Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [146]
Beside me, Lionel’s breathing was very shallow. His hands, flat on the table, were completely still. One of Ryerson’s hands dropped below the table, and one of Angie’s did as well.
Popeye hit one of the darts throwers on the back of the spine with his fist. “Down! On the floor. Hands behind your head. Do it. Do it. Do it now!”
Both men dropped to their knees and began locking their hands behind their necks. Popeye looked at them, his head cocked. It was an awful moment, filled with the worst sort of possibility. Whatever Popeye decided, he could do. Shoot them, shoot us, cut their throats. Whatever.
He kicked the older of the two in the base of the spine.
“Not on your knees. On your stomachs. Now.”
The men dropped to their stomachs by my feet.
Popeye turned his head very slowly, stopped on our table.
“Hands on the damn table,” he whispered. “Or you fucking die.”
Ryerson withdrew his hand from under the table, held both empty palms to the air, then placed them flat on the wood. Angie did the same.
Casper came up to the bar across from us. He leveled the shotgun at the bartender.
Two middle-aged women, office workers or secretaries by the looks of their clothes, sat in the middle of the bar directly in front of Casper. When he extended the shotgun, it brushed the hair of one of the women. Her shoulders tensed and her head jerked to the left. Her companion moaned.
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