The three collected their toiletries, invaded the restaurant's washrooms, ordered breakfasts, and met back at the van, bags of food in hand. The men climbed into the front seats while Julia took her position facing the laptop. Immediately she began clicking away, taking bites out of a biscuit whenever the computer paused to perform a command. The aroma of Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and coffee quickly usurped the odor of old cigars as the van's dominant smell.
"Okay," she said after a few minutes.
Allen tossed her a quick glance, then turned his full attention to her when he noticed that she was sawing her top incisors over her bottom lip. He wondered if she'd have much of a lip left when this thing was over.
"Ready to see what's on that memory chip Vero left?"
Allen thought she was trying to sound optimistic. Truth was, they were all hoping for something that probably didn't exist: an easy answer to their dilemma—
Stephen choked on his coffee. It spewed from his mouth and into the forest of his beard as he snatched at a pile of napkins and slammed them over his mouth. He turned his watery eyes toward her.
"I'll take that as a yes," she said, popping the cables from the back of the laptop and positioning it on the chair behind Allen so all of them could see. She collapsed the van's pseudo-table as though she'd been doing it a long time, put it on the floor at her feet, then turned back to the laptop. The fifteen-inch screen was black except for a palette of five colorful buttons hovering in the lower right corner.
Allen recognized the symbols on the buttons from audio-cassette players: a triangle with the acute angle facing right for PLAY; a triangle pointing left for rewind; two vertical lines for PAUSE; and a square for STOP. The fifth symbol he didn't recognize; it looked like the circle and crosshairs of a rifle scope.
Julia moved a cursor over the palette of buttons.
Something struck the van.
Her pistol appeared in her hand so quickly, Allen wondered if it had always been there. As for himself, he might not have even noticed the sound, had Julia not moved so urgently. Before he realized it, his head was between his knees. He steeled himself for the windshield's inevitable shattering under the impact of the next round. His mind filled with things he wanted to yell out:
But he heard Stephen's words first: "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" He was leaning almost out of the chair to stop Julia's movement toward the sliding door. "The door lock, Julia!" he said. "I just locked the doors." He reached his hand back and toggled the switch twice:
She stared at him in disbelief, whether at Stephen's actions or her own, Allen couldn't tell.
"It
She settled back in her chair, calmly slipping the weapon under her blazer. "It's okay," she said, closing her eyes. "Bit jumpy."
Her lips stretched into a fat grin; then her eyes snapped open. "Told you I was raring to go." She reached out to the computer and clicked play.
fifty-six
The black man emerged from a doorway set in a whitewashed wall. With a perfectly round head and pencil-thin body, he resembled an upside-down exclamation point. He wore blue jeans, which were mostly white and hung loosely on his narrow hips, and a threadbare flannel shirt, buttoned tight at the neck. Dangling from the tips of three fingers was a beat-up metal lunch box, the kind kids toted to school in the sixties. Whatever had decorated it—images of the Brady Bunch, Speed Racer, or King Kong—had long since faded and chipped away. After appraising the sky, he started up the unpaved street, his heavy boots kicking up little plumes of dust. He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. A big smile broke like a crescent moon on a starless night. He raised his unencumbered hand and yelled,
"What's that? What'd he say?" Allen didn't take his eyes off the screen.
Julia shook her head. Stephen said, "Shhh." All three had rotated their captain's chairs to face the laptop. By now, each was leaning forward—even Allen, whose nonchalant posture had succumbed to intense curiosity around the time the man on the screen had assessed the sky for rain. If the McDonald's restaurant suddenly exploded, it was doubtful the three people in the blue conversion van would have noticed—except maybe to turn up the volume on the computer they encircled.
From the left side of the monitor, another man came into view, dressed in equally depreciated clothes, carrying a stained paper sack. He said something unintelligible and clapped the first man on his back. As the two continued on, the camera jerked and followed, wobbling with the camera operator's hurried gait.
