Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. Someone might have chosen to get involved, but the man at the bar was at that stage of inebriation where everything anyone says seems an insult. No one knew him, and his behaviour didn’t provide much incentive to remedy that lack of familiarity.
One by one, customers drifted away from the loud and bellicose man at the bar, seeking out shadowy booths and distant tables; they all knew Karl didn’t like drunken blowhards in his bar. He stood behind the counter, wiping it slowly in clockwise circles.
“Gimme a whisky!” the loudmouth demanded. Karl just shook his head. “I said, gimme a whisky!” the lout repeated, lumbering toward Karl. A sober man might have noticed the sharp sound of deep inhalation from all the other customers, and realised that he’d miscalculated, but the man wasn’t sober.
It happened, as it usually did, with blinding speed. One moment the man was striding confidently toward Karl, and the next moment Karl was standing over his body, tapping one end of a sawn-off pool-cue in his hand. There appeared to be several teeth on the floor. No one moved; they’d chosen to not get involved, and were all content with the result.
Lenny and Al, the burly waiters, picked the guy up off the floor, and dragged him toward the back exit.
“Wait a minute,” Karl said. He gathered up the broken teeth and tucked them into the guy’s shirt pocket before he continued. “Ok. Now you can take out the trash.”
-- 30 --
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