betsy short 02 - ureliable Read online

  It didn’t take long to see what the problem was. Because—

  *****

  “—the place was crawling with witches!” Jessica interjected, waving her fist in triumph and nearly clipping Marc on the end of the nose.

  “No, it was crawling with black marketers trying to freak people out en masse.”

  “Like I said!”

  “No.”

  *****

  Dickie was essentially narrating, and thanks to vamp hearing we didn’t miss a word, despite the fact that every voice save Dick’s was oddly muffled.

  “Will you take a minute and think—really think—about what you’re doing? Right now it’s only breaking and entering, which any good lawyer could plead down to misdemeanor trespass. And stealing pregnancy tests—I mean, I get why you’re doing that, but if you stop now, it’s only misdemeanor theft.”

  “We’re not stealing them, you insufferable pig,” an unfamiliar voice insisted.

  “Hey! I may have put on a few pounds to keep my pregnant wife company, but that’s uncalled for.”

  “Not that kind of pig.” The speaker sounded positively scandalized, muffled voice and all. “We wouldn’t weight shame you.”

  “Oh. It’s the slang term, then. Fine. But that just proves my point—this is all minor stuff so far. Don’t make it worse. Don’t turn a few misdemeanors into 3rd degree assault and federal kidnapping. Which is what it’ll be the moment you cross the river into Wisconsin.”

  “How do you know we’re—“

  “Your van has Wisconsin plates.” Unspoken: you morons. Not that I could read his mind. But come on. Who uses their own van for a caper?

  *****

  “Wait, wait,” Marc said.

  “Yeah, I said caper, and I’ll say it anytime I like,” I retorted, and I wasn’t defensive at all. Nope. “Everyone just needs to get over it.”

  “Not that. Go back—why is stealing pregnancy tests understandable? It sounds like Dickie wasn’t even surprised. I mean, he lives with vampires and a zombie, so his threshold for surprise is pretty high, but didn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “The black market,” Tina replied promptly. She had rinsed out the disgusting blackberry smoothie dregs and to my joy was now making a pitcher of strawberry/banana. “As there is with laundry detergent.”

  I was surprised, which tamped down the annoyance of being interrupted again. “There’s a black market for detergent?”

  “There’s a black market for everything,” Jessica replied. “Dickie told me that people actually use detergent as currency, trading it for drugs and stuff. It’s one of those things that everybody needs all the time, y’know? Same thing with pregnancy tests—somewhere, someone is always going to need one. And they get stolen all the time by embarrassed teenage girls, so they’re always in demand.”

  “Right. So, not witches. Black marketeers.” That was the phrase, right?

  “You’re still telling it wrong,” Jessica insisted. “Why won’t you listen to me?”

  *****

  “So you guys broke in and got around the alarm—I assume one of you works here? The horse Halloween masks are a nice touch, by the way. Can you even breathe in them, though?”

  “Of course we can breathe in them!”

  “Because they look like they’re made of rubber. Tell me there’s at least a hidden nose hole or something. Tell me you’re not ramping up the carbon dioxide in your blood with every breath. Which would explain a few things, actually...”

  “We’re not horses, we’re unicorns! These disguises—“

  “They’re Halloween costumes, kiddos. Not disguises.”

  “—show the world we’re returning to our mystical roots!” Except, thanks to the mask, it came out “mizzdiggal roods”.

  “You think rubber masks mass-produced overseas gets you back to your mystical roots?”

  By now I’d started biting my lip so I wouldn’t guffaw and give the game away. Sinclair felt my pain, judging by how he rolled his eyes at me. Then his voice slithered into my brain, which should have been awful but wasn’t. There are only five. And only one gun.

  If you can get the four on the left, I’ll grab the one closest to me and get in front of Nick in case one of these horsey dumbasses gets triggered. Y’know, literally.

  As you say, my own.

  But before we could do anything, Jessica came in from nowhere looking credibly badass (fresh manicure! designer boyfriend jeans!) and she had...was that a flamethrower?

  “You’re all fired!” she yelled, and the witches cowered away from her as she promptly bathed Target in flames.

  *****

  “What?” I cried. “First, you weren’t there. Second, if you were there—which you weren’t—you wouldn’t have had a flamethrower. I’m the goddamned queen of the vampires and I don’t have a flamethrower. Third, you’d never use such a hack line. Fourth, stop interrupting.”

  “Get to the witches,” Jessica snapped, because I’d died again without realizing and was in my own personal hell, one crammed with constant interruptions, blackberry seeds, and unreliable narrators hijacking reality.

  *****

  There are only five. And only one gun.

  Yep. If you can get the four on the left, I’ll grab the one closest to me and get in front of Nick in case one of these horsey dumbasses gets triggered. Y’know, literally.

  As you say, my own.

  So we did exactly that. I darted up behind the horse closest to me, seized him by the back of his shirt, and yanked back so hard he smacked into the wall behind me, then fell forward on his face for an instant nap. I jumped in front of Dickie, which hadn’t been necessary as Sinclair had already disarmed the gun-toting horse. Good. I can take a couple of rounds to the chest, but it hurts like a bitch and ruins my shirt.

