Bad Night at the Waffle House
The other day I drove by a Waffle House and got an idea. It turned into this…
1
I knew they were trouble the minute they walked in. There were three of them and they had ridden in on their Harleys. I had a moment of guilt for stereotyping motorcycle riders, but only a moment. These motorcycle riders lived up to the stereotype. They could have been clones of each other. Long greasy hair, unkempt beards, wearing leather ensembles with chains adorned in various places. There were subtle differences, as each one had a different colored bandana wrapped around the crown of their greasy hair. As I would find out soon enough, Red bandana was the leader of the pack. Blue and Green bandanas were foot soldiers.
It was shortly before 2 AM and I was sitting in my favorite booth across from the short side of the L shaped bar that was standard in these establishments. Sometimes this booth was occupied and I had to sit elsewhere, but since most of my visits were after midnight, that was rarely the case. Where was I? Well, I was just off a lonely exit on the Interstate. It was not a busy one. In fact, of the four corners that abutted the on/off ramps to the byway below, only the two south ones were developed. On one side of the street that eventually led into a small residential area where I shared a shit box apartment with two other roommates, was a standard gas station with a small convenience store. On the other side was a standard Waffle House. To be more precise, it was Waffle House #337. Most anyone who had spent some time in the southern part of the country knew them. They were pretty much all the same. L shaped bar (as I mentioned before) for single diners and booths situated along the perimeter next to the almost floor to ceiling windows. The kitchen was just on the other side of the bar and had an open design so you could watch the cook making your grub.
So as a single diner myself, why was I sitting in a booth, taking up space that could be used by other diners instead of propping my inconsiderate ass on one of the round bar stools that you could spin around and around if that was how you got your jollies? Well, for one, as I already said, the late hour did not lend itself to a mob of customers, so I wasn’t taking up needed space. Two, and the real reason I insisted on a booth (across from the short side of the L bar if I could get it) was because I was a writer and this is where I came to write. Plopping my laptop down on the bar was a little awkward, always invited (mostly polite, but unwanted) conversation with fellow stool occupiers, and had no outlet in which to plug my laptop power supply. I didn’t have the best battery in the business. It was only good for about an hour and a half before it shit the bed on me. My favorite booth did have an outlet nearby. It actually was between the two booths that were located on the short side, but I preferred the one that was the furthest from any other human contact. I wasn’t anti-social; I just needed to concentrate in order to write.
Why would a writer be writing in a Waffle House? Well, I’m a writer because I write stuff, but that doesn’t pay the bills. My “day job” done mostly at night, was in IT. I was a low level tech that did maintenance and testing on the network at a local financial institution. My hours were 3:30 PM to 12:00 AM with a thirty minute lunch (dinner?) break. As you can probably guess, IT was not my passion. It put food on the table (often the one currently in front of me) but writing was what I always wanted to do. Was I any good at it? I tended to think I was a decent hack. I had self-published a novel on Amazon just nine months prior. Most of that book had been written right where I sat. It actually did all right in the genre it was published in, once getting as high as #3 on that list. It wasn’t a bestseller overall but I was happy just to see it in print and get some positive reviews from it. I first tried to write on the weekends at a coffee house. That’s how undiscovered scriveners were supposed to do it, right? Not being an actual coffee drinker myself, I felt like a total douchebag sitting there drinking my $4 bottle of Mountain Dew with my big earphones on and plinking away at the keyboard. Also, the coffee house did not have hash browns seven different ways. It took a total of two whole visits there to convince me it would not be the setting where I would write the next great American novel.
Writing at home was impossible. Even at the hours I kept, my roommates (one of which worked in IT with me, but even at a lower level) were too distracting in the small apartment we shared. So one night, after work, as I was exiting the Interstate onto the road that led to my apartment, I thought about that Waffle House that sat by itself in a small lot across the road from the gas station that I never filled up at because their gas prices were consistently ten cents higher than the Kroger gas station (fuel points!) close to my work. As of that time, I had never set foot in that particular Waffle House. I jerked a hard left that would have surely brought forth the sound of angry horns from other drivers had there been any at that time of night, and pulled into the parking lot of the predominantly yellow colored building. They didn’t have WiFi but if I needed the Internet for research purposes (or to be honest, checking Facebook) I just flipped on the hotspot on my phone which thanks to the cell phone tower erected diagonally across the Interstate on one of those undeveloped corners, I had 5G full bar coverage. The beverage prices were way less expensive than the coffee house and there were those aforementioned hash browns. I’ve been writing there for the better part of the last year and a half. I was currently working on my second novel, with my big headphones on listening to a Howard Shore play list when the three amigos walked in.
