The Good Guy

“Now what?” she asked.

“Let’s get something to eat.”

“He said he’d find us sooner than you think,” she reminded Tim.

“Hired killers,” he said, “are so full of big talk.”

“You know about hired killers, do you?”

“They act so tough, so big-bad-wolf-here-I-come. You said you hadn’t eaten. Neither have I. Let’s have dinner.”

She drove to a middle-class area of Tustin. Here, the winos sucked down their poison in barrooms, where they belonged, and the prostitutes were not encouraged to strut half-naked in public as if they were pop-music divas.

The coffee shop was open all night. The air smelled of bacon and French fries, and good coffee.

They sat in a window booth with a view of the Explorer in the parking lot, the traffic passing in the street beyond, and the moon silently drowning in a sudden sea of clouds.

She ordered a bacon cheeseburger and fries—plus a buttered muffin to eat while she was waiting for the rest of it.

After Tim ordered his bacon cheeseburger with mayonnaise and requested that the fries be well done, he said to Linda, “Trim as you are, I was sure you’d order a salad.”

“Right. I’m going to graze on arugula so I’ll feel good about myself when some terrorist vaporizes me tomorrow with a nuke.”

“Does a coffee shop like this have arugula?”

“These days, arugula is everywhere. It’s even easier to get than a venereal disease.”

The waitress returned with a root beer for Linda and a cherry Coke for Tim.

Outside, a car pulled off the street, drove past the Explorer, and parked in the farther end of the lot.

“You must exercise,” Tim said. “What do you do for exercise?”

“I brood.”

“That burns up calories, does it?”

“If you think about how the world’s coming apart, you can easily get the ticker above a hundred thirty and keep it there for hours.”

The headlights of the recently arrived car switched off. Nobody got out of the vehicle.

The buttered muffin was served, and Tim watched her eat it while he sipped his cherry Coke. He wished he were a buttered muffin.

He said, “This sort of feels like a date, doesn’t it?”

“If this feels like a date to you,” she said, “your social life is even more pathetic than mine.”

“I’m not proud. This feels nice, having dinner with a girl.”

“Don’t tell me this is how you get dates. The old a-hit-man-is-after-you-come-with-me-at-once gambit.”

Even by the time the burgers and fries arrived, no one had gotten out of the car at the farther end of the parking lot.

“Dating isn’t easy anymore,” Tim said. “Finding someone, I mean. Everybody wants to talk about American Idol and Pilates.”

She said, “And I don’t want to listen to a guy talk about his designer socks and what he’s thinking of doing with his hair.”

“Guys talk about that?” he asked dubiously.

“And about where he gets his chest waxed. When they finally make a move on you, it’s like fighting off your girlfriend.”

The distance and the shadows prevented Tim from seeing who was in the car. Maybe it was just some unhappy couple having an argument before a late dinner.

After an enjoyable conversation and a satisfying meal, Tim said, “I’m going to need your gun.”

“If you don’t have money, I’ll pay. There’s no reason to shoot our way out of here.”

“Well, there might be,” he said.

“You mean the white Chevy sedan in the parking lot.”

Surprised, he said, “I guess writers are pretty observant.”

“Not in my experience. How did he find us? Was the sonofabitch there somewhere when we stopped at that vacant lot? He must have followed us from there.”

“I can’t see the license plate. Maybe this isn’t him. Just a similar car.”

“Yeah, right. Maybe it’s Peter, Paul and Mary.”

Tim said, “I’d like you to leave ahead of me, but by the back door, through the kitchen.”

“That’s what I usually say to a date.”

“There’s an alley behind this place. Turn right, run to the end of the block. I’ll pick you up there.”

“Why don’t we both go out the back way, leave your SUV?”

“We’re dead on foot. And stealing a car doubles our trouble.”

“So you’re just going to go shoot it out with him?”

“He doesn’t know I’ve seen his car. He thinks he’s anonymous. When you don’t come out with me, he’ll think you’re in the restroom, you’ll be along any moment.”

“What’s he going to do when you drive off without me?”

“Maybe he’ll come in here looking for you. Maybe he’ll follow me. I don’t know. What I do know is if we go out the front door together, he’ll shoot us both.”

As she considered the situation, she chewed her lower lip.