Slow Night

            When eight-thirty rolled around and it was now a certainty that the evening was another bust, Danny slid a plate of sliced meat into the window and said, “That’s it for tickets. Should I get on the pizza prep?”

            Abuse clutched his forehead. “God,” he muttered, “I wish it would end. You know, peacefully, with a well-placed explosion or something.”

            Danny leaned back in order to look across his shoulder at Abuse. “What the fuck does that mean?”

            Abuse flicked fingers at the prep board. “Remind me about what we’ve got on the plate?”

            Danny walked over and assessed the printout taped to the board. “Bunch of fuckin states left,” he said. “Tomorrow’s Arkansas. Caramelized pork rinds and edamame.”

            “Jesus Christ in a taxicab,” Abuse said, stirring the pea soup. “Edamame? We don’t have soybeans around here.”

            “Yeah, I asked him about this last week,” Danny said. “Apparently Arkansas grows a lot of soybeans.”

            Abuse was gesturing with his hands. “That’s,” he said, “beside the point. We don’t have soybeans. We can’t make that. What else is coming up?”

            “Let’s see here,” Danny said, reviewing the printout. “Florida. Sardines and orange zest.” He looked curiously across the kitchen at Abuse.

            “Disgusting,” Abuse said. He scraped some thick buildup of pea soup from the sides of the pan with the ladle. “We can do that. Next?”

            Danny looked at the printout. “Hawaii,” he said. “Teriyaki fish and ‘sesame crunch.’ I don’t know what that is.”

            “We can make anything crunch,” Abuse said, nodding. “Next?”

            “Idaho,” Danny read. “French fries and sour cream.”

            “Seriously?” asked Abuse.

            “It’s what it fucking says right here,” Danny said irritably.

            “Okay,” Abuse said. “It’s possible. How about we finish out the week. I have to call in the distributor order before I leave.”

            “It’s Kentucky and then Maine,” Danny said.

            “This should be great,” Abuse said, evacuating some of the collected buildup from the ladle into the trash. “Delicious pizzas, I’m sure.”

            “Kentucky is crayfish fritters with bourbon beurre blanc,” Danny said.

            “Fuck Jesus,” Abuse spat. “Where are we going to get bourbon? Kieran sincerely thinks that bourbon is just scotch with sugar added, so it’s not stocked at the bar. Agh. Fuck it. What about Maine?”

            “Globules of rabbit cream and flecks of irritated lobster,” Danny read.

            Abuse abandoned the ladle and walked across the kitchen to see for himself. “God fuck shit cancer welt buggernut.”

            “Didn’t you see this before?” Danny asked.

            Abuse grimaced at him. “I didn’t read it,” he said. He went back to the hot side and took the ladle back up. “We’re not doing any of that.”

            Danny motioned at the printout. “So what are we going to do now?”

            Abuse stirred the split pea soup in the steam table, careful not to knock any of the remaining hardened ring into the good stuff. He shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re going to do,” he said as he abandoned the ladle to the tasty green slop, “but I’m going out for a cigarette.”

            Danny smirked and went back over to the cold side. He plucked a remaining order ticket from the rack and then impaled it on the bill spike. “Why does time take so long when you’re bored?” he pondered aloud, snapping off his vinyl service gloves and tossing them into the trash.

            “Don’t be bored,” Abuse suggested as he went to his back in the back room to get his cigarettes.

            Danny shook his head. “What about you, Professor?” he asked Jux, who was washing up some of the few dishes that had been brought back. “You got any thoughts on the matter?”

            “Probably you’re just paying more attention to the passing time when you’re not really engaged in something,” he said as he sprayed high-pressured water to knock the nasty bits off of a plate. “Then you’re just thinking and thinking, and you can do a lot of that in a couple of seconds.” He seemed to contemplate this idea for a moment as he stared down at the murky soapwater in the sink.

            “Yeah, I see what you mean,” Danny said, nodding. He looked around purposefully for a moment and then collected a ricer from one of the bins on the low shelf by the dish station and went to the prep table on the other side of the island.

            “What you making?” Jux asked.

            “Noki,” Danny said. “And don’t give me that ‘nyoki’ shit. I’m going to pronounce it how I want.”

            “As long as we can figure it out by the label on the container,” Jux said, “I don’t think anyone cares how you pronounce it.”

