Page 81 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Yeah, don’t bet on it, dude,” another said. “Wait for them to send a negotiator in. That’s what happens next, right? We negotiate for what we want?”

“I want pizza,” the first one said.

“We’re at freaking Waffles?, man, just order something on the menu.”

“I’m in the mood for deep dish, though!”

Clearly the kids weren’t going to be any sort of help or font of wisdom. Of course, neither was I. My body felt weirdly heavy, like I was surrounded by invisible sand and every movement meant sliding through layers of it to get any result. I stared at my hands and slowly flexed my fingers. Great, they still worked. And hey, I had a burner phone in the pocket that wasn’t occupied by agun.

I had all my family’s numbers memorized despite the convenience of a contact list, and it didn’t take long to mentally flip over to my sister’s. She was the best person for me to reach out to—the only one who, thanks to Theo, had any sort of idea about the true depth of the weirdness I’d found myself in. I didn’t call her—I didn’t want to be distracted from, y’know, breathing—but I managed to snap a photo through the restaurant window and text it to her with the caption,“We’re at Waffles and everything is fucked.”

Would that help? Probably not. Did it make me feel better to share my situation with someone whowasn’ttrapped in it right along with me? Yeah, it kind of did.

“You won’tbelievewhat’s happening to us at Waffles? tonight,” one of the kids was saying—straight to her phone. Was she…livestreaming us being surrounded by the cops?

Dude. Generation Z was fucked up. Sure, technically they were my generation too, but still.

“Colin, please.” It was the plea in Kyle’s voice that finally allowed me to focus. That wasn’t a good sound; I hated hearing him so upset. “Just wait with us until Dad arrives. He’ll be able to help, won’t he?”

“The longer I wait before going out, the tougher this conversation is going to get,” his brother said. “I won’t leave you. I’m just going to talk to them from right outside the door, okay? At the very least, someone needs to start responding to their questions before they decide to break through the front door.”

Questions? Oh, ha—yeah, there was someone with a loudspeaker out there shouting in at us.

“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” the cop holding the loudspeaker was saying. He was a portly, nondescript sort of guy, but right beside him was a man in a sharp suit instead of a uniform who nevertheless had an air of“boss”about him. The Chief of Police, maybe?

If he was, then he was the guy who’d inadvertently—no,totallyvertently, and I didn’t care if that was a word or not, I was using it—had pushed us down this grim reaper of a rabbit hole by ordering his guys to kill Ricky and try to cover it up. This guy was the reason we were floundering, the reason that Kyle had to be separated from his fish and I had to be separated from my family. The reason we’d been shot at—and fuck whether Reardon was trying to kill us or not, we definitelycouldhave been killed—and the reason we were surrounded with other innocent people put at risk.

“I’m not going back to prison!” Chet, the line cook, shouted, pulling away from Carol to run into the kitchen. I heard the rack of what could only be a shotgun before Chet reappeared, weapon in hand and a manic look in his eyes. “Get those bastards out of the parking lot before I let ‘em have it!”

“Whoa, whoa!” Colin immediately set about trying to defuse the new situation, while the Goth kids decided their best play was to try to make things worse.

“Yeah, you tell ‘em, Chet!”

“Don’t let them take you alive!”

“Omg, there’s seriously a standoff between a cook and the cops right now, you guys!” The girl with the phone grinned as she swung it around the room. “It’s giving total Tarantino vibes!” Her other hand was on Patches’s carrier, stroking the paw that had poked through, so at least she wasn’t atotalpsycho.

I got closer to Kyle, who seemed torn between helping his brother and addressing the worsening situation outside. “What should we do?” I asked him quietly, sliding one hand into the back pocket of his jeans—not to be a creep, but because I really wanted to hold him right now and wanted to do so without taking away his freedom of movement. “Should we…go out?” I glanced through the window again and, from what I could see, only a couple of police officers had their guns trained on the place. Surely they wouldn’t just open fire; that would be ridiculous.

“We can’t.” Kyle’ jaw was so tense, I worried he’d crack a tooth. “That’s exactly what Reardon wants. Look, there he is! You see him?”

Oh shit, Reardonwashere. He hadn’t been for long, though. As I watched, he bulled his way through the crowd over to where the man I thought was the chief was and pulled him in close to talk.

“He’s probably telling them we tried to kill him,” I said. “Who knows how he changed things back at the trailer to support his story?” Not that these guys seemed to give a damn when it came to crime scene analysis, but?—

There was a brief scuffle, a shout from Chet, then all of a sudden Carol was in possession of the shotgun. She immediatelyset it down on the hostess stand, then turned and put her hands on her hips. “Chet, shut the hell up and stop swingin’ that thing around. You’ll scare the kids!” She pointed a finger at Colin. “You’re a cop, right, son?”

Colin straightened reflexively at the authoritative tone of her voice. “Yes ma’am.”

“Then get on out there and talk some sense into those fools before they do something dumb. Chet, get your assbackin the kitchen, y’hear me?”

“I want my gun,” he mumbled.

“Guns are for adults who don’t bust out swingin’ in front of impressionable youths. And as foryoulittle shits.” She pointed at the Goth kids, who were snickering loudly. “If you were really to be trusted with those cats, you’d be sitting pretty and keeping quiet, not drawing attention to yourselves by cackling like a pack of hyenas.”

“Hey bitch,fucky?—”

One of the girls slapped her hand over the boy’s mouth and hissed, “Don’t mouth off to the workers here, dumbass! You’ll get us banned for life! We already can’t go back to Denny’s!” She smiled brightly, showing the gray smear from her black lipstick on a few of her top teeth. “Sorry ma’am!”

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