GAH! When are the dividers going to get fixed! This is just not cool. :grumbles: Any way, how is everybody on this fine Wednesday? Having a nice day? Yeah, my small talk isn't very good. Well, here we have another update of Of Gumshoes and Moonlighters. Please, feel free to enjoy and tell me what you think. A little note for next week's update. My class is going on our class trip the morning of the sixth aka update day. I will try my very, very best to make sure that it is put up before I leave. I think that it's around 5:30 though, so please cut me a tiny amount of slack if I miss. If it's not up by Wednesday; it will be up by Saturday.

Disclaimer: Balkoth does not own, nor is he affiliated with, DC comics, Cartoon Network, or the Teen Titans - used to be animated - series.

XXXXX

The Meal

Richard ordered for both of them. Them meaning himself and Garfield. Richard got a medium-well steak marinated in the restaurant's special sauce and a side of baby red potatoes. He got Garfield a house salad and eggplant parminiani. Richard thought about waiting for Garfield but started eating on the grounds that he didn't know when Garfield would show up. Really, the steak smelt too good for Richard to ignore.

The restaurant was one of those small family owned, hole-in-the-wall places. There weren't a lot of customers but the place was charming enough. The waitress was a pleasant woman with beefy arms and the chef could be heard in the back talking to the food. Richard wasn't quite sure what to make of that. The steak was good though, so whatever was going on worked.

"Oh, you ordered for me." Garfield pulled out a chair and sat down across from Richard. It was strange that Richard hadn't noticed him earlier. His thoughts were just somewhere else recently. "It's nice to see that you're taking our current job so seriously."

"You had better be joking, Gar," Richard said while slicing off another bite of his steak. Garfield was only joking around, a fact Richard was well aware of. This was another part of the tradition.

Garfield skipped out on research so now Richard had to get in his face about it. Once upon a time, the tradition had been real. There hadn't been a friendly relationship between the two and Richard would do everything short of killing Garfield to get the point across that what he had done was unacceptable. At this point, both of them knew it was an act.

"What? You can't tell that I'm kidding?" Garfield tried to backpedal. Another act.

"No, I can tell," Richard responded, letting it drop earlier than usual. "What have you been up to today?"

"Well," Garfield plopped down in his seat and started in on his salad, "I watched some security footage." Richard felt his annoyance take an unexpected jump but he didn't say anything. "I asked around about recent contracts that have been put out," Garfield stuffed a tomato into his mouth and Richard had to struggle to understand what was being said, "I was a temporary traffic cop at the intersection of Hallow Springs Road and Sunset Avenue."

"Wait a minute," Richard interrupted. This not only shut Garfield up but also gave him an opportunity to swallow his partially masticated food. "There was a wreck at that intersection."

Garfield shrugged sheepishly and impaled a cucumber slice on his fork; "Must have been after I left." It was a nice save. Not true, but a valiant attempt at not looking like an idiot. "Anyway, like I was saying, I… I think I ran out of things I did." Garfield lifted his fork to his mouth before something occurred to him. "Dick, how did you know I would come here?"

"Oh," Richard waved a hand to dismiss the question, "just a wild guess from when you pointed this place out earlier and insisted that we eat lunch here."

"How'd your meeting with Rachel Roth go?" Garfield said around his mouthful of cucumber.

"Want to explain how knew about that?" Richard put down his silverware and crossed his arms across his chest.

Garfield mercifully swallowed before speaking. "Dick, do you remember the very first time we were trapped in a small space together?" Richard remembered the episode clearly. They had just been saddled together as partners back in Gotham City for a particularly tricky case. Both of them had been private consultants before teaming up and starting their own firm.

As a team building exercise, Richard and Garfield had been put in an old isolation chamber – one of those rooms used by NASA for psychological testing and analysis – for twenty-four hours. Garfield had brought up a number of random subjects to pass the time. One that stood out was…

"You finally got to live one of your many idiotic dreams?" Richard couldn't help but smile. Garfield truly was a child at heart.