            “That’s not how you bitches act around here, though,” Danny said as he scooped up some all-purpose flour from a bin with a plastic four-cup measure. After loosely replacing the bin’s lid and setting the large cup on the surface of the prep table, he went around the island and crouched to open the cooler under the hot side station. “Not you,” he clarified as he began rooting around in the cold clutter of plastic-wrapped steel containers. “It’s more like, you know,” he said, indicating the front of the house with an angle of the head. “And sometimes Abuse,” he added loudly toward the door to the back room.

            “Don’t invoke my name, Sir,” Abuse replied from the other room.

            “I’ll invoke your ass,” Danny said with some frustration as he held a steel deep sixth container against his chest and kept looking in the cooler. “Is this it? We don’t have any more mashed potatoes?”

            Jux turned. “You’re going to make the gnocchi with the mashed potatoes?”

            “Why not?” asked Danny.

            “They’ve already got butter and seasoning,” Jux said.

            “Bitch, are you trying to tell me how to do my job?” asked Danny.

            “No,” Jux said with some reluctance. Then, he added, “But you’re supposed to peel and boil the potatoes, and then rice them, and then use that for the gnocchi.”

            Danny stared skeptically at him for a few seconds and then looked down at the sixth. “I don’t know about all that,” he said, replacing the container and shutting the cooler. “I’ve been making them with the mash and ain’t nobody complaining. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Shit, now I got to boil potatoes.”

            Jux pulled down one of the stock pots and began filling it with water.

            “Thanks,” Danny said.

            Jux smiled and shrugged.

            Then Danny went back to the prep table and reached into one of the boxes of potatoes on the low shelf. “What the fuck?” he exclaimed.

            “What is it?” asked Jux.

            Danny held up his hand, in which he was gripping a russet along with a couple of fingerlings. “The potatoes are all mixed up. Some motherfucker dumped them all together.”

            They were mixed up, indeed. On that gaping bottom shelf, the kitchen kept the different flours—the bouncer and the AP—as well as the different oils—the EVOO and the blend—and the different dried mushrooms—porcini, chanterelle, shitake, some others impossible to identify past the old greasy folds of cellophane—and, also, two big boxes, as shipped, of potatoes—hearty black-eyed russets and fine gnarly fingerlings. What Danny was illustrating with his grip of mixed potatoes was that somehow the contents of the boxes of potatoes had been combined.

            Jux was there to observe. “Mixed, indeed,” he said, befuddled and wiping wet dishhands on his messy apron.

            “For real,” Danny said, peering into the boxes. He then shouted toward the back, “Abuse! Check this out!”

            After a few seconds, Abuse emerged from the dock via the storage room with the annoyed and skeptical look of someone who’s been prematurely severed from completing a task of unutterable gravity—in his case, having to abandon a lit Pall Mall.

            “Seriously,” Danny told him.

            Abuse seemed willing to oblige and, after a glance at Jux, crouched down to examine the boxes. His eyes darted about for a moment and then he pursed his lips and muttered, “Somebody is going to die.”

            “It is weird,” Jux admitted, “but I’ve found all kinds of shit mixed up in the containers without explanation. We all have. There was a little sack of nopalitos tucked into a ninth of diced onions the other day. For no reason.”

            Danny nodded in confirmation. “So you think it was the day crew?” he asked. “Those fools operate on their own logic.”

            “Of course it was the day crew,” Abuse said. “Not Concepción, of course. But day crew. You don’t put roasted tomatoes in the same container with slices of Grafton, do you?”

            “When’d you find that?” asked Jux.

            “Today,” Abuse said.

            “So it’s Almo, then,” Danny said.

            Abuse took a moment. “He’s got his way of doing things,” he said, “and we deal with it.”

            “Do you really think that Almo mixed up the potatoes, though?” Jux asked. “Seems like a lot of work to get them all, you know, mixed up like this. Maybe this is just how it came from the distributor.”

Abuse shot out a sardonic smile and then went around the island to the server control console fixed to the poles of the adjoining stations. He pressed one of the buttons repeatedly.

            “What are you doing?” asked Danny.

            “Getting Max in here,” he said, jabbing violently at the button, “is what I’m doing.”

            “Max?” Jux asked. “Max? When would Max have had the time to do this?”

            “Doesn’t matter,” Abuse said, still repeating his pressures against the button. “He’s going to pay.”

            “Come on, man,” Jux said with a wry smile. “He’s probably already pissed that our megalomanic pseudo-manager took all the tables tonight and made him fold up the forks. He doesn’t need this, too. Fucking Packie is a terrible person, we can all agree.”

            “Doesn’t matter,” Abuse said. “We get the information.”

            Jux seemed to appreciate this idea and he was smiling.

