It doesn’t seem real now and the memory is hazy, as if the encounter was a dream or some quirk of the imagination but I am sure that it was some ungodly hour, in a godless place, and I was drinking myself to an early grave when I first heard his coarse voice, coughing and spluttering through the foul air and stink of spoiled beer and piss.
"Kid... come over here. Sit down here." Then a chain of guttural chokes and spray of spittle as his body was wracked with the outcome of a lifetime of hard living and the late stage lung cancer that would eventually lay him to rest.
"Don’t be afraid!" With this he shot me a toothless grin and then leaned away on his bar stool almost to the point of falling backwards. He let out a long, high pitched cackle like a cartoon witch and then spat a large congealed splotch of blood directly onto the bar floor.
I raised my head from my stupor to take a glance at the barman, who was slumped with a needle in his arm and his only good eye rolled back into his head.
I guess he was pretty much dead anyway. So when I stuck a bullet between his eyes and took the cash register nobody really noticed.
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