“Still parked outside the Vendome?” I asked.
“Yup.” Simon’s hamburger was delivered, so he stopped staring incessantly at the screen for a moment. He didn’t, however, stop plotting. “I wonder how much traffic we’d get to our site if we somehow slew the monster and saved the town, thus ushering in a period of peace and prosperity.”
I shook my head at Temi and pointed my thumb at Simon. “This from the guy who made me march into a men’s room shower at a campground to get rid of a spider.”
Simon pointed a sweet potato fry at me. “It was a tarantula, not a spider. Huge difference. You all have some wicked critters down here in the desert.”
“If you find Arizona’s wildlife alarming,” Temi said, “I recommend you never visit the Australian Outback.”
“You’ve b-been?” Simon asked, stuttering for the first time since he’d sat down. It was also the first time he’d looked in her direction.
“Yes, I was in Melbourne for… work and went on a safari afterward.”
“He Googled you,” I told Temi, not sure why she was being evasive about her tennis career. Well, I guess I could understand, especially if she was being judged heavily by her old colleagues, but Simon didn’t care. I didn’t care. Heck, I’d never admit it out loud, but I was perhaps the teeniest tiniest bit contented that she’d fallen from that lofty pedestal and was here asking us for work.
“I see,” Temi said, then dismissed this information with an elegant shrug. How one managed to shrug elegantly, I wasn’t sure, but she did it. “The Outback was extremely hot that time of year-I was there in January-and we saw quite a few dangerous creatures. Did you know that the bite of a funnel-web spider can kill a human being in two hours? Also, I was told that the Inland Taipan has the most toxic venom of any snake in the world. It paralyzes you and eats away at your muscle tissue. It gets dissolved and passed through your kidneys until you start peeing out reddish-brown urine.” She wriggled her eyebrows, clearly going into the garish details because Simon seemed like someone who’d appreciate them. And she was right.
He chomped on his burger as she spoke, listening in rapt fascination. Or just rapt… enrapture. In truth, she could have recited the plot of her favorite chick flick for him and received a similar result, but this would be better in Simon’s eyes. If he hadn’t been in love before, he would be now.
I shook my head and stole a couple of his fries. “If one of those snakes shows up in your shower, I’m not going in to get rid of it.”
“Understandable,” Simon said. “But you’ve got my back on the funnel-spider, right?”
“We’ll see.” It must be a testament to my oddness, but these tales actually filled me with a longing to travel to the continent. I wanted to travel anywhere, really, having never been farther afield than California to the west and Texas to the east. Maybe someday we’d do well enough with the business to finance a few out-of-country excursions.
“Actually,” Temi said, “I understand the Inland Taipan is non-aggressive.”
“Until some idiot runs up to take pictures of it for his blog?” I asked.
She smiled faintly. “Maybe.”
“Hmmph.” Simon picked up his phone again. “They still haven’t left the hotel.”
“Perhaps they’re brainstorming their next move,” Temi suggested.
“Or maybe they found your transmitter and tossed it in a storm drain,” I said.
“No way. It’d be flowing away under the city if that had happened.”
I filched a few more of his sweet potato fries and found a corner of the table on which to open my laptop. I skimmed the local news sites to see if there’d been any recent updates on our creature. According to the Daily Courier, people had been calling in all morning and reporting sightings. Supposedly, it’d been spotted everywhere from the community college to Thumb Butte Recreational Area to the back aisles at Home Depot. There weren’t any pictures to support these claims, and every person described it in a different way. A seven-year-old girl in the Prescott Lakes neighborhood blamed it for a missing cat and said it looked like a rainbow unicorn with two horns and a goatee. You had to love kids.
If the creature continued its west-to-east trek, it might already be on its way out of Prescott and headed to Camp Verde or Sedona. I imagined the legions of tourists in Sedona running out on the red rocks to take pictures of it… right before they were eaten. But if the monster had left, wouldn’t our Harley friends have left too? Either way, if the creature preferred nighttime excursions, it wouldn’t be out and about today.
“Temi, why don’t we go check out some of those estate sales?” I said. “I can show you the other half of our glamorous business, and maybe the scarcity of people on the streets will let us find uncrowded spots and get some good deals.”
She’d long since finished her meal and nodded agreement at this.
Simon was busy refreshing the screen on his phone so I swiped his last couple of fries. “You staying here?” I asked.
“Yeah, might as well. I’ll trade you the van for your laptop.”
“All right, but don’t get ketchup between the keys again. And don’t slip anything into my laptop bag that we didn’t pay for.”
Unlikely since the Raven served condiments in little bowls on your plate rather than leaving squeeze bottles out on the table, but one never knew what he might find. He’d never touch the paintings listed for sale on the walls-his thefts were always food-related and usually never for items worth more than a buck or two-but he might think the linen napkins would make nice souvenirs.
CHAPTER 11
Temi lifted up a rusty bicycle rim with most of the spokes broken. “When you said estate sales, I was picturing mansions full of antique sofas, priceless paintings, and marble busts.”
“You were picturing that in Prescott?” I asked from beneath a picnic table where I was sorting through old apple crates full of vinyl records and self-help books from the 60s. Older books were more my forte, but I put aside a signed first edition of Sex and the Single Girl. That one was still in print and ought to bring a few bucks. “I know there are some trophy homes up in the hills, but I think most of them are the second houses of well-to-do Phoenix entrepreneurs rather than the twenty-third homes of blue bloods with way too much inherited money to spend.”
“I suppose I was at least thinking that there’d be fewer cobwebs.” Temi swatted at a nice collection in the door frame. We were in the back of an old garage that had started its life as a barn. It was packed to the rafters, with a single path winding its way past the precarious junk piles.
“If the dust isn’t to your taste, you could join the people admiring the furniture in the house.”
“When you say furniture, are you referring to the green plaid sofa with the broken springs or the coffee table made out of plywood and cable spools? I simply ask because I wasn’t sure if those qualified for such a lofty label and thought perhaps you’d seen something someone might actually want.”
“Nope.” I squirmed between the legs of the table and poked into another crate. “That’s what I meant.”
“I don’t mind the dust.” Temi took a deep breath-a bracing breath? “What can I do to help?”
I pulled myself out from under the picnic table and pushed aside a laundry basket full of car parts, possibly related to the half-assembled car in the backyard, but just as likely not. Once I could see her, I decided tall, athletic, and well-dressed Temi looked out of place in the dust-and-rust-filled garage. She might have fit in once, but nine years had changed her a lot more than it had changed me. I wondered if it was harder to have never had money and prestige than to have had it and lost it. I doubted I’d ever know. With my grubby hands, stained jeans, and faded T-shirt, I fit right into that garage and I probably always would.