Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel) Read Free

hope he’d believe me the next time I explained that the
reason
I had broken into his car to steal his gourmet fortune cookie was because it contained a mystical curse that would cause his death as soon as the cookie was cracked. (Susan wanted Lopez dead because, as a favor to me, he was helping Ted with location permits for the film.) After stealing the deadly treat, I had taken it to Max to be neutralized.
    No part of this explanation would be helped by the fact that my on-again, off-again boyfriend (mostly off-again) was a confirmed skeptic who clung resolutely to his steadfast belief in mundane phenomena and conventional explanations. (Well, to be fair, most people clung to that. I had clung to it, too, until it was no longer possible.)
    He was also a detective in the New York Police Department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau. Thanks to his job skills, he had easily found out who the culprit was last night after finding his car window smashed in and only one thing (his cookie) missing from the vehicle. Detective Connor Lopez was also not at all happy that the car in question belonged to the police department; I gathered that meant the smash-and-grab involved additional paperwork, thus augmenting his overall exasperation with having a patently insane almost-girlfriend.
    But he didn’t intend to turn me in for what I had done. That much was clear . . . and it was another reason that he was so conflicted about me.
    Lopez was a straight-arrow cop and an honorable man, so he felt guilty and full of self-reproach every time he gave me a pass—and he’d given me a few by now. In fact, he’d completely violated his deepest principles a few times for my sake, and his tension over this—which I understood and regretted—was something else that came between us. In addition to, you know, his conviction that I was demented.
    I wondered what it said about him that despite thinking I was nuts, he kept coming back.
    I also wondered how to convince him I
wasn’t
demented—or even unstable.
Could
I convince him? Just how rigid was his stubbornly conventional worldview? Would it alter, or at least loosen up a little, if he saw some of the things I’d seen since becoming friends with Max and discovering what a deeply weird place the universe really is?
    In any case, yes, Lopez and I were going to have to talk about last night. And it wasn’t going to go well.
    Brooding about a man you’re obsessed with can be so absorbing that I didn’t hear the approaching siren until Lucky said, “Come on, let’s not get run over. Pick up the pace.”
    He put a hand under my elbow and hustled me along. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a fire truck coming this way. We trotted the rest of the way to the sidewalk, along with all the other pedestrians crossing the broad width of Canal Street, then pushed our way through the throng there, eager to avoid the icy spray from passing wheels as the truck sped through the slushy streets. The vehicle slowed down when it reached our corner and honked loudly as it turned down the street. Since the noise was earsplitting, Lucky and I paused a few seconds to let the truck get ahead of us, then went in the same direction.
    A moment later, we heard another fire truck screeching in the distance. It, too, turned down this street. We were half a block from the Yee family’s store.
    “Oh, Lucky,” I said with dread, quickening my pace. “Do you think—”
    “Don’t jump to conclusions,” he replied, also walking faster. “It’s a holiday. Firecrackers. Smoke. Lions with flammable fringe.” We rounded the next corner. “We got no reason to assume—
Whoa.
”
    We stopped in our tracks and stared at Yee’s Trading Company. The building where I had left Max earlier today was now engulfed in flames.

2
    S moke poured out of the windows of the century-old building which had housed Yee & Sons Trading Company for decades. Fire roared upward through the roof and out the front door. Emergency services