Brenda's hands would not stop shaking, and she resented them for it with a fury that surprised her.
She had held them flat through the whole thing — through glass and shouting and a shotgun drifting like a compass needle toward booth nine — and now, with the boys gone and the room safe and Harold sweeping glass into a dustpan with the concentration of a monk, her hands had decided to have their reaction without her permission, four minutes late, at the worst possible moment: while she was carrying a fresh pot of coffee across the diner to the four men who had just declined to die in her place of work.
"Oh, for—" she said, and set the pot down on booth eight's table rather than wear it.
"Brenda." Mike's voice, unhurried. "Sit a second."
"I don't sit on shift."
"Tonight you do. Cook's orders."
"Damn right," Harold called from the door, where he was duct-taping cardboard over the wound in the glass with the air of a man dressing a cut. "Union rules. I read them somewhere. Sit."
So Brenda sat — on the edge of booth eight, not nine; there were things you didn't presume even after a night like this — and Garrett, the young one, the father, got up without a word, took the pot off her table, and poured her a cup of coffee in a clean mug, and set it in front of her with both hands, careful as a communion.
"Fair's fair," he said.
She wrapped her hands around it and the warmth went up her arms like a tide coming back, and she discovered she was crying — not sobbing, not breaking, just leaking, steadily, the way old pipes do — and she was furious about that too, and said so.
"I am not," Brenda said, "doing this."
"Nobody's asking you to file a report on it," Bobby said mildly.
"Eleven years I have worked nights in this place. Eleven years of drunks and truckers and one fella with a tire iron, and I never—" She stopped. Breathed. "Those were children. That tall one. Did you see his hands? He was more scared than I was, and I'm the one who got robbed at gunpoint in her own diner. What kind of a world sends a boy like that in here at two in the morning with a borrowed— you saw the tape on that shotgun's stock, that gun was older than he was—"
"Brenda," Mike said, gently, and she stopped, because his voice had the thing in it that her voice had at the counter, the flat-hands thing, the breath slow thing, and she recognized it the way you recognize your own handwriting.
"They made a choice at the door," Mike said. "Then they made a better one at the floor. The second one's the one that follows a man. You remember that, if anybody ever asks you what happened in here."
She looked at him over the mug. "And if they ask about the men in booth nine?"
"Tell them we were drinking coffee."
"Were you going to—" She stopped. Started again, because Brenda Kowalski finished her sentences. "If he'd raised it again. The tall one. Were you—"
Mike considered her, and the mug in front of him, and chose his words with the care of a man who had been choosing words professionally for thirty years. "Brenda, I've known you eleven months out of twelve for longer than that camera's been up there. You ever once see me do a thing I didn't have to do?"
"No."
"Then that's your answer. It didn't have to happen. So it didn't." He turned his mug that quarter-turn again, thoughtful. "Boys who rob diners at two in the morning with borrowed guns and borrowed courage — the desert was going to teach them this lesson one way or the other. Tonight it used a room full of witnesses and a waitress who doesn't scream. That's about the gentlest classroom that lesson's ever had."
The sheriff's first unit came up the road then, lights walking across the windows, red and blue over the cardboard and the duct tape, and Harold straightened with his broom like a man receiving royalty, and Dave Pelman — who had spent eleven minutes under the counter and would spend eleven years saying so — crawled out holding his sample case with both arms and announced to the room at large:
"I would like it noted that I remained calm."
"Noted," said four men and one waitress, in something dangerously close to unison, and Brenda laughed — a real one, surprised out of her — and the laugh broke the night open like an egg, and let the ordinary world back in.
The deputy who came through the door was young, and tired, and professional. He photographed the guns where they lay. He took statements with a pen that kept dying. And near the end of it, squinting up at the little red eye above the register that none of the statements had mentioned, he said the sentence that turned a bad night into history:
"Ma'am — is that camera real?"