"Mr. Hayes," he said.
Dominic looked at the hand. Then he took it.
"Damien."
"Can I buy you dinner?"
Dominic thought about it.
"I'll let you buy me some pie," he said. "If it's as good as the one in Van Horn."
"It's better," Ray Pruitt said from the counter, without turning around. "Van Horn pie's from a box."
* * *
They sat together for almost an hour. Damien in the booth across from Dominic. Ray had been persuaded, with a great deal of grumbling, to move over from the counter and sit at the end of the table. Sarah came by every few minutes on the pretense of refilling coffee and stayed each time a little longer than she needed to.
Damien told Dominic about the fight in Houston. About Oyelaran, the wrestler from Lagos by way of Iowa State who had never been taken down in a professional fight. About training camp, which would start in June. About the Fundamentals class and the thirty nervous adults and the fifty-percent rule.
Dominic listened. He asked good questions. He seemed, Sarah thought from behind the counter, almost happy.
Ray told the story about the Special Forces sergeant in the highlands in 1968, and Dominic listened to that too, and at the end of it he was quiet for a moment.
"What was his name?" Dominic asked. "The sergeant."
"Hollis. Sergeant First Class Thomas Hollis. Out of Kentucky somewhere."
Dominic sat back in the booth.
"Tom Hollis taught the man who taught me," he said.
Ray stared at him.
"Well, I'll be," Ray said softly. "I'll be damned."
They looked at each other across the table, two old men from two different wars, and something passed between them that Damien could see but not quite understand. It was not friendship, exactly. It was something older than that and harder to name.
It was, Damien would think later, recognition.
* * *
It was 12:14 in the morning when the door opened again.
The bell gave its clean, cheerful chime.
A man came in.
He was young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, skinny, in a gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood up and a pair of dirty white sneakers. His face was pale and his eyes were too bright, and he was moving in a way that made Ray Pruitt set down his fork before anybody else had noticed anything at all.
Dominic noticed.
He did not look up from his pie. But Damien, sitting across from him, saw something change in the older man's face. It was very small. A stillness that had not been there a moment before. Like a house where every light has been switched off at once.
The young man walked to the register.
Sarah came over from the coffee station with her order pad. "Evening, hon. Table or counter?"
The young man took his right hand out of the front pocket of his sweatshirt.
There was a gun in it.
It was a small black semiautomatic, cheap-looking, and his hand was shaking so hard that the barrel was jittering in little circles. He pointed it at Sarah's chest.
"Open the register," he said. His voice cracked in the middle. "Open it. Right now."
Sarah went very still.
In the window booth, a young couple who had come in an hour earlier for milkshakes gasped. The woman put both hands over her mouth. Hector, in the kitchen, dropped something metal that clanged on the floor, and the young man jerked toward the sound and swung the gun toward the pass-through window and then back toward Sarah.
"Nobody move! Nobody move! I swear to God—"
Damien's whole body had gone tight.
He was sitting with his back mostly to the register, turned partway around in the booth. He was perhaps twelve feet from the kid with the gun. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he could cover twelve feet in under a second. He had done it a thousand times in a cage. He could feel his weight already shifting forward, his feet already finding the floor under the table, his hands already—
A hand closed around his wrist under the table.
He looked down.
It was Dominic's hand. It was not gripping hard. It was simply there, resting on his wrist, warm and dry and completely steady.
Dominic was looking at him. Not at the kid with the gun. At him.
He shook his head, very slightly.
Then he mouthed one word.
Wait.
Damien stared at him.
Every instinct in his body was screaming at him to move. To do something. To be the hero. This was exactly the kind of moment he had imagined a thousand times, lying awake as a scared thirteen-year-old kid with a split lip, the kind of moment that the muscles and the record and the billboards had all been built for.
And the old man was telling him to wait.