Free Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) by Jamie Quaid Page A

demon had taken him over, I couldn’t believe he’d really tried to kill me. I might have been willing to buy any theory, no matter how unlikely, but that he was a demon wasn’t one of them. I’d had a bad day. Maybe I’d just imagined his fury.
    So I donned my best little black dress and tucked a compact and lipstick into my messenger bag to repair myself after I arrived. I wore Max’s jacket, pinned my old college skull-and-crossbones earring in one ear, and drove north, past downtown, to the funeral home.
    His family had chosen a place in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of traditional brick houses and tree-lined streets, nowhere near the Zone or anyplace Max might have hung out. I hoped his buddies would be there, because I couldn’t relate to anyone who lived this kind of lifestyle. I couldn’t imagine burly Max growing up here. I’d thought he was my kind of educated trailer trash. What else had I been wrong about?
    Once inside the funeral home, I didn’t have any problem locating the viewing room where they’d set up his coffin. His biker friends were hanging around outside, their stringy long hair and leathers looking as out of place in this quiet, proper sanctum as I felt.
    I limped up to them warily, but they were simple guys. They didn’t read motives into anything. The big lugs hugged me and fought tears and passed me around as if I were a beer can. I was good with that. I was more than good. I let the tears ruin my mascara and accepted their big shoulders as pillows to cry on.The experience was the catharsis I’d needed to relieve some of the lump of molten lead in my chest.
    “If you ever need anything, kid,” said Lance, Max’s closest friend, “we’re here for ya. And we’ve got someone working on getting that car out of impound.”
    “Yeah.” Gonzo, Max’s mechanical partner pounded me on the back so hard that I almost fell over. “We’re taking that Escort apart. Ain’t no way Max would have crashed that baby.”
    “You’ll let me know if you find anything?” Stupid, but it cheered me to know someone wasn’t writing off the fireball as the result of a domestic dispute. Nothing could bring Max back, but knowing someone was at least looking into his death made me feel less helpless. And maybe a shade less guilty.
    “You’ll be the first to know,” Lance assured me. He hugged me and led me into the viewing room as the organ music began.
    All the proper citizens were already in place. The family was sitting to one side, what there was of them. I studied a regal, gray-haired woman wearing a hat with a veil straight out of the sixties and wondered if that was his grandmother. She didn’t look up when we entered.
    A distinguished gentleman sat at her side, holding her gloved hand. He wore a light gray suit that set off his head of silver hair to perfection. I wondered if he had hair implants. No man of his age should have had that much hair. He looked up with a slight frown as we scraped chairs at the back of the room.
    A woman in her thirties, probably a few years older than Max, openly scowled at us. Really, I couldn’t blame her. We represented the side of Max’s life that had taken him away. If this was his family, he should have been up there in a tailored suit and neat haircut, wiping away his sister’s tears, assuming that’s who she was. He shouldn’t have been driving my ancient Escort and cruising too near the edge of nowhere that was the Zone.
    Maybe I should have been looking into Max’s background instead of hunting for a diplomatic limo. Why the devil had someone from that family been hanging out with bikers instead of working in a white-collar office?
    I couldn’t ask Lance or the other guys, not in here. They might not know any more than I did. I tried to let the organ music drown out thought, but then they let a preacher get up there to bleed over the audience, and his unctuous tones and ambiguous moral prosing made me want to hurl.
    I got up and walked out,