            “How could this happen?” Danny wondered aloud, still crouching at the potato boxes. “If somebody dumped one into the other and then dumped them back, there’d still be more of one type of potato in one box and more of the other type in the other, right? I mean, just how they’re going to fall.”

            “They must have either dumped them back and forth a few times,” Jux posited, “or else they did it handful by handful.”

            Danny squinted as he picked out some fingerlings. “Who’s going to do that?”

            “I honestly don’t know,” Jux admitted.

            “This motherfucker looks like Krunklestiltskin’s dick,” Danny said, holding up a particularly twisted and slender-smooth little fingerling potato.

            “I know, I know,” came a voice from the front entrance to the kitchen. Max emerged with his hands as up and wide and out as his curly hair. He was obviously pissed. “They’re already leaving and Packie closed them out and apparently they’re saying they never ordered the plate.” 

            Danny looked up at the island window. “So I had to put that shit together for no reason?”

            “I don’t know,” Max said with an abrupt shake of the head as he snatched the three-cheese plate from the window. “I’m going to take it out anyway. Don’t worry, I’m…” Whatever it was that he was thinking about saying suddenly disappeared into a cloud of frustration and he looked around the kitchen and at the staff with a flailing disgust that quickly transitioned into intimidated confusion. “What?” he asked them, gripping the plate to be delivered via a hopefully quick layover at the cheese case while things were sliced.

            Abuse, Danny, and Jux were giving him the meantime stinkeye. His response was a double-down of frustration.

            “Now you’re all on my ass, too,” Max blabbered. “Unbelievable. Packie’s taking all the tables and making me clean up after them and we don’t share tips—”

            “Just stop,” Jux said.

            “I won’t stop,” Max exclaimed.

            “This is an easy question,” Jux said, moving a hand down beneath his waist.

            Max looked at him and, again, it was skeptical. Everyone was skeptical at that restaurant no matter what was happening, so this skepticism was no surprise. Max, however, was more skeptical than anyone else because he’d been humiliated there too many times. At this moment, in fact, he was obviously conscious in his attempt to not look down at all costs.

            “This isn’t about that,” Abuse said.

            “Fuck you guys,” Max said.

            “Seriously, Max,” Jux said. “Look at the potatoes.”

            Max shook his head. “I’m not looking at the potatoes,” he said. “Fuck you and your tally. I’m not falling for it this time.”

            “So you deny that you had anything to do with the mixing of the potatoes,” Abuse clarified through the island window.

            Max stared maniacally at them. He was still gripping the large square cheeseless three-cheese plate and the guests were probably already preparing to leave. “You’re serious?” he asked with a deepening frown.

            “Serious as The Thing,” Abuse said, nodding slowly.

            Max rolled his eyes and then looked off for a moment. “You’re not going to get me on that again,” he said with a smile. “Seriously.”

            “You got to check this out, though,” Danny said, still crouching at the boxes under the prep table. “This one looks like Krunklestiltskin’s dick.” He waggled the gnarly little fingerling phallus.

            “What?” Max asked. He looked down.

            There were, of course, the boxes of potatoes, mixed as they were, and the bins of flour and the oils and the mushrooms in their various containers, but now there was, also, Jux’s hand, thrust down into Max’s line of sight. Jux had his thumb and forefinger touching and the other fingers sticking up in an upside-down OK.

            Seeing the finger formation, Max recoiled such that the contents of the plate shifted and a couple of Kalamata olives toppled to the floor.

            “Hey!” cried Danny. “Don’t mess that up! I got the crustinis in the boursin stickin up like fingers of a gang sign.”

            “Who the fuck is ‘Krunklestiltskin?’” Max asked. He inhaled loudly and huffed his way out to the front.

            In the kitchen, they were all laughing. Abuse pressed Max’s call button on the server console a few times for good measure as he grinned at the emptiness in the room that the server’s absence had created. Jux was clutching his stomach as he laughed, and Danny fell backwards from his crouch and literally rolled briefly on the floor before realizing how gross the floor was and standing up and self-consciously brushing himself off.

            “Amazing,” Jux said, crossing to the bulletin board on the wall next to the burners and putting another tick of permanent marker next to Max’s name. “Fucking amazing.”

            “He’s a natural,” Abuse said, gazing with admiration toward the door to the front of the house through which Max had disappeared.

            “Pretty soon I’ll have to do some scientific notation shit up in here,” Jux said. He jiggled the marker thoughtfully. “I mean, I’ll have to relearn how scientific notation works first, but it’s going to be worth it.”

