"Thank you," she said, to no one in particular, in the tone of someone closing a door and noting the time it shut.
Chapter 8: The Block
Jada Monroe had decided, several minutes before she stood, exactly how she would do it if standing became necessary. She would push her chair back with the backs of her calves, not her hands. She would keep her purse on her shoulder and her phone in her pocket. She would move toward the bar, not the door, because the bar meant Hector, witnesses, and cameras, and the door could be described later as an attempt to leave a scene that did not exist. When Sutter began talking about cooperation as a debt, she rose with all that already settled.
"Excuse me," she said. "I'm going to speak with the owner at the counter."
She took one step.
Officer Tyler Boone moved faster than his own expression did. He came off the wall near the restroom hallway, crossed the narrow lane between tables, and planted himself directly in front of her, chest squared, boots apart, close enough that Jada had to stop or walk into his uniform. A sheen of sweat showed at his hairline despite the ceiling fans. He was the youngest of the three by enough years that it showed in moments like this, in the effort it took him to look certain.
"Hold up," Boone said. "Nobody said you could get up."
Jada looked at him, then, without moving her feet, looked around him. The path to the bar was three steps of open floorboard and Hector watching with both hands flat on the counter. It was a short distance made insulting by the man filling it. "I don't need permission to walk in a public business where I am a paying customer," she said. "Step aside, please."
"Sergeant's talking," Boone said. "You sit back down and listen, it goes better."
"Better for whom?" she asked.
Boone's mouth worked once before sound came out. Behind him, Sutter made a small sound of approval, and Boone's shoulders rose on it like a boy praised at the wrong moment for the wrong thing. Jada noticed that too. She noticed everything in the order it would matter later: who gave the cue, who took it, who looked away.
Two tables over, Ethan Wright lifted his phone.
He did it without announcement. The phone had been face down beside his fries, screen dark, while he tried all night to be the kind of bystander who could later say it was not his business. But Boone stepping into a woman's path changed the arithmetic. He turned the phone over, thumbed it awake, and held it low against his table at first, lens angled up, red dot small and steady. His hands were not steady. The first seconds shook with his breathing before he braced his wrists and got the frame he wanted: Boone in the foreground, Jada behind him, Sutter and Pryce and Jayla all in one shot.
"Put that down," Pryce said, seeing it.
Ethan's voice came out thinner than he wanted. "I'm in a public place. I'm not interfering. I'm just recording."
"You record us, you become part of this," Pryce said.
"Then I'm part of it sitting down," Ethan said, and to his own surprise he did not lower the phone. He raised it a little instead, openly now, so the officers could see he had chosen visibility over safety. A friend at his table, who had come for trivia and not for this, whispered his name once and then stopped, understanding that asking him to stop was its own kind of statement.
Jada had not taken her eyes off Boone. "Officer Boone," she said, using his name the way her sister had used Pryce's, as a pin through a specimen, "you are blocking my movement without a lawful order or a charge I have been told. I am asking you, in front of a camera and a room full of people, to step out of my path."
"My sergeant hasn't released this table," Boone said.
"Released," Jada repeated, very softly. "Listen to your own word. We are not in custody. We are not detained. You just confirmed it. Now move."
Boone did not move. His jaw set. Up close Jada could see a razor nick on his throat and the tremor he was fighting in his left hand by pressing it flat against his thigh. She felt, briefly, something like pity for the size of the mistake he was being coached into, and let it go, because pity would not protect either of them if this kept sliding.
Sutter spoke from behind her chair, amused and loud enough for the room. "Look at that. One stands up, one gives speeches. Y'all rehearse this?"
"We're sisters," Jayla said from her seat, unhurried. "We share a lot. Standards, mostly."