2
I was munching on a sausage egg and cheese melt as I wrote. Breakfast was my jam at the Waffle House although I would occasionally pick something from the lunch/dinner side of that thick plastic laminated menu they had. That thing was heavy duty and I once thought that if I threw at someone hard enough, those reinforced sharp corners could do some damage, maybe even slit a throat. Nope, stop what you are thinking. That wasn’t the way I saved the day from the three amigos; although that would have been very cool. Believe it or not, I rarely had a waffle at the Waffle House. I didn’t particularly like them. They were a bit rigid and crunchy for my liking. Even when I asked Marge (who was usually the waitress on duty when I visited) to ask Thomas, the short order cook, to make them “medium rare”, they still didn’t taste right. So, I mostly stuck to the bacon and eggs themed dishes, switching it up with sausage here and there. Of course, about anything I ordered (even lunch/dinner items) came along with hash browns. Scattered, covered, and smothered was how I liked them! I just put a fork full of those golden babies in my mouth when I heard the loud engines of the Harleys and glanced out the window to see the three amigos pulling up.
Before they walked in and added three, the population of the Waffle house was six. A man and woman seated at a booth along the far side of the L. A trucker dude seated at one of the bar stools going to town on a T-bone steak with eggs. Marge, who was working the counter and the booths. Thomas, who was busy at the grill cooking up the order that the couple had just made. And me, in my favorite booth shoveling the smothered and covered into my mouth, trying not to get any in the keyboard of my laptop. With the exception of Thomas, we all looked through the windows at the three amigos as they propped their bikes up on the kick stands and removed their helmets.
They didn’t waste any time when they pushed through the glass entrance door. Red bandana surveyed the surrounding and made a barely perceptible smile through that beard mane. He pointed at Green bandana that was standing slightly behind him next to Blue. Green bandana turned back to the door that had silently closed again and turned the lock handle on it. If there had been an OPEN/CLOSED sign, I’m sure he would have flipped that to CLOSED, but Waffle Houses were open 24/7 so had no need of those signs. Made me wonder why they even had locks on the door. That thought was pushed out of my mind as I saw Red bandana reach inside the vest of his leather jacket and produce a handgun. I was no expert, but by the sight of the big hole at the end of the barrel of the semi-automatic, I was guessing it was a .45.
He first pointed the gun at Marge and spoke quite softly but audible to all. “We are robbing this place. If you all chill out and do what we say, nobody will get hurt. If you don’t, we have no problem bringing the pain.” He waved the gun in everyone’s direction for emphasis then nodded at Blue and Green. Blue and Green split up along the perimeter of the building and began to lower the shades on the windows.
As Blue reached over me to accomplish that task I noticed him take a close look at my laptop. “You some kind of writer or something?” he asked me.
“Something like that,” I responded.
“Now you’ll have something really exciting to write about. If you make it through alive, that is.”
I had no response to that but he did. He slapped the lid of my laptop, closing it somewhat rather hard. “Take it easy,” Red said to him.
“Sure thing, boss,” was his reply to Red.
When all the window shades were down, including one over the glass door, Red spoke again. “Phones out on the table or bar in front of you. Don’t even try to tell me you don’t have a phone because I know that is bullshit. If you try that with me you will get one right through the head and then I’ll pull the phone off your corpse. I really don’t feel like man handling a dead body so please don’t do that to me.” Everyone reached for their phones. In my case it was already laying on the table in front of me next to the laptop. The couple at the far booth already had theirs out also, and pushed them to the edge of the table. Trucker dude reached to his belt and popped out an older flip phone from its holder and placed it on the bar. Marge and Thomas both pulled phones from their pockets and also laid them on the bar next to trucker dude’s. Blue and Green grabbed the phones from the booths and placed them with the others on the bar.
