Happy Birthday, Melinda

“Put it down.”

Sweat beaded on Ryan’s forehead, slow rivulets tracing the creases in his brow. His knees felt shaky, but he wouldn’t allow his arm to twitch. Not now.

“You put it down.”

“I swear to God, I’ll paint the walls,” the man with the glass eye said. One arm of his tweed suit jacket was looped around a young girl’s throat. The other held a snub-nosed .45 to her temple. Her amber eyes were absurdly wide, and it distantly occurred to Ryan that their hue exactly matched the color of the suit jacket’s elbow patches.

He considered a bluff. Maybe, “Go ahead. I don’t even know her”, but he was confident he couldn’t fake that kind of bravado. Every man’s got to draw a line somewhere. He may be a criminal, but he was no killer.

“Don’t do anything crazy,” Ryan said, and stifled a wince at the weakness in his voice.

“You want to see crazy?!” the man roared, glass eye rolling wildly. He jerked the girl again, cutting off her scream by pulling his arm closer to his chest.

“No,” Ryan clarified, “I just said, let’s not do anything crazy. Let’s minimize the craziness.”

“I’LL SHOW YOU CRAZY!”

“Don’t, dude!”

“Someone do something!” a middle-aged woman cried from the far side of the pastry counter. The man with the glass eye whipped his sidearm in her direction and bellowed something that seemed to lack enough consonants to be a proper word. Ryan sprinted two steps toward the counter before the big .45 zeroed back in on him.

“Slow it down, twinkletoes!”

He straightened his own arm and squinted.

“What the fuck?”

“Now, we’re gonna do this nice and slow,” he said, edging toward the counter. “I’m going to pick up this cake, for my granddaughter, and I’m going to leave.”

“Like Hell you are,” Ryan said. “I ordered that cake. I paid for that cake. That’s my fucking cake.”

What he did not mention is that the cake contained over fifty thousand dollars in diamonds. They were positioned in a single sheet between the first and second layer, mixed with walnuts and covered in buttercream icing. Ryan didn’t know how the man with the glass eye knew that, but he knew that son of a bitch was not about to rob him of the first payday he’d had since getting out of the clink.

“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” the man snarled, and Ryan shook his head incredulously.

“Why the fuck do you talk like a Rocky and Bullwinkle villain?”

“I ordered this cake THREE DAYS ago,” he said. “It’s my granddaughter’s birthday. She’s eight. If she doesn’t get a cake, she’ll be devastated.”

“Okay,” Ryan said, trying not to breathe heavily. “Okay, maybe we both ordered the same cake. It’s possible. What’s your granddaughter’s name?”

“It’s Melissa!” he shouted, brandishing the gun. “Like it says on the cake!”

A slow, wry smile stretched across Ryan’s face.

“The cake says Melinda,” he intoned, and a hush fell over the bakery.

There was absolute silence for a beat. Two.

The glass-eyed man relaxed his brow and slowly lowered his gun.

“Oh my,” he said. “I’m so sorry. How embarrassing.”

Ryan motioned to the girl with his head and the man inhaled sharply and released her. Whimpering, she scrambled across the room and out the front door.

“This has just been a great big misunderstanding,” he told the baker. The baker was an old contact of Ryan’s from the days when he muled on Benedict street. Fishface Frankie, they called him. Fishface Frankie appeared to be actively shitting bricks; he paused for a moment to shoot Ryan a withering glare.

Ryan cautiously fished a few crumpled bills from his pocket, placed them on the counter, and grabbed his cake. “Happy Birthday, Melinda!” it read. Silently, he strafed toward the door, giving the man with the glass eye a wide berth.

The man placed his pistol back in its holster and tilted his head at Fishface Frankie.

“How long do you imagine it’ll be before Melissa’s cake is ready?”

Ryan slipped into the street and made a beeline for the Ramada Inn, room 406.

His contact with a haggard man in a trench coat. His face was a bouquet of seared flesh. Wordlessly, he sliced open the cake.

There appeared to be a layer of marshmallow, but no diamonds. Ryan barely got the opportunity to say, “Wait” before two silenced 10mm slugs tore through his chest.

On the other side of town, a little girl named Melissa had to be rushed to the hospital after biting into her birthday cake and breaking three of her teeth.