“Darlin’,” Hooker said, wrapping an arm around me. “You’re gonna have to wait your turn.”
“It’s your darn dog!”
Beans made a lunge at a round little lady carrying a bowl of beans and sausage, planting his two front feet squarely on her back. They went down to the ground with a woof from Beans and an oouf from the woman, food flying everywhere. Beans flopped on top of the woman and snarfed up the sausage that had landed in her hair.
Hooker muscled Beans off the woman, grabbed her under the armpits, and dragged her to her feet. “Sorry,” he said to the woman. “He gets playful.”
“He should be in a zoo,” she said, brushing at the sauce on her shirt. “What is he? He looks like a Yak dog. Like a Chewbacca.” She felt on top of her head. “What’s this goo in my hair?”
It was a glob of dog drool.
“Must be from the casserole,” I told her, luring Beans away with a roll.
“Everybody come eat before the food gets cold,” Felicia said.
Felicia had her table extended to maximum capacity, and we fit around it cheek by jowl, with a couple kids sitting on parents’ laps. Every inch of table was covered with bowls of food…rice, beans, fried bread, pork barbecue, sweet potatoes, fruit casseroles, chicken, and who-knows-what.
Maria passed a platter of fried sweet-potato cakes. “How about that Mexican race-car man who got killed? It’s all that’s on the news.” She turned to Hooker. “Did you know him?”
“Only in passing.”
“I heard he was ripped apart by a man-eating swamp monster.”
Hooker and I glanced under the table at Beans. He was making sloppy wet snorking sounds, licking his privates.
“Lucky bastard,” Hooker whispered. “Every time I try to do that, I throw my back out.”
“I don’t know how that swamp monster got to South Beach,” Loretta said. “I get goose bumps thinking about it.”
“Yeah, and how’d the swamp monster get all that plastic wrap? What’d he do, go rob a Winn-Dixie? Personally, I don’t think it was a swamp monster,” Maria said.
“So what do you think?” Loretta asked.
“Werewolf.”
“How’s the werewolf gonna get the plastic wrap?”
“Simple,” Maria said. “He eats the guy, only the guy’s too big to finish up in one meal. There’s a lot left over, right? So when the sun comes up, the werewolf turns into a human, and the human goes to the store and buys the plastic wrap and wraps the guy so he stays fresh.”
“That makes a lot of sense,” Loretta said.
Felicia made the sign of the cross and passed the fried bread.
“If he wrapped him up to keep him fresh, then why did he leave him at the restaurant?” Lily asked.
“Changed his mind,” Maria said. “Maybe the werewolf got indigestion. Like when I eat too many chiles and I get heartburn.”
Felicia’s husband opened another bottle of wine. “It wasn’t a werewolf. There wasn’t a full moon. Werewolves need a full moon.”
“Are you sure they need a full moon?” Maria asked. “I thought they only needed a piece of the moon. How much of the moon was showing when this guy was killed? Anybody know?”
“I’ll show you a moon,” Luis said. “Anybody want to see a moon?”
“No,” everyone said. No one wanted to see Luis’s moon.
Two hours later we were still at the table, and Hooker and I were antsy to get back to the warehouse. Hard to relax when the hauler was sitting there beside a mound of scrap metal that used to be two race cars.
“This has been great,” I said to Felicia, “but Hooker and I need to get back to work.”