Death Gets a Time-Out Read Online Free PDF

creative.” I looked in the mirror to find her rolling her eyes at her brother. He smiled at her. Isaac thinks Ruby is God. He believes everything she says, likes everything she likes, and does everything she tells him to do. A few months before, I had watched heartbroken as he valiantly gave up
Blue’s Clues
when Ruby informed him it was a baby show. He would still snuggle his stuffed Blue, but only when the commander-in-chief was not around to sneer at him.
    After I dropped the kids off, I headed down the highway to Al’s garage, our business’s temporary quarters that lately had begun to seem suspiciously permanent. I found Al sitting at his ancient metal desk, cleaning a gun. He had spread a pale pink dishtowel on the scratched and pitted surface of the desk and laid out an antique pistol. He was polishing the brass barrel and gazing at it lovingly, as though it were a picture of one of his daughters.
    “Do you do that on purpose?” I asked.
    “What?”
    “Play with your guns when I’m coming over. I swear you only do it because you know I hate them.”
    “Ms. Applebaum,” he hissed the “z” on Ms. with extra emphasis, “the world does not revolve around you. I’ll have you know that I just got this in the mail. It’s a nineteenth-century naval officer’s flintlock boarding pistol. Look at this little bayonet that swings out from under the barrel.”
    “Cute,” I said. “I bet it cost you plenty.”
    Al nodded conspiratorially and then glanced over his shoulder at the door leading to the house. “Keep your voice down. Jeanelle thinks it’s a
reproduction
.”
    “I very much doubt that,” I said, and as if on cue, Al’s beautiful, sweet-tempered wife walked through the door, holding a platter of muffins.
    “Hi, Juliet. I baked you two some muffins. Blueberry.” She laid the plate down on the table and ruffled her husband’s remaining strands of hair. Al and Jeanelle might seem to an outsider to be the world’s unlikeliest couple. After all, how many members of a gun-toting, antigovernment militia are married to black women? Al claims his unit is not the only multiracial one in the country, but I have a hard time believing that. Al and Jeanelle have been married for close to forty years. They have two daughters, who get their looks from their mother and their politics from their father. One’s an FBI agent and the other is in law school, hoping to become a prosecutor when she graduates.
    “The new toy,” Jeanelle said, picking up the pistol and looking admiringly at the engraved lock and wood handle. It was tough to read her expression.
    “Yup. Reproduction.”
    “Uh-huh. Impeccable craftsmanship.” She smiled at him and headed back up the two steps leading into the house. “Don’t work too hard, you two.”
    “Fat lot of chance of that,” Al grumbled. It had been a slow month for us. There was barely enough to keep Al busy, and I hadn’t billed a client in over a week. If I didn’t bill, then I didn’t make any money, and I wasn’t much thrilled by the idea of sitting around Al’s garage in Westminister for no money.
    “I might have some work for us,” I said, and told Al about Lilly’s offer.
    “The Chloe Jones murder,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “That’s definitely high-profile. It would get us noticed. Generate some business.”
    “Lilly asked me to do it specifically because she thought we
wouldn’t
be in it just for the notoriety. She thought we’d be committed to helping her brother, not to drumming up new business.”
    “We can help her brother and help ourselves at the same time,” he replied.
    “You don’t think it’s a conflict of interest? My friendship with Lilly?”
    He scowled. “Look, let’s let the client decide. We’ll ask the kid if he minds; we’ll ask the lawyer if he minds. If they both give the okay, we take the case.”
    I didn’t reply. I was too busy running to the bathroom.
    “You okay?” Al shouted at my back.
    “Bad