  “Oh, hey! Hi, guys.”

  “Detective.” Sinclair adjusted his shirt cuff, which had shifted out of place by half an inch while he took out the four horses of the Targetpocalypse. .

  “Hi, Dickie. Keeping busy?” Sinclair handed me the gun, a .38 that had seen better days—did no one take time to clean their weapons anymore? It’s not like it was hard, or took much time. I set it on the box to my left, where the pseudo horses had piled his sidearm, badge, and phone, then got busy pulling him free of the two miles of duct tape they’d bound him with.

  “Christ, this is so embarrassing,” Dickie muttered. “Got the drop on me when it was supposed to be the other way around. Must be slowing down in my old age.” Since he wasn’t yet thirty, that was an adorable notion. “Ow, Jesus! Sorry, Sinclair. Ow, fuck, I hate being tied up with tape! Might as well use barbed wire.”

  “Sorry, sorry—almost done. And it’s your own fault for having body hair.”

  “Being a mammal is my own fault?”

  I didn’t dignify that nonsense with an answer. Another riiiiiiiip. And another. Heh. And then two more. No question: since waking up dead, I’ve gotten more sadistic. “What were you doing at a Target after hours anyway?”

  “I’ll tell you, but you’ve gotta promise not to tell Jessica.”

  “I knew it!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I shredded the last of the tape and Dickie wasted no time surging to his feet. I threw an affectionate elbow into his side, ignoring his grunt. “Snack attack, right?” To Sinclair: “Toldja.”

  “No! Well, yeah. This Target’s closing by the end of the month, so everything’s on sale. And Jessica doesn’t shop here, so it’s safe. Uh. Safe is probably the wrong word.”

  “Only because it implies that shopping for Oreos where your lady love might see you is unsafe,” Sinclair purred.

  “Definitely the wrong word. So I came by, mostly out of force of habit—“

  “You’re making a habit of the illicit snacking!” I said gleefully.

  “So much so that it seems to have turned you into a homing pigeon,” Sinclair observed, because he was awesome.

  “Don’t think I won’t ki
ll the both of you,” Dick warned. “Anyway, I was driving by, saw the lights on around back, and figured they’d decided to stay open later to move more merch.”

  “More delicious merch, no doubt.” I smirked. “Then you did what every cop does in every movie ever—saw something suspicious, didn’t bother calling it on, checked it out on your own, and got captured.”

  “Yeah, well. Like I said. Embarrassing. Especially when you think about why I was here at all.” He looked over the group, three of whom were unconscious. The two still awake were huddled together, staring at us with big eyes. Big, fake, rubbery, brown mask eyes. “You dumbasses, you’re luckier than you know. These guys are literal killers.”

  “We want a lawyer.”

  “And I want world peace, but guess what?” As they made muffled squeaks of terror, Dickie relented. “Yeah, yeah, you’ll get a lawyer. Take those ridiculous things off, I can barely look at you without giggling. All this, just to steal pregnancy tests?”

  “We weren’t stealing them!” This from the one on the left, a slender brunette with brown eyes and one of those little blobs of facial hair on his chin—soul patch, I think? Anyway, he’d dispensed with the mask, then helped his companion wrestle hers off. She looked a lot like he did, minus the facial hair—siblings? “We told you.”

  “What are you doing with them?”

  “We’ve fixed them in our lab.”

  Oh, great. The horses have their own lab.

  Dick-not-Nick, like me, was having trouble following. “’Fixed them’?”

  “Yes. Then we reassembled them perfectly—the boxes don’t look tampered with at all. Isn’t that great?”

  “I have no idea how to answer that.”

  “Yeah, I’m lost, too,” I admitted.

  “Then all we had to do was switch them out.”

  I waited, but Mr. Ed was done. “And?”

  “Don’t you get it?” his accomplice-maybe-sister spoke up. “They’ll all come up as positive. Even if you’re not pregnant.”

  Silence while we all digested that. I could actually feel Sinclair’s confusion, followed by his impatience. No, wait. That was my impatience. “This is an odd thing on which to expend so much energy as well as risk incarceration.”

  “It’s mean, too!” I cried. “Just—really, really mean. Straight-up diabolical.”

  “In such ways we expose the fascist underpinnings beneath—“

  “You know what? I don’t actually care anymore.” What a pack of masked boneheads. Why not expend all that time and effort into something helpful, like making Peeps edible or sunscreen that didn’t stain your clothes? Instead, these galloping asshats wanted to give random consumers heart attacks. Because mystical roots or something.

  Dickie was shaking his head and calling for back-up, which meant Sinclair and I had to get in the wind. Tina was already gone; she’d been advised via text that we didn’t need her this time. “Don’t think I’m ungrateful, but how’d you guys even know to come get me? All I texted Jess was that I was running late. I didn’t want her to worry.”

  “Yeah, well, she did worry. We’re here because she overreacted.”

  *****

  “Except I didn’t,” Guess Who said triumphantly. “Because he was in danger.”

  “Right, but there was nothing tipping you off to that. You just overrea—you just assumed because of your pregnancy sixth sense or whatever.”

