Third in an occasional series

In the middle of the night shift, the manager heard some people talking loudly outside and went to investigate. A moment later, she rushed back into the restaurant to summon help. She ordered the largest waiter, who happened to be the closest to her at that time, and the biggest cook to come and help her. She also told the assistant manager to call the police.

The manager, the assistant manager, the cook, the waiter, and I ran outside. A man sat in an oversized white pickup truck. He wore nothing but a pair of shorts, and he was covered in sweat and beer. A woman knelt in the bushes, wearing only a long t-shirt and undergarments. She was screaming.

The man spoke consolingly but frantically as he got out of the truck. He would address one half of a broken sentence to us, and the other half to the woman. He told us that they had been together and had a disagreement, that the woman had poured beer on him, and that she had jumped out of the truck while it was moving. He assured us that he wasn’t angry with the woman at all, but just wanted her to come back. At the same time, he spoke to the woman. In a tone that belied his words to us, he ordered her to get back in the truck, warning her that the police might get them both.

The cook and the waiter stood between the man and the woman, while the manager tried to persuade the woman not to get back into the truck. On the outskirts, the assistant manager spoke on her cell phone to the police, describing the scene. The woman got up but didn’t move toward the truck. The man tried to move toward her, but was blocked. His voice grew louder. The woman stopped screaming but started babbling about how she was afraid for her life.

I kept moving around the perimeter of the encounter, waiting my chance. When the man turned his face towards me, I pointed my cell phone at him. A flash of light; a photograph. The man’s face was logged in evidence. The flash surprised me, because I had forgotten that it was on. The flash surprised him, and despite being drunk he realized what had happened.

The man started yelling to the woman. “Baby, they done took a picture of us. We’re goin’ to jail for sure. We been in jail before, you know what it’s like. Git in the truck. I’m not angry, baby. Git in the truck. The police are coming. They gonna git us.”

The woman pushed her way past the cook and the waiter and stepped toward the truck. The cook and the waiter were ready to fight the man to protect the woman. Her movement toward the truck surprised them, and they did nothing. The manager kept yelling to her to stay away at the truck, but she kept moving toward it. She said something that only the manager heard: “This is my death sentence.”

The man pushed her into the truck and climbed in after her. As they did, I moved to the back of the truck to photograph the license plate. I took a picture, saw that the plate was illegible, and wrote the number on my hand. Then I quickly got out of the way as the truck squealed backwards. The assistant manager later passed the license plate number on to the 911 operator. The truck turned onto Wade Hampton, then took the first side street. There was little chance that the police could find them.

We stepped back into the restaurant. Two minutes had passed–maybe less. The employees gathered for post-encounter debriefing and posturing. It seemed to me that we had failed at our mission, for we had neither protected the woman nor stalled the man till the police could come. The managers saw it my way too. The cook and the waiter, however, congratulated me on scaring away the bad guy with the camera flash. They laughed at my bravado, and the managers started talking about other domestic disputes they had witnessed.

I took some pride in being coolheaded enough to gather evidence. Since the police would doubtless want to see the picture when they came to investigate the incident, I pulled out the phone to look at the photographs. The picture of the back of the truck was blurry, but at least I had the license plate number written on my hand. The picture of the man was gone. In my haste to take the second picture, I had forgotten to save the first.

My failure didn’t matter, though. The police never came.

Note: I was not a direct witness to all these events. This is the best recreation I can write from the facts I gathered from other witnesses.