Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,4
an armadillo trying to avoid being roadkill stew. I landed with a grunt loud enough to wake the dead.
Or at least I thought I was loud enough to wake the dead.
Unfortunately, the dead woman I landed on didn’t seem to share that opinion.
I was having a hard time breathing. Some of it was from my twisting scar tissue, but a lot of it was from shock. I knew this woman. Surprised breathless, I scrambled from her lifeless body and planted my ass in the middle of a stretch of wet lawn.
The irony of finding her dead on this job didn’t escape me.
Lying on her back, her arms and legs flung brokenly away from her torso, Mrs. Adele Brinkerhoff was dressed much like she’d been when I was first hired to catch her cheating on her husband. When I’d taken that job, I couldn’t imagine the grandmotherly woman whose photo I’d been given was into leather corsets, braided whips, and a lesbian love affair with a woman much younger than herself. But as I found out then, looks can be deceiving.
She chased me that night, much like Lamb Chop did just a few moments ago, but she’d been armed with a shotgun and had a hell of a lot better aim than the guy in the sheep costume. I dodged her through a topiary sprinkled with bushes shaped like animals. She nearly took my head off with a powerful blast but took out a leafy elephant instead.
Judging by the hole in her chest and her bloodless, sagging face, Mrs. Brinkerhoff wasn’t going to be cheating on her husband any longer.
She was a doughy-soft woman, but she’d tucked those curves and fleshy thighs into a black leather jumpsuit. Her feet were bare, and the expression on her face was one of deep surprise. I tried fumbling for my phone, my fingers cold and unresponsive as I reached into my back pocket. The gore of her chest wound was immense, and even in the faint light, I could nearly see through her to the lawn… or at least my imagination could.
That’s when I spotted the handful of sparkling gems in her partially closed right hand.
It wasn’t like I’d kept up with her and her husband. They’d reconciled or at least come to some sort of agreement after I caught her, because both of them showed up in my office, paid the bill, and thanked me for my time. In a lot of ways, she had actually been the beginning point of my new life. I came home to find my older brother, Mike, sitting in my living room with a job that would eventually lead me to cross paths with Jae-Min Kim, the love of my life and the man who was stupid enough to agree to marry me.
In a lot of ways, Adele Brinkerhoff was the leather-wearing BDSM godmother who’d made our lives possible. Sort of. And now she lay dead at my feet, holding a handful of diamonds that looked expensive even to my uneducated eye.
“Oh, Adele,” I whispered, finally getting my phone out of my pocket. “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?”
I had just hit the last number for LAPD’s emergency dispatch when the second damned Doberman came over the wall and took me down.
Two
ODDLY ENOUGH, the Doberman who tackled me kept me company. His attack consisted of a fierce bathing with a damp tongue and then trying to climb up the front of my body to be held when the man in the sheep costume flung himself over the wall. I’m not sure if the costume’s hooves did him in or if he just wasn’t that athletic, but even from ten feet away, I heard both of his legs snap as he landed. He dropped down into the lawn face-first, and the Eagle went flying, discharging a bullet when it bounced on the ground. The shot hit the wall, and the Doberman probably decided it had located the spider monkey part of its genetic thread and scrambled up my body to quiver on my shoulder.
He weighed a lot less than Jae and smelled a hell of a lot worse, but I would take the claw marks over his teeth into my jugular any day.
I coaxed the Doberman down and left Lamb Chop where he landed after I kicked the gun as far away from him as possible. I ignored his screaming while I limped up toward the house, dialing 9-1-1 as I went. No one was home