"Laugh if you will, Dick. The fact remains that I, not you, got to say," at this point Richard joined in, doing his best not to laugh, "follow that car."

Richard broke down into silent laughter. "You tailed me? Wow, I'm getting rusty to not notice a taxi following me."

"So?" Garfield asked, finally cutting into his eggplant.

"So, what?"

"How was your meeting with Rachel, smart one?" Garfield lightly smacked his forehead to accentuate the insult. Things truly were going topsy-turvy if Garfield was calling Richard out on his intelligence.

"It went well. We talked for a little bit…"

Garfield cut in at this point, swinging his fork in the air to swat the words back. "About what?"

"I was getting to that, Gar. Try not to be so impatient," Richard sighed. "Just small talk really. A little about this case, a little about her business and life, a little about how the two of us," Richard used his finger to connect Garfield and him with an invisible line, "met and work together. Just small talk."

"Right. So, how did she turn down the date invitation?" Garfield plucked an olive off the top of his salad and tossed it into the air. Garfield's aim was a little off and it bounced off his nose. He snatched the olive out of the air before it could hit the floor and popped it into his mouth.

"I keep forgetting that you followed me. Where were you anyway?"

Garfield avoided answering the question by brandishing one of his infamous I-told-you-so moments. "You're willing to admit that I have gotten better at tracking and stealth? I told you I got better since the Drake thing but noooo…"

"Yes." Richard didn't take long in spitting out the admission. Anything to shut Garfield up. "Gar, you've gotten better since the Moxley case. Do you have to do the thing that you do?" The answer was yes. The meal digressed from a civilized conversation into childish taunts. It was a one-sided conversation.

"How did she respond?" Garfield asked after about fifteen minutes. Richard started at the abrupt change in subject, choking on the water he'd just put in his mouth. Just a second ago he was being told about one of Garfield's fourth grade science projects – which, apparently, he did well on. Now he was trying to breathe while simultaneously keeping water in his mouth.

"How did who respond to what?" Richard asked when he finally coughed sparse amounts of water from his lungs. Richard had a feeling that something had sailed over his head, but with Garfield it was hard to tell.

"How did Rachel respond to you asking her out?" Richard caught an additional, "And people call me slow," that was obviously supposed to stay either a whisper or a thought.

"She was polite and asked for a rain check," Richard shrugged slightly, waiting for whatever random bit of dating wisdom Garfield was about to impart.

"Yes, Jessie told me that much," Garfield rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Do you remember her exact response, though?"

Richard raised an eyebrow, as if to ask if the exact wording was important. Garfield responded to his thoughts. "Her exact words are very important. It's possible that she really did just want a rain check or she could have wanted you to go cut your wrist but was too polite to say it."

"I don't really remember the exact words, Gar," Richard said distantly while taking the last bite of his steak and signing the air when he caught the server's eye – the universal sign for getting the check.

"Try to remember, Dick. It's important. By the way," he added as an after thought, "I'm not paying for lunch."

"First off, Gar, I've paid the last six times we've eaten out. Second, it isn't important. Important is a murder. Important is a thief who nobody has managed to catch. Important is…"

"Yada, yada, yada. Dick, you never listened to that tape I made, did you?" Richard felt his cheeks heat up in an ashamed blush. He had, actually, listened to the tape in question.

Garfield had once hidden a tape recorder on his person and recorded everything he did on a normal day. Then, he got all the parts where Richard was present and put it on a single tape. He'd given it to Richard the next day insisting that he really needed to hear himself talk. Richard had listened. He hadn't changed since the tape but he had listened to it.

"I know something about our case. I was looking at contracts that have recently been put out today, remember?" he added in response to the double take Richard did. "I can tell you what I know if, and only if, you tell me Rachel's exact words. You also need to pay for lunch." Almost as if by magic, Richard remembered Rachel's response.

XXXXX

Next Update: Wednesday, September 6, 2006

XXXXX