Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery Read Online Free PDF

other, sniffing at everything, and occasionally remembering what she’d come out here to do in the first place.
    The physical act of walking the dog let Ginny’s brain focus on the day’s events with a little more composure, pushing aside the mildly emotional weebling and focusing on the facts.
    Fact one: her client had not been at the house.
    Fact two: her client did not, by all appearances, live at that house.
    Fact three: someone probably not her client had been, by all appearances, running a fake ID shop out of that house.
    Fact four: someone—probably someone who did live in that house, or maybe worked there, or was just a random stranger, although she thought that was unlikely—had been killed there.
    She had the where, and could guess at the how, but the who and the why were still unanswered. The cops would be able to get the who pretty quickly, but the why  . . .
    “People are complicated, Georgie,” she said. “We lie, we cheat, we steal, we do things that require fake ID, and then we kill people and shove them under tables. What’s with that, anyway? What in that guy’s life made him worth killing? Was it the fake IDs?” She shook her head, having trouble imagining that. “Who gets murderous over fake driver’s licenses?”
    Her dog, finished with her rounds, bumped her head against Ginny’s leg and aimed deep brown eyes up at her owner with a quiet plea.
    “I’d rather be a dog, I think. You’ve got all the basics covered, don’t you?” Ginny said, giving Georgie the expected treat from her pocket. “Food, shelter, belly rubs . . .”
    Georgie took the treat gracefully, then whined as though to say, “Well, yes, and where are my belly rubs?” and flopped over on the pavement, wiggling happily against the rough surface. Ginny laughed and bent down to oblige, one hand scratching the plush fawn-colored fur on the dog’s stomach.
    “Not my circus, not my monkeys, isn’t that the saying?” She should just walk away, leave it be, leave town as soon as the cops gave her the all clear, which hopefully would be today, or tomorrow at the latest.
    “It is weird, though,” she went on, still rubbing Georgie’s belly. “Not the dead guy, because sadly that’s not weird at all, I’ve discovered.” Even before she’d started looking into people’s uglier secrets, she’d not been an idealist about human behavior—she’d worked in too many offices for that. “I mean, Mrs. Adaowsky. She contacts me, hires me, pays my retainer, which, okay, isn’t huge but it’s not chump change, either, and then gives me the wrong address, the wrong phone number? And it just happens, hey, to be a murder scene?” Ginny frowned, staring across the parking lot without really seeing anything, still petting Georgie’s belly. “Which raises the question of, if Mrs. A actually calls me back, do I want to take the call? Or do I tell her that her retainer bought my trip down here, but her games cost her the rest of me?
    “What do you think, baby? Maybe I should call Tonica, get his take on this?”
    Georgie whined again, but that could have been requesting harder scritches, not telling her to call her sometimes-partner.
    “No,” Ginny decided, pushing back to her feet. “This is weird, and my serious bad luck in getting caught up in any of it, but we’re done. Whatever the hell is going on, this one’s for the cops to figure out, not us. And Mrs. Adaowsky can whistle for me—I’m done.” Ginny worked with a wide range of divas—that being the personality type who hired private concierges, as a rule—but she wasn’t a docile lapdog they could ignore and scoop up at whim. She demanded respect from her clients, as well as a respectable fee—it was the only way to get the job done. And giving her the runaround was not respectful.
    “And neither is dumping a dead body on me,” she said out loud. “I need to add that to the website’s FAQ. If you have a dead body, you have to say that right up