The Lady in Pink - Deadly Ever After 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

make more of an effort with our employees,” she often said. “Get to know them. Let them get to know you instead of walking around the office glaring at everybody.”
    That was why I now found myself slowly getting out of bed, mostly because of my advancing age, and heading for the shower. Thirty-one was a bitch. Everything ached, from my littlest piggy to the ends of my hair. Naked, my pale, flesh-toned skin nearly blinding in the sunlight, I padded across my bedroom to the bathroom. I avoided glancing in the mirror, knowing just what I would see—red-rimmed eyes, a bluish five-o’clock shadow, and a head full of hair badly in need of a cut. My hair stood on end from both static and my own electricity, not to mention a slight beer gut, which stood out on its own as well, a new addition to my already vast array of physical shortcomings.
    With a wet smoker’s cough I vowed to take better care of myself.
    Like I did every morning after hacking up a smoke-infested lung.
    Stepping into the shower, I cranked the water to hot and enjoyed a rainbow of blue sparks flickering off my body as I washed myself clean. After scrubbing my parts twice, I turned off the water and toweled dry. Still taking my time, mostly just to annoy Izzy, I slowly pulled on a clean undershirt, a silk dress shirt, a freshly pressed pair of suit pants, and shiny loafers. As much as I hated the dress code of corporate securities, I had to admit I looked damn good in it.
    However, I absolutely refused to wear a tie.
    Any tool who did was asking for trouble.
    It took only a few seconds when in a fight for your life to twist your opponent’s tie into a garrote, thereby ending the fight with little muss or fuss. Never would I give someone that kind of leverage.
    Besides the snub-nosed .38, the final accessory to my attire was a pair of black leather gloves. No use electrocuting the clients before they paid their bills. Fully dressed, I headed to the kitchen for the breakfast of champions: leftover coffee from the day before and a stale roll with what looked like flakes of basil in it but turned out to be green mold. I spit the roll out, promised my stomach a big lunch, and headed off to work.
    I wasn’t whistling.
    Far from it, in fact.
     
    I grabbed the Fey Train uptown to the office of Reynolds & Davis Securities. The building that housed our offices dwarfed the surrounding buildings by ten stories at least. Like a beanstalk, the building rose into the clouds, disappearing into the sky. When we first partnered up, Izzy had insisted on new digs, saying my old office was too small for a growing business. Which it was, but given our financial standing, it was hard to rent anything bigger inside the city limits, and I’d be damned if I’d commute to the outer kingdoms. A two-hour drive to go twenty miles held little appeal. But I suspected Izzy’s insistence on moving had more to do with my nearly dying inside my old office than a longing for more expensive digs. I never put the question to her, though. Instead, I agreed to look at a few places within our price range, which was about a thousand bucks a month at the time. A stretch, but anything under a grand meant we’d be doing business out of a box under a bridge in Troll Town. Not a pleasant thought.
    Two days after that, Izzy dragged me to what were now our offices, way up on the fortieth floor of a mass office complex. Lawyers, stockbrokers, and other assorted corporate riffraff worked on the floors above and below us.
    We actually prettied the place up a bit.
    Or so Izzy claimed was the reason the rent was so cheap. I hadn’t believed her at the time, and I still didn’t. My only hope was that the twins weren’t our landlords. I’d had enough of their interfering innkeeping at my old place.
    Shaking off the memory, I took the elevator to the fortieth floor, inanely singing along to the Muzak version of “Ring Around the Rosie” blasting through the elevator speakers. To tell the truth, I was