Chapter 5: A Round and an Apology
The glass sat on their table where Sutter had set it, sweating onto the wood, and for a moment nobody touched it. It seemed to Jada that the whole bar could see it for what it was, a claim staked in someone else's evening. She looked at the glass, then at the sergeant, and she kept her hands folded where they were, because she had already decided how this would be handled, and it would not be handled by her hands.
"Here's what's going to happen," Sutter said, warming to his own script now that he had an audience arranged behind him. "You're going to apologize. Both of you. For the attitude. For sitting here looking at officers of the law like you're better than the people who keep this neighborhood safe. And then you're going to buy a round. For us." He lifted his chin toward the bar, where Pryce stood motionless and Boone had finally risen from his stool, hovering. "Three whiskeys. Top shelf, since you're feeling fancy tonight. That's how you make this right. That's how this ends friendly."
"An apology," Jayla said, "and a round."
"That's right."
"For sitting at a table," Jada said.
"For disrespect," Sutter corrected, and the word landed with the weight he clearly felt it deserved. "I know disrespect when I see it. Fifteen years I've done this job, and I can read a look across a room. You two walked in here tonight like you owned the place, and you've been sitting there ever since like the rest of us are the help. So. Apology first. I want to hear it plain."
The room had arranged itself into that particular stillness that falls over public places when a line is being crossed and no one has yet decided whose job it is to say so. Ethan Wright held his phone in both hands now, low, near the edge of the counter, his thumb resting against its side, his eyes on the corner table. He had not lifted it. Not yet. But his whole posture had changed from waiting to witnessing.
Jada could have ended it in one sentence, with a name, an agency, a title apiece, and the evening would have snapped into a different shape entirely. It would have taught them nothing except to check a room more carefully before performing in it. And everything being said now, unguarded, in front of witnesses and Hector's cameras, would never have been said at all. So Jada waited, and let the sergeant stand in the full size of his own words.
"We're not buying you drinks," she said at last, quietly, "and we haven't done anything to apologize for. We'd like to finish our evening, Sergeant."
The rank, which she had read on his sleeve and offered back to him as plain courtesy, seemed to land wrong, as if she had mocked it by pronouncing it calmly. Color climbed his face. "You'd like," he repeated. "Listen to that. You'd like. Let me tell you what I'd like. I'd like a little gratitude in this place for once." His voice had risen enough that Hector, behind the bar, set down the glass he had been polishing with a care that announced itself. "And if gratitude's too much to ask, then maybe this establishment needs reminding about how many friends it has downtown. Inspections. Permits. Occupancy. Funny how fast a popular place can develop problems on paper."
There it was. Out in the open, in front of witnesses, attached to a demand for drinks and an apology for existing at a table. Jayla felt the familiar, almost peaceful settling that came when a scene finished revealing what it actually was.
Hector came out from behind the bar then, wiping his hands on the towel at his waist, and his voice, when it arrived, was the steadiest sound in the room. "That's enough, Brett." He used the first name deliberately, neighbors use first names, and he placed himself beside the table, not between anyone, just present, a man standing in his own establishment. "These ladies are my customers. They ordered dinner, they paid for dinner, they've been polite to my staff and everyone around them, which is more than I can say for this conversation. They don't owe you a round, and they don't owe you an apology, and you know it."
"Hector," Sutter said, with a laugh that tried for warmth and missed. "Come on. Don't do this to yourself again. You remember last year."
"I remember everything about last year," Hector said. "That's why I'm standing here." Above the bar, small and dark in the corner of the ceiling, the security camera's eye held steady on the table, as it had been angled to do since the sergeant's first step. "You've had enough tonight, all three of you. I'm closing your tab. What happens next is your choice, but it doesn't happen at their table."
Chapter 6: The License Threat