"Working hard or hardly working?"

"What?"

He looked at the young barista a moment before opting out of a second try. "Nothing. I'll have my usual."

"..."

"A vanilla breve, please." He smoothed his hair down a bit while she wrote the order on a dry-erase tablet velcro-stickered to the counter. She tapped a few prompts on the iPad register and swiveled it around for him. "Busy today," he tried.

"Yeah," she said, already looking past him.

He hit the 'tip' button for 25% anyway. The place wasn't that busy, but he he didn’t appear that good at smalltalk. Instead, he moved down the counter to wait for his drink.

We’d never met. We weren’t supposed to, not until the next day. But I was one who liked to prepare, liked to know what I was getting into. Call it an old habit from my previous line of work.

I pretended to be reading a book as I watched him. He was to be my new partner. That’s if I opted to take the job—a decision I had yet to fully commit to. The gig looked good on paper, but—again—I’d learned from pervious experience that wasn’t always a good sign.

I took a sip of my Americano. It was good. Really good. Better than I could remember. I made a mental note to buy some beans before I left.

Being a downtown coffee shop it was of course a remodel of a remodel of a remodel, back to the earliest days of the small west coast town. I assumed that various owners had probably tried to hide the exposed-brick walls and the real wood floors and open ceilings. The trend now, though, was to accentuate all that. I figured it was only a decade or so before things would change up again and the next hipster-fueled makeover would include checkered linoleum or patterned wallpaper or opened umbrellas hung upside down from the ceiling. Whatever trend was pretending to be new.

My potential new partner wasn’t at all what I expected. He wasn’t not what I expected, either. He just… was.

He was looking around, not actively trying to strike up a conversation, but also not avoiding one. I could tell he liked the place, liked the staff.

I checked my watch. There was still a few minutes before the meeting I came to observe.

"Vanilla breve on the bar!"

"That's mine."

From my seat at the elevated center bar I watched as he looked at the lop-sided palm frond design in the foam. "Oh, hey, you're getting pretty good."

A young barista offered a half-hearted 'thanks' and went back to work at the controls of the big stainless steal machine. Strange how the coffee here was so much better, when so many places used the same machine.

He still seemed like he was trying to get them to engage. The staff. They all looked past him. How often did he do this? How many times did he buy coffee only to get ignored? He did a final check to see if any of them wanted to say 'hi' before making his way to one of the small, two-person tables.

He wore a polar fleece vest a size too big. The vest seemed to droop, as though it was weighed down. Maybe so, considering he pulled out a Bluetooth headset from one of the pockets. It was a fossil; An antique compared to the newer earbuds. It had one foam earpiece over his left ear--letting him keep his right ear uncovered--and a mouthpiece that he could move down if he needed to talk or keep straight up like an antenna if he wanted to look like a dork.

Maybe he liked to keep things simple. Tried-and-true. Why change what worked?

Maybe.

I watched as he connected his headset to his iPhone and tapped the screen to open an app. I leaned back a bit so I could see what he was watching. It took me a second. He was watching Hunter, the cop show from the 80s that my dad used to watch as reruns!

The vanilla must not have been sweet enough because he got up, carrying his iPhone open-handed so he could keep watching his show, and grabbed a couple packs of raw sugar.

He was temporarily distracted by an adorable set of three year old twin boys watching their equally adorable grandpa like he was a wizard as he drew silly characters of Crayola reds and greens and burnt umbers onto the pages of a spiral notebook.

A man entered. Big dude. He walked toward my potential partner.

"You Skitterchest?"

The man had to be 6' 4", 270. He looked like a retired powerlifter. Stood like one, too, as though his joints were finally forced to make good on all those checks his muscles had been writing for decades. He wore black tee under an unbuttoned black-and-white flannel jacket, some kind of dark cargo pants, and Columbia hiking boots. West Coasters lack of pretense made it hard to size them up, but the man's $1200 wrist watch and the half-karat diamond pinky ring were enough to know he was someone that 'did okay.'

"I'm Blandon Skwëttervest. Are you Dan Ferguson?"

"I am."

"Excellent. Did you want to order, or--"

The massive man—Ferguson—pulled out a chair and sat down. He rested his massive forearms on the table, but thought better of it when the wood started to bend down with the added weight.

"Well, then, shall we get started?" Blandon asked.

