Ben Rogue sits alone in his habitual booth at an all-night diner, gazing through the window at the restless, neon street. It’s three-thirty in the morning and the sirens are singing a cappella on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, outside Borracho’s Café, known to locals as Cucaracho’s Café, as he smashes a namesake bug with the back of his cell phone. He has the Exterminator app.

   “Nothing good happens after midnight,” Ben remembers his father telling him as a teenager, when he asked to have an extension on his curfew. No dice. He grew to know that his pops was right. He usually was.

   The café’s décor is dressed in homage paid to better nights gone by: faded paintings from long lost times, subdued lighting hiding dirty stains on tattered wallpaper, black and white photos of past patrons no longer black or white, floor tiles showing traffic lanes – shabby chic with a run-down motif. Humbly glum and void of others until the entry bells jingle and a body walks in – more a skeleton.

   The entrant stops beside Ben’s booth and stares at his breakfast of huevos rancheros, jittering like a bug in a dirty white tank top over pale, gaunt skin, baggy jeans hanging below his ass and a grimy cap on sideways, saying nothing you could read. His mouth opens like an Alien creature, exposing rotten stubs of brown ratty teeth, the dilated pupils of his bloodshot eyes popping like ants on a hotplate, pimples pocking jaundiced cheeks. The smell of death surrounds him. Ben takes a measured look at him and says tweaker reflexively, half aloud, then turns his head to the window where the reflection of the tweaker’s face now looks like a mask from a Dia de Muertos celebration at a cartel carnival. He closes his eyes.

   When Ben opens them, the tweaker has moved to a booth two spaces toward the toilet and across the aisle, sitting on the bench facing him, staring in wonder at a cell phone and smiling like a ghoul. He fumbles with it, poking and swiping until the screen lights up and he begins to shake, holding it with both hands as though it might swim away, snickering like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, clutching his Precious.

   The tweaktwack sits and stares at the phone. He punches in a call after several minutes of shutting his eyes and mouthing the numbers. After many failed attempts he finally connects. His eyes twitch as he wriggles in the booth, drooling and screeching like a rabid bat. Somewhere dark someone answers.

   “Dude, check this out, bra. I gotta phone!…”

   “Naw, I took it off this bitch at the bus stop…”

   “Nah, bra, no one saw me. She was all alone…”

   “I told her I’d fuck her up if she told anyone, bra. I’ve got her device so I can find her. I slapped her around just to be sure. That bitch ain’t gonna squeal, bra. Believe me…”

   Blood rushes to Ben’s eyes and a fierce, piercing noise fills his mind as his memory suddenly serves up images of another tweaktwack encounter, this one involving him.

   A different dark early morning Ben is walking back to his apartment from the neighborhood tap on an empty street when a youngblood punk looking like the dude in the booth rolls out of a shadow and jumps in Ben’s path, bouncing on his toes and dangling fists from his bobbing shoulders like a welterweight boxer with a bug in his ass, talking shit about nothing, nothing that made any sense.

   “Yeah you muthafuckas think you bad, butchu ain’t…”

   “Hey gimme a smoke, bra…”

   “I gotta get to my cousin’s place, that fool owes me money. You got my money, bra? I gotta get to my cousin’s…gimme a smoke, bra!…”

   Ben just stares him down and keeps walking, not losing a stride but glancing to his side wondering if dude’s homeboys are going to pop out next, triangulate him and pull him down. This goes on for several blocks with tweaktwack walking backwards and jumping off the curb when the bubble gets small, talking trash through rotted teeth, eyes twitching wildly, and grinning. Ben’s only words are “You don’t wanna fuck with me,” letting his hand check the blade in his back pocket as he strides along the sidewalk, stalked. After a few more blocks and crossing streets under lights Ben is no longer worried about other bugs coming out from under the rug.

   He focuses on jitterboy, who’s getting more excited, screaming out of control now. As they approach a railroad crossing and the brighter lights beyond, tweaktwack drops off and starts waving his arms like a spider losing a fly from its clutch.

   “Where you going, bitch! I ain’t done witchu, bra. I need my money…my cousin…I’ll kill you bitch! I’ll kill your ass!”

   Ben keeps walking, holding his stride and looking behind to keep the tweaker on radar. But then youngblood loses his shit and flips the script.

   “I’m gonna kill you bitch…and your kids! I’m gonna kill your kids, bitch!”

   Ben stops dead in his tracks. Pictures of his children on the refrigerator are all that he sees. Warm blood rises from his feet, climbing up his torso as though lowered in hot sand. The feeling reaches his head and his mind stops thinking – something else takes over. His hand finds the knife and pops the blade, flipping the handle from fingers to fist with the edge facing forward and walks down deliberate to the tweaker on the tracks, who now holds his fists up, bobbing and weaving, talking garbage.

