Joyce & Jim Lavene - Taxi for the Dead 02 - Dead Girl Blues Read Free Page B

sure. I knew Debbie was frightened by it, but it was beyond my understanding. It wasn’t like I was knowledgeable about supernatural happenings before this. I’d been learning about things as I went along.
    “How is he doing with the kids?” I asked. Debbie had a daughter, Raina, who was eight like my daughter, Kate. She also had a teenage son, Bowman, who was fourteen.
    “They don’t seem to notice what’s going on with him,” she said. “Bowman doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore. I think it’s because he’s so disappointed about Terry quitting the highway patrol. Bowman still wants to be a cop, too, even though his father was shot and killed—not that I would ever tell him about that.”
    I knew Terry had decided to take disability. It didn’t look as though he would ever walk again, at least not in the normal sense. I’d seen him get up from the wheelchair. He could walk, but I didn’t think he’d be able to wear a uniform—not with legs like a goat.
    “And the bottom half of him, Skye.” She shook her head. “He looks like an animal from the waist down. I’m not kidding. Do you think it’s permanent?”
    “I don’t know. But we didn’t get Jane Darcy to the mortuary. I’m sure Abe has something to say about that—and we won’t get our bonuses.”
    “I know.” She frowned as she scuffed her sandal along the hot sidewalk. “I was planning on taking the kids to the waterpark next week with that money.”
    We’d reached Deadly Ink. A few of Abe’s rowdy crowd of zombies jostled us as they left. The building was one of those older ones that made you wonder what was holding it up. The old red bricks looked as though they’d been there hundreds of years trying to survive the wind, rain, and sun.
    Abe lived on the top floor of the three-story building. I’d never gone up that far. He was very private about his personal life. I didn’t want to know that much about him anyway.
    He was a frightening man.
    They said he was born in 1863 when his mother named him for President Lincoln after the Emancipation Proclamation. He’d fallen in love with a witch who’d killed him and made him her slave. The story went on to say how he’d killed the witch and began his own zombie army.
    He’d never acknowledged that any of it was true—at least not to me. And he wasn’t a man I wanted to have that conversation with.
    His past was his, as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t interested in his mythology. I was only here for Kate.
    The tattoo shop was busy, as it always was. Abe had a keen interest in tattoos even though he didn’t have any ink that I’d ever seen.
    On the night I’d died, a pale blue tattoo that looked like an A inside a circle, was put on my heel. All of the LEPs had them. It seemed like a possessive thing to me, although people said it was just Abe’s magic that was part of keeping us alive.
    But come on—an A when his name was Abe? I thought it was more that he wanted us to know that he owned us.
    We had an instinct for finding each other too, Abe’s people. Maybe that was part of the magic too. I could look across the room and easily pick up on who was living and who was dead. To me the dead had a kind of blue glow about them.
    Abe kept a dozen or so young, tough guys around the tattoo shop. What were their jobs? I could only imagine where they went and what they did when they left Deadly Ink in groups with small handguns tucked into their waistbands.
    But I kept my imagination on a short leash. It was none of my business.
    “He’s waiting to see you.” The new head tough guy sat on a tall stool behind the counter, scrolling through his phone. He jerked his head toward the back office—like we didn’t know where to find Abe. I ignored him.
    Debbie gave him her new killer look and then turned to me nervously. “Should I go in with you? I already saw him. He just told me to get you.”
    “You’re involved too,” I reminded her, admiring a full-torso tattoo of a