            “How many is it now?” Danny asked.

            Jux looked at the chart pinned near the kitchen staff schedule. “Fifty-three for Max,” he reported. “That’s a full fifty more than anyone else. We need to give him a certificate or something.”

            “Wait until it’s a hundred,” Abuse suggested.

            Jux nodded. “Might have to be more,” he said, “because that’s probably going to happen pretty soon and it’s too fun to stop.”

            “Man, you guys are hardcore,” Danny said.

            “There’s nothing untoward going on here,” Abuse assured him.

            Danny chuckled and looked back at the boxes of potatoes. “Seriously, though,” he asked, “who do you think did this?”

            Abuse and Jux exchanged glances and shrugs.

            “No clue,” Abuse said, crouching down to help sort the potatoes back out.

An Hour Later

            There were no new tickets. Abuse had the hot side wrapped and clean. He’d set up the day shift’s ingredients in the cooler and scoured the ranges. Jux was rinsing bleach solution from the cutting boards and eyeing the little stack of dishes and flatware that Teatree had just delivered onto the surface of the dish station.

            They had been playing music all night at low volume, but now it was loud and it was Abuse’s choice, so it was Children of Mercy that was playing. The violent thrumming and screeching vocals vibrated the stacks of dishes and pounded into the walls. Only moments before, Abuse had indicated to Jux that the coming track was one deserving special attention, but Jux was apparently uninterested as he scoured the rest of the dishes.

            Then through the back door came a large human wielding a small gun.

            “Watch out, motherfuckers!” this person shouted above the blasting gothic metal. It was Danny, and he was brandishing a small firearm.

            For some reason, Jux went to him, and they met in the narrow space between the island and the prep table. Danny grabbed Jux by the shoulder and pulled him close and put the gun to his head.

            “Give me all your money, motherfucker!” Danny shouted.

            Jux, terrified, slapped at the gripping hand, crying, “What the fuck are you doing?”

            “Not a goddamned thing,” Danny insisted, letting Jux go. He pointed the weapon at his own head and then jiggled his body around in something like a dance. “Not a thing in creation.”

            Abuse was gripping a pair of tongs as if ready for melee on the other side of the island.

Jux scampered back and gripped the dish station with both hands.

            “What?” Danny asked as he glanced at the pistol in his hand. “You scared when you see a nine?”

            Jux was clutching his chest and looking around. “What are you doing that for?” he asked, barely audible over the track playing on Abuse’s phone through the stereo.

            “Relax,” Danny said loudly. He grinned. “It’s not loaded.”

            “Fuck you,” Abuse said.

            Danny chuckled.

            “Get that shit out of here,” Jux told him.

            “It isn’t even loaded,” Danny explained. “I got you guys, though. Admit it.”

            “What,” Abuse began slowly, “the fuck are you doing bringing a gun into the kitchen?”

            “Prissy bitches need to relax,” Danny said, tucking the handgun into his belt at the base of his back and then straightening his black chef’s jacket. “You act like you never had a gun pointed at your head before.”

            “He hasn’t,” Jux said, “and neither had I until you just did it.”

            “Whatever,” Danny said. He walked to the information board and studied the schedule.

            “What are you doing?” Abuse asked him.

            “Looking at the schedule,” Danny said.

            “Take the gun back out to wherever you got it,” Abuse said. He set the tongs on the sparkling stainless steel line counter and went to his phone to shut off the music.

            Danny slumped his shoulders and then wordlessly left the kitchen through the storage room to the back dock.

            “Goddamn lunatic,” Jux said, shaking his head.

            Abuse unhooked a clipboard from a wall mount by the ice machine and readied its attached pencil. “I just need to call in the order and then we can get out of here. Let Danny finish the bar dishes himself.”

            Jux nodded. “We need basil.”

            “Got it,” Abuse said, writing. He also wrote garlic, fennel, lemons, lemongrass. “Did you see clam juice in the pantry earlier?”

            “There’s like three cans,” Jux said.

            “What am I thinking,” Abuse said. “I have to go up there anyway to look at the produce.” He sighed pathetically and passed Jux and left through the hall to the bar.

            Jux looked around the quiet kitchen. The air was still stinging sweet and noxious from the range cleaner.

            Suddenly Abuse’s voice came from the bar hall. “Hey, are there enough russets to do both the chowder and the gnocchi in the morning?”

            Jux was startled by the question and glanced fretfully about for a moment before answering, “I’ll check.” He crouched down at the prep table to look into the potato crates.

