Please.” She bit her lip, then poured a cup of coffee for him without asking, added cream roughly but no sugar. A guess and it was right. “Besides, I don’t want him out there.”

So he’d have some coffee, if for no other reason than to calm her down. “The freezer,” he asked. Said.

“Good idea,” she said, walking across the room with his coffee.

He felt taken. “I’ll need some Irish whiskey for that.”

She stopped short, put the coffee down on the bar abruptly, and walked back around for the bottle. Evidently she’d stepped through this response already, something to think about during the deep and scary night. He felt chastised but amused nonetheless. This was so typical, one of several tacks they take when faced with an indefatigable drunk.

“Pour it yourself,” she said, setting the bottle down next to his coffee but not moving, just standing there behind the bar.

Not far from the stiff, he thought. Nineteen seventies TV bad guy talk. So she couldn’t go through with it. Well, it was a start. He sat up, grunting inadvertently.

“Oh here.”

He watched her splash some whiskey into the mug, too much as a better choice than being accused of adding too little. She walked back around. That wasn’t hard, he thought, but he knew she probably was looking for a way to distance herself from El Stiffo. Rudd laughed and some snot came out of his nose and that was unacceptable. Time to clean up the act, have some coffee.

“Coffee. My dad drank coffee,” he told her when she handed him the mug. Drink it down now, boy. That’s hot. Best drink it down. Hurt. No hurt. Not Jill hurt. Drink it down, boy. White boy drinkin’ down his coffee. Truck stop boy drinkin’ down his joe. Rudd was eleven when he saw a man in the men’s room (of a truck stop) pee from five-call it six-feet away from the urinal and make it. Call that an education. Thing to do now is put the stiff in the freezer.

“We’ll drag him in as soon as some of the guys get up.