Jonah spread the city map flat on the table for the second time the fold had been wrong the first time, and it needed to look like a prop, not a stall and left the coffee at his elbow going cold.
The map was a prop.
The coffee was an anchor.
Griddy’s Donuts smelled like burnt sugar and old coffee and a desperation strong enough to keep the place open at ten on a Tuesday morning, long past when the health inspector had stopped caring.
The booth had sightlines to the door, the counter, the kitchen, and the narrow hallway that led to the back.
Klaus Hargreeves sat at the counter eating a glazed donut he had not paid for.
The waitress Agnes, her name was Agnes, and she would survive this if Jonah did not interfere had given it to him with a smile that said she knew exactly what he was and had decided to be kind anyway.
Klaus talked.
Klaus always talked.
Something about a palm reader in Alphabet City who had told him his lifeline was a circle.
Jonah counted exits in Spanish under his breath.
Uno.
Dos.
Tres.
Front door.
Kitchen door.
The back hallway had a fire exit that opened onto an alley.
Three ways out.
Klaus had zero of them.
The bell over the door would ring in four minutes.
Give or take thirty seconds.
Foreknowledge was not a countdown timer.
It was a shape in the fog, and the fog moved.
An older Black woman sat two booths up from Jonah with a newspaper and a slice of coconut cream pie.
She had gray hair pulled back in a bun and reading glasses on a chain and she was humming something low under her breath.
Her name was Doris.
Jonah knew her name because he had asked Agnes for a coffee refill ten minutes ago and Agnes had said Doris, you want a warm-up?
and Doris had said I’m fine, baby, thank you.
Doris would take the first bullet.
Center mass.
Gone before the sirens.
Jonah folded the map.
Refolded it.
The angle was wrong.
He tried again.
Klaus laughed at something Agnes said.
The laugh was too loud for the room.
Klaus’s laughs always were.
Three minutes.
Jonah’s hands were steady.
His heartbeat was not.
The notebook sat in his back pocket and he wanted to pull it out and write Doris, Griddy’s, October 2, 10:23am, coconut cream pie because writing a fact down made it real and real things could be saved.
But the protocol said no.
External facts only.
Verifiable.
A woman’s name in a donut shop was not verifiable.
It was a loss waiting to happen.
The coffee mug was warm against his palm.
Doris turned a page of the newspaper.
The headline was something about the mayor.
She was not reading it.
She was looking at the crossword in the corner.
Jonah stood.
Walked to the counter.
Ordered a coffee to go.
Agnes poured it without looking up.
Klaus was telling her about the palm reader’s cat now.
The cat had apparently bitten him.
Klaus thought this was significant.
Jonah walked back to his booth.
Stopped at Doris’s table.
Leaned down like he was asking for the time.
He whispered it behind the menu she had propped against the napkin dispenser.
“I heard a rumor that you need to use the bathroom right now.”
Doris blinked.
Put down her fork.
Stood.
Walked toward the hallway.
The cost was immediate.
A voice Jonah, mijo, you’re gonna be late his sister Maya’s voice, its cadence, how she used to stretch mijo into two long syllables when she was teasing him.
The name had been gone for days.
Now the sound went with it.
Jonah sat down.
The coffee mug was still warm against his fingers, and his hands were still steady, which seemed like something that should not be true.
One minute.
The bell rang.
Hazel and Cha-Cha walked in wearing cartoon character masks that were thirty years out of date and wrong for the decade, which made them worse.
Hazel’s mask was a dog.
Cha-Cha’s was a bear.
They did not look at Agnes.
They looked at Klaus.
Klaus glanced up from his donut.
Said something.
Jonah could not hear it over the sound of his own heartbeat.
Cha-Cha pulled the gun.
The room moved in the wrong order.
Agnes dropped behind the counter.
Klaus dove left.
The first bullet took the napkin dispenser off the counter where Klaus’s elbow had been.
The second took out the front window.
The third went high.
Jonah stayed under the table with his hands flat on the cold tile.
He counted the bullets because counting was better than watching.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Hazel said something low.
Cha-Cha answered.
Klaus lay on the floor near the kitchen door and Hazel moved toward him and Cha-Cha was sweeping the room for witnesses.
The back hallway was empty.
Doris was behind the closed restroom door, and that was the only clean thing left in the room.
Seven.
Klaus tried to run.
Hazel caught him by the back of his jacket and Klaus went down and Hazel said something that sounded like an apology and hauled him up by the arm.
Plaster dust.
The smell of burnt powder.
They left through the front door.
The bell rang on the way out.
Klaus hung between them.
He was not struggling.
He looked like he had expected this.
Silence.
Jonah stayed under the table and counted to thirty in Spanish.
Uno.
Dos.
Tres.
At twenty, Agnes stood up behind the counter.
Her hands were shaking.
She looked at the shattered window, the bullet holes in the ceiling, the overturned stools.
She did not look at Jonah.
At thirty, Jonah stood.
Walked to the back hallway.
Knocked twice on the door.
“Doris.
It’s over.
You can come out.”
The door opened.
Doris looked at him with her reading glasses crooked on her nose, and she straightened them before she spoke.
“What in the hell was that.”
“A robbery.
You were in the back.
You didn’t see it.”
“I don’t I don’t remember walking back here.”
“You needed the restroom.
You went.
That’s all.”
Doris looked at him for five seconds and nodded once, the way you agree to something you know isn’t true because the alternative is worse.
Jonah walked her through the kitchen.
The back door was unlocked.
The alley smelled like old grease and rain that had not fallen yet.
He walked her two blocks east to the bus stop on Seventh.
The M15 pulled up thirty seconds later.
“You take care, baby,” Doris said.
She did not ask his name.
She got on the bus.
Jonah watched the bus pull away.
The sky was gray.
The street was empty.
Behind his eyes, something unhooked itself not a memory, just the space where one had been.
He reached for Maya’s voice and found only the fact that he had once had a sister and her name had been Maya and she had called him mijo in a specific way he would not hear again.
He turned left.
Walked back toward the short-let.
The notebook stayed in his pocket.
The protocol held.
By the time the sirens reached Griddy’s, Jonah Vega was six blocks away, counting exits in a language that was running out of words.