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.#p#分页标题#e#
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.”