This bar was good, it was freakin' awesome. The second he'd stepped through the door and inhaled the mix of stale smoke and fresh beer, heard the clack of pool balls, backdropped by "Smoke On The Water" blaring from a prehistoric jukebox, he felt right. He felt once again like he had hitting the road in his jacked ride, like he was really and truly himself. This was his place and these were his people. It didn't matter that he had never seen the place before, or that after today he may never see it again. Right now, in this moment, he was home. Better, he was him. This was a dance he knew, unlike the off tempo world outside.
Before leaving the Sweet Dreams that morning to travel into Pontiac, he had counted what remained of the cash he had acquired. The paltry sixty-three eighty-seven was not going to get him far. He figured, if he had to, that he could keep going from one "borrowed" car to the next for travel, and if need be sleep, but he also needed to re-equip, clothes, and just as important, weapons. As it was, he was walking around just as naked as he had woken that morning, and he didn't like it.
No respectable bar was open at the hour he had rolled into town, so his first stop had been to pick up a notebook. His second had been an eat in donut shop, where he had worked to transcribe his notes from the night before into something more organized and legible while he packed away a number of jelly donuts that he lost count of after three and enough coffee to keep him wired until the day after tomorrow. They'd kicked him out an hour after he'd stopped ordering anything more than refills.
He'd found himself a likely bar, The Loose Moose (lame ass name that he, for some unknown reason, kinda liked), and camped in the parking lot. In the back seat, where he had more room to stretch out comfortably, he continued to work on his notes while he waited for the Moose to open.
The work was tedious but inciteful. Reading through, rewriting, elaborating, he could almost feel things coming together in his head, staying together, finally beginning to form into a cohesive whole that while spotty, and full of blank spots, was at least solid and didn't feel like it would dissolve like sugar in the rain the second he stopped making a focused effort to keep it all together. Damned if Dad, or his ghost, or his memory, or whatever it had been, hadn't been right, and Dean enjoyed the way that felt. Sure, it had probably just been a waking dream, or stress induced hallucination, but whatever it was, it was Dad. Alone in a world without Sam, without even a clear idea of who else there might be that also wasn't around, without even all of himself, Dean would take it, crazy fever dream or not.
He hadn't wanted to walk in right at opening. He was here to score some operating capital, and there was no way to do that in an empty bar, well no legal way, so he'd given it another hour for a bit of a crowd to show. By then he was more than happy to toss the homework aside for the day and go check out his place of business for the evening. With any luck, he mused, he could finish out the night getting paid and laid both.
A quick scope of the room as he entered let him identify the best strategic spot at the bar. Not that he expected a pack of werewolves to lay siege, but this was the sort of place where an accidental collision or compliment to the wrong lady could escalate into a brawl faster than a '67 Chevy could go from zero the sixty. He didn't know the regular clientele, so better to hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
The bottle blonde bartender, who's personality turned out to be a sweet as her top shelf ass, filled his "whatever's on tap" order and slid a basket of pretzels within his reach with an expression that implied more than that was within Dean's reach, if he was interested. It was his first beer since being back. He was tempted to chug it, but he knew he had to keep his sobriety relatively intact to achieve his objective.
He made a quick list in his head, clothes, food, gas, rent, phone, at least one gun, with ammo. He needed to walk out of here tonight with at least three hundred, bare minimum. He nursed the beer as he assessed the crowd, looking for the most likely target.