Free John Gone by Michael Kayatta Page B

suddenly. It must
have noticed the escargot at the end of the table
    “Excuse me?” replied a large,
Southern-sounding female attendant on the other side of the buffet.
John quickly grabbed at Mouse’s head and shoved it down to the
bottom of his bag’s pocket.
    “Sorry, nothing,” John mumbled, grabbing a
small plate from the side of the table.
    “You know,” the attendant said, leaning in
toward John, “ya’ll’re paying for it, so if you want to keep
stuffing it in your bag there, you don’t have to try and hide it
from me. This ain’t the free breakfast bar at the Charleston church
now, hear me?” She smiled mischievously.
    “Thanks,” John replied. “I’m just a little
hungry,” he said, adding his own version of a Southern accent to
the back half of the sentence. The woman looked at him
suspiciously, perhaps deciding if he was trying to make fun of
her.
    “And just who in the hell are you?” a man
yelled from the party behind John. John’s heart raced, but he kept
his attention rapt on the table ahead of him.
    “Don’t touch me,” the man yelled again
loudly.
    “Now what in the hell’s going on back there?”
the attendant asked, looking out past John.
    John turned to see two men in worn gray suits
and thin leather gloves confronting a portly gentleman about twenty
yards aft of the buffet. One had dark hair, the other had blond.
Both wore a strange-looking, flat black bag across their chests.
John thought they looked like diagonally seated fanny-packs, but
wider and shallower.
    The blond-haired man grabbed the portly
gentleman’s arm violently, thrusting the sleeve of his jacket up
and off his wrist.
    “The rest of you line up over here,” the
dark-haired man stated loudly to the crowd.
    “I do say!” the portly man responded gruffly.
He shook out the sleeves of his tussled jacket and approached the
blond-haired man. “Explain yourself this instant!” he demanded.
    The blond-haired man pulled a small gun from
the inside of his coat and fired it into the air above his head.
The portly gentleman stumbled backward onto his rump and scrambled
away from the armed man like a frazzled crab.
    The dark-haired man then revealed that he too
had a gun and moved it slowly across the party. The sweep of his
weapon created a wave of ducking and whimpering across the crowd
that matched its lateral motion above them.
    “Everybody needs to listen very clearly to
what I say next and do exactly as I tell you,” he commanded. “In a
moment, my friend over here is going to check each of your arms for
something that belongs to us. The sooner we find it, the sooner we
leave.”
    The blond-haired man coughed loudly.
    John dropped to the ground and rolled under
the white-clothed buffet table. The maneuver tangled him with his
messenger bag, and he awkwardly tried to disentangle himself from
it without drawing the attention of the two armed men.
    “You almost crushed me!” exclaimed Mouse.
    “Who in the twelve hells said that?” asked
the buffet attendant, her whisper strained. John looked to his left
and saw the woman suddenly lying a few feet from him underneath the
same table, her hair now frazzled as if she’d been rubbing it
wildly with her large meaty hands. Apparently, she and John had
shared the same idea about where to hide from the frightening
commotion at the party.
    “What are you doing down here?” he exclaimed
quietly. “Get your own hiding place!”
    “Don’t make me jack-slap you, boy; I don’t
work for nobody when I’m in a crisis situation,” she said.
    “Okay, okay,” John whispered. “Let’s just
both shut up so they don’t hear us.”
    “Name’s Rodney,” she said quietly.
    “Rodney?” John replied on reflex. “That’s a
weird name for a woman.”
    “Boy, I’m fixing to--” she started.
    “Okay, okay, I’m sorry I said anything. I
love your name. Just be quiet.”
    “You don’t get to tell me--”
    John rolled out from under the table to
behind it. He slowly