And then, as if someone had turned a switch, the noise shut off. Kate looked around to see what was going on.

Jim did not.

Phyllis Lestinkof was standing at the table, a hand on the shoulder of one of the young mine workers. He was red-haired, blue eyes bright in a freckled face, with an awkward ranginess of build that made him look tall even sitting down. Phyllis touched his shoulder with a timid hand. He shook it off and said something to his friends that made Phyllis redden. “It is, too!” she said, and reached for his shoulder again. This time she laid hold and shook it.

This time he slapped her hand away.

The scene at the clinic that morning replayed itself in Kate’s mind and many things were more clear now than they had been then. She pushed her plate back.

“I’m begging you,” Jim said, without much hope.

“You’re repeating yourself,” Dan said, watching events unfold with the judicious eye of a drama critic. Did those idiots not see an Alaska state trooper in full regalia sitting ten feet away?

“Oh, hey, man,” one of the redhead’s friends said. “No call for that.”

“Fuck off,” the redhead said, or spat, more like. He looked embarrassed, and angry.

Several of the more prudent men around the table pushed back their chairs and gathered their legs beneath them, ready to leap out of the line of fire when the shooting commenced.

“No call for that, either,” the friend said, his own face reddening. He looked at Phyllis. “You okay, honey?”

Phyllis burst into tears. “It’s his, it really is, and now what am I going to do? My mother — “

“This is such bullshit!” the redhead said, leaping to his feet and in the process knocking Phyllis off hers. She fell backwards with a cry that Kate judged to be more startled than angry.

Her champion leaped to his feet to go to her aid. Mistaking this for aggression, the redhead pulled a knife and raised it.

Kate was on her feet and in between the two combatants before the knife moved more than a foot down. She blocked his right hand with her left one, reached up under his right arm with her right hand, grabbed her right wrist, stepped in closer to him, turning left and stepping to the side as she did so, and brought the hand holding the knife down smartly. The redhead let out a startled squawk and dropped the knife before he stabbed himself in the thigh.

“Aren’t you going to do something?” Dan said.

“Not feeling the need to,” Jim said, sloshing more vinegar on his remaining fries.

Just for the hell of it, just because she could, Kate grabbed the redhead’s wrist and kept going, bending her knees and using his own momentum to roll him forward right over her. She was so much shorter than he was that he was forced to bend forward over her back to remain attached to his arm, which he had discovered was caught in an unbreakable grip. In the split second between the moment when he lost his balance and the moment when he fell on her she straightened her legs with a jerk, shoving her back into his torso, and he performed a half gainer with a twist to land flat on his back on the table in front of Dan and Jim.

The table held but the impact jarred the entire room. Dan saw some dust shake out of the join where the wall met the ceiling.

Jim, who had moved his glass and plate out of the way just in time, said in a stern voice, “Son, you brought that on yourself.”