felt bad for her. Or I did before she tried to turn me into a pillar of salt with her caustic glare. Holy crap and damn. Now they both hated me.
At least Cookie still liked me.
“I hate you,” Cookie said as she checked her phone. “Just so you know.”
For fuck’s sake. “What’d I do?” I asked, tearing my gaze off Reyes and following her to the front register.
“This.” She held out a hundred. “Someone left a hundred-dollar tip on your table.”
“No way.” I brightened, snatched it out of her hands, then held it up to the light to make sure it was legit. Because it would be my luck… “I’m rich. I can get a phone.”
“You can take me to a movie,” she countered.
“Deal.”
“Or that mansion you want to see.”
“Oooo,” I said, grinning from ear to ear. “The Rockefeller Mansion. I’ve been dying to see it.”
“We should go today. Right after our pedicures.”
“We’re getting pedicures?”
“We are now.”
I laughed as we changed out our tips, the metal kind, for real money, the paper kind. Cookie finished before I did. Mostly because I couldn’t keep my recalcitrant gaze from wandering in Reyes’s direction every few seconds.
“You should invite him,” Cookie said.
“To get a pedicure with us?”
She giggled. “Men like that stuff, too, right?”
“Then why don’t you invite Bobert?”
“Point taken. I have to get my jacket.”
And I had to get Reyes’s, but first I had to finish counting my tips. I was so bad at counting.
I was standing there wondering if I’d counted ten quarters or only nine when a guy walked into the café, strode straight up to me, and jammed a gun into my side.
Oh, for the love of crab cakes. I forgot we were doing this today.
“Open it. Now.” He rammed the gun into my ribs again a little too aggressively.
I glared over my shoulder. We said to make it look real. Not feel real. I leaned close and whispered to him. “Chill. We have to wait for Lewis to get up here.”
I looked over the sea of tables to where Lewis stood bussing a table nearby. Then I looked around for Francie. She was just walking out of the storeroom and toward us. I gave Lewis a secret thumbs-up, which was basically a thumbs-up with enthusiastic eyebrow arching thrown in.
This was it. Lewis’s big day. But he shook his head at me.
Was he backing out? Now?
“I won’t say it again, bitch. Open the fucking drawer.”
Lewis looked shocked. And confused. And more than a little concerned. Holy crap, he was good.
He tried to mouth something to me. “He’s not… I didn’t…”
I had no idea what he was saying, but I did know that he needed to give up on his dream of becoming a rock star and become an actor, because he was totally convincing.
Maybe a little too convincing.
When Lewis stayed frozen to the spot and his cousin shoved me a little harder than was necessary into the register, I realized something had gone horridly awry. Either the man holding a gun at my back wasn’t Lewis’s cousin or Lewis’s cousin was a scene-stealing asshole. I was leaning toward the former. And wondering how I let myself get talked into these things. Though I couldn’t remember any particular circumstance in which I got suckered into a ridiculous situation, the scenario did seem oddly familiar to me. Like an old sweater or a favorite pair of sweats.
I began to panic. As adrenaline took a huge dump in my nervous system, a calmness came over Lewis’s face. A determination. A disregard for his life. And my life, for that matter.
He stood up, set his jaw to extra firm, and headed straight for us, his movements sure. Steady. Calculating. And I realized he’d sautéed his marbles and had eaten them with a nice Chianti.
“Stay back!” the guy yelled when he noticed Lewis. He pointed his gun at him.
Francie screamed when she realized what was happening. Shayla covered her mouth in shock. But Lewis kept walking, even with the gun pointed right at him. Right at his heart.
There was brave, then there was suicidal.
“Hurry up!” he yelled at me, keeping the gun trained on the massive, bearlike creature coming to get him.
I had to do something before Lewis got killed, but what?
Oh, wait. I’d give him the money and he’d leave. Okay. I could do that.
I took my key and opened the register. Dixie had been robbed more than once, so she insisted on using a register that required a key to get into