Wolverine Drinks In A Bar
The leather-jacketed man at the far end of the short, stained chipboard bar was nursing what must have been his 16th shot of bourbon. He hunkered on his bar-stool and glowered into the middle distance, but he showed no signs whatever, inasmuch as you could make out his movements in the dim flicker of busted neon which passed for light in this place, of being drunk. Nobody bothered him. He gave off that aura. Can't have been more than five foot in his stocking feet, but you could tell he was dangerous. I mean, for Chrissakes, the guy – when he talked, which wasn't often, except to tell the barman: "set her up, bub" – talked like a dumb Canuck; and he was drinking here in a divebar in south Texas at 3am, and nobody even caught his eye.
I'd been following the man they called Logan for four days, and I knew, and he knew, that he'd made me on day one. For some reason, he was tolerating me. Maybe he was bored. Or maybe he just wanted to see what I'd do. I'd read his file. We all had.
"Weapon X," that was what the Bureau called him. "Logan," was what, when he'd salvaged some broken idea of what it might mean to be human from what the Bureau had done to him, he had eventually called himself. "Wolverine" was the name under which he fought. What he had been originally – whether he had ever, in any real way, lived a normal life, was anybody's guess.
"Gimme another," he said, and slid his shot glass maybe eight feet down the bar without it falling. It wound up bang in front of the barman's right hand and – so it happened – right in front of me. I picked it up, before the barman could.
"Let me get this one for you, friend," I said. He looked at me. One eyebrow arched. He pulled on the stub of the cigar he was smoking, and looked me in the eye.
