Mike blushed.
“Go on, you can tell me.”
“Toohot.” He paused. “You know, from too hot to handle.”
“Oh, baby,” I said. We locked eyes again.
Time to get back to business. “We’ve got at least one amateur bomb maker with Internet access,” I said. “He may or may not be the sweaty guy who Gunter and my sister-in-law and I all saw around the bathroom. What else do we know?”
We didn’t know much more, though we had a seemingly endless supply of questions. Mike believed that the bomb could have been built in anybody’s kitchen, without requiring much in the way of special supplies. It wasn’t a particularly expensive proposition, either. I laid out for him my plans to research the groups that had opposed the gay marriage lawsuit, and how I had recruited Harry, and Lui’s station, to help. “I managed to catch the five and six o’clock news from the station,” I said. “KVOL did a nice piece on Sandra and Cathy. Maybe tomorrow they’ll come up with some leads.”
By the time we finished off the pasta I was way too stuffed for dessert, but the waiter brought us complimentary little glasses of grappa, a strong Italian brandy. Mike downed his in one shot, so of course I had to do the same.
But I was without the benefit of his Italian ancestry, or his undoubted years of drinking the stuff. Man, did it burn going down! I started coughing and choking, and he laughed. I wondered if this was what dating him would be like, the two of us constantly struggling to get the upper hand.
Somehow that didn’t seem too unpleasant.