“Cookie, take these phones and dump them in the deep fryer,” Red said to Thomas as he pointed to the fryer behind the bar where the chicken fried steak that the couple had ordered earlier were more than likely burnt by now due to the inattention that Thomas had been forced to pay them since the three amigos had walked in. Thomas hesitated for a second. Red moved closer to the bar and pointed his gun directly at Thomas’s head. “Now.” Thomas gathered up the phones in his hands, turned and dumped them into the fryer. It didn’t quite sizzle like it did when frozen food items were deposited in it, but it did bubble up and soon rendered the phones most definitely inoperable. “Don’t get any ideas about dumping hot oil on us,” Red said to Thomas as he was staring at the blobs of plastic that used to be phones. “As a matter of fact, get your ass out from behind there.” Red waved the gun in the direction of the little flip up partition of the bar near where I sat in my favorite booth. Thomas complied, leaving the flip up partition raised as he exited and sat down at the booth next to mine.
“Waitress,” Red said to Marge. “Is there anybody in the bathrooms?” Marge shook her head indicating there was not. “You sure? Because my buddy there,” he titled his gun toward, but not pointed it at Blue, “is going to go check, and if he is surprised by someone you are going to get one in the face.” To emphasize this, he stuck the barrel of the gun to Marge’s head. I could see Marge was scared but she didn’t make a sound. Red nodded at Blue, who walked into the small alcove just on the other side of the long part of the bar. He went into the men’s room first then into the women’s before coming out and declaring it all clear. “Good girl,” Red said to Marge as he lowered the gun. “Now, open that register for me.” Marge walked over, pressed a few buttons on the register and the cash drawer popped out.
“The safe is on a time lock,” Marge said.
“Did I ask about the safe?” Red responded. “I know the safe is on a time lock. This here will do for us fellas. Go sit with Cookie over there.” Marge did as she was told as Red pulled out a plastic to-go bag from under the counter and filled it with the cash from the register.
Something didn’t seem right to me. At this late hour and the fact that most people paid electronically now, there couldn’t have been much money in the register. Everyone’s attention seemed to be focused on Red filling his bag so I whispered over my shoulder to where Marge was sitting in the booth behind me. “How much cash was in there?”
“No more than a hundred,” she whispered back.
I felt a blow to the back of my head as my vision blurred and pain erupted. Blue spoke, “Knock off the chit-chat!” Red looked up from his task briefly but then went back to it. I was no fighter, and while Blue and Green had yet to show evidence of possessing a firearm, I’m sure either one could put a beat down on me. That didn’t stop me from coming really close to retaliating against Blue for his open handed smack to the top of my head. I got control of myself and just glared at him while I rubbed the assaulted part of my noggin.
Red finished up at the register and actually slide the drawer shut like he was being tidy. “OK, almost finished here folks. Just one more bit of business we need to attend to.”
“You got what you came for, why don’t you just get the hell out of here?” Thomas asked.
Red looked at Blue. Blue walked forward and slammed his closed fist right into Thomas’s face. Thomas rocked back, blood spurting from his nose. Marge grabbed a bunch of napkins from the dispenser on the table and pressed them to Thomas’s nose. “That answer your question?” Red asked him as Thomas gave back much the same glare I had. I guess Blue, and probably Green, were the non-lethal enforces. Green hadn’t had to employ his skills as of yet, since he was covering the long side of the bar where the trucker dude and the couple sat, and had not given any trouble.
Red slid into the seat opposite of mine. “I hear you are some sort of writer,” he said to me with a smirk on his face.
“Yeah, I guess,” was my reply.
“You ever publish anything?” Before I could reply he kept going. “I bet you have. From just looking at you I bet you self-published a techno-thriller novel about a lowly IT tech that saved the world?”
I looked at Red for a second. That’s exactly what I had done. My previous novel was titled The Pegasus File, and it was about an IT tech that discovered some nefarious activity going on in the network and ended up saving the day. How did this guy know that?
“You know me?” I asked him.
“Do I know you, Robert?” he asked. “Let’s just say I do my homework.” He pulled a folded up piece of notebook paper from one of his pockets and consulted it before speaking again. “One Robert McMichael, 28 years old, single as of now, living in an apartment that he shares with two other roommates. But most importantly, an IT tech that works for the Chase National Bank.”
Holy shit, why did he know so much about me? “What is this?” I asked.
He briefly looked again at the paper then said, “Rob, I’m going to need you to log onto your work server and get the root access code for me.”
“Shit. You guys aren’t here to rob this place.”
Red smiled real big producing quite the eerily grin emerging from his massive beard. “Well, the extra pocket cash on top of what were already being paid for this job doesn’t hurt.”
