“Homicide.”
“Oh, cool. Wait, what?” The barfly in jeans and halter let fly half an ounce of spittle into her well and tonic before sipping the mixture through a thin red straw.
“Yeah.” Hitting the double black hard sans straw, Winston let off no hint of feeling to the impressionable scenester, no implication to read the truth behind his words. Joking? Probably not. Stressed? Obviously.
“That sounds really hard. you know.”
If he wore a hat he would have tipped it, but in a way that made no more space between himself and his drink. In fact, a transparent Stetson seemed to envelope the young public servant’s cranium.
Keeping her bust in check, she grabbed her shirt between her thumb and forefinger in a manner that put her whole fist in her underarm and pulled up. Winston thought maybe she would be tickled by this, by the back of her hand hitting the tiny prickles on the roof of her pit. “I mean, you know, not hard hard, you know? Like, just hard like the way like losing a pet is hard?”
“Same kind of hard.”
“Really? Because my dog died last year, and well…oh. Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“It’s just, when quincy died — that was my dog’s name -”
“Quincy?”
“Yeah, my dog. Well, that was awful, for me. And you, well, you must go through that every day.”
“Not every day.”
“No?”
“Sometimes we work a case for a few days, sometimes weeks. It’s only hard when you start.”
“Yeah?”
“You meet the family, you get to know the vic…”
“The victim, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I watch a lot of TV.”
“I used to.”
“What happened?”
“It got too hard.”
She was comfortable on her stool, excited by the conversation with the man who just sat down. She loved the way he dressed. Shirt and tie. Very retro. Very now. And drinking alone at this particular gin-joint was cause for a rather boring night so company was more than welcome.
“Hard to watch TV?”
“Those shows.”
She used the multi functioning straw to play with the ice left in her glass. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Hard hard.”
He breathed in the remaining malt twittering over his empty glass. It put him at ease enough to finally raise his head from the traditional man-with-no-name position and look the sweet loner in the eyes.”
“No. Just…hard.”
—
Watching:
Dick Wolf
Law & Order
