My attention was so focused on Twiddledum and Twiddledee that the diner seemed to fade away into a fog. I suppose they were likewise so focused on me that they never noticed that the diner staff had overheard enough to be alarmed. Being the kind of food-service patriots who would stand up for a friend, Hazel Beane’s crew had wordlessly coordinated an intervention on my behalf.
Having drawn a basket of crisp potatoes out of the deep-well fryer, Jill pivoted and threw the hot contents of the basket in Rightie’s face.
Having drawn two sixteen-ounce beers from the draft spigot, ostensibly to put them on the counter for the waitress who requested them, Phil instead splashed the contents of one mug and then the other into the golden eyes of the man on my left, just as the guy on my right got an order of fries that he hadn’t requested. Behind me, I heard Pinkie Krankauer say, “Don’t even think about it,” as she dumped a tray heaped with dirty dishes into the laps of the agents in the booth.
If a week earlier we had been playing a game of What Would You Do, and you had described the Beane’s Diner scenario to me, I would have said that I would most likely spin off my stool, slip and fall on the way to the front door, and be captured by highly agitated ISA agents. Instead, I surprised myself by knocking aside my lunch and scrambling across the counter, availing myself of the cover that it provided. As I stayed low and scuttled past Jill, heading toward the kitchen, she slipped a spatula under a half-done beef patty, scooped it off the griddle, and sailed it into the face of the guy who was still wiping French fries out of his eyes.
In the kitchen were refrigerators and ovens and worktables, as well as Pepe Chavez and Tau Hua. He said, “Quinn, my man,” and she said, “What’s up?”
I said, “Gotta run,” and sprinted past them. At the back door, I snatched a fire extinguisher off its wall mount and threw open the door, expecting machine-gun fire.
The guy in the alley was wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, but he was big and alert. He said, “Hey there, boy-o.”
No normal person calls a stranger “boy-o,” so I figured he was ISA, and I foamed him relentlessly with the fire extinguisher. As he staggered around like Frosty the Snowman dissolving in the Phoenix sunshine, I ran west, carrying the extinguisher just in case I might encounter another overheated federal employee.
|?3?|
On the north side of the alley, behind Dirty Harry Clean Now, the dry cleaner’s van was being loaded with freshened clothes to be returned to customers’ homes. The driver—Juan Santos, who often had lunch at Beane’s Diner—slammed shut the back doors of the van and saw me coming. With the perspicacity of a first-rate deliveryman, he recognized that I was fleeing from a threat, and he waved me toward the passenger side of the vehicle. “Get in, let’s scoot.”
“He’s the law. You’ll get in trouble.”
“I eat trouble for breakfast,” Juan said. “Anyway, he won’t see us.”
I glanced back and discovered that the boy-o in the Hawaiian shirt was staggering away from me, disoriented, temporarily blind, with gobs of fire-suppressant foam cascading from him as if he were a hellhound with rabies. None of the other ISA agents had yet made it out of the diner, where perhaps they continued to be obstructed by barrages of food.
With reluctance, I dropped the fire extinguisher. Defenseless, I clambered into the passenger seat, pulled the door shut, and slid low as Juan started the engine. The air was crisp with the faint but lingering scent of the solvents used to process the racks of clothes in the back of the van, and I sneezed so hard that the cartilage between my nostrils vibrated for a few seconds afterward.
“Gesundheit,” said Juan.
“Thank you.”
“De nada.”
At the west end of the alley, Juan glanced at his side mirror to scope the scene behind us. “Foam guy just fell into a cluster of trash cans.” He turned right into the street. “You can sit up now.”
“I think not. The ISA is after me. They have eyes everywhere.”
“The secret police?”
“Semisecret,” I said. “Everyone knows they exist, but nobody knows what they do.”
“Why’re they after you, Quinn?”
“I have no idea. They said I’m unique.”
Juan snorted with contempt. I’ve never known anyone else who has such a variety of snorts, each of which is easily interpreted. “Everyone is unique, amigo. If unique is a crime, they’d have to arrest all of us.”
“Maybe they will eventually. Right now, it’s me.”