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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781477571798 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | CreateSpace Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2012 |
| Series: | Casey Jones Mystery , #1 |
| Pages: | 206 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.24(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.47(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
"This better be good or you're dead meat," I warned my midnight caller. And I meant it. I had a 26-year-old bartender parked next to my wrinkled old hide. I didn't take kindly to interruptions.
"You've stepped in it now," Bobby D. replied, hisvoice oozing with satisfaction. He takes great pride inpointing out my screw-ups.
"What is it?" I mumbled, tugging the sheets away from Jack, Jesus, he was a human Labrador retriever: glossy black hair, big wet tongue, sturdy chest, and a silly grin on his face when he slept.
"Your babysitting job just went sour. " Bobby followed this pronouncement with a cough. I could practically feel the phlegm bubbling through the phone wires. I don't know what goes on inside Bobby's massive stomach but half the time, whatever it is, it's trying to crawl out.
"It's three o'clock in the morning," I said, fumbling for my black cat eyeglasses. "What the hell could go wrong with that man at this time of night? She get caught breaking into the Junior League membership file or something?"
"She got arrested for murder."
"What?" I was wide awake. Mary Lee Masters arrested for murder? No way in hell. Not in the middle of the final month before the election.
Unless she had killed her husband. As a candidate's husband, Bradley Masters was a perfect specimen. As a human being's husband, he sucked.
"Don't you want to know who was killed?" Bobby asked. Our offices are only a few blocks from the Raleigh Police Department headquarters and Bobby has some clerk there paid off but good. He knows when the chief hits the can before the guy can even unzip his fly.
"Okay, I'll bite. Who was killed?"
"Don't know!" Hisrumbling laugh threatened to turn into a belch and I held the phone away just in case. Bobby was the kind of person you kept permanently stuffed in a closet. If you could find one big enough.
"Bobby — tell me everything straight or I'll confiscate your six-pack. I mean it. " In searching for my bra, I discovered one pink bunny slipper dangling from a door knob. I tried my damnedest to remember how it had gotten there but failed. I should never have let Jack talk me into drinking Mind Erasers. And don't even ask what's in one. The recipe alone can give you a hangover.
"The call went out about an hour ago," Bobby explained. "Male body, unidentified as yet. Parked in the back seat of your client's Jeep Cherokee. Which was parked about ten feet from her front door. Stiff was covered with a tarp. State Bureau's involved. Better hurry if you want to get anything."
"Ten feet from her front door? Give me a break. She's, smarter than that." Where the hell was my yellow dress? If Jack had ripped the zipper, he was dog food. I finally found it crumpled in a heap near the toilet with a suspicious brown stain over one boob like a breastplate. Forget it — I'd wear my black pants instead. Maybe even throw in my $9.98 pearls. All for the SBI.
"She's been under a lot of strain," Bobby said. "Maybe she cracked."
Mary Lee Masters crack? Not in a zillion years. Not in my lifetime. And certainly not in the middle of the night.
The woman couldn't sneeze without full makeup, nail polish, and a coordinated scarf. If she murdered, it would be a hell of a lot cleaner than this one was shaping up to be.
"Shit," I said, thinking out loud. "They aren't going to let me get near a murder. Not the SBI. "
"For chrissakes, Casey. You're her bodyguard, remember? Go guard her."
For once Bobby had a good idea. I rang off in the middle of another of his gastronomic rumbles. I was sure it would still be going on when I saw him next.
No sense leaving Jack a note. I doubted his eyes could focus enough to read at this hour. Instead I piled as many prepackaged foods as I could find on the kitchen table for his breakfast. Who says the art of hostessing is dead? Not in the South, it isn't. Not in my house, anyway. At least not while preservatives live.
I stopped on the way out the door to make sure Jack was still breathing. He smelled like the floor beneath a beer keg the morning after a frat party, but he was still alive. His gentle snores purred through the silence of the night like an electric outboard motor in water. Jack was an incorrigible flirt, an overqualified bartender going nowhere fast and a smart man who preferred to play dumb. But he was also my friend — and a good friend is hard to find. I tucked the sheet carefully around his sleeping form before I left.
For once, I-40 was deserted. The invading hordes of northern commuters were all tucked in their split-level homes, sleeping quietly beneath a Carolina moon. And what a moon it was. Full and white in the October sky, like a big china plate spinning through the night. The kind of moon that used to set my grandpa howling by the edge of the swamp just to see if he could get an answer.
I felt like howling myself from the throbbing in my head but pushed onward through the pain, inching my 1965 Plymouth Valiant up to eighty miles per hour. It began to shudder, the doors rattling like they would tear off any minute. I knew the shimmy would stop when I hit eighty-five. It did. I slid down the highway smooth as a shark, wondering how the hell a dead body had ended up in Mary Lee Masters's driveway.