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Considering how far out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere the Last Chance Diner was, it was amazing the place had any customers at all, much less any regulars. But it did have regulars. There were truckers who stopped in every time they went by, single-route guys who didn’t like the big truckstops where the long-haul truckers hung out. There were one or two state highway patrol officers who would come in and get food and coffee and then sit in their cruiser ‘patrolling’ the two-lane highway while they ate. There were some people who had small ranches who would stop for a break while bringing one of their animals back home from whatever show or breeding place they’d taken it to. And every once in a while the ‘local’ veterinarian stopped in after a long night at someone’s place, because he knew Dean wasn’t going to bat an eyelash if he was filthy and tired and just wanted to drink hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and curse his long-ago decision to work with animals and the people who owned them.
The Last Chance also got a few tourists. Tourists were sort of regulars too, because the only two kinds Dean ever saw were the Lost and the Stubborn, and they were always the same. The Lost were invariably scared. Their phones wouldn’t work, which meant their GPS wasn’t working either, and they were terrified that they’d run out of gas and be stranded and die in the desert. Dean did his best to make sure they knew which direction to drive in when they left the diner, but fully half of them still went the wrong way anyway and he didn’t worry about it too much – the Last Chance was equidistant from both of the closest gas stations and the State Highway Patrol was up and down the highway a few times a day, so one way or another he knew they weren’t going to stay Lost for long.
The Stubborn were different. There would only be one Stubborn per vehicle, always the driver, and they were always angry and whoever had the misfortune to be with them was always tired, cranky, and somewhat scared. Dean always greeted the Stubborn by saying, “Welcome to the halfway point!” because it was good to see whoever was with them relax a little on realizing there was light at the end of the tunnel and they really hadn’t been driving around in circles in the desert all this time with a crazy person. Stubborns tended to leave a big mess behind for Dean to clean up, and they usually didn’t tip although Dean really didn’t care if anyone tipped or not – the way he saw it, he was already getting paid. He stayed quiet and mostly behind the counter when a Stubborn was present, though; a lot of them were just spoiling for a fight, but they were also the type who would try to sue you for giving them one so Dean just kept his distance and his cool until they left.
He never saw any hunters, and he was happy about that. He rarely saw druggies or drunks, and the one time someone had tried to hold him up he’d just cocked an eyebrow at the gun the guy was pointing at him and asked if that was the best he could do. When the State Highway Patrol had shown up in response to Dean’s call, they’d found the guy crying on his hands and knees, cleaning up the floor where he’d pissed his pants and made a mess. The responding officer had sat down at the counter to have some coffee and made the guy finish cleaning. “It’s your mama’s fault you’re not housebroken, not his,” the cop had told the tearfully outraged wannabe robber. “If you want someone to clean up your bodily fluids, get a girlfriend.”
There was one other kind of person Dean saw come into the Last Chance on a regular basis, although he hesitated to call even the ones he saw more than once a regular, and those were the Loners. Most Loners rode motorcycles, although a few drove older-model cars. Dean knew without asking that they had all picked Highway 49 as their route of choice on purpose, deliberately. They weren’t tourists. They didn’t want traffic, they didn’t want huge brightly-lit truckstop complexes…they wanted to be alone to think, and look at the desert and the sky, and even though they were mostly all coming from somewhere or going to somewhere else, they weren’t in a hurry about it. And they all invariably wanted pie. All of them. Anyone else might have thought that was weird, but Dean had been a Loner himself and he loved pie, so it made perfect sense to him. And he made sure the diner always had pie. There were frozen pies in the closet-sized basement freezer; apple, cherry, and pecan. Or sometimes Dean would make pie from scratch, so there would be cream or custard or whatever fruit he’d been able to get from a passing produce truck – some of the trucks would even stop now, on their way back from the farmers’ market or wherever, and offer him his pick of what they had left. He almost always took them up on it. Whatever wasn’t pie material could go into the Daily Specials, which was a nice change of pace for Dean and the regulars, so it was all good.
And if he did say so himself, Dean had gotten pretty damn good at making pie, because he’d been making it at least twice a week for over a year just to have something different to do in his free time. The diner was only open from 5pm to 5am, which sounded weird until you remembered where it was: Nobody in their right mind was going to be driving across Highway 49 in the middle of the day, and the diner’s owner maintained that keeping the air conditioning fighting against the daytime desert heat cost more than he was going to get back from the one carful of tourists who might come in wanting to get cold drinks or use the bathroom. So Dean worked all night, slept for about half the day in the tiny basement apartment below the diner, and then got up in the afternoon and had several hours to just do whatever he felt like doing before it was time to open at 5pm.
He didn’t have much to choose from, really. The diner was too far out to have television or Internet – not that he had a TV or a computer anyway. Occasionally he could pick up a radio station, but the one that usually came through was from some tiny little desert town and was weird in a way that kind of freaked him out, so he didn’t try the radio very often. Occasionally there would be a book or a magazine left behind by a tourist, or a newspaper left on the counter by a regular, but Dean had never been much of a pleasure-reader and he had very little interest in what was going on in the outside world. The diner did have a phone, an old hardwired rotary dial no less, but it wasn’t like he had anyone to call, or who would call him for other than business; the restaurant supply company called him every week to get the diner’s order and the owner called every once in a while to make sure everything was going okay, but that was about it. The only people he saw outside of regulars, tourists and Loners were the restaurant supply guys once a week, the owner once a month, and the guys in the armored truck who picked up the diner’s takings every Monday and Thursday morning at closing time. And even if Dean had still had a car, which he didn’t, there wasn’t any place nearby for him to drive to and there was no place he really wanted to go to anyway. So he puttered around the diner, he made pies, and he went for little walks around the inside of the ‘safe’ perimeter he’d set the first week he’d been there to keep trouble away from the diner. Because trouble was the visitor Dean absolutely did not want but the one he knew would eventually try to show up, and he did not want trouble becoming one of his regulars. He’d been left alone for just over a year, but he knew that, in some circles, his name might still come up as someone who was ‘needed’ for something. And that wasn’t a good thing for a man who was done with fighting and didn’t want to be dragged back in.
No one else ever walked around outside of the diner, so no one but Dean had ever seen the wards and safeguards he’d put into place to keep the less human kind of trouble away. If someone who knew about that kind of thing had ever happened to see them, however, they might have been surprised to find that only half of them were to keep out demons and monsters…and the other half were for keeping out angels.