When Hendricks was twenty paces away, Stanton shouted, “Hey, dipshit-not so fast.”
Hendricks tensed. Reddened. Turned. Those near enough to hear Stanton turned too, their gazes focused on Hendricks once more. A few placed their hands on their guns. Hendricks broke out in a nervous sweat.
“What now?” he asked, as casually as possible.
Stanton smiled like a grand master declaring checkmate and waved something at Hendricks. “You forgot your phone.”
Hendricks didn’t have to feign embarrassment; his rattled nerves made his performance as convincing as it was effortless. He jogged over to Stanton and took his phone. Once he had it, he set off walking west-toward the nearest off-ramp, toward anywhere but here.
26.
YANCEY SET HIS items on the counter beside the register and flashed the teenage girl behind it a smile. She was young, pretty, and Somali. Her skin was light brown. Her hair was hidden beneath a vibrant head scarf of orange and pink. Her clothes were otherwise indiscernible from any reasonably modest Western teen’s. She was chewing gum and texting someone as he approached, thumbs flying across her cell phone’s screen. But when she turned her attention to him, her face went immediately expressionless. “That it?” she said, eyeing the items he’d set down, her tone bored, her accent Californian.
“Actually, little lady, I’d also love a book of matches, if you please.” He cranked up the wattage on his smile and threw in a wink for good measure.
The girl snapped her gum, rolled her eyes, and rang him up. Then she grabbed some matchbooks from beneath the counter and tossed them in the general direction of his bag, her eyes glued once more to her cell phone’s screen. A couple of the matchbooks landed inside. The others missed. One bounced off Yancey and landed at his feet.
The smile died on Yancey’s face. He snatched the cell phone from her hand and launched it across the room. It ricocheted off a magazine rack and shattered when it hit the floor.
“Hey!” the girl exclaimed. “What the-”
Yancey flipped aside his sport coat to reveal the wooden grip of his revolver. The girl’s eyes widened and she shrank a little behind the counter. Her chin quivered as tears threatened.
“T-t-take whatever you want, just please don’t hurt me.”
“I ain’t gonna hurt you, honey-I’m one of the good guys. I keep this country safe so people like your folks can pour across our borders and take advantage of our social services. But I draw the line at letting ’em raise their kids to be spoiled brats. If you’re gonna live here, you better learn to show some goddamn respect.”
He fished his wallet from his pocket and tossed a twenty on the counter. “Ditch the scarf and use the change to buy a baseball cap,” he said. “This is America, for Christ’s sake.” Then he snatched up his bag and headed for the door.
The air outside the convenience store smelled of exhaust. Yancey lit a cigarette on his way across the parking lot and then waited at the curb for the traffic to clear. Once it did, he jogged across the street to the mosque.
The place didn’t look like any mosque he’d ever seen. There were no domes. No minarets. No ornamentation of any kind besides the banner hanging off the roof with lettering in Arabic. It was just a squat, ugly commercial building that used to be a second-run movie theater-though the letters had been removed, the words DAYMARK CINEMA were still faintly visible in negative on the building’s dingy facade-in a commercial stretch of Daly City, ten miles south of San Francisco.
Today, the mosque was closed. Its expansive lot-sun-bleached and in need of repaving, tufts of crabgrass sprouting through the cracks-was nearly empty. The only vehicles were his rental, a plum-colored Cadillac ATS; two unmarked Bellum Industries Humvees, identifiable as Bellum’s only by their license plates, BI23 and BI27; and a green late-1980s Chrysler LeBaron with a Bondo’d front-right fender that likely belonged to the imam. Two Bellum men, both thickset and clad in sleek black body armor, flanked the front entrance.
Yancey headed toward the door. One of the men opened it for him before he arrived. He stepped inside, exhaling smoke, and looked around.
They hadn’t done much with the place since its movie-theater days. Same carpets, same walls, same lights. The concession stand was dark, its glass case empty. There was a set of shelves beside the door for shoes, a couple pairs left on it, even though the imam was the only one here. Yancey wondered how the fuck somebody managed to walk out without his shoes. These people were a mystery to him.
He kept his on.
The lone theater had been converted into a prayer hall, its seats removed, its floor recarpeted but not leveled so it still sloped gently toward the curtained screen. Its entrance was to the left of the concession stand. Yancey headed right, to the imam’s office-originally the theater manager’s-and went in without knocking.
The imam was inside, zip-tied to a folding chair.
His desk-metal, institutional, painted antacid green decades before and left to flake-was shoved against the wall, as was the thrift-store office chair that normally sat behind it. Office chairs were lousy for interrogations. Always rolling away or slowly spinning around. They blunted the force of a good punch, and made it hard to intimidate the subject by walking in and out of his field of view.
The imam was in his early forties, tall and thin, with long limbs and delicate hands. He had a well-trimmed beard, black flecked with white, and wore a loose-fitting white button-down with no collar, a white skullcap, and gray trousers. His wire-rimmed glasses rested on his desk blotter. An oozing cut split his right eyebrow. His face showed anger. His feet were bare.
Yancey schlepped his grocery bag across the room and set it on the floor where the imam could see it. “He give you any more trouble since we last spoke?” he asked the black-clad man who leaned against the desk cleaning his fingernails with a carbon-steel tactical knife. Another Bellum man stood, silent, in the corner of the office behind the imam.
“No, sir. He hasn’t said a word.”
“Good.” Then, to the imam: “I hear you gave my boys quite a fight.”
The imam said something in reply but too quietly for Yancey to hear.
“What was that?”
“I said you cannot smoke in here. It is a place of worship.” His voice was calm. Quiet. Full of rage and hurt, well mastered.
Yancey took a good, long drag. Let the smoke flow freely from his mouth. Inhaled it through his nose. Held it, savoring. Then blew it out again, smiling. “Seems to me, I can smoke in here just fine. And anyway, from where I’m standing, this place looks more like a porno theater than a place of worship. Now, you wanna tell me why you went all Taliban on my boys when they came knocking?”
“I did no such thing. I merely attempted to flee. When one is Muslim in America, one learns to be distrustful of masked men with guns. Given the proximity of their arrival to yesterday’s tragedy, I surmised-correctly, it appears-that they were here in a misguided attempt to lay blame for this horrible attack at my feet.”
“Seems to me that distrust cuts both ways,” Yancey said. “We wouldn’t come knocking if you people would stop attacking us on our own soil.”
“The soil is as much mine as yours,” the imam replied. “And I resent the implication that I am anything like the men who did this. Those men are zealots, savages, lost souls corrupted by leaders whose teachings are an affront to the true message of the Koran. I am not like them. I am a man of faith. A pacifist. Neither I nor Allah condone what happened yesterday.”
“A damn shame those savages look so much like you, then.”
“On that,” the imam replied, “I do not disagree. Although I hasten to point out that I am not the one to resort to violence today. These restraints are unnecessary. Perhaps you’d consider removing them and having your men wait outside so that we two may continue this discussion in a civilized manner.”