Sixth Grave on the Edge

* * *

After the plainclothes got to Cookie’s apartment, I let him walk her over to the office while I sought out Misery. Cook would have a busy day with everything I’d thrown at her, and I had enough to do to keep me busy for minutes. Probably half hours.

I needed a man. A man I could push around and shout orders to like a military commander. I needed a man named Garrett Swopes. He was the only one of our group who’d visited hell. Besides Reyes, of course. I excavated my bag for the keys to Misery, which were brand-new and not like my old keys at all, and headed that way. I unlocked Misery with the fob. That was new, too. Misery had never had remote anything. She’d been old school. Stick the key in. Turn. I was surprised I didn’t have carpal tunnel with all the sticking and turning. But now, I just pushed a button. It was so Jetsons. I made that whirring sound every time we took off down the street.

After opening the door, I tried to climb inside. I would have succeeded, too, if an eighty-pound Rottweiler hadn’t been sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Artemis,” I said as she panted happily, her stubby tail wagging as fast as bumblebee wings flutter, “you can’t drive. The last time you drove, we almost killed a mailman.”

She whined and put a paw possessively on the steering wheel, her huge brown eyes pleading.

I leaned over and checked Mr. Andrulis. He didn’t seem to mind Artemis. I rubbed her ears. “Okay, look, I know traditionally your species and the mailman variety of my species have never really gotten along, but we can’t kill them. We can’t target them.” I was never sure if she did that on purpose or not.

She let out a loud bark, indicating something just over my shoulder. I let my gaze wander in that direction and realized we had company. A man in his early thirties dressed in a gray hoodie and fatigues stood watching us. Well, me, since he couldn’t see Artemis.

I nodded congenially before turning back to Artemis and saying through gritted teeth, “Seriously, girl, you have to move.”

“I’ll wash it for you,” the guy said, taking a couple of steps forward. I’d recently had a gun to my head and wasn’t in the mood for any more shenanigans from the penis-endowed gender. I reached into a side pocket of my bag as nonchalantly as I could and wrapped my fingers around Margaret, my Glock.

“I’m sorry?”

If he was homeless, he hadn’t been for long. He was clean, his clothes almost new.

“Your Jeep. I can wash it. I have a side business.” He took another step toward me and handed me a homemade business card. It’d been printed on regular paper, then cut out with scissors. Apparently by a preschooler.

“Well, thanks, we’re good for now.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a couple of bucks on you?” he asked, sniffing into a knit fingerless glove.

“You take a few steps back, and I’ll look.”

“Really?” he asked, excited. “Thanks.” He stepped back, and I once again excavated my purse for a wallet as I let my gaze slide past him.

I’d been having a lot of odd encounters with homeless people of late. Well, lots of my encounters with homeless people were odd. Especially the one where that guy threw a mustard burger at my windshield as I sat at a stoplight. I didn’t even do anything to that man. He was all screaming through my plastic window.

But maybe these encounters were a sign from God. Maybe he wanted me to work with the homeless. Or, and I was thinking outside the box with this one, maybe they were all some kind of elaborate setup to take pictures of me with these people, so that they could later blackmail me into doing something illicit. Normally my thoughts wouldn’t have veered in quite that direction, but they did this time. Probably because there was a man sitting in a beige sedan parked down the street with a wide-angle camera pointed directly at me.

Oddly enough, I’d been seeing that same beige sedan a lot lately, too.

He seemed to have snapped the shots he wanted. He lowered the camera and was scrolling through the shots when I knocked on his window. Hard.

He jumped and flailed a bit at being surprised.

“Who the f**k are you?” I said, practically screaming at him. I was not going to take being set up lying down.

Of course, there was an added benefit to screaming. With any luck, it would garner the attention of anyone who happened to be close by. If he came at me, I’d have witnesses.

I took two quick seconds to scan the area. Probably something I should have done before provoking a stranger who could’ve had an AK-47 stashed in his undies, for all I knew. Luckily, there was a man taking out the garbage of a little café that sat beside Calamity’s. He paused from his task to look on with mild interest.

No Reyes, though. I guess the only thing he sensed, the thing that called him to me, was a spike in adrenaline. I tried to stay calm so as not to summon him. He’d had a busy night what with all our sexual energies colliding like atoms in the sun. And then there were the men in masks. Add to that the whole toothpaste debacle, and Reyes should be about as exhausted as I was.

I refocused on the paparazzi. “What the f**k, dude?” I yelled when he turned to put his camera on the passenger seat. He put his key in the ignition, and for some reason—my reflexes being so catlike and all—I tried to open the door. I had every intention of dragging him out by his hair and beating the truth out of him. Thankfully his door was locked, because at some point during my walk over, I lost all sense of reality. His engine roared to life, and before I could utter another curse word, he peeled out, narrowly missing my toes.