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Stereotypical
Shadow walked in through the swing doors and paused, scanning the room, checking out every table and face to ensure he didn't recognise anyone. He moved quickly over to the bar and signalled to me that he wanted a scotch.
"Evening stranger, you look like a man on a mission. Vendetta? Blood feud? Avenging the death of your sweetheart gunned down by mobsters in a crossfire during a routine drug-dealing doublecross?"
Shadow looked up and over the top of his sunglasses, his eyebrows raised in astonishment.
"How did you know?!" he stammered.
"You just look like that sort'o fella" I replied, topping up the glass in front of him with pale brown liquid that sloshed over the ice. I slid a bowl of peanuts closer to him.
"Take a look over in that corner there" I flicked my eyes to a corner of the room "and you'll see four teenagers on a road trip. They think their fake IDs worked on me, but I just didn't have the heart to throw them out. One of them's slept with a transvestite, another swallowed a live lizard, the geeky one is going to discover by the end of the trip that the girl he met on the Internet is only 12 years old and the last one will make it out with a valuable life lesson and narrate the conclusion of their tale."
Shadow munched a few peanuts absent-mindedly before looking back round at me.
"Or over there at the pool table" I jerked a thumb behind me to the dimly lit tables on the opposite side of the bar "at one table you've got two women who are on a voyage of self-discovery, bonding in a mutual distrust of men. The tall one has a gun under the seat of the car that she'll eventually use to save the redhead from an attempted rape. I figure we'll be seeing them in a live police pursuit on CNN by the time they make it to Nevada."
Shadow frowned and downed the remainder of his drink, obviously disgruntled that I had seen it all before. He dropped a ten onto the bar top and headed for the door, but as he reached it a fist flew in from outside, knocking him backwards.
"Cool! Bar fight!" shouted the road trip kids and immediately leapt on some nearby generic extras who had been pretending to converse by simply moving their lips and not making any noise.
"Aw hell!" said one of the fugitive man-haters as she swung a poolcue at one of the sidekicks of Shadow's blood fued enemy. They had arrived at the midpoint of the movie for the all-important first confrontation. Shadow shook himself awake again and moved in for his close-up.
Jul.20.2006