“Surprise me,” he said. “And I’ll have a second lobster roll to go. My monkey’s in the car and he’s hungry.”
“That is so adorable,” the waitress said. “What’s your monkey’s name?”
“Carl,” Diesel said. “And it would be great if you could hurry things along because Carl is probably gnawing on the steering wheel. We just got back from Sri Lanka, and he’s still freaked over the elephants. There were lots of elephants.”
“This is Theodore Nergal,” I said to Diesel. “And the guy with the patch on his forehead is Josh the Pirate.”
“Aargh,” Josh said to Diesel. “Who be you?”
“I be Diesel,” Diesel said.
“What were you doing in Sri Lanka?” Nergal asked Diesel.
“This and that,” Diesel said.
“Ah, one thing and another,” Nergal said.
Diesel ate half his dinner roll. “You got it.”
“Was it difficult getting your monkey into the country without a quarantine period?” Nergal asked.
There was a long pause where no one spoke and everyone looked at Diesel.
“He’s a service monkey,” Diesel finally said.
Not to mention, Diesel doesn’t fly by ordinary means.
“You’ll never guess what happened tonight,” Glo said to Diesel. “Josh was giving us a tour of the Pirate Museum and one of the exhibits came crashing down at our feet, and it turned out to be a real dead guy. That’s how we got to meet Dr. Nergal. He’s a coroner, and he was awesome. He figured out that the guy had been shot, and he knew all about the gun and everything. And he figured out the guy had been shot over ninety years ago.”
“Impressive,” Diesel said.
Nergal shook his head. “Not at all. It was obvious.”
“The head fell off when the dead guy hit the floor,” Glo said. “And it was as if the instant Dr. Nergal touched the head he knew all this stuff!”
“He had a bullet hole in the back of his skull, and the round was still contained in the cavity,” Nergal said to Diesel.
The waitress brought the food, and we all dug in. Nergal was halfway through his lobster roll when his phone buzzed. He read the text message and tapped in a response.
“This has been fun,” he said, pushing back from the table, leaving his share of the bill, “but I have to be going. Duty calls.”
“He seems nice,” Diesel said to me when Nergal left. “You should consider going out with him.”
“You think?” I asked.
A half hour later we left the restaurant. Josh walked Glo to her car, and Diesel and I walked up Wharf Street to my tan Chevy clunker.
“I sense a disturbance in the Force,” Diesel said.
“Gee, I can’t imagine why. Maybe it’s because one minute we’re in bed together, and then all of a sudden you get dressed and leave, and I don’t hear from you for three weeks. And then I find out you’ve been in Sri Lanka.”
“Well, where did you think I was?”
“I don’t know…a drugstore. I thought you were going out for condoms.”
“Yeah, looking back I could see where that might have been a possibility.” He slung an arm around me and nuzzled my neck. “Maybe we should take up where we left off.”
“You’re actually willing to risk one of us losing our abilities?”