The man said nothing when he came in, just walked over to the jukebox, threw in a quarter and punched some numbers in.
Then he walked over to the bar.
Then "Southbound Suarez" by Led Zeppelin began to play. A younger girl sitting close to the door groaned. Fritz had forgotten that record was even in the juke.
The man sat down.
"Well, Mister, what'll you have tonight?"
"A cup of coffee, two shots of bourbon and a spoonful of brown sugar."
The man's voice was surprisingly pleasant to the ears, with a slight southern accent.
Fritz fetched the man's odd order and then went to see about another patron.
Jordan watched the man in the purple hat, sitting at the bar with his head bent over a coffee. He lifted a shot glass to his mouth, paused then picked up a spoon of what appeared to be brown sugar. He licked it and then tossed back the bourbon. He then took a swig of piping hot coffee.
Jordan had seen the man before.
He had a bad feeling about that man.
He walked over to that man.
"Hiya, sir. I just wanted to meetcha, since this is a small town and an unfamiliar face rarely goes unnoticed," Jordan said in as friendly a voice as he could muster.
"Mm-hm."
"Well, where are you from?" Jordan could not see the man's face very well. He didn't know what he made of his earlier greeting.
"Are you not even going to introduce yourself, Jordan?" Jordan recoiled a bit and the man smiled. "You know, I'm not as unfamiliar to this town as you seem to think."
"Well, I never saw you before but once," Jordan said.
"Oh, I've been around more than once. I just might have looked a little different."
Jordan was growing increasingly uneasy.
"Well, Mister, I best get going. I gotta get home or the wife'll have my ass."
"Oh, no she won't. You are just being evasive because I make you uncomfortable. It's okay.
That's how many of your kind react to many of my kind. You just go on ahead and leave."
Jordan planned to do exactly that. He walked out to his truck and tried to start it. It just made a nice, raspy coughing sound. He waited. It was old; sometimes this happened.
The man in the bar finished his bourbon, coffee, and sugar. He headed to the bathroom. No one made much of it.
Jordan still sat outside in the truck, trying to get it to start. He climbed out to look under the hood.
The man walked out of the bathroom, toward the outside door, opened it. The groaning girl by the door noticed that he looked a little different. Less human.
Jordan was still outside, but he had just hopped back into the truck and gotten it started.
An old man with fiery, sunken eyes and hands that looked like claws stepped out of the bar, a terrible, blood-curdling grin on his mummy-face.
Jordan shoved the truck into reverse and sped out of the parking lot and down the road. When he looked into the rear view mirror, he saw the bar explode. The old man was nowhere to be seen.
