The customer turned and smiled. “Some show, huh?”
Bob started to respond but fell silent when he took a closer look at the man, sensing trouble as a deer might sense a stalking wolf. The guy was wearing scuffed engineer boots, dirty jeans, and a stained windbreaker half zipped over a soiled white T-shirt. His windblown hair was oily, and his face was shaded with beard stubble. He had bloodshot, fevered eyes. A junkie. Approaching the counter, he drew a revolver from his windbreaker, and the gun was no surprise.
“Gimme what’s in the register, asshole.”
“Sure.”
“Make it quick.”
“Just take it easy.”
The junkie licked his pale, cracked lips. “Don’t hold out on me, asshole.”
“Okay, okay, sure. You got it,” Bob said, trying to push Laura behind him with one hand.
“Leave the girl so I can see her! I want to see her. Now, right now, get her the fuck out from behind you!”
“Okay, just cool off.”
The guy was strung out as taut as a dead man’s grin, and his entire body vibrated visibly. “Right where I can see her. And don’t you reach for nothin’ but the cash register, don’t you go reachin’ for no gun, or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”
“I don’t have a gun,” Bob assured him. He glanced at the rain-washed windows, hoping that no other customers would arrive while the holdup was in progress. The junkie seemed so unstable that he might shoot anyone who walked through the door.
Laura tried to ease behind her father, but the junkie said, “Hey, don’t move!”
Bob said, “She’s only eight—”
“She’s a bitch, they’re all fuckin’ bitches no matter how big or little.” His shrill voice cracked repeatedly. He sounded even more frightened than Bob was, which scared Bob more than anything else.
Though he was focused intently on the junkie and the revolver, Bob was also crazily aware that the radio was playing Skeeter Davis singing “The End of the World,” which struck him as uncomfortably prophetic. With the excusable superstition of a man being held at gunpoint, he wished fervently that the song would conclude before it magically precipitated the end of his and Laura’s world.
“Here’s the money, here’s all of it, take it.”
Scooping the cash off the counter and stuffing it into a pocket of his dirty windbreaker, the man said, “You got a storeroom in back?”
“Why?”
With one arm the junkie angrily swept the Slim Jims, Life Savers, crackers, and chewing gum off the counter onto the floor. He thrust the gun at Bob. “You got a storeroom, asshole, I know you do. We’re gonna go back there in the storeroom.”
Bob’s mouth was suddenly dry. “Listen, take the money and go. You got what you want. Just go. Please.”
Grinning, more confident now that he had the money, emboldened by Bob’s fear but still visibly trembling, the gunman said, “Don’t worry, I ain’t gonna kill no one. I’m a lover not a killer. All I want’s a piece of that little bitch, and then I’m out of here.”
Bob cursed himself for not having a gun. Laura was clinging to him, trusting in him, but he could do nothing to save her. On the way to the storeroom, he’d lunge at the junkie, try to grab the revolver. He was overweight, out of shape. Unable to move fast enough, he would be shot in the gut and left to die on the floor, while the filthy bastard took Laura into the back room and raped her.
“Move,” the junkie said impatiently. “Now!”
A gun fired, Laura screamed, and Bob pulled her tight against him, sheltering her, but it was the junkie who had been shot. The bullet struck his left temple, blowing out part of his skull, and he went down hard atop the Slim Jims and crackers and chewing gum that he had knocked off the counter, dead so instantaneously that he did not even reflexively pull the trigger of his own revolver.
Stunned, Bob looked to his right and saw a tall, blond man with a pistol. Evidently he had entered the building through the rear service door and had crept silently through the storage room. Upon entering the grocery he had shot the junkie without warning. As he stared at the dead body, he looked cool, dispassionate, as if he were an experienced executioner.