Game Over

Chapter 34





“WHAT CAN I get you, sir?” asked Dana, passing my alien a moist washcloth with a pair of tongs. Japanese restaurants—even McDonald’s—almost always pass out moist cloths for washing your hands before you eat.

“Your spiciest soup,” grumbled the alien safari hunter. “And make it a double helping.”

“Big day ahead of you?”

“What business is that of yours?” he snarled.

“My profound apologies, good sir,” she replied, bowing. “I will place your order immediately.”

The alien grunted and brusquely turned his attention to a small black item he’d removed from a jacket pocket. It looked like a BlackBerry or some other smartphone, but I could see with a glance that it hadn’t been manufactured by any Earth-based company.

I climbed to the brim of his hat and looked down, making a thorough study of the device—its shape, its color, and the specifications of the tiny screen, which, at least for the moment, simply read, AWAITING SIGNAL.

I zipped to the men’s room, transformed myself back into human form, and returned to the counter. My plan was simple: I was going to get my hands on his tracking device, and I was going to do it without him knowing I’d done it.

“Can I take your order, young man?” asked Dana, passing me a washcloth.

“Yes, miss, I’d like a steaming hot bowl of whackami, please,” I said to her with a wink, using the Alpar Nokian word for “distraction” in place of the Japanese word wakame, which means seaweed, and was one of the flavors of soup featured on the menu.

She winked back. “And would you like a large or small serving, sir?”

“Might as well make it a large,” I said. “And if you could,” I whispered, “please time it to arrive exactly when you bring lunch to that gentleman down the counter.”

I pulled out my iPhone and pretended to read some manga while Dana went back to the kitchen. In a moment she returned with a very large—I’m talking bigger than her head—bowl of soup, and carried it down the counter.

I tensed, ready to spring to action.

“Here’s your soup, sir,” she said, placing the bowl of soup on the counter in front of the alien.

“Fine,” he muttered without glancing it up. “Leave it there.”

“Would you like some hot sauce?”

He looked up from the tracking device and glared. “I said I wanted it spicy—of course I want hot sauce.”

“Very good, sir,” said Dana, reaching under the counter and pulling out a bottle of shishito chili oil. “Will this do?”

He squinted down at the bottle’s label and nodded. But, as he did, Dana squeezed the full bottle ever so slightly, causing a single droplet of the oil to spurt out and into the alien’s left eye.

Shishito chilies are legendary for their potency, and after handling them Japanese cooks know very well not to touch their faces, particularly their eyes. The stinging and burning can be so intense that temporary blindness often results.

With a muffled yelp, the hunter dropped the tracking device onto the counter and jammed his washcloth into his eye, rubbing furiously and shouting all manner of alien curse words. If it hadn’t been a brightly lit, crowded restaurant, I’m sure he would have leaped across the counter and throttled Dana without a moment’s hesitation.

Instead, he snarled at her: “Would you… please… get me… a clean washcloth!”

I quickly transformed a stack of napkins into something that looked exactly like his tracking device. And then it was a simple matter of sidling up behind him and making the old switcheroo while Dana hurried to get him a clean cloth so he could dab his eye.

“You are a fool,” he spat out as he ripped the towel from her hands.

“A thousand apologies, good sir,” she said. “May I offer you a free cup of tea?”

“You can offer me nothing, you pathetic lower life-form,” he grumbled. He was about to say something more hostile than that, but he stopped himself. Instead, he grabbed his newly replaced tracking device and stormed out of the restaurant.

“This is some excellent seaweed soup,” I told Dana as she passed me the check.

“I thought you’d like it.” She smiled as I shelled out the appropriate combination of yen notes and coins and scribbled some instructions on the back of the check for her to meet me outside.