"Started and finished," Ferguson said. "Imma make this real quick. You tell Grimshaw I paid him what he's owed. As far as I figure it, we're squared up."

Blandon took a slow sip of his drink, listening as the giant gave his two cents on the situation.

"You clear on where I stand, Suiterman?"

"Skwëttervest."

"Who gives a shit? You clear?"

He took another slow drink before responding. "Well, I mean, I'm clear on it, but my opinions don't really matter. I'm just a representative."

"That's what you can represent, then: My foot in Grimshaw's ass if he thinks I'm about--"

"Mmm. You might want to rethink that. That's a pretty rude thing to--"

"Who do you think you're talking to, Skittlebag?"

"Skwëttervest."

"I said my piece. If Grimshaw wants to test me, you tell him--"

"You sure you don't want a latte or something? A mocha? The mochas here are sublime. They make a sort of ganache that--"

"I don't want shit other than for you to tell me you understand what I said to you."

"I do."

"So you'll tell that nickle-n-diming bastard what I said?"

"I will not."

Ferguson's cheeks reddened. "You won't?"

"I won't."

"Then what are you doing here?"

I was now concerned about the table as well. It looked as though Ferguson's shear bulk might break it in half.

"Like I said, I'm the representative."

"The representative… right. So, if you aren't going to tell him what I said, maybe you'll need to represent my message in a different way? Maybe I send you back to him different than I found you."

"I wish you wouldn't."

Ferguson paused, sizing up the much smaller man. From his perspective I assume Blandon was nothing. I mean, to me Blandon looked about as unthreatening an opponent as I could imagine: Caucasian male, maybe five-nine, a soft two bills. Mid-to-late-thirties. Super Cuts hair. Goatee improperly trimmed—actually, accentuating the slight double-chin he probably grew it to hide. He wore his dark pants and dark shirt a size too big in the way that I assume men 'of a certain age' do to disguise their middle-aging bodies, but which makes them appear larger and more oddly shaped than they really are.

I mean, to be fair, this guy was nothing. A rube. A tool. Nothing a dude the sizes of Dan Ferguson had to concern himself with. It was like someone had invented a 'generic male creator' and Blandon was the prototype.

No, Ferguson was not the slightest bit intimidated.

"You tell your boss he can kiss my ass. And if I see you again, buddy, I'll send you back to him with two broken legs."

"I wish you wouldn't."

"You wish I wouldn't…” The big man laughed. “You know, you're something else, kid."

With that Ferguson got up and left, letting the door slam behind him.

I followed.

If I accepted the position I’d have to work with people like Ferguson so I wanted to get more on him, take him in, figure him out.

I trailed him as he walked the half block to a pay lot, finding a ticket on his windshield. He placed it under the windshield wiper of the vehicle next to his and got in. He turned the ignition, put his large SUV in reverse and started to back up before immediately slamming on the breaks.

Ferguson got out of his rig, red-faced and fuming. Blandly was behind him. How did he get out of the cafe so fast without me seeing him?

"Alright, I’ve had about enough of you, you little son of--"

The sound was jarring. Familiar. I instinctively took cover before peeking around it to see what was happening.

Blandly was standing over a now supine Ferguson.

He was holding a gun.

That little shit shot him!

Ferguson was having trouble breathing.

Sounds were coming back to my ringing ears now: traffic, screaming people, car horns.

Sirens.

I had to move.

Wait. Ferguson was moving. Or trying to. He reached into his jacket for a little snub .38.

He pulled it from its holster, hand covered in blood.

He tried to raise it but Blandly stepped directly on his elbow, pinning his arm to the ground. He was leaning in, saying something.

The last thing Ferguson heard before the second shot was, "I wish you wouldn't."

I opted not to take the job.

Reports of the small town murder in broad daylight filled the local and state news for three days. The victim was identified as a local real estate developer with a questionable past and a series of exes and offspring all preparing to stake their claims on his estate in what would likely be long, drawn out and complicated court cases.

The shooter was only described as a 5'10" caucasian, medium build, somewhere between 30 and 45 years old. In the Pacific Northwest that described, well…

With one eye I combed through the database of available jobs in my very niche line of work. With the other eye, I watched Blandon Skwëttervest wait for his usual—a vanilla breve—and try unsuccessfully to get any of the baristas to notice him.