            “All right, it’s gone,” Danny boomed as he reentered from the store room. “You happy now? Look, I’m sorry I scared you.”

            Jux didn’t answer. He still stared into the cardboard crates, one and then the other and then the other again.

            “Jux?” Abuse’s voice called. Soon he emerged from the short hall. “Didn’t you hear me?”

            Jux shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Yeah, yes, I heard you. It’s just…”

            “What?” Abuse asked.

            “Look,” Jux said, pointing at the boxes.

            Abuse shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “You’re not getting me that easy.”

            Jux stood and raised his hands. “There,” he said. “I promise.”

            Abuse and Danny exchanged looks and then both leaned in, from either side of Jux, to peer down into the potato boxes. One was completely empty except for what looked to be a scrap of black bark in a gritty corner. The other contained all the potatoes, mixed together.

            “What the fuck?” Danny cried.

            “Now how did that happen?” Abuse asked.

            “We already sorted them out earlier,” Danny said. “I fucking hated doing that.” He frowned at the mix of potatoes.

            “Who’s been back here except for the three of us?” Abuse asked. “Has Teatree been back here?”

            Danny shook his head.

            “I didn’t see him,” Jux said.

            “And Packie’s been sharing a bottle of wine with the couple at E2 since nine,” Abuse said, “so that means it had to have been Max.”

            “I’ma grab him by his Jew-fro and lay the bitch out,” Danny swore.

            Abuse held out a palm. “There will be none of that,” he commanded.

            “I take responsibility,” Jux sighed. “He probably took some opportunity while we were on a smoke break to mix them all up again because he’s a whimpering child who always looks down at the fingers. And a crafty little bastard, as much as I love him.”

            “It would be some petty shit, indeed,” Abuse said. “I wouldn’t put it past him, though. He’d stoop.”

            Jux nodded. “One time he persuaded me to give him a piece of raw ahi,” he recalled. “He was just back from helping with some catering job and he had got Packie’s car key into his possession. He told me he was going to hide the ahi under the seat.”

            “Damn,” Danny said. “That’s cold. Did he do it?”

            Jux nodded. “Packie didn’t find out for three days,” he said, “but that’s only because Crystal ended up telling him. The fish apparently didn’t end up stinking for whatever reason—I mean, it was probably already zapped. Anyway, Packie got it out of his car and snuck it into Max’s apron pocket. So there was that little surprise for him.”

            “So his petty vindictive prank backfired,” Abuse said.

            Jux nodded. He crouched down and pulled the bulky box of mixed potatoes halfway out over the ledge of the shelf so that he could more efficiently commence with the resorting.

            “There is a pattern here,” Abuse said, going over to the hot side of the line.

            “What do you mean by that?” asked Jux.

            Abuse hit a page button several times. “The pattern of Max’s failure,” he said.

            “What?” Max’s voice cried before he emerged from the hall from the bar.

            When he did emerge, Danny reprimanded him for not calling “corner.”

            “I just yelled,” Max said.

            “Look at the potatoes,” Danny told him.

            Max stared at Danny and then very intentionally shot a quick look toward the prep table, where Jux was down sorting at the box. “No,” Max said. “I’m not looking at the potatoes.”

            “Look at the potatoes,” Danny demanded.

            Max tossed up his hands and smiled. “I’m not going to do it,” he said. “Honestly, I’m not in the mood to play games.”

            Then Danny lunged forward from between the cold side and the dishpit, plucking the handgun from the crack of his ass and holding it out with his arm arced in Max’s general direction. “You think I’m playing games, motherfucker?” Danny asked, stepping closer. “You think I’m fucking around? Look at the potatoes!”

            Max and Abuse were frozen with shock. Jux, however, had still not looked up from the task of sorting the russets from the fingerlings, and, sensing another opportunity, he simply held his left hand down near his ankle and placed the finger game gesture.

            “Look,” Danny snarled, “at the motherfucking potatoes.”

            Max was wincing in terror, but he managed to nod tightly and then direct his face downward toward Jux and, even though Jux was obviously positioning his arm in an unnatural way, Max continued reflexively to follow the arm to its termination, where, inevitably, inconceivably perhaps, Jux’s fingers were ready in formation.

            “Boo-yah!” Jux hollered, jumping up and executing a few clumsy rapid pelvic thrusts. “Fifty-four!”

