That's What You Think

Russell was running later one night, around eleven. This was his favorite time to go running, especially in the summer when running at any given point before sundown was like an open invitation to trouble of all sorts for a person of Russell's constitution. He had the night off from the Patina and was tentatively planning to join Maggie on her deck later for a refreshing beer or two.

He crossed the river and came back on a different bridge, coming up through downtown and its bustling drunkenness. He ran up Franklin, which hugged the side of the faux-cobblestone agora and its hipster enclave of coffeehosues, juice bars, and head shops, bordered on the opposite side by the incongruous seven-story black glass tower that housed Perfidian Bank and Trust, Inc; it was easily the tallest building in St Claire's otherwise architecturally humble college-town topography.

He was just crossing Clarion onto its residential side, across from Javanalia and, further to the north, his employer, the Patina Tavern�mentally congratulating himself on a declicious witticism he'd dispatched earlier in the day, when Otto had described a woman at his job as toothsome, and Russell asked if that meant she gave bad blowjobs�when a car of high schoolers hooked around the corner and cut across his path just in front of him, and a teenage boy with an ungainly storklike face shot Russell square in the old visage with a squirt gun.

The joke was on them, though, because just before the run, Russell had enjoyed a 30 mg Diazepam cocktail with the standard pseudoephedrine chaser.

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