Wicked Fix

Wicked Fix Read Online Free PDF

Book: Wicked Fix Read Online Free PDF
Author: Sarah Graves
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
began marking off a
    perimeter, using yellow tape weighed down with small
    stones to form a circle about twenty feet in diameter.
     
    "Tell me it wasn't," I said to George, who had
    been at the restaurant with us. Who had seen ...
     
    Victor, tossing back that final martini. And afterwards
    ...
     
    George nodded, looking unhappy. "Pried open the
    guy's mouth, see what was in there, that's when we
    found it."
     
    One of the state officers went back to his car and
    got on the radio, while the other began marking off a
    second perimeter a few yards out from the first. At the
    center of it all, Reuben hung there like some ghastly
    flag.
     
    "And to judge by how far down his windpipe it
    was," Arnold went on, "I doubt that fellow just happened
    to mistake it for a cheeseburger. I don't care," he
     
    finished, "how rip-roaring drunk he'd got, couple
    three hours earlier."
     
    My mind's eye showed Victor readying himself for
    impromptu surgery, in the course of which there might
    be blood. So that Victor, always a poster boy for the
    compulsively fastidious ...
     
    "Mistook what?" Ellie demanded.
     
    Monday stopped nosing around and sat down beside
    me, wanting to go home. Me, too.
    "Victor's tie," George said. "What the guy strangled
    on."
     
    He must have taken it off. Tucked it into his shirtfront,
    first, but that hadn't been enough for him; it
    might get dirty. So he'd taken it off.
     
    "Part in his mouth, and the rest," Arnold supplied,
    "damned near down into his lung. Have to wait for the
    medical examiner, of course. And the way his dance
    card's filling up already today, it could take a while.
    But I'd agree the guy suffocated on it."
     
    Somebody touched my shoulder and I jumped:
    Sam.
     
    "Mom? I think you better come. Dad's at the
    house, and he's pretty upset." Sam kept his eyes
    averted from Reuben.
     
    "Oh, brother. He knows about the tie?" I asked
    Arnold.
     
    "Yeah. Teddy Armstrong remembered who he'd
    seen wearing it. I talked to your ex-husband about it a
    little while ago. Told him I'd see him at your house,
    and I was on my way over there. But then," he gestured
    in disgust at Reuben, "I got diverted."
     
    I got up. To Victor, everything was always about
    him. But this was going to put the frosting on it.
     
    "Did Reuben have relatives?" Bob Arnold asked,
    squinting at the body. Thinking, I supposed, about a
    funeral.
     
    Ellie shook her head. "His parents were from
    away. Both gone now. Buried away, too, I've forgotten
     
    quite where. They both had," she added, "that same
    white-blond hair. And those white eyelashes--to look
    at them, you'd think they must be brother and sister.
    But," she came back to the practical present, "he didn't
    have any brothers or sisters, himself."
     
    Trust her to know; Ellie's memory contained a veritable
    orchard of Eastport family trees. "Come on,
    kiddo," I told Sam. "Let's go settle your father down. I
    guess he must have left that tie in the bar last night.
    He'd forget his head, you know, you feed him enough
    martinis."
    "Uh-huh," Sam agreed, not sounding convinced,
    but I just laid it to general upset. When Victor gets
    going, he can generate emotional shock waves that
    would shatter the Rock of Gibraltar.
     
    Ellie came too, looking grimly gratified now that
    the first surprise of our discovery had worn off. She is
    ordinarily the mildest of souls but her gentleness conceals
    some icy attitudes, partly I think because her ancestors
    were cold-water pirates, men who cut their
    eyeteeth on barbecues of long pig and rum until a hurricane
    blew them out of the Caribbean, eventually to
    downeast Maine, back in the 1700s.
     
    Since then her family had flourished in Eastport
    and the surrounding towns, as tenacious as barnacles
    and when necessary as coldly pragmatic. I got the impression
    she felt some rough justice had been served
    there in the cemetery.
    George stayed behind with Arnold, calling on Arnold's
    radio for sawhorses to hold more perimeter
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

The Lovely Shadow

Cory Hiles

Inferno

Stormy Glenn

Sword of the Lamb

M. K. Wren

Comanche Woman

Joan Johnston

Class Is Not Dismissed!

Gitty Daneshvari

Ménage for the Night

C. J. Fallowfield, Book Cover By Design, Karen J

Sexy Gay Stories - Volume Four - three m/m short stories

Michael Bracken, Elizabeth Coldwell, Sommer Marsden