Free Meanwhile, Back in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 6) by Ann Charles

exhaust boomed its final sayonara.
    “There’s no sneaking around in this thing, is there?”
    I patted the Picklemobile’s dash. “She’s no Stealth fighter plane, but she gets me from A to B.”
    “It’s more like one of those old German tanks.” Natalie shoved open the passenger side door. “Hey, your For Sale sign is hanging crooked. It looks like one of the chain links broke. I’ll fix it before we leave.”
    “Thanks. We’ve had some good wind gusts the last few nights.” I climbed down from the pickup, picking up the smell of wood smoke in the crisp mountain air. The slam of my driver’s side door echoed down the hill toward the huge hole in the ground otherwise known as Homestake Mine’s Open Cut.
    I took a few steps until I was standing at the end of Cooper’s front walk, and then turned, staring down at that big pit. Half shrouded in the cool fog left over from a rainy night, it looked cavernous—a gaping toothless mouth. I could almost see one of my sale-pending properties, the Carhart house, that overlooked the mine.
    Prudence-the-ghost, who’d spent the last century haunting the Carhart house, once had used the house’s previous owner as a microphone in front of me. During her ventriloquist act, Prudence had told me in a roundabout way that something most likely non-human periodically came out of one of the drift tunnels down at the mine’s bottom to collect bodies that were left there. Only whatever this mysterious beast was hadn’t come out of the drift to cart off the body of my previous boss when she was left there.
    Or rather the pieces of my boss.
    Damn it! I hated it when my brain turned into a butthead and brought up ugly shards of the past when I wasn’t prepared. I closed my eyes and tried to see Jane as I wanted to remember her, alive and vibrant, writing her to-do lists on the whiteboard at work.
    Instead, my thoughts turned to Jane’s killer, the spikey-haired psychotic bitch I’d gone head-to-head with in the bowels of the Homestake Opera House last month. Detective Cooper had yet to locate the pointy psycho, but I had a feeling she’d be back for Round Two someday. She didn’t seem the type who could turn the other cheek and resist the lure of revenge.
    While part of me shivered at the thought of facing off with Jane’s killer again, another bared its teeth and pawed the ground. After what she’d done to Jane and Helen Taragon, I had some revenge of my own to work out of my system.
    “Come on, Daydream Believer .” Natalie spun me around and pushed me up the walk in front of her. “Dirty Harry is waiting for us.”
    Sure enough, Detective Cooper stood in the doorway, looking tight-faced and squinty-eyed with a curled upper lip. He must have been practicing his Clint Eastwood face in the mirror this morning. All he needed was a poncho, a pistol, and a hand-rolled cigarette.
    “ Hola , Blondie,” I said to him with a Spanish accent, the iconic soundtrack from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly whistling in my head. I paused at the bottom porch step, waiting to see if he’d draw on me.
    The usual muscle in his cheek twitched. “You’re late, Parker.”
    “I reckon so,” I shot back in my best Josey Wales voice.
    “You do realize you’re mixing Eastwood’s characters.”
    I squinted back at him. “Everybody’s got a right to be a sucker once.”
    Natalie clapped at my encore performance. When I bowed, she nudged me aside. “Honey, we’re home,” she sang to Cooper, climbing the steps.
    “Morning, Ms. Beals.” His voice had warmed about fifty degrees compared to the arctic gusts he kept blasting at me today.
    “Knock off the formalities, Coop,” Natalie patted his shoulder. “You’ve seen me almost naked. I think that puts us on a first name basis.”
    What?!! Since when had Cooper almost seen Natalie in her birthday suit? This was news to me. Why hadn’t Natalie mentioned it before now? Was seeing her almost naked what had spurred Cooper’s change of