WAY TO TREAT A LADY

Was busted up along the highway,

I'm the saddest ridin' fool alive.

Wond'ring if you're goin' in my way,

Won't you give a poor boy a ride?

Here she comes a ridin', Lord, She's flyin' high.

But she was rollin' down, movin' too fast;

Do you wanna, She was thinkin' can I last.

All Monty wanted was a quiet drink in a quiet bar. His girl was having heart trouble along with about twenty other boats, meaning he was stuck here for a week with an illegal cargo burning a hole in his hull and no way to shift it while he waited on a grease monkey. Sure, there were other mechanics in town but none of them knew shit from shingles, not everyone could be as lucky as Malcolm Reynolds after all. A good strong whiskey had seemed the way to get his mind off things. But now, as he sat among his fellow spacers in The Flying Dutchman, he wasn’t so sure.

For one thing the girl on stage, bill said her name was Lodi, kept playing sad songs and while Monty liked sad songs as much as the next guy, he wanted something a bit more upbeat in this sort of situation.

Second, he was sitting at a table in the usual shadowy back corner but here was this creepy kid at the bar, staring around the room like he had something to prove. More than once, his flinty gaze had rested on Monty. Now he’d gotten his share of double takes and stares in his time, on account of his size and big bushy beard making him a hard man to miss but this fellow was looking at him like he owed him something. That was, of course, always a possibility but Monty was sure that he’d never even so much as threatened the kid, so that just left the question of why.

The third and most important thing was that he had asked for an Old Stillskin Hundred Year on the rocks and here they’d given him some le se that couldn’t even be called moonshine. He was debating whether or not it would be worth the trouble of going up to the bar and demanding a new drink. He took another sip, thinking it would maybe grow on him. He grimaced a