Who showed up in a limo?
Okay, maybe it wasn’t a limo limo. It wasn’t half a block long and the windows weren’t all blacked out. She could see the driver, at least. A heavyset woman, looking at her phone. It looked like one of those cars that people who didn’t have to bum rides from their friends took to the airport.
She approached the man, now scanning the menu he had taken out from between the paper napkin dispenser and a ketchup bottle.
“Coffee?”
“Um, yeah,” the man said, smiling.
He seemed to be looking at her chest. That would hardly make him unique. Half the men she served could never get their eyes above the tit line.
“Chloe?” he said.
Oh, okay, he was reading her name tag. Once he’d read it, he looked her in the face.
“At your service,” she said. “I’ll get your coffee.”
He looked like he was about to say something else but she’d already turned on her heel. Within a minute she was back with a white ceramic mug of coffee.
“Put enough cream and sugar in it and it’s even drinkable,” she said. “Know what you want?”
“How are the pancakes?”
“Flat.”
The man chuckled. “Just the way I like them. I’ll have those and a side of bacon.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Thank you, Chloe,” he said.
A little too much emphasis on her name, she thought, walking away. Like he enjoyed saying the word. Was that weird?
She thought of Anthony Hopkins saying Clarice. Yeah, kinda like that. Making your name sound like it was coming out of a sewer grate.
She put in the order, turned her attention to a single mom who brought along her toddler for a late breakfast once a week, then cleared dishes from another table.
Before the pancakes were ready, she delivered a bottle of syrup and some extra pats of butter, each in their own sealed container, to the guy. Before she could turn away, he cleared his throat again to get her attention.
“Do you have a second?” he asked.
“You wanna change your order?”
“No. I just wanted to ask, have you worked here long?”
“About a year.”
“Like it?”
“I’m just here till some big-time movie director comes in and discovers me. I’m gonna go check on your—”
He reached out and grabbed her arm before she could walk away. “Hang on a second,” he said.
She looked at the hand on her arm and quickly wrenched it away. “Hands off, mister.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But I was wondering—”
This dude was creeping her out. Shoot him a lie and shut this down. “Let me help you out here. I have a boyfriend, and even if I didn’t, you’re old enough to be my daddy.”
The man chuckled. “I don’t know about that.”
Chloe departed before he could say anything else. She’d been hit on before — like, maybe every single fucking day — but it was usually by guys closer to her age. Sure, you had some dirty old men, guys who probably couldn’t get it up if you rubbed your boobs right in their face, but that didn’t stop them from pinching your ass as you walked by.
The other waitresses, who’d been at it longer than her, said things were better than they once were. The message was slowly getting through, even to the Neanderthals, that you couldn’t pull that kind of shit.
She sidled up next to Vivian, who was working the cash register and had been at Paradise for pretty close to twenty years now, and said, “Seen that guy in here before?”
Vivian shot him a look. “Maybe. Might be a professor from Brown, wanting to mix it up with the common folk. Could be we’re part of a research project.”
“You seen the black car out front?”
Vivian took a step away from the register to get a better look. “Hmm,” she said. “Forget the professor thing. I say he’s a reviewer from the Michelin guide. This is the big break we’ve been waiting for. Hey, you find a credit card the other day? Someone phoned, was asking.”
Chloe said no.
The pancakes were up. As she was heading to the table something outside caught her eye. The limo driver was outside the car, and opening the back door for someone. So maybe this guy wasn’t—
“Looks delicious,” the man said as Chloe set the plate in front of him.
“Can I get you anything else? Need a refill on your coffee?”
“Maybe in a second.” He looked into his mug. “Still got half a cup. Warm it up in a couple minutes.”
“Sure.”
Behind her, she heard the bell on the door jingle again.
The man tipped his head back, looked her square in the face, and said, “I hope I didn’t get off on the wrong foot before.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I was here before but you didn’t wait on me. I’m glad it was you this time.”
That was when he ran his hand up her leg.
“Jesus!” Chloe shrieked, jumping back.
And then she screamed because something very horrible happened to the man’s face. It appeared to explode, to erupt in blood.
Except it wasn’t blood. It was ketchup, streaming at him from a squeeze bottle being held by another man who seemed to have come out of nowhere.
“What the fuck!” said the man in the booth, wiping ketchup from his eyes.
Chloe whirled around, saw someone else standing there, the man who had seconds earlier gotten out of the limo. He was holding the ketchup container, ready to take another shot if need be. There was something slightly off about him. His head was rocking slightly on his neck, like he had some sort of palsy or something.
“Leave her the fuck alone,” he said.
“Get out,” Chloe added.
The man in the booth grabbed a wad of paper napkins from the chrome dispenser and wiped his face as he shifted his butt to the end of the bench and exited the booth. He looked ready to fight back, but then he caught sight of Vivian, closing the distance between them, an iron skillet in her hand. She had it raised, like it weighed no more than a balloon.
Holding up his hands in a gesture of peace, ketchup-smeared napkins clutched in his fingers, he said, “Okay, okay, I’m going.”
Once he was out the door, he made a sharp left, and did not head toward the black limo. He got into a Civic parked just beyond it and drove off.
Chloe, rattled, took the ketchup bottle from the second man’s hand and set it back on the table he’d grabbed it from.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No problem,” he said.
“Who the hell are you?”
The man hesitated before replying. “My name is Miles,” he blurted, “and I think I’m your dad.”
Nineteen
New Rochelle, NY
Something was not right with Dr. Martin Gold.
His assistant, Julie Harkin, noticed he’d been acting strangely for several days. Showing up late to the office, leaving early. Canceling appointments with almost no notice, yet not leaving the building. He’d just sit behind his desk, staring at his computer screen.
Julie knew he was drinking more. She believed he was keeping a bottle of something in his desk, because more than once, when he’d come out to ask her a question or hand her something to be filed, she could smell alcohol on his breath. And he was glassy-eyed. One morning, she’d been able to smell booze on him when he first arrived, like he was skipping coffee and having vodka shots with his bacon and eggs.
Gold had always enjoyed a drink, but in all the years Julie had worked for him she had never seen him this way. Good thing he wasn’t a surgeon, she thought. You wouldn’t want this guy cutting into you.
At first, she was worried that somehow his erratic behavior had something to do with her.