A late night mystery

“Hey, what’s that?” John pointed with his chin towards a box left on the counter.

Desiree followed his gaze and discovered with her own eyes the box wrapped in brown paper. It looked like one of those mafia boxes where you could find a head or some other body part inside it to send a message. However, this box was carefully packaged, it was pristine, not a smudge, nothing.

“Who left that there?” She retorted.

“Beats me.” He replied, not much interested. He’d come out of the kitchen to linger behind the bar, taking a break from the grease and fumes that were, otherwise, his constant companions.

It was two am. The diner was almost empty at that hour of the night. The only people being the usual suspects. There was Bob, the security guard who worked across the street. He’d show up a couple of times during the night for his fifteen-minute breaks to get a coffee to help him get through his graveyard shift. There was Sandi, the insomniac, sitting in a corner booth with her laptop, writing one of her stories or the book she was always attempting to get started on. George, the bus driver who finished his shift at one-thirty and sat at the counter to talk to Desiree when she wasn’t busy with customers. He stayed there a couple of hours. He enjoyed her company and there was no one home waiting for him.

Drinking his usual decaf and piece of apple pie at a booth by the window was Tom, the cabbie who stopped at the diner between fares. He didn’t say much, but he was always polite, and carried a book to keep him company. Tonight he visited New England in Steinbeck’s ‘The Winter of our Discontent’.

Occasionally Lola would stop by for a piece of blueberry pie. Lola was a talented drag queen who performed in a club some blocks away a few nights a week. The diner was on her way home, so she’d stop there to banter with John and gossip with Desiree. Desiree envied her long, smooth legs, and how effortlessly she made walking on six-inch heels look. She had never managed to walk on heels “like a lady”. Her mom always told her she looked like a walking duck. Years of dancing were responsible for that. On that frigid night, Lola was absent. It was Thursday, one of the nights when she did perform. She was not one to follow a routine, so she might stop by sometime between three and four. She might just skip it for the night and go home with friends or her cats. She was unpredictable, which was one of the many qualities Desiree loved about her. Perhaps because her life was the complete opposite. There was nothing in it that was spontaneous or out of the ordinary. She sighed while she continued observing the package, creating all sorts of interesting stories in her head of what its contents were.

George was looking at Desiree, noticing her attention upon the mysterious package.

“What do you reckon is in it?”

“A ticking bomb?” She half-joked. George grimaced. Although he understood her quirky and sardonic sense of humor, bomb jokes were not funny to him. He’d seen too much devastation in his life to laugh at those.

“I daresay no one would be interested in bombing this dump!” Shouted John cheerfully, as if he was speaking to all the patrons, the walls, and everyone walking by the street who might find themselves wandering around at stupid o’clock in the morning.

George laughed at that. John walked closer to the box.

“No ticking sounds,” he said genially.

“Oh, John! Dontcha know? Bombs can be quiet now. You watch too many cartoons, my man,” replied Desiree laughing.

“So whatcha gonna do about it? It could be something important… or dangerous… You wanna call the popos?” He widened his eyes in a way that reminded Desiree of Wile E. Coyote when he discovered that he was holding Acme dynamite about to explode in his face.

Sandi suddenly looked up, as if she had just realized where she was. As if waking up from a deep slumber. It seemed as if she had been enchanted and she was finally free of the magic that had enveloped her mind.

She got up slowly and walked towards the counter, to where the box sat near the entrance. She picked it up as if she’d been expecting it all along. She returned to her seat, put the box in her bag, and kept typing away at her laptop.

The others stared at her in total disbelief, but then decided against asking any questions. They shrugged it off, kept talking, and letting the minutes drip one by one through the long night.

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