            Max shuffled back a step but suddenly realized that Danny was still there with the gun, so he tried to stop his backward momentum by throwing a shoulder ahead. He lost his balance and stumbled into Jux, whose right leg clipped the box of potatoes and sent it upending over the side of the shelf. Fat, rough russets and slim, smooth fingerlings scattered across the freshly-mopped false tile flooring, a good number of them rolling into dark crevices under and between bulky furnishings.

            “Aww, fuck!” Jux yelled, steadying himself on the prep table counter while Max rushed out of the kitchen into the back.

            “It isn’t even loaded, bro!” Danny called after him.

Jux watched Max disappear into the dock and then looked around the kitchen, ending with a look at Danny. “What?” he cried. “What just happened? Why do you have that in here again?”

            “Sorry, bro,” Danny said, tucking the piece away. “I was just scaring him a little bit.”

            “He’s probably shitting himself and vomiting at the same time back there,” Jux said.

            “Better be doing it in the alley and not on the dock,” Abuse said.

            “And he probably thinks I was in on it,” Jux said, shaking his head. “Goddamnit, Danny. What the fuck are you thinking, dude?”

            Danny waved a hand. “It isn’t even mine,” he said. “I have to give it back tomorrow, anyway.”

            Jux held out his hands. “Well, that’s good,” he said, nodding and looking over at Abuse. “It’s not even his.”

            “Danny,” Abuse said.

            “What?” Danny responded.

            “Clock out and go home,” Abuse said.

            Danny looked over at the clock on the wall above the dish station. “It ain’t even 9:45,” he said.

            “Jux and I will finish up,” Abuse said.

            “That’s taking money out of my paycheck, bro,” Danny complained. “I got to get me my 36 hours.”

            Abuse looked up at the ceiling. “Then will you please go put the gun away, for real this time?”

            Danny shrugged.

            “And never do this again,” Abuse said. “I fucking mean it.”

            “I just told you I have to give it back to my cousin tomorrow,” Danny said.

            “He means, like, the general situation,” Jux said as he tossed a handful of fingerlings into one of the boxes.

            “Man,” Danny whined, “you guys are clowning on each other all the time. I can’t clown too sometimes? Is it because I’m Mexican?”

            Abuse shook his head. “You’re from Idaho,” he said. “You’re not even as Mexican as I am.”

            “You ain’t Mexican,” Danny said, tilting his head to the side.

            Abuse nodded. “Mexican-American.”

            “What?” Danny asked. “How did I not know you were la Raza, bro? Am I going to have to investigate your name, mister—””

            “I’m fucking calling Tati right now,” Max suddenly hollered, his call increasing in volume as he stormed through the store room from the dock. “If you want to stop me, you’ll have to shoot me.”

            “Whoa whoa whoa,” Jux cautioned, arms out at Max as he charged forward. “Watch out for the finger—”

            Max sped past Jux and stepped on a small potato, causing him to slip momentarily and slam his hands with a clang onto the stainless steel surface of the prep table to steady himself.

            “Everyone calm the fuck down,” Abuse said sternly.

            Jux watched as Max tried to control his rapid breaths. Danny leaned back against the corner of the dishpit.

            Abuse surveyed the kitchen. “Jux,” he began, “collect the rest of the potatoes. Max, I’m sorry that you had to experience this. Danny thinks it was funny, but he has promised not to joke like this again.”

            “Straight up,” Danny said to Max. “It isn’t even loaded.” He pulled the small handgun back out from his waist and pointed it at the ground. “See?” he asked, squeezing the trigger twice, quickly, but stopping as soon as he’d registered that the weapon was popping and discharging. The sound was not nearly as loud as expected, but nonetheless the others all ducked and breathed heavily as two little pellets tinkled to a stop somewhere under a counter. Danny stared dumbly down at the weapon in his grip.

            “Pellet gun,” Abuse scoffed.

            “That doesn’t make it better,” Jux protested.

            “Not saying it does,” Abuse said. “It’s just a little less dangerous.”

            “Not when it’s pointed at your temple,” Jux said.

            Abuse nodded gravely.

            “He told me it wasn’t loaded,” Danny pleaded, holding the gun loosely down. “He told me it was a nine and that it wasn’t loaded.”

            “You didn’t even check?” Max squinted at him.

            Danny shrugged. “I squeezed the trigger right there with him earlier,” he said. “When he gave it to me.”

            They all stared at him.

            “Nothing happened,” Danny explained. “Just a click.”

            Abuse picked the tongs up from the hot side counter and immediately dropped them back down with a clang. “That’s it,” he said. “Kitchen’s closed.”    

---

---

---

---