3
Red opened up my laptop for me and said, “Get to it.”
“They don’t have WiFi, here,” was my response.
“Now, I may look like a dumb redneck biker but I do have half a brain. That’s why I was hired to be the leader this here motley crew. I know you wouldn’t sit here night after night, yes I know, writing without having access to the Internet for research.”
“Probably for watching Porn Hub and pulling on his pecker in that lonely corner booth too,” Green said from across the room chuckling like a teenage boy.
Red looked at him and said, “Shut up!” Green looked abashed but didn’t say anything else. He turned back to me and said, “If we are going to do this the hard way,” he reached across to the other booth grabbing Marge by the neck and dragging her halfway across the seatback. “I can start by blowing this pretty lady’s head clean off. I hear you, she, and Cookie here have become somewhat friends lately since you have been patronizing this establishment.” He once again placed the barrel of the gun against her head.
As before, Marge did not crumble but softly spoke, “He’s right. We don’t offer WiFi service here.”
Red looked at her for a second, then back to me. “How do you get online, then?”
“I use a cellular hotspot,” I told him.
Red released Marge and shoved her back over the seat. “Do that then.”
“Just one problem with that.”
“And that is?”
“The hotspot I used was my phone and it is currently a plastic blob floating in the deep fryer over there. That really smells bad by the way. You might want to have Thomas turn that off.”
Red didn’t immediately say anything but his face (what I could see of it through his beard) actually turned red. He was just now probably figuring that the half a brain he didn’t have must have been in charge of simple logic. Inside, I prepared myself for some sort of physical retaliation for that curt remark, either from Red himself or one of his foot soldiers, probably Blue. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, Red took a big breath, then pulled a phone from the inside of his leather jacket, fiddled around with it some, then placed it on the table. “I just turned on my hotspot. Use it and do it quickly. I grow weary of this place.” He looked at Green and said, “Turn that fucking fryer off. He’s right, it does smell.”
While Green was accomplishing that task, I popped up my laptop’s WiFi menu and did a search. There was only one available device. I was hoping Red would be dumb enough to use his personal phone that might have given me some details that I could later tell the authorities, if there was a later, but it was just a generic name for what was most likely a burner phone. I clicked to connect to it.
“I need the password to your phone,” I told Red.
Red gave me an evil beard grin and said, “BadMotherFucker69. Capital B, capital M, captial F.”
Figures. I typed it in and was online a second later. I pulled up a Telnet window and typed the commands that would establish a connection to the bank’s network. Once I was in the appropriate administrative routine, I was about to give Red a string of alphanumeric characters that represented the root access code for the network, when he glanced at his paper again and spoke up.
“I know the code is changed every twelve hours so don’t bother giving me an old one. Once you give it to me, I’ll be calling someone who will know if you are bullshitting. Then I’ll plug Cookie or Marge here and we’ll try again. By my count, you’ll have five tries to get it right before I terminate your connection to life.”
Damn it! That is exactly what I had been about to do. Obviously, the person that hired these goons knew what they were doing. “No worries,” I said. As I was about to access the list with the current access code I heard a blood curdling scream!
4
“Get your hands off me!” the lady from the far booth screamed! We all looked over to see that Green was manhandling her with one of his hands on her left boob and the other around the back of her head.
“Come on girl, give us a kiss,” he said and made it seem like the creepiest thing in the world. To his credit, the guy she was with tried to defend her. He wasn’t built any better than I was to deal with these brutes, but he tried. He stood up and grabbed Green by the back of his jacket and hauled him off the lady. Green turned around and punched him in the stomach, doubling him over. Green then proceeded to kick the shit out of the poor guy.
At this point, the trucker dude, who up until now, had not moved or said so much as one word, chose to make the move he’d probably been waiting on an opening to make since the three amigos walked in. He rose, took two steps, and in an arcing down motion, plunged the steak knife that he’d been using to carve up his T-bone steak, toward the back of Green’s neck. Green sensed it coming at the last second and turned to avoid it, but only managed to change the target area, which had probably been the center of his neck, to his right shoulder. He screamed and let go of the guy that he had been pummeling as the knife slid in.
Had trucker dude’s primary target been Red, he might have surprised him and possibly saved us all. There was a deafening roar and two holes appeared in the trucker’s back! He wasn’t thrown across the room like someone who had just been shot in a movie would have been. He actually slowly turned around to see Red with his gun still aimed at him, a small wisp of white smoke curling from the big hole in the barrel. He then crashed over the bar where he had been sitting, sending the remains of his breakfast/dinner falling to the floor behind it.
