Page 3 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
“Echo told me to tell you that turkeys can swim.”
“And I’m telling you to tell Echo to stop bugging the house,” Jez yelled back.
Echo was our pet hacker-slash-sociopath, a tiny blonde who shopped for clothes in the kiddie section but packed a cyber punch like no other, and boundaries weren’t a thing she recognised. If she weren’t on our side, one of us would have dumped her in the ocean years ago.
I rolled my eyes. “Good luck with that.”
Sin glared at me. “Stop chatting and catch a turkey.”
“This might be a dumb question, but why are there two turkeys running about the place?”
“Because they escaped from their box,” Marcel said, enunciating clearly as if I were the idiot here.
“Okay, wiseass. Why did you open the box?”
Jez laughed, something she’d started doing after she miraculously met a man who put up with not only her job but also the fact that she was a world-class bitch. And I meant that as a compliment.
“Marcel tried to give them a dish of water.”
“It’s hot,” he defended. “What did you expect me to do?”
“Move the box into the air-conditioned garage and call the supplier?”
“Oh, please. You think I wasn’t on the phone with the supplier already?”
Storm meandered out of the house. “Marcel ordered two fresh turkeys for pre-Thanksgiving dinner, and something got lost in translation.”
Yikes. “I mean, they are fresh.”
And with Sin around, they’d clucking stay that way. For a gal who’d put a bullet through a man’s head with zero regrets, she got surprisingly pissy about our consumption of animal products. She also rescued stray dogs in her spare time and gave half her money to the animal shelter. Someone would be building a turkey pen this afternoon, and I was torn between sneaking off so that didn’t end up being me and sticking around to watch the fun.
“Marcel versus two turkeys,” Jez mused. “My money’s on the turkeys.”
Mine too.
CHAPTER 2
Phae
“This has been the best day of the entire year.” Barbie leaned back on a sun lounger and sipped a cocktail. “Maybe even the entire decade.”
On the other side of the pool, Marcel and Sin faced off with Butterball. We’d caught Drumstick two hours ago with a net gun, then Marcel had grown impatient and shot the net onto a barrel cactus, and now it was stuck there forever.
“I’ll admit it, I underestimated the turkey.”
“I overestimated the dog,” Jez said. She’d gone out to get lunch, then made the mistake of returning home and gotten co-opted into welding. “So much for Saint being fierce.”
After the net fiasco, Sin had tried sending her Schutzhund-trained Malinois to herd Butterball into our hastily constructed—but nevertheless solidly built—turkey pen, but then Butterball had given Saint a death stare and said “gobble-gobble,” so Saint bugged out. Now she was lying beside Barbie, looking mildly embarrassed as well she should. Kermit, Sin’s tracking dog, had proven adept at finding the turkey but useless at catching it, while Trooper, the fluffy little mutt she and two acquaintances had rescued from a canyon a couple of years ago, wisely stayed inside.
“How trainable are turkeys?” Jez asked. “They’ve trained rats to sniff out land mines, dolphins to find sea mines, monkeys to work as service animals, miniature horses to guide blind people… Those birds are surprisingly tenacious—there must be a job they can do.”
“Like spy turkeys, you mean?”
“Their evade-and-escape skills are on point.”
“Wouldn’t work. The terrorists would just shoot them, which we’re not allowed to do.”
“They’re probably bulletproof,” Barbie pointed out. “Did you see Drumstick’s move with the wing earlier? She’s like Neo from The Matrix.”
