“You’re a long way from home, son.”

Charlie chuckled. The man with the droopy mustache scrutinized Charlie’s ID for another few seconds, then handed it back.

“I couldn’t find your birthdate,” he said. “But if this were a fake, you’d make damned sure to have the fake birthdate where an old guy like me could see it. So I guess I’m ok with you buying this.”

“Are you always this particular about guys buying one single beer?” asked Charlie.

“Not really,” said the man. “I just know most of the folks who come in here, and I don’t know you. So, I asked. Not a lot of people buying single bottles on a Monday night.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” said Charlie.

“Have a good night,” said the man.

“You, too,” said Charlie.

As he left, Charlie started wondering what he would have said had the man asked him his birthdate, as he had absolutely no idea what the fake Tennessee ID listed. He walked across the convenience store’s parking lot, looked both ways, then jogged to the other side of the highway. It wasn’t much of a jog, as the highway through town was four lanes wide.

He was staying in a Motel 6. His mind automatically added Tom Bodett’s voice saying“We’ll leave the light on for you.” It was true; when the staff turned over his room during the day, they always left the lights on. Charlie liked that; if anyone was going to hide and wait for him in his room, they’d probably turn the lights off. A cheap and effective early-warning system, it was.

Charlie entered his room with his beer bottle clutched by the long neck, scoped the bed area and then the bathroom, then relaxed. He sat on the bed, twisted off the top of his bottle, and turned on the television, as he had done for four nights in a row.

He hadn’t planned on spending any time at all in central Nebraska, really. The bus went straight to Chicago, where he had transferred to a westbound local through Omaha and Lincoln. After fourteen hours of stop-and-start through the plains, Charlie had snapped and hopped off at a truck stop in Belney, and it was there that he’d ended up staying. Mostly, he’d been reading. The truck stop in town had a small book trading/selling area, and he’d traded in Dar’s books for other classics. So far he’d gone through the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nicholas Nickleby, The Jungle, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Classics are in the eye of the beholder.

When he woke up on his fifth day in Belney, he walked down the road to the Denny’s a half a mile down and sat on a stool.

“Hey, hon,” said the waitress, a young girl with limp brown hair and slouching posture. “Coffee to start?”

“I didn’t know that people who called you ‘hon’ still existed,” said Charlie.

“I guess we do in Belney,” said the girl. “Coffee?”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “Thanks.”

The coffee was nothing special, but it was relatively strong, and tasted good. Charlie had been breakfasting on oranges and water every morning, so the caffeine buzz was quick and powerful.

“Know what you want?” asked the waitress.

“I’ll take the Grand Slam,” said Charlie. “With scrambled eggs and bacon, wheat toast, and some orange juice.”

“Coming right up,” she said.

Charlie stifled a laugh; he wasn’t used to being spoken to entirely in cliché. He went over to the door and picked up the local free real estate newspaper to pass the time while his food was being prepared. Houses were selling in the $50,000s here. He smiled again while he read.

“Here you go,” said the waitress, dropping a plate full of food in front of Charlie. Two pancakes, two eggs, two slices of bacon, hash browns, two pieces of toast cut diagonally. “The OJ is coming up.”

“Thank you,” said Charlie.

“You’re welcome,” she said, with the hint of a smile. “Most people just say ‘thanks.’”

“I’m a believer in the full phrase,” said Charlie.
“Wish that other people here were like that,” she said, definitely smiling this time.

Charlie sighed. She was flirting with him, probably because she’d never seen him before and would never see him again. When she came back with the OJ, she made a point of putting it down slowly, meeting his eyes, and smiling once more.

His breakfast was OK; by the end, he was stuffed to the gills and felt a little bloated, as if the pancakes had been primarily made of the ingredients in a Coke that make you burp. He wandered back to his motel, climbed the stairs to his room and collapsed on the bed. Eventually, he switched on Montel.

Charlie was startled awake by a knocking at his door. Montel had turned into another talk show – this time the girl who had played the almost-youngest daughter on the Cosby Show was lecturing a clean-cut young man about the dangers of drug abuse while the young man’s mother looked on with a satisfied smile.

The knocking came again. Charlie hurled himself out of the bed, catching his feet in the rumpled blankets in the process, and hit the floor with a resounding thunk.

