Bouthier had been busy setting up in the hotel room all morning so when there was some unexpected downtime, he decided to try to squeeze in a quick workout.
The hotel gym was downstairs off the lobby and even before he fully pulled open its glass door, he saw without surprise that it was tiny and complete shit.
The only good thing about it was that its sole occupant, some pudgy thirty-something insurance-salesman-type on the exercise bike, immediately put on the brakes and began gathering up his stuff the split second Bouthier peeled off his shirt.
It wasn’t surprising. Six foot and hard bodied with dark pitbull-like eyes, doorway-filling shoulders and a slab of a face that looked like it had been squared into shape with a bricklayer’s crack hammer, Bouthier rarely found social distancing to be too much of a problem.
“Before,” he said as he tracked the soft bubble butt’s hasty exit in the wall mirror.
“After,” he said with a gruesome smile as he popped a rock-hard front flex.
He looked around. Without anything real to lift, he decided to do some CrossFit. Burpees, renegade rows, jumping lunges then some dumbbell thrusters with the pathetic 50s.
When the Bluetooth in his ear chirped, he was just done stretching and was bending over about to do his first burpee.
“Heads up. This just in. It is the plane after all,” his partner, Llewellyn, said.
“Now you tell me. On my way,” Bouthier said with a sigh.
As he came back out into the lobby, the front door of the hotel swung open and in came some grinning Alaskan hillbilly family with a bunch of kids.
There were five kids in all, Bouthier quickly counted. Three girls and two boys, the oldest boy maybe ten. All of them were blond haired and smiling and the dipshit lot of them, even the thirty-something parents, were color coordinated in Walmart blue T-shirts that said Congrats Grammy! on the front of them.
Well, kiss my Alaskan grits, Bouthier thought as he watched the backwoods von Trapps head for the cheap hotel’s ballroom. This is funner than when we done gave that Sarah Palin a ride in the turnip truck. Don’t y’all just love going-into-town day?
As he headed on a collision course with them, Bouthier’s dark predator eyes were fastened onto the smallest child lingering at the rear. He was a daydream-eyed, tow-headed boy of perhaps five, the plastic string of a huge shiny Mylar balloon clutched fervently in his pudgy little mitt.
Time for some of his own fun? Bouthier suddenly thought with a raise of an eyebrow.
He quickly glanced over at the check-in desk and saw that the clerk was missing.
Why, yes, he thought, reaching into his back pocket as he picked up his pace. Why, yes, it was.
Arriving in the middle of the lobby at the same time as the cute-as-a-button cluster, Bouthier waited a beat, and just as the five-year-old crossed in front of him, he snicker-snacked open the razor-sharp karambit blade he always carried with a card trick flick.
Bouthier was ten feet past the desk with the blade resheathed when the child began howling.
He glanced back casually over his shoulder.
And had to bite his lip to keep from cracking up.
Because the redneck kid’s balloon was missing in action now. Up, up, and away it had gone, hopelessly lost somewhere in the lobby’s double-height ceiling.
“Mommy, my balloon! Nooooo! Nooooo!” the inconsolable rug rat wailed to his mother, kneeling now beside him.
“But why did you let it go, Tyler? I told you to hold it tight,” she said.
“But it broke! Why did it break?” Tyler bemoaned as he pathetically showed her the now limp short end of the balloon string that Bouthier had just parted as clean as a whistle.
“Because shiny balloons are only for winners, that’s why,” Bouthier said quietly, unable to stifle the giggles as he finally turned and stepped into the waiting elevator.
“Losers like you, Tyler,” Bouthier said as the door closed, “only get the string.”