after all. The new manager had made a big deal about wastage. She filled the rest of his glass and placed it on the service station for the waitress to collect.
The door opened again. She didn’t recognize the guy: middle-aged, dark hair, chinos and a green polo shirt with an embroidered logo she couldn’t make out. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses and had his hands buried deep in his pockets. Did Adam say if the man who’d turned up at her apartment had dark hair? She should have asked him what he looked like, made him sketch it out. She hadn’t been able to see who was driving the Durango yesterday. Was this him?
He stared straight at her, his mouth curling up in a sneer. He pulled his hands out of his pockets. She saw the glint of something metal and felt her legs go weak. She gripped the side of the bar. Her eyes darted toward the back entrance. Could she make it in time?
He looked down at the cell phone in his hand before sliding it back in his pocket. He turned and saw Ken sitting in the back booth, waved, and slid in at the same table. She watched as Ken pushed a menu toward him.
He wasn’t coming for her.
She was so relieved she barely had time to register the fact that Ken was drinking with someone other than Nick. Three years and she’d never seen him in the bar with anyone else. It was clear they knew each other, though: as soon as the guy had ordered his drink from the waitress, their heads were bent together, deep in conversation.
Cait spent the rest of the shift trying to control her nerves. The bar stayed quiet. A couple in their sixties came in, nursed two glasses of house white with their dinner, complained about the music being too loud, and left her two bucks on a thirty-dollar tab. A group of red-faced Englishmen stumbled in wearing matching soccer jerseys, sank three beers each in under an hour, and stumbled back out into the night. A woman in a business suit ordered a double Scotch straight up, drank it in two swallows, and left without saying a word. By the end of the night, Cait had made eleven dollars in tips, and Ken and his mystery friend were the only ones left in the place. The waitress chucked their bill on the table unceremoniously and stalked out back for a cigarette. They hadn’t drunk much—just a couple of beers each—and they hadn’t eaten, either, so the tab wasn’t worth the waitress’s effort. She knew, same as Cait, that the night was a bust.
Ken didn’t wait for the waitress to come back from her smoke break. He brought the bill up to the bar, handed it to Cait with a twenty, and told her to keep the change, which came to a princely sum of four dollars. A generous tip, but not enough to make a difference in the waitress’s night.
“No Nick tonight?” Cait asked as she tucked his change back into the billfold for the waitress.
Ken shook his head. “Not tonight. Hey, Mike.” He waved to his friend, still sitting in the booth. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
The man got up from the booth and came toward the bar. He wasn’t a big man, but he moved slowly and deliberately, like his clothes were sopping wet and too heavy. He had removed his sunglasses, and she saw that he had eyes the color of the bluebonnets that grew outside her parents’ house in Waco, and that they were filled with sadness.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, but he didn’t put out his hand to shake hers, and she didn’t offer. She had the feeling that she already knew him.
“You’re from Austin?” she asked, already knowing he wasn’t.
“Mike here’s from Columbus,” Ken said, as if that were some particular achievement.
“I know Columbus,” she said. “My family is from Waco, so I drive through it whenever I go to visit them.”
Mike nodded once but didn’t offer anything more. They stared at each other for a few silent seconds, and then Ken slapped the counter so hard it made all three of them jump. “Well, Caity, I know you’ll be anxious to close up, so we’ll get out of your hair.”
“See you soon, Ken.”
“I’m sure you will. Keep my seat warm and the beer cold while I’m gone.”