Bullies Targets The Wrong A Waitress — Unaware She's A Karate Black Belt Working Part-Time
Chapter 3
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By 7:00, the regulars started arriving. An old man named Walt Higgins sat in his usual booth by the window. Walt was seventy-six years old, broad-shouldered even now, with hands that still looked like they could do real work. He had been a police officer once, a long time ago, working right alongside Gus Carter for almost twenty years. These days, he came in every morning, ordered black coffee and two eggs over easy, and read the newspaper front to back. He liked to watch people; it was an old habit from the job, one he never quite lost.That morning, like most mornings, he watched Joe work. Something about her caught his attention lately; he couldn't name it yet, he just knew it reminded him of somebody. She poured his coffee that morning without spilling a drop, even while glancing toward the kitchen to check on an order—the kind of small, practiced precision most people never noticed in anybody. Walt noticed it. He noticed most things these days, whether anyone asked him to or not.By 9:00, the diner was busy: families in for a Tuesday breakfast, a couple of retired teachers arguing gently over crossword clues, Dotty moving table to table, greeting everyone by name. That was when the door opened and the noise walked in with it.Four young men came through the door, loud before they even sat down. They wore matching gray jackets with the state university's wrestling logo stitched on the chest. At the front of the group was a tall young man with sharp cheekbones and an easy, careless grin. His name was Braden Whitfield. He was nineteen, a freshman on the university's wrestling team, and the only son of Marcus Whitfield, a real estate developer whose name was on half the new buildings in the county. Braden had grown up hearing that name open doors for him he had never once had to knock on.The four of them dropped into a booth without waiting to be seated, boots up on the vinyl seats, laughing at something on somebody's phone. Joe grabbed four menus and walked over the way she would for anybody."Morning, gentlemen," she said. "Coffee to start?"Braden looked up at her slowly, the way a person looks at something they've already decided isn't worth much of their time. "Depends," he said. "Is it any good here? Or is this one of those places where the coffee tastes like dishwater?"His friends laughed.Joe kept her voice even. "I think it's pretty good. But I'll let you decide.""Four coffees," Braden said, not looking at her again. "And tell the cook not to burn my eggs this time. Last place I went burned them.""This is your first time here," Joe said."Exactly my point," Braden said, and his friends laughed harder.She wrote the order down and walked away. It wasn't much. It was rude, sure—the kind of rude a lot of young men are when they think nobody's really watching—but it was only the beginning.