entirely.
The Straight Edgers might be infuriated because of the restraining order I delivered or the protective spell we placed over Sheldon Fennerman. I’d been in Basilisk asking questions, and if Ivory was involved in poisoning Sheyenne, she might have gotten nervous, especially after we went into Grandma Wong’s shop. Or, I’d followed Brondon Morris and Harvey Jekyll to their secret meeting in the warehouse. For that matter, the heirs of Alvin Ricketts could have been vindictive now that he’d sold his zombie puppies painting for a large amount at auction.
Sure, I had more enemies than I could shake a stake at, but I had a gut feeling that Jekyll was involved—a conclusion I drew partly from circumstantial evidence and partly because I just plain didn’t like the guy. Even if it turned out he had nothing to do with my murder, I still wouldn’t have minded seeing him screwed in his divorce.
I slowly sat up on the sidewalk. Sheyenne fussed over me and uttered a string of frustrated curses because she couldn’t lend me a hand and help me to my feet. By myself, I managed to stand up again.
I looked at the bullet holes that had torn through my sport jacket. “Son of a bitch, this was my only good jacket.” A private investigator doesn’t require many jackets, but I need at least one without bullet holes.
The six slugs had passed cleanly through my chest. Fortunately, they’d missed my spine, which I really needed in order to keep myself upright. I poked my fingers into the large holes across my torso—it was like Frankenstein’s game of connect-the-dots. Every bit of damage to my body was tough to repair, and I had vowed never to become one of those shamblers who fall apart with each jostle or hiccup.
I heard a puttering muffler and recognized the sound of the Pro Bono Mobile. Sheyenne reappeared down the street in the headlights of the oncoming car. She flitted and bobbed like a will-o’-the-wisp, guiding Robin to where I was standing, then she yanked open the passenger door for me so I could collapse inside onto the musty fabric seats.
“Dan, I heard the gunshots on the phone,” Robin cried. “Sheyenne said—”
“Just get me to the sawbones, and we’ll see how bad the damage really is.”
In the month since crawling out of the grave, I hadn’t had any occasion to visit the Patchup Parlor of Miss Lujean Eccles, but thanks to word on the street, every zombie knows where to go for an emergency bodily repair.
Miss Eccles operated her business out of an old Victorian home. A large dead oak tree stood out front, from which dangled a tire swing for the human and inhuman children in the neighborhood. Sheyenne’s ghost had drifted ahead, passing through the Patchup Parlor’s front door to alert Miss Eccles we were coming. Robin helped me out of the car, slung my right arm over her shoulder, and supported me as I stumbled up the tulip-lined path.
I had a hard time getting my legs to move right, and I felt clumsy and stupid—worse, I was acting like a shambler, and that made me both embarrassed and horrified. Wasn’t death hard enough already? “I’m just disoriented, that’s all,” I said. “I’ll get better.”
“Yes, you will,” Robin said. “Or else.”
Miss Eccles clucked her tongue as she looked me over. “Oh, my, my!” She was a sweet, plump woman in her late fifties, with gray-brown hair piled in a beehive hairdo that looked like an ancient obelisk. “You look much the worse for wear!”
Robin hurried me into the front room, where I slumped onto an old Victorian flower-print sofa. “Can you treat him?” Sheyenne asked. “Somebody shot him because of me.”
“We don’t know why I was shot,” I said. “Not tonight, and not the first time either.”
I ran the ideas over and over in my mind. We’d asked questions of the clerk at Grandma Wong’s, but he hadn’t given us any names of toadstool customers. And how could anyone have had time to set up the shooting? Jimmy the stoner clerk was the only one who knew we’d asked the questions, and I’d been gunned down less than fifteen minutes after that. Unless Jimmy did it himself . . . but I doubted he was in any condition to shoot straight. My hand looks funny.
Though he gave us no names, Jimmy had mentioned that bartenders sometimes purchased the death cap extract, but the only bartenders I knew were Francine at the Goblin Tavern—she