A Good Day for Chardonnay (Sunshine Vicram #2) - Darynda Jones Page 0,4
calling in her book club more than his lame-ass excuse.
She used to think Quincy’s crush was just a post-pubescent schoolboy thing, but since she’d moved back to Del Sol four months ago, Quince constantly asked about her mom, the lovely Elaine Freyr. How was she? What she was up to? Had she ever had an affair with a younger, freakishly comely man?
It was weird. And getting weirder every day. So much so, in fact, that Sun had caught onto his ruse about a month in. He was deflecting. Straight up. He was in love with someone else, and he didn’t want her to know. Her. Sunshine Vicram. His best friend since the sandbox.
Sun vowed to find out who he was rounding the bases and sliding into home with if it were the last thing she did on this Earth. To date, she’d narrowed it down to thirty-seven women (and two men, just in case). She was so close she could taste victory. Or wishful thinking. Emotional figures of speech tasted startlingly similar.
Her phone dinged with a text from her date asking if everything was okay.
Before she could answer, Quincy whispered so loudly he probably scared off the masked bandit. “There he is!”
Sun glanced at the porch and, sure enough, the little guy was climbing out of a tiny hole in the ceiling of Quincy’s porch as though being poured out of it, his fur fluffing up to three times his actual size. It reminded Sun she needed to cut back on the carbs.
Quince slid his goggles down and raised his dart gun, a non-lethal tranquilizer launcher that looked like a combination of an Uzi and a water gun.
“Please don’t tranq my mother,” Sun said, cringing as she stood beside him and watched the critter through her goggles.
Before he could get a clear shot, however, Wanda ran forward, her net at the ready. “I’ll get ‘im!”
“Shit,” Quince said. Abandoning his cover, he vaulted around the bush toward the melee of vigilant women.
Sun fought off the branch again and followed, trying not to twist her ankle. She watched as Wanda, her mother, and Darlene Tapia, another member of the infamous Book Babes Book Club, ascended the stairs to the porch and rushed the panicked, screeching creature.
Poor little guy. Sun would’ve screeched, too. Those women were alarmingly fast runners.
“Don’t get near it!” Quincy shouted.
“It’s okay, handsome.” Wanda took a swipe at the ball of fur, just missing it by several tenths of a mile. “I was vaccinated for rabies when I was a kid. I’m immune.”
Sun’s heart jumped into her throat as Wanda got closer. The rabies angle had yet to occur to her. “I’m not sure it works that way, Wanda!”
“I can’t see anything,” Elaine Freyr said, now watching from a safe-ish distance on the porch as her friends advanced. She spun in a complete circle, searching the shadows of the porch. “Where’d it go?”
Darlene Tapia followed suit. All three women were in the dizzying midst of full-on adrenaline rushes, screaming and recoiling with the slightest movement, Wanda swinging wildly as the raccoon scurried about trying to escape. Wanda was either going to kill the raccoon or concuss someone else.
Quincy took up position about ten feet out and raised the rifle again.
“Don’t you dare,” Sun said, glaring at him as she ran past. She hiked up the stairs, ducked another swipe from Wanda’s net, and slid to a stop beside her mother, her gaze darting about.
“Son of a bitch,” Quincy said with more whine than all of southern France. “He got away.”
“And whose fault would that be?” she asked him over her shoulder. She turned back to the maniac who’d birthed her. “Mom, it’s okay. We’ve got this.” When Elaine didn’t move, Sun put a hand on her arm. “Mom?”
Her mother stood frozen, staring up into a darkened corner of the porch. Sun pivoted slowly and came face-to-face with a very angry raccoon, their noses only inches apart.
It sat hunchbacked on a high windowsill, a slow hiss leaking from between its exposed teeth, as it gazed at her with wide, feral eyes. Eyes that glowed like they belonged to a creature possessed by a powerful evil. One so ancient, so primordial, it predated human language.
Then she realized she was still wearing the goggles and the ominous metaphor lost its ardor. Much like Sun’s hopes to go her entire life without wrestling a raccoon in the dark with a gang of bookworms cheering her on. But stranger things had happened.