“Jesus Christ!” Red yelled, finally losing a bit of the stoic composure he had maintained throughout this whole ordeal.
“Ahh! It hurts!” Green moaned as he tried to reach behind himself and pull out the steak knife. Blue quickly went over and yanked it out. “Arrrghh!” Green yelled as blood began to spurt from the wound. Blue just stood there watching the blood soak Green’s shirt and spatter to the floor.
“Get over there and help him!” Red shouted at Marge. She got up and grabbed a cloth off the bar she had been using to wipe tables. She deftly avoided the trucker’s body that was still half draped over the bar and half lying on one of the stools. She pressed the cloth to Green’s wound to try and stop the bleeding. Green winced at that but didn’t say anything else.
Red moved over to survey the scene better. “You numb nuts didn’t think to clear fucking knives from the bar?” They didn’t think to clear them from the tables either, but lucky for them, or maybe us, nobody at the tables had ordered a menu item that required a sharp instrument to cut it with. The three amigos only had to fear attack from forks, spoons, or very dull butter knives.
“Get behind that bar,” Red said to Blue, “and get every sharp instrument you can find and dump them in the fryer.” As Blue set off to do that task, Red continued, “You love birds get back in your booth.” The guy was just this side of conscious and could barely move. With the help of his lady friend, they returned to the booth with him laying his head in her lap. Green and Marge sat down at another booth on the long side while she continued to apply pressure to his wound.
“Now, back to business,” Red said and slipped back into my booth. “Give me that fucking code and give it to me now!”
I turned my laptop so he could see the screen and pointed to a list of codes. “The second one down.”
He looked at the list, then back to me. I nodded. “You better not be fucking with me,” he said as he copied the code down on the same piece of paper he had been using for crib notes. You are already down one try from the previous tally thanks to the hero over there.” He pointed his gun at the body of the trucker still sprawled over the bar.
“It’s legit,” I told him and it was. The person he was getting his instructions from would know any subterfuge trick I might try and I didn’t want to cost anyone else their life.
Red grabbed his burner phone from the table and dialed a number he got from his crib notes. “Hey, Jay,” he said. “Yup, got it.” He repeated the code I had given him into the phone. “OK, standing by.” He pointed his gun directly at Thomas but didn’t say a word. Just that creepy beard grin again. After several minutes of very uncomfortable silence, he spoke into the phone again. “Good? OK, let me check my end.” He fiddled with his phone for a few more moments then said, “All right. It’s all there. This concludes our deal. Pleasure doing business with you, man.” He disconnected the phone and looked at me. “Good job, Thoreau.”
I was actually impressed he knew who Henry Thoreau was, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Red reached over and closed the lid on my laptop. He then stood up and grabbed it off the table. With a twirl of his arm that would make any disc golf player proud, he whipped my laptop across the bar and right into the deep fat fryer. While Green had turned off the fryer earlier, the oil inside was still hot enough to stop my laptop’s operation forever and certainly still hot enough to prevent anyone from grabbing a sharpened instrument from inside to attempt a trucker dude move. I slightly cringed thinking about the loss of the work I had done on my novel up until the time that the three amigos had graced us with their presence, and then I remembered I always saved my working file in a Dropbox file which automatically uploaded to the cloud. At the most, I probably only lost a couple of pages that I hadn’t saved before all this drama began. I might actually work on a new project now, one inspired by the events of the night now that it was over. Over. It was over, right? Shit. It dawned on me. It wasn’t quite over, but I suspected it shortly would be, and not in a manner that anyone other than the three amigos were going to be satisfied with.
“Nice throw,” I said to Red. “You play disc golf in the Olympics?”
“Funny,” Red said back to me. “How would you like it if I threw you in there head first?”
“Don’t think I would like that at all.”
“I bet not. Now shut the fuck up so we can finish up here.”
I didn’t shut the fuck up. “You know they are going to notice any unusual activity on the network. It won’t take long for them to catch on and shut that shit down.”
“From what Jay Man told me, it will be long enough for him to do what he needs to do. Besides, we don’t give a fuck. Our job is done and we already got paid.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
Red looked at me hard. “That’s right, I am the boss.” He slowly raised his gun so that it was pointing at my center mass.
