The sound stopped.
“That’s my lucky pool cue, you son of a bitch!” Truck, when he found his voice, sounded perhaps a bit more surprised than furious.
But it was fair to say he was alotof both.
“Damn straight it’s your lucky cue. You’re lucky I didn’t skewer you like chicken satay with it.”
Truck was scarlet. “What the fuck is satay! Quit saying things like satay!”
“You’re lucky I didn’t puncture you like a toothpick infondi de carciofi.”
He’d never before used hors d’oeuvres as weapons. But he was resourceful, and Truck had just handed him a weapon, and as he’d told Britt, he didn’t see the need to fight fair.
He decided to put Truck out of his misery.
“What I mean to say, Truck, is, you’re lucky...” J. T. leaned, perhaps inadvisably, forward and said, very, very slowly, with tenderly menacing patience “...I didn’t ram it up yourass, Truck.”
“It’s broken now. One of those pieces ought to fit on up there,” suggested some wit.
Truck whipped around on him. “You shut your hole!”
“You don’t want to fight me, Truck. You ever been in actual prison? It ain’t the cozy hometown drunk tank I bet you have here. And what I did to that cue? I can do to your neck. And just as fast.”
Ain’t?Where the hell had that come from?
When in Rome, he supposed. He didn’t like discovering his veneer of civility was tissue thin.
J. T. didn’t like knowing it was a veneer.
Britt had sidled up next to him and gently laid his beer tab down on the table in front of him. Deliberately.
He glanced at it. It read:Mention his mama.
“You think your mama would be proud, Truck?” he said seamlessly.
Bingo.
Truck froze.
Doubt rippled across his expression. He made a visible effort to collect his temper.
Satay was one thing. His mama was apparently a whole other level of combat.
J. T. sighed a great gusty sigh of exasperation. “The trouble with you, Truck, is you’re boring. I’m willing to bet everything that you circle around and around, doing the same damn things, in the same damn way, blaming the same damn people, throwing the same damn tantrums. Like a damned baby with a dirty diaper. Am I right? Ain’t youboredwith yourself?”
J. T. seized the chalk used to keep score on the board and dashed out, in huge, sweeping letters:
GOOGLE
SATAY
He slapped the chalk down on the pool table.
“The internet,” he said. “Not just for porn anymore.”
Truck was speechless.
“You follow me now or if you ever again touch Britt here when she doesn’t want to be touched, or say anything untoward to her or anything that so much as raises a blush, Iwillkick your ass in ways so surprising and painful you’ll have to Google your own name to remember who you are.”
