Frostbite

Crossway

Peter dove forward, sliding across the tile and skidding to a stop just before his head hit the pipe running down from the bottom of the sink.

He jutted one hand out and above his head, waving the three mice in his grip.

"Okay!" He exclaimed. "Okay, this is progress!" He looked up at Granny Sal sitting on the spare stool they dragged to the back, her arms over her middle and an amused upturn to her mouth. "How many do we have now?"

She peered into the plastic box on the table next to her. "With what you just grabbed? Ten."

"Nice. How many are still loose?"

Two separate mice ran across the space between them. Sal's expression morphed into a more apologetic one.

"Somethin' like twenty or twenty-one."

Peter sighed. One of the mice in his grasp nibbled on his finger, and he dropped his catch with a small yelp.

"Or twenty four."

"Sorry, Ms. Granny."

"You're doin' your best, sugar."

Weasel poked his head into the kitchen, eyeing the makeshift barriers of bricks and towels stuffed into every which crevice from behind his cloudy lenses. "So I'm probably gonna close the bar tonight because of... this." He plucked his glasses off his face, squinted as he rubbed them down with the bottom of his orange-blue flannel, and slid the frame back onto the bridge of his nose with slightly clearer smears. Then gestured vaguely in their direction. "Also I banned Jay-Ar and Kaia from making any more executive decisions about our ant problem."

"You've got this sweetie back here playing exterminator because you listened to those idiots?" Sal planted her hands on her hips and dogged him down with one of those stares reserved by long-suffering grandmothers. "See, this is why you don't have a girlfriend."

"Sal, I swear to fucking god—"

Peter cocked a brow. "You let Jay-Ar and Kaia back here?" His head tilted a bit before he glanced towards a different corner of the kitchen. "That sounds like it's your fault for listening to anything they say, Mr. Weasel."

"Do you know how much cheaper they are than calling an actual guy for this?"

Two sets of unamused stares bore into him. Weasel suffered under the pressure for an entire five and a half seconds before he crumbled.

"Okay, fine, shut up, fuck. It was a bad call." He sighed. "Did we decide on Raid for the bugs?"

"Yeah, I texted Wade to get some."

Weasel pulled a face. "You're on my ass for Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Fuck and you got that flared-based ass plug running errands?" A hand slid up his face to rub his eyes, re-smudging his lenses back to square one. "You know he's going to kill someone on the way here, right?"

"You've got crazy faith in the guy that rakes in one of the highest job completion rates," Peter remarked dryly as he crouch-crawled towards the quiet scuffle he zeroed in on from across the kitchen. One knee was all the way bent while the other stretched out to the side as he held his balance on the tips of his toes, fingers splayed across brown tiles and stained grout. With a hunched back and a laser-focused gaze, he crept forward with an uncanny resemblance to something with a little more than two legs. "And I need to keep him busy because these lil' guys are still out and he'd just shish-kebab them the first chance he gets."

A flash of white and he tumbled into the bottom shelf between two boxes of spare dishes. Still, he emerges with his hair fluffier and a pair of mice wriggling from his grip on their tails.