Drug Lord

I had no idea where I could sit. I looked around, totally lost.

“Hey,” a guy said. “Are you looking for a team?”

I was startled to hear someone talking to me in English.

“Yeah.” I realized that everyone in this section had pieces of paper in front of them.

“Welcome to the Fruitbats.” He motioned to the table.

I didn’t ask about the name, but I pulled up a chair at the edge.

“How do you even order here?” I looked around, but I didn’t see anybody with a menu.

“Oye,” one of them shouted at one of the waitstaff. “Menu!” He gestured at me.

The waiter gave him a nod and went off, a tray of discarded glasses in his hand.

A half minute later, the waiter came back with a menu.

“What do you want?”

I looked at him. He was American and probably working his way through South America.

“Could I have a burger?”

“Sure.”

He plucked the menu out of my hands. I blinked as I watched him walk away. I knew that the service industry outside of America was different, but wow. He barely stopped to take my order. I’d just ordered the first thing that I saw on the menu. I guessed that they got a lot of homesick Americans here.

“What’s your name?”

“Naelle,” I told the guy who had flagged down the waiter.

“Pretty name for a pretty girl. I’m Emilio,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

It was hard to see very much in the dim light of the bar, but he looked like he had killer cheekbon

es and a sculpted jaw.

“Have you ever played trivia here before, Naelle?”

“No.”

“Here are the stakes: if we win, we get a $100 bar credit.”

“So…we want to win?”

“If we win, we’ll get a jirafa.”

“A giraffe?”

There were a lot of good-natured chuckles around the table.

“No,” Emilio said, amusement clear in his voice. “It’s a name for a very large container of beer.”

“Can’t you just call it a pitcher?”

“It’s a lot bigger than that.”