The Archfornicator of Canterbury

19 Rendezvous at Café Olé

Bulimia had not yet been invaded by faceless international coffee shop chains. This did not mean that there weren't any faceless coffee shops. Café Olé was just such an establishment. Patrons could have their choice of coffee with or without yak's milk, and that was pretty much it. Regular customers, very few of whom had ever been outside the country and as a result hadn't been exposed to foreign coffee shop standards, didn't fully appreciate what a blessing it was not to have to wade through a swamp of ristrettos, macchiatos, skinny lattes, vanilla syrups and French roasts. Jack Back, being the well-travelled man of the world that he was, wholeheartedly welcomed the fact that he was able to order a coffee and get one without further ado.

Jack was sitting at an outside table and had a steaming mug of strong black coffee in front of him. He wasn't sitting at Café Olé, though. Instead, he was at Café Autodafé across the street. He was reading yesterday's Royal National Herald, or at least appeared to be. His attention was fully on the black Mercury approaching fast from the other end of Green Dolphin Street.

The car screeched to a halt in front of Café Olé and four men stepped out. Two of them entered the coffee shop and emerged only a moment later. One of the men spotted an empty table with a coffee mug and a newspaper across the street. He reached for his walkie-talkie.

"Eagle One this is Eagle Two. The bird has flown. Over."

"Eagle Two this is Eagle One. Copy that. Return to base. Over and out."

The men piled back into the Mercury and drove off. On a balcony two floors above Café Autodafé, Jack Back returned the safety of his Glock 17 to the safe position and holstered his weapon.

The Archfornicator of Canterbury by Olli-Pekka Rinta-Koski
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.