So he figured he would wait quietly until his friend came to his senses, and in the meantime tipped his second scotch on the rocks. He had ordered the strong, old, peaty Glenfarclas, a departure from his usual choice, and it was ripping through him like a sharp rock. When some overly-muscled bigmouth at the other end of the bar whistled through his teeth, Jensen naturally turned around to look. The impetus was a skinny fashion victim in a thigh-high black cocktail suit. He felt his eyelids droop, and the booze break over him in a first big, wide wave.
The woman stopped cold for a moment, then strode boldly up to the bar, employing that deliberate manner that women used to show they hadn’t been cowed by circumstance. Slowly she gravitated toward Ash Jensen, and then hovered in an ambivalent fix, eyeballing the empty barstool beside his. Jensen smiled up at her; and after a moment, she eased her bony bottom onto the stool, plopped her Prada bag down on the bar, and remained private while the two of them adjusted to the additional human content.