed in somersaulting into the kitchen. Ed spun, leading with the gun, panicked. Without a freshly smashed nose to stun him, Jack probably had all the time he needed to retrieve his revolver.
“Ed!” His father was calling from the dining room.
“Get them out!” Ed called back. He looked at the line he’d have to run through the kitchen. He doubted Jack would go out into that open space himself but feared he had the escape route covered. Did he dare risk it? Risk getting shot from both directions, by Jack and by a sharpshooter who might mistake him for Jack? His skin was clammy and the gun slick in his palms. He thought he might throw up.
It was a one-second-remaining, half-court-shot-to-win-it risk. Ed sprinted for the kitchen-to-café entry. He made it through, saw his father looking toward him from the shattered window while someone in a tactical helmet and bulletproof vest hauled Estrella safely past the daggers of glass. He adjusted his stride to make the necessary leap over the pastry display cases and tossed the gun over to free his hands. The gun hit the floor at the same time that his palms met the cases like they were a gymnast’s vault.
Ed felt the flaming pain in his left tricep before he heard the pop of the gunshot, and his joints gave way before he could push off the glass and swing his body over the top. He stumbled and smashed into the sliding door on the back of the case, his jaw taking the hardest hit.
Jack had him by the ankle before he hit the ground it seemed, and Ed smacked his head on the floor as he came down. His T-shirt rode up on his back as Jack dragged him back into the kitchen, exposing his skin while Geoff protested loudly, sounding much farther away than he really was. Jack pulled him all the way to the pantry along the sticky trail left behind by the coach’s wound, and it coated Ed’s back and hair with morbid warmth.
“I’ll say when it’s time to go,” Jack said. “It isn’t even twelve o’clock yet.” Then he kicked Ed in the face and brought a merciful end to the excruciating pain in his arm.