   Ben watches his left hand come up in a drawn-out roundabout as the tweaker turns his shoulders in defense, unclenching his fists for an open hand block when Ben’s right shoulder loads up and launches. The last thing he sees is the tweaker turn his face, and then his vision goes to slow motion. He literally feels himself leave his body, float ten feet backwards and ten feet up, and he’s watching what’s happening below until sudden darkness takes everything in. Time stops passing and holds. All sound halts…until honking horns and yelling voices stir Ben back to the present.

   “Get off the street asshole!…”

   “You wanna get run over ya idiot?…”

   “What the fuck’s the matter with you?…”

   Sight returns with the sound of traffic as Ben realizes he’s stepped off the curb, staring down at his fist holding a bloody blade. A truck horn blasts and he leaps back onto the sidewalk, looking for the tweaker but seeing no one.

   Instinct pulls him into a tree’s shadow and he kneels on the downhill side of a slope overlooking an empty field along the train tracks. His gut reaction is to throw the knife as far as he can but he catches himself before doing so, not wanting to leave evidence in case police are on the way. No sirens are audible, so Ben inspects his hand, looking for the source of blood. Two knuckles are barked but barely bleeding, not accounting for the red edge of the blade, which he stabs into soil and wipes on grass, folds up and pockets to beat a fast walk home, safe. He looks at the pictures of his children on the fridge, opens the door and grabs a beer before staring out his window behind a curtain in the dark. Silence…

   Noise. Back at La Cucaracha in his booth, Ben finds himself holding a knife and fork as he cuts the tortilla in his huevos rancheros, hearing a voice familiar to his thoughts.

   “Yeah, bra, I could get fifty bucks for this thing, but I think I’m gonna keep it…told that bitch I’d fuck her up if she shut it off…”

   A hot white light connects past with present. Ben’s impulse is to go to the bathroom and count to ten, slide out behind tweaktwack and pull him back into the bathroom by the neck, make his eyes roll back until he passes out and leave him there, take his breakfast to go and grab the stolen phone to find its owner, before she spends any more time being scared. But he’s on probation for a driving offense and can’t afford to violate. You never know what can happen when you wrap up with someone either. All the confidence and rage can come undone. Every dog has its day.

   Ben eats his meal slowly, staring at the food. Tweaktwack gets up to leave after a waitress asks for his order, walks slowly past Ben’s booth, mesmerized by his purloined toy and saunters out the door, jingling the bells and breaking Ben out of his fix. He glares out the window as the tweaker steps off the sidewalk, not paying attention as he walks off the curb and into a lane of traffic.

   Tires screech and a dull, hard thud snaps Ben to attention. He sees two feet sticking out from under a van, toes pointing up like the Wicked Witch of the East’s in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s house lands in Munchkinland – dirty sneakers replacing ruby red slippers. It’s a pest control van bearing its logo on the passenger door above the tweaker’s feet: The Exterminator.

   The van peals off, bouncing over the body like an unmarked speed bump, leaving the phone lying on the asphalt, untouched.

   No one else is in the diner to notice. Screaming tires are a part of the symphony of the street and the waitresses are back in the kitchen, yacking with the cooks. No pedestrians at this time of the night. None that would call the police anyway. Ben sees the phone and reflexes pop. He slides out the door and grabs it without jingling the bells, and is back in his booth in an instant. He examines the phone which appears to be unscratched, having landed on its backside. Ben puts his own device in his pocket, after wiping the roach from the back of it. The stolen phone is on Instagram. He scrolls through pictures of young teens having fun, huddled in groups, smiling and mugging at selfie range. Some faces look familiar until one stands out – his cousin’s daughter who lives in the neighborhood. He recognizes more faces of his younger cousin’s friends from school and locations familiar to the area. She appears in more and more pictures as he cascades through the images. Ben turns the phone off to save the battery. He’ll take it to his cousin’s house and give it to her, as soon as he’s had some sleep, so she can return it to the owner. Teenagers are never up by noon on weekends. Not if they don’t have to be.

   His appetite hits him and he devours what’s left on his plate. The waitress comes out and he orders a piece of apple pie ala mode with butter pecan, warmed up just enough to make the ice cream start to melt. She tops off his coffee and leaves. He empties two creamer singles and pours a blast of sugar out of the old-school dispenser, wiping off the spillage to not attract another roach.

   Ben sits alone in his habitual booth, and turns his head from the street. He’s seen enough for one night.