Deadly Dues Read Online Free PDF Page B

I was dishing out loads of fries at McDonald’s.
    I trudged up the walk, fumbling my keys out of my bag, fighting the wind.
    I shivered. Something rustled behind one of the bushes by my front door, and it wasn’t any lousy leaf. Horatio woofed behind the door, and I automatically shushed him. He woofed again, and I shushed him again, before I realized that maybe I should have let the dear boy bark as ferociously and as long as possible. Was something lurking by my front door? Just because I told Horatio to shut up, did he have to listen? Over a hundred dollars in Bow Wow Dog Food every month, and that big lummox of a dog couldn’t take his job seriously enough to bark when there are lurking things in the front yard?
    Halfway up the walk, I knew I had to make a decision: either scream like Fay Wray in King Kong, or be a grown-up and pretend there was nothing wrong. So many unfamiliar cars parked on the street, and nobody in sight. I decided to rise above the nervousness induced by the nightmarish events of the evening. I was in Lulu life, after all, not a Hitchcock movie. Right?
    The door looked different as I rummaged for my key. Could that be a shadow? Something or someone was behind me. Right behind me. Oh great universe, don’t let me die, I prayed. I have more to do. And in the morgue, they’ll see I have gained a few pounds and missed a few spots shaving my legs, and make vulgar jokes about it while I lie on the slab, unable to rise with a snappy comeback.
    I hate it when heroines in scary movies are frozen and helpless. What wimps. Grab the plant pot, find the rolling pin, hoist that cast-iron frying pan, and bonk the baddie on the bean. But here I was, a total wimp, feeling my knees get white and weird and weak, and myself beginning to— oh no —faint? I should grab the plant pot. My eyes almost closed and as I looked down, I didn’t see a plant pot. What I saw was the garden gnome my friend Jerome had given me years ago as a bad-taste joke. I used it as a doorstop in the summer.
    I smoothly slid out of my faint and swooped down, got sort of a grip on the gnome’s ears— damn, these things are heavy —and whirled around. I didn’t have the muscles to get the gnome as high as the lurker’s head, but I managed to heave it into his midsection.
    He gave an anguished squeak and fell back into what was left of the geraniums. The gnome rolled off his stomach and down the walk, with an interminable series of thunks and rumbles.
    â€œDamn you, Lu!” gasped Geoff. “Are you trying to kill me or what?” He was flat on his back, bedraggled geraniums sprouting between his legs and under his arms. His head was resting in the artistic little fountain pool from which Horatio liked to slurp. He tried to say more, but he had trouble getting his breath.
    Mine came back, with part relief that I was not in danger and part horror that I might have severely damaged one of the great Lotharios of low-budget independent film.
    Meanwhile, the gnome continued its torturous rolling and thunking down the path. A light came on in the condo across the alley. Another across the street.
    Geoff was still trying to breathe. He sounded like an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner, roaring in air, then expelling it. It was almost as loud as the excruciating gnome noise.
    The gnome finally rolled off the last step, and landed in the little gulley by the main road.
    In a minute, we were flooded with light. Mrs. Lauterman, from her upper window in the next condo, kept a high-powered searchlight in her bedroom for just such occasions. A circle of blazing white surrounded us.
    â€œLulu, are you all right?” shrieked Mrs. Lauterman’s high-octane soprano. I looked up. She was silhouetted in her window. She had recently traipsed her eighty-two-year-old self into Raptures, the super-trendy hair salon down the street, and her once white hair was now neon green and sticking up in spikes around her