11 HOSTAGE NEGOTIATION FOR DUMMIES
Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is the crappiest of all ways to die. Of course, it’s never really about one time and one place. It’s about the getting there.
Had Alma and Lowell not met some fifty years before, their daughter Barb would not have ordered an anniversary cake at the last minute, I would have locked up early, and some luckless bastard behind the cash at Doug’s Liquor would be staring the Sophomore Slayer in the face instead of me.
Had my father not done what he did, I might have become an astrophysicist instead of a soda jerk.
Had Mom not hauled us out of Hillsdale, I might still be living at the house on Appleton, working Dad’s candy business or Mom’s Christmas Cottage crap.
Or maybe I’d be into my second decade of pushing up daisies in Parchment Hill Cemetery.
Whatever, the punk hadn’t listened to much I’d had to say. Perhaps I could get through to him with the kindly advisor schtick. “If you’re going to rob an ice cream parlor, use your head. Look at it out there. It’s coming down in buckets. The sky’s falling. Nobody’s eating ice cream today. There’s nothing in the till. Come back when it clears. Tomorrow. Next week.”
“Don’t diss me, man. Nobody disses me, man.” Why he felt the need to say everything twice I do not know. I also had the feeling he’d never used diss before.
“I’m not dissing you,” I said, never having used the word before, either.
He sandwiched the gun between two palms and, once more, extended his arms, turning his wrists until the gun was parallel to floor and ceiling. Shooting me sideways would be way cooler than straight on.
He calmed, his grin fixed. “It’s not the money I come for, anyway.”
Thunder bellowed with a ferocity better reserved for the end of the world. Lightning illuminated the fissures. The lights of Loony Scoops winked and blinked.
“I come for you, Butcherboy.”
“Ah, Jesus.”
“I hear you’re some scary piece of work, huh? Like you iced a bunch of clowns or something? Like some Cannibal Lecture or something?”
Butcherboy. Brittle Butcher. Ah, jeez, just what I needed. “That’s not me,” I said.
“Yeah. Right. And this here’s a water pistol. It’s my turn now, amigo. I’m the one they’re gonna talk about. Because the only news bigger than Cannibal Lecture is the guy who offed Cannibal Lecture.”
“You’re confusing me with my father,” I said. “Also, it’s Hannibal Lecter.”
He shut one eye, puckered up like he might blow me a kiss, grunted a multisyllabic “Fuck,” shut the open eye, and fired.