Free [SS01] Assault and Pepper by Leslie Budewitz

the same circles.”
    “So why is Tag warning me off him?”
    “It’s Tag. Do you need a reason?”
    I picked up my bottle. “Seems like more than not wanting me to date. But maybe you’re right.”
    Someone called her name from the kitchen and she slid off her stool. “Trust me, I’m right. About Tag, and about Doc. You make sure those detectives tell you when they find out who his family is so you can get in touch. Nobody ever regretted going out of their way to be kind.”
    Famous last words.

Seven

    Egyptian morticians stuffed pepper up Ramses’ nose to guarantee him eternal life.
    Laurel’s words followed me back to the Market. Did I honestly have a responsibility to the family I’d never met of a man I barely knew, just because he’d had the misfortune to die on my doorstop?
    But I take seriously the point of view of people who’ve been where I haven’t. Laurel knows what it’s like to lose someone you love unexpectedly and get no resolution. No justice. No closure, in modern terms.
    The haunting harmonies of my mother’s beloved chants began to play in my head, a sure sign that I’d made up my mind.
    The early-afternoon lull had settled on the shop by the time I returned. I made a few phone calls, updated our Facebook status, twipped through our Tweets, and flipped through Fabiola’s fuchsia folder.
    The more I saw, the more her ideas grew on me. But they also made me nervous. They screamed “Hip! Modern! Eat this, love this!” And that was great. But they were a
looong
step away from our image. Our tradition.
    The flip side of classic is boring, and the dark side of tradition is stuck-in-a-rut. Which side you land on depends on your point of view.
    And I wasn’t so sure about upending our customers’ view of us. Or my own.
    “They’re good,” Reed said, shrugging one narrow shoulder when I asked the staff for their opinions. “But they don’t, really, like, rock.”
    “Do-o-o it,” Sandra said, drawing out the words in an urging tone. My face showed my reluctance. She tucked her hands in her armpits, flapped her wings, and clucked her way to the front counter.
    “What do you two think?” I asked Zak and Tory, busy refilling the spices on the wall. The job goes faster with two—one to climb the rolling wooden ladder and fetch extra inventory off the upper shelves, and one to refill the jar, note the date, and confirm the records generated by our point-of-sale inventory software. With bulk supplies, you’ve got to have an idea how much you sell over a period of time, so we were developing a baseline. A total pain, but Jane had tracked inventory on a yellow pad no one else could read, so anything was a vast improvement over nothing. We hoped to have all the info we needed after a full year.
Soon. Soon.
    “Go for it,” Zak said, tucking the caraway back in place. He almost didn’t need a ladder to reach the shelf.
    “Follow your heart,” Tory said, voice soft, eyes carefully trained on the iPad inventory screen.
    What message was she sending me?
    “Back in a flash.” Zak headed for the restroom.
    “What’s next?” I asked Tory, my foot on the bottom rung.
    “Brown cardamom.”
    She still wasn’t looking at me, and that wasn’t like her. Not a lot of call for brown, also known as “bastard cardamom,” except in the Indian community. Even there, green cardamom outsells brown. Jane introduced me to the spice through her Indian Butter Chicken, and I love grinding the rough, ribbed pods in my flea market brass mortar and pestle to release the smoky, woodsy flavor.
    I handed Tory the dark brown jar, Jane’s spidery script on the red-trimmed white label yellowed with age. Those labels we would never modernize, except when we couldn’t read them anymore.
    “You told the detective you didn’t see Doc this morning. Did you see Sam?”
    Her eyes widened, then quickly narrowed.
    “He was here,” I continued. “His beret fell out of Doc’s coat when they picked up his