Torrent

CHAPTER 10

Simon ordered a burger from the bored man cleaning glasses at the bar-business still hadn’t picked up-then veered over to join us. He dragged over another chair, and I pushed my laptop to the side. We could have moved to a bigger table, but he didn’t suggest leaving the sacred outlet. Also, he’d been bouncing from foot-to-foot while he placed his order, so I knew he was impatient to share his news. He gave Temi a nervous glance though, apparently remembering his shyness around girls now that we weren’t busy chasing motorcycles.

“What’s your idea?” I asked him. “And how much will it cost?”

“Nothing.” He focused on me and grinned. “It’s already been implemented.”

“Irrevocably?”

Somehow Simon managed to shoot me a dirty look without losing the grin. “No. Do you remember those collars I made for your uncle this summer?”

“The GPS tracking collars for his hunting dogs? I mostly remember you cussing out Taos because you couldn’t find a decent electronics store.”

“Yes, I made that app and a few trial devices before I had two that were sturdy enough to stay on a pointer hurling itself around in the brush. I still have those prototypes in the van, or had rather.”

I glanced at Temi and lowered my voice. “You didn’t… put the collars on someone, did you?” I imagined some homeless fellow sleeping on a bench under a newspaper with a dog chain around his neck before it occurred to me to wonder why Simon wanted to track someone anyway.

“No, of course not. But I took the trackers off and taped them on something.”

“On what?” Temi asked, her chin propped in one hand. She seemed to find this admission of clandestine detective work amusing rather than alarming. If she started working with us, she’d learn better soon enough.

“It’s more of an in really.”

“Simon,” I whispered in exasperation.

“The tailpipes of a couple of Harleys.” He pulled out his phone and opened an app. A map of Prescott came up.

I leaned back in my chair, trying to decide if I was horrified or intrigued. Or both.

“Why do you want to track them?” Temi asked.

“Del said they’re trying to find some tool or weapon to kill that monster. If it’s something old that they’re prying out of the earth, I’m sure she’ll be interested. She also wants a sample of their language. If they don’t know we’re around, I’m sure they’ll speak freely.” He held up his phone, which happened to be opened to a voice recording application.

“You’re being awfully… considerate of my interests.” I squinted at him. “Why do I have a feeling you have ulterior motives?”

Simon smiled innocently. “I’m certain I don’t know.”

“Anyone been by our blog to read your story?”

His smile widened. “Oh, we’ve had oodles of visitors. I had to talk to our hosting provider a while ago, because we crashed on account of all the traffic using up our monthly bandwidth quota. In two hours.” He waved like some self-important Vegas prognosticator and proclaimed, “It all happened just like I thought it would. Wired and BoingBoing picked us up, and I don’t know how many lesser blogs.”

Temi’s mouth quirked, as if she didn’t know if she should be impressed or not.

“Uh huh, and did we get any orders?” I asked.

“No, but that’s not how it works,” Simon said. “It’s the links from these big sites that count. The traffic is cool, but you’re right in that it won’t be targeted to our business. It’ll all be people interested in the monster story. Although…” He drummed his fingers in his Star-Wars-Imperial-March pattern. “If I acted quickly, maybe I could put together some T-shirts or something. We wouldn’t make a ton, but merchandising could be good for a few bucks.”

“Merchandising?” I mouthed to Temi.

She shrugged back at me.

“I don’t have any artistic talent, but maybe I could do something with the pictures I got,” Simon went on. “I wish I had one of the monster. I mostly have mutilated bodies. That’s kind of garish for a T-shirt, right?”

“You think?” I asked.

Temi was more tactful than I, forgoing sarcasm to simply say, “Yes.”

“I did put some impression-based advertising on the site when I saw all the traffic,” Simon said. “We’ve already made thirty dollars today.”

I kept myself from rolling my eyes-barely. Money was money, I supposed, but I wanted to succeed doing something that added value to the world, or at least made someone happy. True, an antique steam shovel probably wouldn’t grant anyone eternal bliss, but that fellow had been pleased to find one for his collection.

Simon switched to another app. “They’re not doing anything.”

“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.