A dead end [6]

Whenever Augie felt like things were too much, he took a long walk. Predictable, yes. Cliche, yes. But that seemed to be everything else about his life recently. He had tried to adopt a child, drunk on cheap whiskey. I mean really, what’s wrong with that picture?
“Asshole,” he muttered aloud.
He thought of Chico, who he’d left at home today. It was about his walktime, about the time he’d normally be meeting with Sandra and listening to her nasally voice all around this shitty town, but what Matilda had told him the night before shattered his norms.
Augie rubbed the lump still present on the back of his head where he’d hit the corner of the counter behind the bar. He’d woken up in this hospital with a bandage around his head and no one by his bedside, besides a note from Matilda written on a bar napkin, apologizing for minorly concussing him and saying that he could forget making up the shift he missed as a result of the injury. I suppose this meant that his church embarrassment was water under the bridge as far as she was concerned. Or she didn’t feel like hiring a new bartender.
But to him, it represented every failure in his life so far. His parents had failed to be decent for him, he failed at running away and making a life for himself, and he can’t even adopt a child if he wants to fuck up his life even further. He was at a dead end, there was no denying it. And all he had here was a job with his phsychotic boss and a stone with his dead mother’s name on it. What good will that ever do him?
He found himself behind the police station and paused for a moment, for whatever reason. It was beginning to get dark, and even though he’d never lived in an unsafe place in his life, something in him told him to get close to home before it became fully dark.
Even as the thought occured to him, however, he heard a commotion. Shouting and then footsteops, heading straight towards him. Suddenly, a man in a business suit careened around the corner, running flat into him.
“Wait!” Augie heard from around the corner. “Stop him!”
He wanted to reach out a hand, a foot, something to help bit it was too late. The man, whom he’d barely had a chance to glimpse, was gone and he had nothing to show for the encounter either.
Augie stood in the empty alleyway, waiting for something to happen. Just waiting.