Chapter 8
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Chapter 8: Six
He could see his destination across the road now: a ridiculously small café crammed between a clothing store and a law firm. Fifteen feet wide at most. It was where BB's sister - Angie - worked. The man had known her since his college days back in Atlanta with Carlo. Was Carlo still alive? And what ever happened to Bob?
The man crossed the street and opened the door to the cafe. Unnoticed behind him was a wildly swerving tractor-trailer hauling a load of Chinese microwave ovens up from Nashville, the squealing tires leaving long, acrid-smelling black streaks across the hot pavement, the outraged trucker screaming hoarsely as his grip on the wheel slipped. Angie looked up, and her jaw dropped.
"Grant?" she said. Shade let his latte drop back to its saucer, looked at this Grant standing at the entrance of his very own ‘o.k. café’ showdown. A white microwave oven, its open door flailing, crashed against the battered newspaper kiosk outside, its shattered plastic shards rattling gently against the café window.
Shade wondered what she was to him, if he was anything to her and if either would ever rotate back into his world after he stood up, walked out and tipped the pair back into whatever story book he was about to leave behind. He stood up and shuffled out between the too close tables, fixing Grant with a bitter stare on his way through. His lungs gulped for the first hit of Indian summer air. He felt he was sweating from the inside out. He squeezed his eyes tight shut for a moment, then moved off down the sidewalk, fumbling his cell phone free from his sweat-sticky pants pocket. He was pushing digits on his cell, stepping over the scattered microwave ovens, when it flashed in his mind again...
…a faraway place where the dragons sleep where nobody has a care, where there are ice cream mountains and champagne fountains and… He shook his head.. ..concentrate.. she’s about to… The line on the end of his cell was buzzing. It buzzed, it answered, lipstick and perfume and cold indifference puffed out the speaker like a little black storm cloud into Shade's face. He pictured her in the back of the limo, stroking that infernal dead pet, squeezing the hearts of men.
"Well?" "He just showed up" And the simpering Cinderella waiting for him?
"She'd been waiting for three hours. She looked happy"
Good. He's the last one. For you, you’re done. Go back to your cheating wife.
Shade flipped his phone shut, leant on a wall and looked down at his hands. A tiny, scabbed over puncture wound on the end of his thumb flickered at him like the first star. He squeezed it hard against his forefinger. Pressure built, his thumb reddened, the pinprick popped, a droplet of blood bloomed.
In the cafe, a painful silence hung in the air, a silence more deafening than the roar of the F15s engines that Grant was so used to. Disbelief was a thick cloud that obstructed the view between Grant and Angie.
"We thought you were dead! Where in the world have you been?"
Her voice was raised a couple of octaves, shrill, and penetrating the thick, smog-laden afternoon air.
Then silence. A deafening silence. She was trembling - from happiness or disbelief? Grant could not tell. He was never a man of many words. He had missed her, yet he didn't know what to say.
And then the gunshot. The gunshot that haunts his dreams even now. It rang through the thick afternoon air, which until now had been filled with the buzz of human voices making small talk in that small cafe.
Time slowed: it was as if he could see the bullet, its smooth trajectory, its merciless bite. And yet it happened in a split-second.
The briefest of silence, after the gun shot and before all hell broke loose.
Pandora's Box had been opened. And like a microwave oven with the door wrenched off in a high-speed impact with a parking meter, there was no way the lid could be put back on again.
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