“Dammit,” he said. “Hang on.” Somehow the blankets had become entangled in the laces of his right shoe, and he had to reach down and completely untie the laces before he could get rid of the blanket and hobble over to the door. He paused as he reached for the knob; what if some kind of ninja hit squad was waiting on the other side, ready to rub him out?

No way. A Ninja hit squad would have come in through the air ducts and nailed him quietly. Normal goons would have just broken down the door. Still, he engaged the security chain and stood to the side when he opened it, just to be sure.

“Hello?” The voice was female and tremulous. Through the cracked door, Charlie got a look at her. She was the waitress from the Denny’s, still wearing her powder-blue fake-apron uniform, sans name-tag.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” said Charlie.

“Um…can I come in?” she asked.

“Oh…ok,” said Charlie. He shut the door, pulled off the security chain, and opened it all the way.

“Nice room,” she said.

Charlie looked around; his bed was made and his little duffle bag lay on the dresser, and a set of fresh towels was on the floor next to the bathroom. If the bag hadn’t been there, the place could have been unvisited.

“It does ok,” said Charlie. “What brings you here?”

“I work up the street,” she said. “You were there this morning.”

“Yep,” said Charlie.

“Well, after you left, we were talking about you.”

“Why?”

“Not too many guys stay here for more than a night,” she said. “And I decided to come by and find out.”

“Find out?”

“Find out what?”

“The girls at work were guessing who you are, and I was the most interested”, she turned a little bit red. “We were bored and I lost.”

“Have a seat,” said Charlie. She sat on the bed; Charlie leaned against the wall.

“You really want to know who I am?” said Charlie.

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” she said. “It’s not like I’m a bumpkin. We have cable TV here and Amazon delivers books just like they do to anywhere else. I’m sure you’re just a businessman or a consultant who somehow got assigned to an obscure project here, and you’re bored out of your skull like everyone else here. That’s who usually comes through town.”

“Not exactly,” said Charlie.

“Are you a magazine writer, come to town to get reactions on what people in the heartland think about some issue or another? Because we’re all sick of that.”

“Definitely not,” said Charlie.

“Are you a guy who sold his company, got rich, and is now road-tripping to help decide what to do with all of your money? Because if you are, I’ve got some ideas.”

Charlie shook his head and looked at the ground. “No, I’m none of those,” he said softly.

“So what are you, then?”

“I’m just a guy who happens to be spending some time here,” said Charlie. “I’ll be leaving soon.”

“Not good enough,” she said. “I have to have some specifics or I’ll get ranked to hell and back over at the restaurant.”

Charlie sighed. “Fine,” he said. “I’m an assassin-for-hire, and I offed a really bad guy the other week.”

She whistled. “That’s kind of a bummer.”

“You know it,” said Charlie.

“Hm,” she said.

“You’re not even going to react? I assume that’s not a normal story,” he said. “You don’t want to know any details? Anything to prove that I’m telling the truth?

“Why would I?” she said. “If you’re making it up, I’ll find out eventually, and if you really are an assassin-for-hire, you’re not going to kill me because nobody would pay you enough to do the job.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” asked Charlie.

“I have fifty-five thousand dollars saved up from my ridiculous waitressing job here. In about two weeks, I’m going to quit my waitressing job and go west until I can get to a place where I can see something besides cornstalks and straight roads. I want to go where there are crooked streets and maybe guys fishing in streams or off of piers. I’ve never fished, and I’d like to try it. I graduated high school two years ago, and I’ve been working since. I’m like a million other girls who never leave their hometowns, except I’m going to leave.”

“Why didn’t you go to college?” asked Charlie.

“I don’t like school,” she said.
“So you’ve saved nearly sixty grand by waiting tables here?”

“Taxes are easy to play with,” she said.

“Why are you waiting two weeks?”

“Because it seems to be the standard thing to say. I’ve been waiting two weeks for about three months now, but I haven’t gotten around to leaving.”

“How are you going to get to wherever you’re going?”

“I have a car,” she said. “It drives.”

The two sat in silence for a few minutes. Charlie wanted to ask a question, and he got the feeling that she wanted him to ask the exact question he was wanting to ask. The seconds dragged on. The girl picked at her fingernails.

“So I was wondering…” he said, right as she said “Hey, I thought…”

“When?” she asked.

“Tonight?”

She smiled and nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie.”

“Hannah,” she said. “With a second ‘h. I’ll be here at eight .”