A Kiss Before I Die Read Free

he…?”
    “He’s a hit man for the mob and the FBI.”
    Samantha had issues with deliberate lies. Her father swore it was a character flaw, and that someday he would have her take a DNA test done to see if she was indeed his daughter. Her mother said her dad was a jealous idiot and only wished he could be as smart as she was.
    The professor with the three-letter degree gave her a B+ despite her not writing more than a thousand disjointed words.
    Middlebury, when needed, makes exceptions for exceptional students.
     
    **********
     
    She continued her swift inspection without interruption. Before she left the second floor, she opened the cold-water tap in the master bathroom, a moderate flow. The sound was loud enough to be heard at the front door.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

(4)   The Man the Pork Pie Hat
    She was hungry. She’d arrived after 9:00 p.m. the previous night, purposely waiting until the sun was set and the town asleep.
    Based on her godfather’s manuscript and research she’d done on the village before arrival, she had an idea of where to eat, but had to drive through the town and search them out by sight. 
    When she googled Foursquare for images – her surest signposts – she found a variety of meaningless pictures:  close up interior shots of bars and chairs and tables, hamburgers, plates of fish, and, oddly, silverware.
    She drove north to south, east to west, crisscrossing the town, essentially memorizing the major intersections, coming to learn the village in a way a native might not.
    Street signs were a blur of symbols and gibberish. However, the town was laid out in a typical pattern of square blocks and rectangles with the main roads on the usual east/west and north/south parallels.
    She’d grown up in a small town about an hour from Foursquare, a place called Vernon Castle. There were no castles in Vernon Castle and the name was a subject of jokes and puns, especially for those who lived here.
    Middlebury had been a breeze to navigate once she had memorized the landmarks; Foursquare was evolving in a similar way. 
    Cities were treacherous. She and her mother had to rely on her father, relatives like her Uncle Benny, and a succession of friends to help her navigate any town that didn’t follow a set pattern. She’d been to Manhattan once, with her parents while her dad was on business, and she and her mother never traveled without him unless it was to a restaurant or movie house in walking distance.
    Thanks to a freeway interchange, Foursquare had a McDonald’s , a Taco Bell , and a Pizza Hut . There was a place called Zambia’s , which she drove by slowly but was unable to understand what they were offering. Spanish? Italian? Portuguese? She concluded it was just one of those bizarre eateries destined for a restaurant rescue show.
    There were bars, plenty of bars, and she found a Denny’s , and a place called Tony’s Little Italy Pizza , which sounded and looked familiar although she couldn’t say why. Then, with her hunger worsening, thinking she would settle for a Big Mac or worse, she spotted the place that had come up so often in her godfather’s manuscript: Ramon’s Authentic Mexican .
    She sat in a booth next to one of its long windows: the scents floating through the restaurant assured her their menu would be delicious.
    The man in the kitchen, who was handsome, round, and short, was smiling and greeted her like a long lost relative although they had just met. The server offered a free drink – she accepted water, thank you, explaining that she didn’t drink wine, beer, or anything alcoholic.
    The menu was simple and the words were spelled out phonetically – this was a marvel for her, this breakdown in words into short symbols and sounds:  Sha-lu-paz , Chee-lays ray-ya-nohs , and Nah-choz . She knew some of the dishes because of the pictures but the phonetics helped… Ramon’s made her think of home, her mother explaining and pronouncing