Page 11 of A Seer and Present Danger

“Let me get you a few more napkins.”

I got the kids sorted and refilled their drinks. Out of the corner of my eye, I noted Gail had thrown money on her table and stormed out the door like she was late to yell at someone. (I was gonna guess that someone might be her ex.)

I turned back to Jean’s table.

She wasn’t there.

She hadn’t even touched her drink.

Aggie strode down the hall from the back, her hands pink and damp. She paused to take in the pile of soggy napkins I hadn’t thrown in the garbage yet, then looked at her table of teens.

“What did I miss?”

“Spillageddon.”

“Sorry. I was in the bathroom. My shift’s over though. Are you going to be okay with all this?”

I chuckled. “This isn’t my first fiasco rodeo. It’s cool.”

Aggie gave me an appreciative smile and I rambled off to clean Jean’s table. Jean had left behind a half-shredded napkin.

I scooped it up and glanced out the window. Kenny was gone. There were only a few cars in the lot. Jean’s car was parked at the far end of the parking lot away from the light poles.

Was she out there?

Future flash showed she wasn’t coming back for her table, so I wiped it down and reset it.

Buzz whistled his way back to the kitchen and a woman in a flannel shirt and baseball hat who was going to order the soup of the day and make a joke about it being the soup of the night, walked in.

“Go ahead a sit anywhere,” I told her. “I’ll be right with you.”

I put in the order for soup, then pretended to write it down when she asked for it. I also laughed at her joke, because, yeah, it was funny.

Someone, maybe chronically over-worked Buzz, had left a bag of garbage by the back door, so I picked it up and walked out with it.

The gravel area was dark, only the single automatic light above the door casting weak illumination.

I turned toward the garbage dumpster and stopped.

A man lay on the ground.

He was on his stomach, his jacket yanked back as if someone had tried to grab his coat as he fell.

The uneven light turned the pool of blood spreading beneath him an oily black.

He wasn’t moving.

He wasn’t breathing.

He was dead.

CHAPTER 3

For a moment I thought the man was Stalker-Man, and the memory of my Future flash:

Him, lying dead on the cold, dark ground…

…rolled like thunder through my head.