A Good Day for Chardonnay (Sunshine Vicram #2) - Darynda Jones Page 0,3
“How’d the date go?”
“Well enough to justify a plea of temporary insanity when I kill my parents. Why are you risking my deputies’ lives for a rodent?”
He snorted. “They’ll be fine. Even if they fall, it’s not a tall barn. They’ll shake it off.”
“Like when you fell off your grandfather’s barn and cried for two hours?”
“I was six. What did this one do for a living?”
“You mean after my last blind date, the breatharian life coach?”
“Yeah.” He scratched his chin. “I wouldn’t have figured your mother as one to set you up with a man living out of his van. Clearly, you’re depreciating with age.”
“Clearly. Mom said he was still finding himself.”
“How old was he?”
“Early seventies. Thankfully, tonight’s victim was more age-appropriate. And he had a job! Pest control. Or at least I think it was pest control. I wasn’t really paying attention.” When he ripped off the goggles and turned to gape at her, his eyes glowing green through her lenses, she asked, “What?”
“Let me get this straight,” he said, ironically straightening to his full height of six feet, four inches, with shoulders spanning a similar distance. “You were on a date with a pest control guy when I called with a pest control issue, and you left him at the café?”
She stabbed him with the best glare in her arsenal, number 12.2—she’d recently upgraded—even though its genius was wasted behind the goggles. “Of course I left him at the café. Can you imagine what he would’ve charged for an after-hours emergency?”
“Budget issues?”
She snorted. “That’s an understatement. My left pinky is bigger than our budget.”
He gave her a surprised once-over. “As opposed to your right one?”
“I know right? I have weird fingers.”
“Please. You should see my toes.”
“I want to see them,” Zee said over the comm.
“Never, sis. My toes are very private.”
Quincy and Zee had decided they were twins separated at birth when they met four months ago. Since Quince was a blond-haired, blue-eyed wreck with few worthwhile talents—because the ability to sleep standing up didn’t count—and Zee was a tall, gorgeous Black woman who could shoot the wings off a fruit fly at a hundred yards, Sun highly doubted the validity of their claim. Also, neither was adopted. So there was that.
“Okay, Quince, I have a random, off-the-cuff question,” Sun said randomly and off-the-cuff.
“Shoot.”
“What in the name of God is my mother doing here?” Sun watched as her mother tiptoed through the sultry night air, easing closer to Quincy’s back porch. She’d pulled her graying blond hair into a ponytail that always made her look younger than her fifty-five years. A gauze tunic hung loosely over her slim frame.
“You said to call for backup.”
“And you called my mother?” she asked, her voice rising a notch.
“No. I called her book club. Those ladies are fierce.” The grin he wore made it impossible to be annoyed. He had a point, after all.
Sun scanned the area, now littered with women who’d run out of fucks to give decades ago, and focused on two in particular. They carried butterfly nets, one as though it were an assault rifle, the other as though it were a missile launcher.
“Just two more quick questions,” she said.
He pulled the goggles back into position, and said, “Hit me.”
“Why the hell do they have butterfly nets and where did they get them on such short notice?”
He chuckled and gestured toward a wily, five-foot firecracker in full camouflage regalia and neon pink crocs that were so blinding through the goggles Sun had to look away. Wanda also happened to be the one carrying her butterfly net like a missile launcher, which fit her personality to a tee.
“I think every time the men in white coats come for Wanda, she steals their nets and runs away.”
The deputies laughed softly through the comm, Zee’s an alluring, husky thing, and Deputy Salazar’s a bubbly giggle like champagne. Or denture-cleaning tablets.
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Sun said, wondering in the back of her mind if any of her mother’s book club mates could be associated with the Dangerous Daughters. If it were even real. “It would also not surprise me if she brought the butterfly net more for you than for the raccoon.”
He laughed again, but quickly changed his mind. Concern flashed across the part of his boyishly handsome face that she could see. “You’re joking, right?”
Sun shrugged. Wanda had always had a thing for the intrepid deputy. Sadly, the intrepid deputy had always had a thing for Sun’s mother, which would explain his