Free Dating Dead Men by Harley Jane Kozak

a store, you're not a small business owner, but maybe you feel strongly about something—ferreting, say. If you take ferreting, and imagine four walls around it, that's my store. Maybe you find it gimmicky, the whole Welcome! Willkommen! Tyrolean village thing, but it works, these stores sell cards. Well, not my branch, not in record numbers, but that's changing. Too many people need me to stay in business. Fredreeq. My brother. Vendors.”
    Margaret wrinkled her nose, then turned her back on me. I stood.
    â€œI can't call the cops in case there's one of those APB things out on me, so I'm on my own.” I paused. Doc hadn't said what she ate. I poured Wheat Chex into a ceramic bowl, and showed it to her. She couldn't have cared less. I added milk. “Okay, here's food. And a paper slipper, to remind you of Doc. Gomez. Your human.”
    Margaret studied the cottage cheese ceiling.
    â€œAll right, I'm leaving. Good luck to both of us.” I stashed the gym bag on top of the refrigerator and started scouting around for a blunt instrument.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    M Y HIKING BOOTS squeaked on the linoleum stairs outside my apartment. I was armed with a marble bust of Dante and a can of Raid. In my jacket pocket was a cordless phone. All the better household items—police flashlight, hammer, carving knife—were in the shop. I didn't own a gun (number eleven, No Guns), nor did my life include ice picks, tire irons, hatchets, shovels, pitchforks, electric drills, or bowling balls.
    Was I overreacting? Several people had keys to the shop. Of course, all those people had cars, too, except for Uncle Theo, who didn't drive. In any case, it was hard to imagine circumstances that would lure Uncle Theo here from Glendale at 4 A . M .
    But if it was intruders, it would be my second criminal episode tonight—me, who'd never before seen anything worse than illegal U-turns. Still, vandalism ran rampant in L.A. I thought of the Hummels, tiny porcelain Bavarian children, so fragile . . . the shop was insured, but Welcome! policy required managers to pay the deductible, which—
    In apartment 1A, a dog barked. I hurried out the back exit, into the courtyard that connected the Wildwood Arms Deluxe Apartments to the rear of the mini-mall.
    The cold hit me anew. The courtyard was too dark to make out anything but the scraggly citrus trees. I moved slowly and stepped on something squishy, probably a rotten lemon. I stopped.
    My plan had been to go through the courtyard to sneak into the back room of my shop. But then what? Hit the intruders? I couldn't hit a golf ball with conviction. My best bet was to scare them off, but I'm not visually intimidating, despite being tall. I backed up into the shadows of the Wildwood Arms, as close as possible to my own apartment, one story up, so my cordless phone would still get reception, then dialed the shop. I waited through my outgoing message, then put on the most vicious voice I could muster. “I know you're in there, whoever you—”
    There was a wail from apartment 1B. I'd managed to scare the Tomlinson baby. Next it would be Mrs. Albertini in 2B, who called the police as a hobby—yes, there was her light popping on. In a minute her curlered head would appear in the second-story window, a truly scary prospect. I whispered into the phone, “I'm coming with
cops
. So you better
get out,
” then raced back through the apartment building and out to the alley.
    Gravel crunched underfoot as I stumbled ahead. My new plan was to sneak to the front of the mini-mall and see if I'd flushed out someone, without actually confronting them. The alley was dark and gave me the creeps, and I fervently hoped the dead cat carcass from earlier in the week was gone. I remembered how Ruta felt about alleys: the urban equivalent of dark forests, a place little girls should never go into at night. Of course, I was no longer a little girl. After tonight I'd be