One Free Lesson

Andres started the morning of his eightieth birthday the same way he started most of his mornings. He dressed, made sure his keys were in his pocket, grabbed his cane, and walked the mile to the cemetery where he sat in silence, leaning on his wife’s headstone.

Rather than heading straight home for some breakfast, however, he decided to treat himself. He caught the bus into town; free for all riders over sixty. The drivers hadn’t asked for his ID in at least the last five years.

Once in the shopping area around the bus depot, he walked past the chain diner advertising all its senior discounts and went to the locally owned diner that connected to a bar that would open in a few hours.

The bar and diner were known as seedy by some, as the only neutral ground in which to conduct business by others. Andres chose a booth in the corner, where he had a view of the diner, the entry, and the connecting door to the bar. He sat at the outside edge of the bench seat, rested his cane next to him, and adjusted his belt. 

He waved off the menu offered by the young woman waiting tables. “I’ll have the half-portion chicken-fried steak with sourdough toast, black coffee, and water, please.”

“I’ll get that started for you right away, sir,” she said.

Andres hadn’t been in the diner in at least a decade, but it seemed that nothing had changed, beyond the grime being more deeply ground into the linoleum tiles and, of course, the staff. They were all too young to have worked anywhere back then.

The steak was also unchanged, with paprika in the sausage milk gravy, and the hash browns cooked right to the edge of burnt without going over. The sourdough was different, or he thought it was, at least. He could’ve just been remembering it as more sour than it was.

He took his time with the meal, watching other diners come and go. He recognized most of them — not as individuals but as players in the world from which he’d retired. He didn’t pay much attention to the ones he could pick out easily by their clothing or behavior, but focused more on those who left him wondering.

Anyone he could suss out at a glance was not likely to be a threat, but those that struck him as being a civilian he paid closer attention to. It wasn’t an attempt at surveillance, just noticing things, as he’d done all his life. The guy in the courier windbreaker with the backpack — slung to allow quick access; there was something long in the backpack, and he’d left the courier pouch on the bike outside. He was too obvious.

The young woman that parked a motorcycle out front and came in calling for eggs, toast, and coffee, though — he couldn’t tell for sure. To Andres, she stuck out by not sticking out. Anywhere other than here, she’d blend right in, but she seemed too comfortable for a civilian in this environment.

It meant either that she was oblivious, or very good. He kept a sliver of his attention on her, as the “courier” grabbed a to-go bag and dropped it into his backpack where Andres saw the pistol-grip of a short shotgun. The motorcycle girl talked with the waitress for a moment before looking around the diner.

The crowd had been building, and there were no empty tables. She approached his booth. “Excuse me, sir. May I join you?” she asked.

Andres nodded, and she sat in the center of the bench opposite him. Again, she was either oblivious or confident enough in her abilities or position to put herself in a less-than-optimal position. She set her helmet on the table next to her.

Her food arrived a moment later, and she thanked the waitress before turning her attention to him. “Thanks for letting me sit here. My name’s Emily,” she said.

Andres nodded. “Nice to meet you, young lady. What brings you in?”

“Cheap breakfast, my roommate works here, and they let me park my bike right out front where nobody’ll mess with it. What about you?”

“Good chicken-fried steak. Thought I’d treat myself.”

He kept his left hand under the table as he ate with his right. He took time between bites. He was in no rush.

Emily wolfed down her eggs and went back to making conversation while she took her time with her toast and coffee. “What did you used to do — or still do — for work?”

“After Vietnam,” he said, “I had enough of the Army and just bounced around from job to job. You?”

“Mechanic,” she said, “at a bike shop.”

She could mean exactly what she said, or it could be a euphemism. The “bike shop” could be exactly that or have something to do with the outlaw bikers that had moved into town, twenty years earlier.

While he was thinking about the bikers, one of them walked in. A giant of a man openly wearing his colors, with a one-percent patch on his chest. He waved at the waitress and walked straight for Andres’ booth, where he pushed the woman to the inside of the bench and sat beside her.

“Imagine that,” he said. “I get to meet the ‘Left Hand of the Nikolaev Family’ in the flesh.”

“There is no such thing,” Andres said, “as the Nikolaev Family or any Left Hand.”

“Don’t be so modest,” the biker said. “Just because Niko’s gone, doesn’t mean you are.”

“Let him be, Fang. He’s just an old Vietnam vet having breakfast,” Emily said.

“Sorry, sister, but he used to be the number one triggerman for the Russian mob around here, before we got rid of them and took over.” Fang leaned forward. “Now he’s just a washed-up old man.”

Andres took a sip of his coffee. “You at least got part of it right. I’m just an old man.”

“Andres ‘Trigger’ Petrenko,” Fang said, leaning back, “I owe you for at least half a dozen brothers you did back in ’02. You was old even then.”

“You must be mistaken,” he said. “I think any old man you went to war with twenty years ago would be dead by now.”

“I should just beat you to death right here.”

“I have no doubt you could do that,” Andres said, “but if I’m who you think I am, why would I let you get close enough to?”

Fang whipped out a knife and started to rise when a pop like a loud firecracker rang out and he stopped, falling back into the seat, the knife dropping to the table where Andres swept it on to the floor.

Andres reached into his pocket, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and placed it under his plate. Fang was cursing and groaning, while Emily was doing her best to stuff napkins against the wound to stop the bleeding.

Andres noted that no one in the diner wanted to get involved, which was all to the better. “That, son, is a gut shot. Hurts like hell, I know. You’re going a little grey there. What you’re feeling now, is shock. You’ll survive…most likely. If you or any of your brothers come at me again, you won’t. Understand?”

Fang responded only with more curses and groans.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” He stood, holstering the suppressed pistol he’d held in his lap while he ate, and grabbed his cane. “This is your one free lesson, son. Fear the old man in a profession where men die young.”