The Broken Bit Steakhouse didn’t have a tomahawk steak on or off the menu.
They each ordered a 24-ounce bone-in Cowboy Ribeye. She went for the Cajun Char rub and the snowboarder had his straight.
She knew his burdens were too much for her.
At first, she surrendered to what she suspected was the hazardous act of dismissing his strife. But she was not one to see what she wanted to see. Her decision to downplay his pockmarks didn’t last long.
The waitress set down a third round of Sazeracs.
The sooner they parted ways the better. She could slip twenty of her hundred-dollar bills under his plate, excuse herself to go to the bathroom and leave.
That would be easiest and probably best, best for both of them.
The night before, an eruption of wild chattering had woken her up. He had broken into a shrill staccato of rapid fire talking in his sleep. Bursts of slurred muttering about the hellhound on his trail, looped over and over.
She nudged him and he slipped from one realm of troubled sleep into another.
Then, through a day of driving south, their conversations in the 1963 Studebaker Avanti kept falling apart. Long stretches of silence layered in the gloom of nothing to say.
She found the snowboarder’s curiosity limited, his vocabulary stunted. Most of his replies to her questions, none of which she felt prying or awkward, could not have been more dull.
She considered him good-natured in the way she felt simple people often are. To his credit, she could tell he respected her. But for the formidable tasks ahead and the qualities she would require from an accomplice, he was sadly inadequate.
She didn’t know what she could do for him other than leave two thousand dollars.
He didn’t see her slip it under his plate.
Out in the warm wind, off on the ragged edge of the Broken Bit Steakhouse parking lot, she screwed a fresh set of plates on the 1963 Studebaker Avanti.
She pulled out of Quartz Hill, California all alone and almost relieved.
