Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) Read Free Page B

funeral whether or not to turn off the alarm. In the end, we left it.
    I replaced the silver dollar on the doctor’s chest and closed the lid of the coffin, then I shut off the lights and left the doctor to his last night on Earth. Billie was looking tired and I sent her off to bed. “I’ll lock up,” I told her. Which I did. Then I put on my coat and headed back down the dark street to my place. The wetness had finally gone out of the snowfall. It was down to wind-whipped flurries, silver brush strokes in the gusty night air. And
cold.
God
damn
it was cold.
    There was a leggy blond woman in my bed when I climbed the stairs to my place. She had a big, sad, bruised look on her face.
    “I hate my goddamn job,” she pouted.
    I shrugged, getting out of my clothes as quickly as possible. “Oh you know, you win some, you lose some.”
    I slid between the sheets. The warmth coming off her body was a rapture. She turned to me.
    “I didn’t just ‘lose some,’ Hitch. I called for light fucking flurries and lows in the upper twenties. Have you seen it out there? It’s a goddamn disaster. I fucking stink.”
    I love a woman who swears like a sailor. Bonnie Nash rolled into my arms. Fronts collided. High pressure dominated. We were in for a wild one.

CHAPTER 3
     
    T he following day was gray and bitter. Greenmount Cemetery was painted in apocalyptic tones. Chalky tombstones angled out of the dingy snow like disordered teeth. Black trees against a gray sky. Low, transparent clouds and a spastic wind slicing hard scars in the air. It was ugly.
    Bone cold, with a threat of vultures.
    Nobody at the doctor’s funeral mentioned the incident of the night before, but it was in everybody’s eyes. Huddled together against the cold on the side of a shallow hill, the mourners looked hungover, unfocused and detached. The coffin hovered above the grave, and next to it was a pile of earth, covered with a tarp, too frozen now to shovel into the hole. After the guests left we’d be calling on the cemetery’s John Deere.
    We zipped through the service and got the hell off that hill. The doctor’s brother escorted Ann Kingman to her car, and she never looked back. I declined the post-funeral bash. I usually do.
    Bonnie was still there when I got back home. Her disposition hadn’t improved much from the night before. She was wearing my white plush bathrobe and standing at the window when I returned. The robe has a curlicue
H
embroidered on the front. On a drunken lark a few years ago I checked into the downtown Hilton for the night. A hundred and twenty-five dollars later, I came away with this robe. I could have snagged one at Sears for half that.
    “Looks like a beautiful day,” Bonnie sniffed, looking out the window at the unquestionably lousy weather. “What do you think? Sunny and warm? Highs in the low eighties? Oh! Is that a fucking
rainbow
I see over there?”
    “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said, giving her a pat on the bumper and a nip to the back of her neck … to show that
I
wasn’t going to be hard on her. I’m sometimes accused of being patronizing, and I guess I am. But only with people I already like.
    Bonnie turned from the window. “I’m a fucking joke in this town. I might as well stand before the camera and tap dance for two minutes.”
    I stepped into the kitchen to feed Alcatraz. “I didn’t know you could tap dance,” I called out. I filled my dog’s bowl with hard, chunky nuggets, poured in a touch of milk, a half cup of water and mixed the stuff up into an ersatz gravy. I topped it with a garnish of crushed doggie vitamin. Bonnie appeared at the kitchen door. She didn’t appear there amused.
    “I don’t. But I’d probably
predict
that I was going to tap dance and then break into a goddamn Charleston.”
    Uh-oh. This wasn’t going away. I skidded the food bowl across the floor to Alcatraz and took Bonnie by the shoulders. She tried to look away, but I bobbed and weaved and finally got her