The café suddenly felt quite silent.
“Why are you chasing me?” Evan asked.
“Why are you running?” the plainclothes officer said.
“Because you’re chasing me.”
“We had an incident a few blocks away,” she said.
“An incident.”
“That’s right. And then I saw you switching your hat.”
The two uniformed cops unholstered their Glocks. They didn’t aim at Evan, not yet, keeping the muzzles pointed at the floor. An ice cube crunched under one of their boots.
Evan looked at the three cops facing him down. “So that’s why you’re all here? Because I changed hats?”
“Why would you do a thing like that?” the woman said.
“The Nationals need some heart-of-the-order bats,” he said. “I decided the Orioles are a stronger bet for the postseason.”
“And you decided this in the middle of E and Eleventh?”
He liked her.
“I did,” he said. “And while I know that civil liberties have been under assault by the current administration, I would think you could overlook an epiphany regarding the national pastime.”
The amusement went out of her eyes. “Why don’t we stop fucking around?” she said.
Evan took another sip of the tea. Hot, not scalding. “I’d like that.”
“I’m gonna tell you what’s gonna happen next,” she said.
“No,” Evan said. “I’m gonna tell you what’s gonna happen next.”
He was still tilted back in his chair, casual as could be, but beneath the table he pressed his foot to its base. The uniformed cops were holding their Glocks too stiffly, seams of white showing at their knuckles. The muzzles were now aimed halfway between the tips of their boots and Evan’s table.
“You’re gonna let me walk out of here,” Evan said.
One of the male cops laughed, and the female officer blinked twice. “Or?” she said.
“I’m gonna throw salt in your eyes at the precise instant I kick this table over. While you’re busy blinking, the table’s gonna hit you”—Evan’s gaze flicked to the cop in the middle—“right in the solar plexus. That’ll knock your gun to the side. Maybe you’ll fire it into your partner’s leg. Maybe not. Either way he’s gonna be distracted, because I’m gonna throw this overpriced latte in his face. Around then, when you’re all scrambling to react, you’ll notice just how slippery those wet tiles are that you’re standing on.”
He turned his focus to the cop on the right. “I’m gonna come over the top of the table, swinging my chair, clipping your wrists, which’ll knock away your Glock — if you’ve managed to hold on to it by that point. Then I’m in your midst. Which means — even if you could see, even if you still had your weapons — you wouldn’t be able to fire at me without hitting one another.”
Back to the cop in the middle: “You’ll be doubled over on the floor at this point, because … well, we’ve already covered that. I’m gonna break your nose as cleanly as I can with a quick left jab to make sure you don’t get your vision back anytime soon. Let me apologize in advance for that. I know you’re just doing your job. Then, with my right foot, I’m gonna kick you into her”—his gaze slid to the plainclothes officer—“while she’s still clawing at the salt in her eyes.”
“But you’re not gonna break my nose,” she said, “because you’re chivalrous.”
Evan gave a one-shoulder shrug of assent. Then continued, “After you three are tangled up and useless, it’ll take me four and a half strides to reach the end of the rear hall, where your backup’s waiting. The mirrored side of the espresso maker there on the service counter’s giving me a nice clear reflection of the back door with the frosted pane. Your boy with the extra Y chromosome is throwing a shadow from the hinge side. He’s holding his service pistol too far from his body, so when I kick the door open, it’s gonna knock it back into his teeth. He’ll go down hard, because that’s what muscleheads do. The veteran cop on the other side I’ll take down gently with a chicken-wing arm control, but I won’t break anything, because: respect. Before they can recover, I’m gonna bolt up the alley and disappear into the rear entrance of one of the shops that I scouted earlier, but I won’t tell you which one, because I don’t want to be predictable, and let’s face it, at this point that would be gilding the lily.”
He lowered the giant mug to the top of his stomach, and all three cops inadvertently tensed. Their hands were too tight on the grips, and too tight meant tremors and imprecision. Evan was unarmed, and his body language was so unaggressive it verged on soothing, a dissonance they clearly found blindingly bewildering.
Evan scanned the three officers, frozen where they stood. “So, guys. What’s it gonna be?”
In answer, all three muzzles raised to aim at him.
“Okay, then.” Evan adjusted his grip around the mug, readied his loose fist around the salt, firmed his foot against the table base. “Are we ready?”
5
A Not-Unfamiliar Coldness
The park bench by the artificial pond looked like a movie prop, set at an artful slant beneath a Rockwellian maple tree. In the pond a family of plump ducks paddled by, ignoring the embarrassment of bread crumbs on the shore.
The man sitting on the bench was clean-shaven, save for a patch of hoary stubble at the point of his jaw. His once-rugged face had crumbled under gravity, giving him jowls. His eyes were a touch milky, his still-brawny forearms liver-spotted.
Jogging at a pace just shy of a sprint, Naomi Templeton took note of the bench from a good distance out and decided to accelerate until she passed it. Racer-back tank top over a jog bra, black running tights, sports headphones blaring Alicia Keys — all designed to make her run faster, go harder, be better. This girl is on fire.
She crossed the finish line of the bench and leaned over, hands on knees, taking a few minutes to recover. Then she circled the bench, sat on the end opposite the old man, and flipped out her earbuds.
As she caught her breath, the old man looked over at her, gave a double take. “You remind me of my daughter.”
She said, “Is that so?”
“Yeah, she’s sturdy like you. And don’t go getting offended. I mean well built, not fat.”
“Noted.”
“Her brothers are fit, too. Athletes, both of them. Lacrosse. You shoulda seen their muscles when they came home from college. Put me to shame — me in my prime, I mean. I think she was always trying to keep up.”
Naomi leaned forward. A breeze blew across her bare shoulders, turning her drying sweat pleasingly cool. “Girls’ll do that.”
“Yeah, especially with her mother gone early.” His trembling fingers found the cross nestled in the gray chest hair visible below the notch of his throat. His shirt was buttoned wrong, misaligned. He shivered a little. “She’s a tough one, my daughter. Always tried to please me, I think.”
Naomi stared at the water. “Girls’ll do that, too.”
“She never learned that you can’t ever please anyone by trying to please them.”
“That’s a tough lesson to learn, I guess.”
For a moment they sat and watched the breeze ripple the pond’s surface. It was faux idyllic here, which made it easy to disregard the countless TVs blaring too loud from countless windows in the industrial block of a building set behind the strip of artificial turf, the wheelchair platform lift waiting at the base of the stairs, the direct-care specialists — all lovely, all patient, all ethnic — heading back from their breaks along the gently sloped walkways. All you had to do was squint a little, breathe the fresh air, and you could pretend you were in the real world, that everything was okay.