Super Meals: Part Twenty-Five

Doctor Ralph had to remain calm but move quickly. He stumbled backwards from the drive-through window, tripping over the young woman who had given him the grease-stain on his shoulder and running for the manager’s office. He thought of logging into the workstation there using his backdoor passcode to bypass the locks installed on every computer used in the fast-food chain, which prevented any web surfing, social media connections, or, honestly, any functions other than running the store management and point of sale systems.

He struggled, but couldn’t remember the reaction he’d gotten from mixing the restaurant’s synthetic syrup with their lab-cooked cheese-slices, and that bothered him. Knowing things was a large part of what defined him to himself, and forgetting the results of an experiment was like forgetting his middle name.

His feet slipped on the tiled floor, still wet from the morning mopping and more than a little grease that was as good as baked into the flooring at this point. He held onto the doorknob to the office until he got his feet under him and stabbed his PIN code into the lock, mis-typing it twice and then finally getting it right and stumbling through the door.

The “manager’s office” was a little bigger than the broom closet, and Diana was sitting at the desk with a stack of papers in front of her. She appeared to be filling out a spreadsheet by hand. When Doctor Ralph burst through the door she looked up and asked, “Yes sir? Can I help you?”

“I…need…computer…” he panted.

“Excuse me?” asked the manager.

He took a moment to gulp air into his lungs and slowed down to say, “I need to use your computer, please.”

She held her gaze on him a moment longer and he felt like she was trying to read him, which pissed him off. He wasn’t one to suffer scrutiny, he was the one who scrutinized. (It was a sad line, stolen from a popular TV show, but it made him feel cool)

Before he could snap at her, though, she said, “I’m very sorry, but our computer is offline.”

Doctor Ralph froze and said, “What?”

“I’m sorry, but our computer went down a week ago. I called the district office and put in a request for a new one, but they said it could be up to two weeks before it’s actually replaced. I’ve been doing the schedule and payroll reporting by hand ever since.”

In an instant, Doctor Ralph was enraged, but couldn’t possibly show it. Not just for the fact that he did everything he could to never show true emotion to anybody, ever, but because he had always been proud of the fast food chain’s business model regarding replacement of equipment. Namely, that it didn’t happen until or unless it was absolutely, one hundred percent necessary. He’d seen stores’ requests for maintenance go unanswered for months until everybody who knew that something was broken either quit or was fired. The new employees never even knew there was something actually wrong – they just accepted that something didn’t work and found a way around it.

He was wasting time here, now, with no working computer and no way to access his records or experiments. His tablet was back in his hotel room and he couldn’t reach it fast enough. His car…

He stopped there, thinking of the car.

The woman behind the wheel, the forgettable guy in the passenger seat, the unmarked cop car with the license plate number 3FJP24A…

He had to follow the car.

Without speaking he bolted from the manager’s office, grabbed his jacket off a hook by the door, and sprinted out to his car. He knew they were heading east from the parking lot, so he pulled into traffic as quickly as possible and accelerated well past the speed limit and scanning the horizon for the car.

Detective Mimi and Walter were headed for the wheat fields outside of town. They had stopped at the local community college to tell Walter’s boss in the maintenance department that he wouldn’t be coming to work as he was needed to aid in a police investigation, and they had given him the day off.

As they pulled out of the far parking lot, they didn’t notice Doctor Ralph’s car pulling through the intersection a block back from them.

Neither did they notice him fall into position several car lengths back from them and match their speed.

Two miles down the road they pulled into a local park and stopped in the last stall in the parking lot. Mimi had already eaten the “normal” meal that they’d ordered, much to Walter’s protests. “How come you get to eat the regular food?” he asked.

“Um, duh? You get to eat your meal when we get there,” she answered.

“But we don’t know what it’s going to do to me!”

“Correction, we don’t know if it’ll do anything to you at all. This way we get to do our little science experiment and you get breakfast. Besides, I paid for it, so I get to eat it. Shut up.”

He grumbled, but only because his stomach did the same.

When they had parked the car, Mimi snapped the bag up and got out, headed for an empty field on the edge of the park’s grounds, and Walter followed. Once they were out of sight of the parking lot, Doctor Ralph pulled into a stall of his own and exited his own vehicle.

He followed them at a distance, trying like hell to stay far enough away that they wouldn’t notice, while still keeping them in sight so he could see what happened when one of them ate that sandwich, and it was tricky. The park had several trails that wound their way around and through, following the river and bordering the grounds, and more than once he did lose sight of them. Luckily, being early morning on a weekday, there was nobody else to distract or confuse him, and he was always able to pick up their trail again.

Walter and Detective Mimi came to a stop at a shelter, where Mimi sat down on the picnic table and sipped the orange juice in one hand while holding out the bag of food in the other.

Walter looked at her and said, “What?”

She slurped the last of the orange juice, ignoring the look of irritation on Walter’s face, and said, “What are you waiting for? Eat up.”