not the Brontosaur’s forte. But he’s a trooper, and I know in my heart of hearts that come morning, he’ll be hunched over his typewriter, concentrating on detail like a monk illuminating a precious manuscript. “You wanna come back to the house tonight?” he asks. “I’m gonna grill up a few steaks, maybe go wild and do a little oregano seasoning.”
A shake of my head, a shuffle back toward the front of the club. Dinner sounds great—steak sounds better—steak and oregano would just about put me through the roof—but I’ve got work to do. That, and I need a few more hits of basil, pronto. “Sounds great, but I’ll have to take you up another time.”
“Hot date, eh?” Dan wriggles his eyebrows lasciviously.
I think of the burned Velociraptor up in the hospital, of his perplexing struggle to remain inside a room blistering with heat, with smoke, with a hundred ways to die. Nobody’s
that
attached to a desk chair—even Teitelbaum would manage to wriggle his way up and out of the office with five thousand degrees pressing against his back. It stands to reason, then, that Donovan Burke had a reason to stay in that room—a damned good one—and there’s only one dino who can tell me what that reason was.
“The hottest,” I tell Dan, and make my way out of the nightclub.
H ospitals are a tough gig for anyone, I’ll give you that. The last place the sick and dying need to be is around the sick and dying. But for a dino, it’s worse. Much worse.
Even after all these millions of years—all these tens of millions of years—of the laboriously slow evolutionary process, we dinos still receive our best information through our schnozzes. Twenty-twenty vision and pin-drop hearing notwithstanding, our main sense is scent, and when we’re deprived of the olfactory, it can be quite the debilitating experience. You’re not going to find anything on this earth more pathetic than a dino with a head cold. We whine, we sniffle, we complain at the top of our stuffed-up lungs that nothing seems right, that the world has suddenly lost all color, all meaning. The most courageous of us revert into sniveling infancy, toddlers just out of the shell, and those who are pretty sniveling to begin with become downright unapproachable.
A hospital has no smells. None of use, at least, and therein lies the problem. The gallons and gallons of disinfectant slopped along the floors and onto the walls every day make sure that not a solitary odor molecule makes it out of Dodge alive. Sure, it’s all in the name of good health, and I can understand where the elimination of bacteria and similar microscopic evildoers might come in handy in fighting offinfection and whatnot, but it’s a bitch and a half for any dino trying to keep his sanity.
I’m losing it already, and I’ve barely gotten through the front door.
“I’m here to see Donovan Burke,” I tell the thin-lipped nurse, who is busy brooding over a cup of coffee and this morning’s—Tuesday’s—crossword puzzle.
“You gotta speak up,” she says, a stick of gum smacking rhythmically between her short, blunt teeth. Instinctively, I lean in closer to her pistoning jaws, my nostrils flaring, my brain craving a whiff of Bubblicious, Juicy Fruit, Trident—anything to combat this pervading sense of nothingness.
“Donovan Burke,” I repeat, pulling back before she notices me sniffing away at her mouth. “That’s Donovan with a D.”
The nurse—Jean Fitzsimmons, unless she swapped name tags with someone else this morning—sighs as if I have asked her to perform some task beneath her station such as steel-toe boot licking. She allows the newspaper to flutter out of her hands, and her narrow, birdlike fingers set to tapping away on a nearby keyboard. A computer screen fills with patients’ names, their respective ailments, and prices that simply can’t be correct. One hundred and sixty-eight dollars for a single shot of antibiotics? For that kind of cash, there
A shake of my head, a shuffle back toward the front of the club. Dinner sounds great—steak sounds better—steak and oregano would just about put me through the roof—but I’ve got work to do. That, and I need a few more hits of basil, pronto. “Sounds great, but I’ll have to take you up another time.”
“Hot date, eh?” Dan wriggles his eyebrows lasciviously.
I think of the burned Velociraptor up in the hospital, of his perplexing struggle to remain inside a room blistering with heat, with smoke, with a hundred ways to die. Nobody’s
that
attached to a desk chair—even Teitelbaum would manage to wriggle his way up and out of the office with five thousand degrees pressing against his back. It stands to reason, then, that Donovan Burke had a reason to stay in that room—a damned good one—and there’s only one dino who can tell me what that reason was.
“The hottest,” I tell Dan, and make my way out of the nightclub.
H ospitals are a tough gig for anyone, I’ll give you that. The last place the sick and dying need to be is around the sick and dying. But for a dino, it’s worse. Much worse.
Even after all these millions of years—all these tens of millions of years—of the laboriously slow evolutionary process, we dinos still receive our best information through our schnozzes. Twenty-twenty vision and pin-drop hearing notwithstanding, our main sense is scent, and when we’re deprived of the olfactory, it can be quite the debilitating experience. You’re not going to find anything on this earth more pathetic than a dino with a head cold. We whine, we sniffle, we complain at the top of our stuffed-up lungs that nothing seems right, that the world has suddenly lost all color, all meaning. The most courageous of us revert into sniveling infancy, toddlers just out of the shell, and those who are pretty sniveling to begin with become downright unapproachable.
A hospital has no smells. None of use, at least, and therein lies the problem. The gallons and gallons of disinfectant slopped along the floors and onto the walls every day make sure that not a solitary odor molecule makes it out of Dodge alive. Sure, it’s all in the name of good health, and I can understand where the elimination of bacteria and similar microscopic evildoers might come in handy in fighting offinfection and whatnot, but it’s a bitch and a half for any dino trying to keep his sanity.
I’m losing it already, and I’ve barely gotten through the front door.
“I’m here to see Donovan Burke,” I tell the thin-lipped nurse, who is busy brooding over a cup of coffee and this morning’s—Tuesday’s—crossword puzzle.
“You gotta speak up,” she says, a stick of gum smacking rhythmically between her short, blunt teeth. Instinctively, I lean in closer to her pistoning jaws, my nostrils flaring, my brain craving a whiff of Bubblicious, Juicy Fruit, Trident—anything to combat this pervading sense of nothingness.
“Donovan Burke,” I repeat, pulling back before she notices me sniffing away at her mouth. “That’s Donovan with a D.”
The nurse—Jean Fitzsimmons, unless she swapped name tags with someone else this morning—sighs as if I have asked her to perform some task beneath her station such as steel-toe boot licking. She allows the newspaper to flutter out of her hands, and her narrow, birdlike fingers set to tapping away on a nearby keyboard. A computer screen fills with patients’ names, their respective ailments, and prices that simply can’t be correct. One hundred and sixty-eight dollars for a single shot of antibiotics? For that kind of cash, there
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