“Rob!” Thomas said from the adjacent booth. “Why are you jawing with this man? Shut up and let them go.”
I had been jawing with Red on purpose. Why? To stall of course. “Listen to Cookie,” Red said.
“I don’t think you want them leaving just yet, Thomas.” Why was I stalling? Well for one, I was quite certain they didn’t intend on leaving witnesses to the job they had pulled off tonight. For another, well, you’ll see shortly.
“Why not?” Thomas asked.
I just looked at Red who gave me his best creepy beard grin of the night. “Gentleman, our business here is concluded! Let’s blow this Popsicle stand. You two,” he said indicating Blue and Green, “head out and get our hogs ready to go.” Blue took the cloth that Marge had been holding on Green’s shoulder and stood him up. It looked like the blood had mostly stopped flowing. They moved toward the door with Green in front and Blue holding the cloth on the back of his shoulder. “I’ll be right behind you. Just have to take out the garbage.” Fuck, I knew it.
Without bothering to raise the shade that had been drawn over the door earlier, Green unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was a pzzzzzt sound as three squiggly wires shot through the open door and imbeded themselves in Green’s chest. Then I heard a zzzzzzppt sound and he did fly back like one those guys in the movie. Everyone in the Waffle House was shocked at that turn of events. Well, everyone except me. I was still somewhat shocked at the manner in which the take down had happened, but not shocked that it had happened. It was what I had been stalling for.
5
Let’s rewind this yarn a bit shall we? Back to the point where trucker dude had made his heroic, albeit, ill-fated attempt to take on the three amigos. Amongst all the chaos that erupted during that time, Red’s attention had been focused on things other than my laptop screen. I had managed to pull a bit of information off his burner phone without him being any the wiser. The two bits of information I got were his ESN (Electronic Serial Number) and MAC (Media Access Control) address. Basically I had his phone’s name and serial number. Anyone worth their salt could use those two pieces of information to locate the phone fairly quickly. I composed a quick e-mail and sent it to Lou, the Network Administrator for the bank, containing the information and a quick explanation as to what was going on. I barely had time to close the e-mail window before Red had returned his attention to me.
I know what you are thinking. How could I possibly hope that Lou would read that e-mail in anything close to a quick enough time frame to do any good? The simple answer is I didn’t. I didn’t need to. When I had turned my laptop toward Red and pointed at the second root access code on the list, I indeed gave him the correct code. However, what he didn’t know, along with most all the other IT personnel at the bank that didn’t have a need to know that code, is that the few who did need to know it, had received an e-mail several weeks ago instructing them to enter the code from the list into the system backward from how it was displayed.
Why would they type it in backward? Because, several weeks ago, at the suggestion of yours truly, the list had been changed to present the codes in reverse order. It was my idea and the reason someone at a lower IT level such as myself had been given access to view the list. I had made changes in the code to allow for a situation such as had occurred here on this bad night at the Waffle House. When someone entered the code in backwards from what was on the list, everything operated normally, and it was business as usual. If someone entered the code exactly as it appeared on the list, everything still operated normally, with the exception of one little thing. When whoever this Jay person was entered that code the wrong way, they had all the access they needed. What they didn’t know is that silent alarms were being set off all over the system, including one that pinged the Network Administrator’s phone. Lou was never without that phone; his job literally depended on it. Lou woke at the late hour alarm coming from his phone to see that the network had been penetrated by an improperly entered root access code. This set up had intentionally been designed to give the intruder full access so the employee that had been compromised would not be in danger. Lou, being no dummy, monitored the intruder’s activities while alerting the authorities. He also noticed the high priority e-mail in his Inbox from one, Robert McMichael, low level IT tech. Passing the details contained in that e-mail along to the authorities, they were quickly able to track the location of the burner phone to Waffle House #337. I just needed to stall them long enough for the cavalry to arrive.
6
When Green flew back into the restaurant from the force of the electrical current flowing through his body from the Taser gun that a tactical SWAT officer had fired at him, Blue caught a bit of that current through bodily contact. He quickly let go of Green to watch him fall to the floor where he convulsed. He was a bit dazed but still on his feet as he stared at another body armored officer standing just behind the original one with his own Taser gun resting just over the right shoulder of the original officer. Blue was about to get the same shock treatment, but it never came.
