Center – the RC, everybody called it – which was a long, square, flat-roofed dump of a place with ginormous plate-glass windows cut into three sides of the icky yellow brick. Somebody’d once told Carla that, a million years ago, the RC had been a Ford dealership.
That was Acker’s Gap for you: Everything had once been something else. There was nothing new. Nothing fresh or different. Ever.
She had to endure her court-mandated Teen Anger Management Workshop at the RC on Saturday mornings, 8:00 to 10:30, during which time the counselor would go around the circle and ask each of them what she or he was feeling. What I’m feeling, Carla wanted to say, is that this is a lame-ass way to spend a Saturday morning. But she didn’t. Usually, when her turn came, she just scooted a little bit forward and a little bit back on the chair’s tiny wheels and stared at her black fingernails and mumbled, I’m, um, feeling kind of mixed up inside. Her friend Lonnie Prince had told her once that adults want to hear that kind of thing, so that they can nod and look all concerned and show that they remember how hard it is to be a teenager, even though it was, like, a thousand years ago.
The counselor always dismissed them right at 10:30. On the dot. He didn’t want to spend one more minute with them than they wanted to spend with him. Half an hour after that, her mother was supposed to pick her up at the Salty Dawg. Her mother’s office was just up the street, in the county courthouse, and she was working this Saturday, so it was a good plan.
Except that her mother was late. Again.
A shriek sliced through the room. It startled Carla, making her fingers twitch, which in turn caused her to demolish one entire wall of Fort French Fry.
Her head whipped around. A little girl and a man – surely the kid’s father, Carla thought, because they looked alike, they both had broad, squashed-looking noses and stick-straight, dirty-blond hair – were sitting across from each other in a booth in the corner. The little girl was screaming and pounding the tabletop with a pair of fat pink fists, flinging her head back and forth. The dad, meanwhile, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal a pair of aggressively hairy forearms, was leaning across the table, clutching a chicken biscuit with most of its yellow wrapper removed. His face was frozen in a hopeful, slightly crazed-looking smile. The girl, though – she was four, maybe five – was ignoring him and instead just kept screaming and jerking her head around. Threads of dirty-blond hair were stuck in the snot ejected by her nose in two bright tubes of ooze.
The father was panicky, confused, desperate. Gotta be a divorced dad, Carla surmised. Gotta be some asshole out to bank some kid time on the weekend. He was clearly a rookie. An amateur. He made cooing sounds, trying to do something, anything, that would stop the ferocious yowling.
Give it up, dude, Carla thought.
She knew all about part-time dads who wanted to make up for everything in a few short hours on a Saturday morning at the Salty Dawg. She could’ve written a handbook. Offered tips. She could’ve told this jerk that he’d blown it by starting to unwrap the chicken biscuit for his daughter. Never, never, never. The more wounded the little girl was, the more blindsided by the divorce, the more she’d want to do everything by herself from now on. It was survival instinct. She was in training. Getting ready for the day when Daddy Dearest didn’t come around so much anymore.
Carla’s attention swiveled back to the three old men. They were still laughing, still making those horrible old-man-laughing sounds that came out like a whiny scritchy-scratch. One of them was using the back of his brown-spotted hand to dab at a happy tear that was leaking out of his disgusting-looking runny eye. After the dab he reared back his head and peered at that hand, like he wondered how he’d gotten the wet spot on it.
She saw the three old men in their matching black jackets, laughing, mouths open, faces pleated.
She saw them savoring their little joke.
Then she saw them die.
Pock
Pock
Pock
One shot per head.
By the time a startled Carla let go of the french fry she was holding – she’d been rebuilding Fort French Fry from scratch – the three old men were gone.