the gun to steady it. It rocks back and forth as he tries to draw a bead on my face. It’s unnerving as hell. “I can shoot you and take it from you,” he says.
I put the phone on the counter. It’s still ringing. Caller ID says it’s Maggie.
“You lied,” he says.
“Please, I’m begging you, don’t take my phone. I need it,” I say, looking at the display. I haven’t spoken to Maggie in ten years.
The door to the bar opens behind him and my robber for the evening spins and around and takes a shot, the bullet lodging into the doorframe between a man and a woman walking in. They stare in our direction looking at the gun, then the man dives to the floor and the woman turns and runs back outside. I grab at the shooter’s arm but I’m not quick enough. He points the gun at my face.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
He pulls the trigger. The gun clicks and nothing happens, and he looks at the gun then looks at his hand and tries to figure out what the problem is, and whatever answer he comes up with he doesn’t share, because he grabs my phone off the counter and bolts for the door. I watch him go, unable to move, listening to the sound that gun made over and over inside my head, not just listening to it, but feeling it, the same way you feel a dentist drill you hear operating on another patient. I put both hands on the bar to keep myself from falling over. All the strength has drained out of my legs. He pulled the trigger. He tried to kill me. In another timeline right now another version of me is lying on the floor with a head that doesn’t look like a head anymore.
“You okay?” A guy has come up to the bar, but I can barely hear him because my ears are ringing loudly. I can’t answer him. The guy who dived for the floor a few moments ago gets up and dusts down his suit. He’s completely pale. His color and look reflect my own. In that other timeline he’s lying dead on the floor too.
“Hey, hey, man, you okay?”
I look at the man at the bar talking to me. Feeling comes back into my legs. I let go of the alternate timeline and focus on this one. “I’m fine,” I tell him, my voice low.
“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m fine,” I say, louder this time, then to prove just how fine I am, I say, “Drinks are on the house.” I say it loud enough for everybody to hear. I’m expecting everybody to woohoo, but nobody does.
Suit Guy looks at me, and says, “Okay,” either to this entire situation or to the free drinks. He looks confused. He jams a finger into his ear and waggles it back and forth as if he can pry out the ringing sound. I don’t see him being a repeat customer. “Did that . . . did that just happen?”
“It did.”
“I should . . . I should go find my girlfriend.”
We talk with loud voices so we can be heard. “That sounds like a good idea,” I tell him.
“I . . . I’m not so sure we’ll come back,” he says.
“I won’t hold it against you.”
He heads out in the direction his girlfriend went. I can see her across the street, standing in the doorway of a restaurant. She’s on the phone, no doubt to the police. The guy who approached me asks again if I’m okay. I tell him that I am. And I am. Now.
With the danger over and the police on the way, people go back to the business of drinking. Nobody leaves. Plenty of them have their cellphones out making calls. The ringing in my ears fades. I pour some beers as if what just happened is no big deal. I answer some questions about how scared nervous kickass I was, and then the police show up. They don’t come in guns blazing which means they know the perp has long since gone. It’s a pair of patrol officers, a guy and a woman, who look like they could be brother and sister. Not charismatic, but both nice enough, the kind of people you forget you ever met about fifteen minutes after they’ve gone. I offer them a drink and neither of them look tempted.
I go over the sequence of events. There isn’t much to say. A guy came in, he pointed a gun, and he left with money that wasn’t his. What did he look like? He was thin, wiry, ugly, he looked like he was high, he looked like an asshole, he looked like the kind of guy who’d say things like meth is the breakfast of champions. Could I be more specific? Yeah, he was really ugly. He really looked like an asshole. He was wearing blue jeans and a gray hoodie. Nothing more? No characteristics? How old was he? Did he have tattoos? Scars? I tell them everything happened so quickly and all I really saw was the gun. I tell them that the gun seemed like the biggest thing in the room. It had its own gravity. It was a black hole I couldn’t see beyond.
What about the security cameras? I shake my head. I tell them they haven’t worked in eighteen months. They tell me I should get them fixed. I tell them that’s the plan. They interview others at the bar and ninety minutes later they leave, telling me they’ll update me if they find anything.
I call final drinks and nobody complains because everybody is figuring I deserve an early night. Thirty minutes later I’m locking up the bar. In the office I watch the security footage I told the police I didn’t have and get another good look at the guy. Then I fire up the computer and log in to my phone account and a minute later there’s a blue dot on a map telling me where my phone is. It’s a mile away from here. A fifteen-minute walk, maybe twenty. The dot isn’t moving. I write down the address and grab the gun from under the counter and lock up the bar.
Seven
It’s midnight when I get home. I live on the top floor of an apartment building that’s six stories high, giving me a nice view out over the city. It’s a nice place. It has two bedrooms and an open-plan kitchen flowing into the dining room and lounge. I used the money from the sale of our house back in Acacia Pines to invest in the bar ten years ago, and since then business has been good. There’s a set of French doors that open onto a balcony, the one on the right with a cat door cut into it. My cat, Legolas, a rescue tabby who lost one of his back legs when he was a kitten, spends his days out there, jumping from the balcony onto the oak tree that reaches our floor, coming inside when he’s hungry or tired or wants cuddles. He comes in now and follows me into the bathroom and watches me wash up.
“You hungry, Lego?”
He meows. Yes. He’s hungry.
I fill his bowl and freshen up his water and sit down on the couch with a beer. I use a tea towel to wipe the blood off my cellphone. Then I have a drink and dial the number that reaches out over a thousand miles and takes me back twelve years to the last time I saw her. In the beginning we’d talk on the phone a little. Then she asked for a divorce. Then we sold the house. Then we stopped talking. In a way it was like she had died.
“Hello, Noah,” she says.
The line is so clear it sounds like she’s sitting next to me. I picture her on the couch we used to own in the house we used to own in the life we used to share. How have I let ten years go by without reaching out?
“Hey,” I say. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“I was still awake,” she says. “I’m glad you called. I . . . I wasn’t sure you would.”
“Your message sounded important.” I had listened to it outside the apartment complex where the man who’d stolen my phone lived. Maggie had asked me to call her back as soon as I could, day or night. “I mean . . . I would have called you back even if it hadn’t.”
“It’s good to hear your voice,” she says.
“It’s good to hear yours,” I say, and it is. It really is.
“I’ve often thought of calling you,” she says, and I know that this isn’t a social call. She’s ringing to tell me something. Somebody has died. Either her mom, or her dad, or maybe it’s Sheriff Haggerty, or Drew, or any one of a number of people I used to know. Maybe it’s all of them. Maybe a tornado came and swept everybody from my old life out to sea. “I’ve always hated the way things ended between us.”
“None