Page 26 of My Violent Valentine

No honey, darlin’, doll, or sweetheart for me, I guess.

Mina digs into her pancakes and I take a sip of my coffee and continue to people watch. I tense as two black cars pull up right in front of the double doors. I take a long slow breath.

Stop being paranoid, Brian. Nobody’s out to get you. Nobody knows we’re here.

And yet, I can’t help the way my body seems to coil like a viper ready to strike as car doors open and shut in tandem.

The cars are still running. The headlights shine through the diner’s front doors. I look again frantically for that emergency exit, when four men dressed in black and strapped down with weapons burst into the diner. The waitresses scream as a bullet tears through the old guy. He falls face first into his soup. Before I can pull my gun or say a word to Mina, his blood is splattered all over her pancakes and shocked face.

She reaches for her gun, and turns and stands and then… just like that, a bullet rips through her. She stumbles and falls.

Everything around me seems to slow, mere seconds stretching into infinity before me, and I have the closest thing I have ever felt to an out-of-body experience. The Tower card from the tarot spread on Christmas Eve flashes in my mind along with Benjamin Barker’s warning… “Tell her before it’s too late.”

And I suddenly know exactly what he meant. I never told Mina I loved her. Not once. I had a million opportunities. I knew she wanted to hear it back at the motel and still I couldn’t make those fucking words come out of my worthless mouth.

“Mina! Mina!” I shout, choking back sobs that already threaten to overwhelm me. I don’t recognize my own voice. I sound like a dying animal. I’m completely oblivious to my own safety and how I’m leaving myself open to attack. I stare, frozen as her hand falls open, lax, the fork with a bite of blueberry pancake rolling out onto the floor.

She doesn’t move.

The diner is pandemonium now. One of the gunmen has gone to the kitchen. Another is taking out the redhead and Dottie. I don’t know where the third one is, but the one that shot Mina is now focused on me. He releases his magazine, and it clatters on the black and white checkered floor. And suddenly my instincts re-engage. By the time he’s slammed the next one in, I’ve already pulled my gun and started shooting.

I keep walking as I unload the gun into him. When it’s empty, I drop it and pull a second one from a holster at my back and just keep firing. He’s dead, but I keep shooting until I’m out of ammo on that one, too.

“Dominic!” one of the gunmen shouts, frantic… echoing the way I said Mina’s name only a few moments ago. And I know someone else besides me now has a vendetta. Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I pick up the corpse and spin around, planning to use him to absorb gunfire, but the other gunman hesitates, not wanting to put more bullets in someone he obviously cares about.

“You motherfucker!” He shouts. He starts to rush me, but I pull another gun from a holster at Dominic’s waist and fire it over the dead guy’s shoulder, taking out probably his only mourner.

Now we’re down to two. The third gunman just shot the truckers, and as he turns his focus to me, I lift a coffee pot filled with hot coffee and fling it at him. He screams as the searing liquid hits him, drops his gun, and I grab it and shoot him in the back of the head before he can regroup. Mack is dead but Floyd is still with us… just barely.

“Help… me…” he coughs out. But the blood is already coming out of his mouth. There’s no help for him. I put two bullets cleanly in his head, then I look for the last shooter.

He comes out of the kitchen, covered in blood. I vaguely recall hearing the clattering of pots and pans in the kitchen. Hank fought back, valiantly, it appears. But it wasn’t enough. We are the only two living souls left in this diner. And I need answers right the fuck now!

I’m keenly aware that I can’t just shoot this motherfucker or I won’t get what I need. Instead, I start flinging throwing stars at him. When I run out of those, I start throwing plates of hot food, then flinging forks. I pick up a full napkin dispenser and chuck it at him. The sharp edge clips him on the shoulder, causing him to let out a howl of pain. If that hurt him, he’d better brace himself for what’s coming next.

He tries shooting at me, but his shots keep missing and going wildly off course as he tries to shoot and avoid the endless cascade of shit I’m throwing at him at the same time. Finally I’m out of small things and start throwing chairs.

He drops the gun and decides to join me in a grown-up fight. We swing punches and throw kicks, and grapple.

He grabs a piece of broken glass and goes for my throat, but I manage to keep him off me. He slashes out and gets the side of my face instead, causing warm sticky blood to start a trail down my cheek. I choke him until he drops it, grateful that he doesn’t die on me.

I finally gain the upper hand and flip him and slam him down on a table. It knocks the wind out of him, and I take the opportunity to relieve him of the remaining weapons on his person, then I grip him by the collar and slam him back against the jukebox so hard a quarter actually comes out of the machine. It spins around several times before lying flat and still on the floor.

I throw another punch at him, and shout in his face. “Why? Why? Motherfucking why? Why this diner? Why us? Why her?”

The logical answer is that they’re getting some vengeance for tonight… that someone saw us. But that doesn’t feel right to me. There is no way these guys are with those guys. They dress and carry themselves too differently.

Tears are streaming down my face as I scream at him, but I don’t care. Is this what it feels like to be human? If so, I want to claw it out of me. I want to go back to being cold and dead inside so nothing like this can ever touch me again.

I can’t look back at her body, I just can’t. This is all my fault.

I release my grip enough so he can talk. He coughs a few times and then finally says… “The money. The contract.”

“What contract?” I growl.

“Valentino put out a hit on you for ten million dollars.”

This is the problem with pissing someone off with far deeper pockets than sense. I’d suspected he might have done something like that at the Krampus run, but it shouldn’t still be in effect with him out of the picture.

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