Oil kept to a minimum.
Just as he’d asked.
They were perfect.
She grinned at him.
He could not let this stand.
George was not here to talk him down. Ariel was not here, to be at his side whether he wanted her there or not. The memory of Mike’s body being put into a white coroner’s van and George’s body being lifted into the back of an ambulance and Dean Charles’s body lying sprawled on the pavement mixed together, bled into each other like the songs on Dustin Daye, and from that neon-lit, heat-stroked Hell Felix Gogo told him to know his role and a sniper in a suit reloaded his rifle and three fratboys laughed behind his back and the waitress gave him perfect Greek potatoes and said it was no problem.
He was a mass of clanging alarms and trapped terrors, and just like that he broke.
It was a quiet breakage.
He said, with sweat sparkling on his cheeks and forehead, “Ma’am?” Whose voice was that? He didn’t know it. He was aware of the other waitress, standing again at the kitchen door to watch.
Well…it was showtime.
“Ma’am?” Nomad said again. “There’s something in my food.”
“What?”
He picked up the platter of Greek potatoes and slid out of the booth with a slow, smooth motion, and he said, “Your fucking face,” in a mild matter-of-fact tone before he grasped the back of her head and pushed the platter into her stunned mug.
She shouldn’t have screamed as she did, like a wild animal. She shouldn’t have reached out and clawed at his face and kicked at his shins. Because he would’ve thrown down a tenner and walked out, but with lines of blood rising from the scratches on his left cheek and one of his shins nearly cracked he also gave an animalish roar and shoved her away from him, and she fell back over a table and chair and went down on the floor still screaming.
The three stooges should not have jumped him from behind, either. They should not have tried to catch his arms and pin them at his sides and drop him to the floor by kicking his legs out from under him. All that just made Nomad punch loose from them, pick up a chair and start swinging. “Come on, man! Come on!” shouted one of the guys, but whether he was wanting Nomad to stop fighting or to advance on him was unknown, because the chair crunched him across the left shoulder, he grabbed at his injury and scuttled away and he didn’t say much after that.
The middle-aged man fled with his book. The other waitress was screaming Call the cops! Call the cops! The waitress with lightly-oiled Greek potatoes on her face came rushing at Nomad with a dinner knife raised in a stabbing position, and Nomad in his red rictus of rage got the chair between them and drove her back across another table. “Jesus Christ! Stop it!” someone shouted, and Nomad saw the cook standing in the kitchen door. Then the bravest or most stupid of the young men caught him around the neck from behind and tried to wrestle him to the floor. Nomad dropped the chair and thrashed like a maniac to get loose. The blood was pounding in his head and dark spots swirled before his eyes. He gave the guy an elbow shot in the ribs, followed up with another one that drew a grunt of pain, and then he broke free, turned around and swung a right fist that popped a jaw crooked. A second punch to the face ended the discussion because the guy ran for the door holding a bloody mouth.
It might have finished there, if the waitress had not thrown the ketchup bottle at Nomad’s head.
“Fuck you, you motherfucker!” she shrieked just before she threw it, giving Nomad enough time to dodge it and save his skull, but the bottle crashed through the front window. Then Nomad, who heard George’s voice in his head begging him to stop but who was now locked into what seemed almost a catharsis of hallucinatory violence, picked up another chair and threw it at her, and she ducked down as it passed overhead. The chair crashed into the Argo, the painted ship upon the painted sea, and knocked a plate-sized hole in the mural’s wall just above the waterline.
Two seconds after that, the cook came out of the kitchen holding the pistol.
He was red-faced and shaking and he held the gun out toward Nomad with his finger on the trigger and he bellowed, “I’ll shoot you, you sonofabitch! I’ll—”
Nomad only had an instant in which to flinch, because then the bullet had sizzled through the air past his left ear and followed the ketchup bottle through the glass onto East Congress. The cook was looking at the pistol with horror, as if he were grasping a spitting cobra. Nomad staggered to the side, against the booth he’d been occupying, as he saw the cook bringing the gun back to bear on him.
“Don’t move!” the cook shouted, but by then the coffee cup that Nomad had thrown was on its way, and as the man lifted an arm to deflect it he—by accident or by intention—fired again.
The bullet punched a neat round hole in the booth’s red vinyl seat. Nomad saw the pistol’s barrel searching for him. In either desperation or madness he picked something else up from the table and flung it and the lump of healing crystal hit the cook smack on the collarbone, causing him to stagger back against the wounded Argo.
Nomad attacked. He propelled himself at the cook with his head down and his shoulders ready for collision. He was his own bullet.
Before Nomad got to his target, the waitress on the floor grabbed at his legs and tripped him up. Still, his momentum was enough to hurl him forward, and before the cook could get the pistol between them Nomad hit him so hard they almost crashed straight through the Argo into ancient Greece, or at least the kitchen. They fought face-to-face, the cook trying to get the gun in position and Nomad trying to pin the gunhand. Then Nomad head-butted him and suddenly all the fight jumped out of the other man, his fingers opened and Nomad was holding the pistol.
“Run! Run!” the cook shouted, as he—a truly brave soul—tried to push Nomad back so the waitress could get out. She ran for her life, trailing a shriek, and then the cook let go of Nomad’s shirt and he ran too.
And then Nomad was alone in the Argonaut with three lines of blood on his face and a gun in his hand.
He heard the sirens coming.
His fire had diminished, but it was not yet embers. He put the pistol down on a table and listened to the sirens. Music, of a sort. Ariel could do something with this situation. She could write it out so you could feel the pain and frustration and sadness as if you were living it yourself. Because, really and truthfully, she was so much better a songcrafter than he.
Now there were red and blue lights spinning out on East Congress, beyond the broken window. He didn’t know how many police cars were out there, but it looked like a cop convention. He could hear people shouting. Heard what might have been the voice of that damned bitch of a waitress, raised to ear-breaking decibels.
He had been a bad, bad boy.
“Oh my God,” he said, and though he did not believe in God, who were you gonna call on when the shit hit the fan?
A bullhorn spoke from the street: “Attention in there! Throw your firearm out the window and come to the door with your hands locked behind your head! Nobody’s going to get hurt!”
Nomad just stared at the busted wall and the broken mural, as his shadow danced in a world of red and blue spinning lights. Poor fucked-up Jason, he thought. Standing at that mast, directing a ship that never moved. Believing he was actually going somewhere, getting closer to a golden fleece.
He thought he would put Jason and the other Argonauts out of their misery.
The bullhorn repeated its message, but this time it left out the last line.
Nomad picked up a chair and began to demolish the mural and destroy the wall. When that chair broke to pieces he picked up another one and kept on knocking holes in Jason’s stupid dream. With the breaking of the second chair he picked up a third, and this was hard work now, very hard, but he was determined to finish what he’d begun, he wasn’t a quitter, no way Dean and Michelle Charles had raised a quitter, and so he was still working hard when the two small torpedo-shaped canisters came through the window and he didn’t even turn around, he didn’t even care because he was involved in his emancipation of Jason, and when the gas swirled up around him like purple snakes and his skin began to burn and his eyes involuntarily shut tight because they were full of wet fire he kept swinging in the dark because it was all he knew how to do.