Red grabbed me around the neck and dragged me out of the booth, positioning me as a shield. He backpedaled through the still open partition at the bar and behind it, pulling me with him. He aimed his gun at the door and fired, surely hoping to hit one of the officers but instead, exploding the back of Blue’s head. Blood and brains flew everywhere. I was certain I saw a piece of Blue’s brain arc straight into the deep fryer that had oil still hot enough to start frying it. I thought that this new item on the menu might not catch on for even the die hardest of Waffle House patrons. I barely had time for that thought before Red pulled me down behind the bar where he pressed the gun against the back of my head, forcing me into a praying position. With just the top of his head visible over the countertop, Red shouted, “Stay back! Stay back or I will blow his head off!” I couldn’t see it from my position but I could imagine the SWAT officers halting their advance and maintaining a stand-off position.
What I could see from my position was the remains of the trucker dude’s breakfast/dinner on the floor. The item that most interested me was the bone from the steak that he had done a great job of removing pretty much every piece of meat. You remember what kind of steak he had, right? Yup, a T-bone. I wrapped my right hand around that bone, getting a good grip on the short end with two fingers while the long pointy end jutted from my now closed fist. Stick them with the pointy end is something I recalled a character in a popular show once saying. I shoved my now pointy fist straight up and into Red’s neck. I half expected him to reflexively pull the trigger of the gun, ending my part in tonight’s little dinner theater at the Waffle House. But he didn’t do that. What he did do was drop the gun and reflexively grasp the T-Bone sticking out of his neck with both hands. As his life-blood ran out between his fingers, he fell on his ass and stared at me with a shocked expression on his face.
In my best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression, I said, “You T’d me off, Red.” I could barely make it out among the gurgling noise he made with his reply but he said, “Who is Red?” Then the light went out of his eyes and his hands fell down along his sides.
7
Later that night, or should I say morning, because the sun was just beginning to rise, I walked into my apartment. I had spent hours among the police answering questions and giving a written statement. Then I spent hours with Lou and other bank officials repeating the same information before I had finally been released to go home. I did find out from Lou that once he had been given the all clear from the SWAT team, he had shut down the network before the intruder could do anymore damage. Even with the mostly quick response time, the intruder had managed to transfer approximately $100,000 to a local account that had immediately been transferred to an off shore account that had been shortly transferred to another account in a country with less than cooperative banking officials. That’s where the trail grew cold. The IT guys had attempted to back track the intruder’s digital footprint but they were good and had covered their tracks. In the overall scheme of things, $100,000 was chump change to the bank and the higher ups had been pleased with the outcome and the success of the new system that they hadn’t even known about. Not pleased enough to actually thank any of the IT staff in person, but pleased enough to send on their attaboys through the proper chain of command.
“Damn, dude. You just now getting home?” Jack, one of my roommates that worked IT at the same bank asked me. “I know you are into this writing thing but I don’t think I have ever seen you doing it until the sun came up.”
I chuckled and gave Jack the whole Bad Night at the Waffle House story. He was thoroughly impressed. “I think I heard once that a plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy. Sometimes you have to work with what you got and what you get. You did good Rob. Glad you are OK.”
Jack was on the day shift so I expected to see him shuffling off to work. He indeed had the backpack he normally carried to work, but he was also standing next to a roller suitcase with the handle extended. “What’s with the suitcase?” I asked him.
“I’m going on vacation, remember?”
I didn’t remember, but chalked that up to being a bit distracted. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Well, I need to get some shut-eye. Damn bank didn’t even give me the day off after I saved their asses. Have to be up soon to return to the mines.”
“Better you than me,” Jack said.
“Fuck you,” I jokingly told him. “Have a great time on your vacation, J-Man.” As I entered my closet sized bedroom and prepared for bed, I heard the front door close. I also heard the snores from my other roommate in the room just next to my paper-thin wall. I undressed and slipped under the covers. Just as I was about to drift off I sat bolt upright in bed! J-Man? Jay Man? Jay? Red hadn’t been calling the intruder Jay; he had been calling him J! J for Jack! I reached for my phone and realized I no longer had one.
The End
P.S. Yes, I went to a Waffle House to do “research”. Scattered, smothered, and covered research.
BarbaraM
That was terrific!!! But I need another chapter. Or a new book on how Rob helped capture Jack.
arionis337
Who knows? Maybe Rob will capture him in an IHOP. 🙂