  “Which was right.”

  I was gonna pick my battles. “Yep. Your gestational ESP worked perfectly.” I glanced around the table. Jessica looked vindicated, Marc entranced (he loved story time), Tina was simultaneously texting and blending, and Sinclair was smiling at me, doubtless remembering the al fresco sex we’d had once we’d left Target.

  We had barely made it out of the parking lot before I lunged at Sinclair, which worked out nicely as he had chosen that exact moment to lunge at me. (We collided somewhere above the gear shift.) You’d think a three minute sex act conducted inside a giant electric shaver would be difficult and uncomfortable, but you’d be wrong-wrong-wrong. I wriggled around enough for semi-easy access (let’s hear it for leggings!), and all Sinclair had to do was yank his zipper down. Somehow we managed to fold our long limbs in just the right way to let me sink down on Sinclair’s cock while he clutched at the small of my back and bit me right over the carotid. I hissed as the brief flash of pain warred with my pending orgasm, let him drink, then buried my fists in his dark hair, yanked his head back, and took my own reward, tipping over the edge so fast I felt like I’d been shoved, with Sinclair right behind me.

  There was something about fucking while sirens wailed in the distance that was just...oofta.

  I managed to shake away the memory of the hurried erotic encounter, which wasn’t easy with Sinclair’s dark gaze boring into me—I could almost feel his intense regard—and got back to business. “So, to sum up: it wasn’t a coven, it was a Facebook group. And they weren’t witches, they were thieves dealing in black market pregnancy tests. Thieves who hadn’t actually stolen anything, and disguised themselves as horses who thought they were unicorns. Okay? Everybody clear now?”

  “I still don’t under—“

  “Everybody clear now?”

  With near perfect timing, the star of the story (besides me), came in through the back kitchen door. We heard him fight his way past Fur and Burr, the puppies who slept in the mudroom, then make it into the kitchen. He hung up his keys and grinned at the sight of the midnight smoothie hour, if midnight was two in the morning.

  “Hey, guys. Hi, babe.” As usual, he looked like the very thing he was: a corn-fed clean-cut Midwestern fellow who was blessed with a yummy swimmer’s build. Lucky for both of us I’d never gone for blonds.

  We greeted him with a chorus of howdys (howdies?) and Marc scooched his chair over to make room. Dick-not-Nick dropped a kiss to the top of Jessica’s head, then looked hopefully at Tina. “Got enough left for me?”

  “Of course, Detective.”

  “You missed it, Dick!” Marc said as the aforementioned Dick climbed on the stool beside him. “Betsy was telling us about the time you were kidnapped by witches at midnight while on a junk food run.”

  “Whoa!” Dickie nearly dropped the glass Tina had just handed him. “None of that is true.”

  “See?” I cried, and mighty was my triumph. Mighty. “Told you guys you had it wrong.”

  “It wasn’t a junk food run, I was checking out a gluten-free bakery for Jess. And they weren’t witches, they were militant vegans. And it wasn’t midnight, it was noon.”

  I groaned and buried my face in my hands as everybody instantly burst into argument. I would leave. I would move into a studio apartment in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, I would devote four-fifths of said studio to my shoes, and I would be a hermit. Forever. It would be lonely (I assumed—I’d actually never lived alone) but I would at least retain what was left of my sanity. Perfect plan.

  Never threaten such a thing, my own.

  Perfect plan, Sinclair!

  Or if you do, swear you shall live the life of a married hermit at least.

  Nope. I’m gone. I’m out.

  Then before you take your leave, at least allow me to lead you upstairs, divest you of your clothing, and put my tongue anywhere you like as long as you like.

  Well. I didn’t have to move out right this minute.

  THE END

  (2)

  And now, a sneak preview of MaryJanice’s upcoming release, USA Dead Ahead! This is book two in her Danger series, a rollicking romp that pokes gentle fun at romance tropes. (Think Shaun of the Dead, except with romance novel tropes instead of zombie movie tropes.)

  PROLOGUE

  Agh. Pain. And thirst. Painful thirst. Thirsty pain. Where? Was? Ow.

  Rake Tarbell sloooowly rolled over and stared at a ceiling. (His ceiling? No.) His eyes were so gritty and the room so quiet he could hear his eyelids sticking and unsticking as he blinked. And sometime in the last few h
ours, he’d eaten...a dead bird? And washed it down with another dead bird? One that had drowned in vermouth?

  He tried to open his mouth and felt his gummy lips struggle to part. Had he been kidnapped? Hit over the head and kidnapped, then had his mouth and eyes taped shut?

  No.

  Worse.

  Hung-over.

  He made it to the edge of the bed in a series of small wriggles, each one causing a new wave of nauseating pain to claw up his spine and wash over his brain. When at last he was upright, he fought his gorge to a draw, and buried his head in his hands, praying for swift death. He noticed he was in a black t-shirt he’d never seen before with the puzzling yet reassuring logo I do all my own stunts. No socks. No pants. By squinting very, very hard he could just make out a pair of crumpled dark brown cargo shorts on the floor three feet away.

  I keep telling you, Rake.

  Shut up, Blake.