Free Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) by Shannon Hill Page A

me, and let Boris slide back into his seat. His fur was on end, his whiskers stiff, his mismatched eyes pitch-black, and he kept opening and closing his mouth. Filtering all the smells, most of them strange, all of them tainted by the dead body in the truck.
    Rucker was blustering at Breeden. Punk labored over, his prosthesis skidding in the muck. He spat out a word that even I blinked to hear, then remarked, “Danes ain’t happy. He wants this off his hands.”
    I risked a grin. “So does Breeden. Rucker wins.”
    Punk stared past me, and down at the creek sixty feet below us. “Gonna be someone he trusted, I bet. Someone he didn’t lock up the guns around.”
    I almost shrugged. “You know Rucker’ll pin this on some nonexistent hobo.”
    We both looked uphill, where Rucker and Danes were talking. Or Rucker was talking at Danes, who looked like he’d hand over the keys to the kingdom to get Craig McElroy’s murder off his books and onto someone else’s. He’d do what was easiest for him. He didn’t like intrusions into his jurisdiction. Fastest way to get everything back to normal was to let Rucker do whatever he liked. Not a bad man or a bad police chief, just one who saw this as an external matter. There’s a lot of them around.
    I got settled behind the wheel. Punk slid into the back, and started cleaning the crud off his prosthesis. We’d gotten back to the main road before he spoke. He startled me. I’d figured he’d gone back to sleep.
    “It’s okay, y’know,” he said. “Not sleeping so much. I still get twitchy when I drive past where I wrecked. It’s normal. This early in, you only start worrying if it stops bothering you.”
    I did not like being transparent, not even to a deputy. “Watch much Dr. Phil on your days off?” I asked acidly.
    I caught a flash of his grin in the rear view mirror. “Nope. Oprah.”

8.
    E veryone was happy to let Vernon Rucker have the case. Danes got to keep the potential embarrassment of an open homicide on someone else’s shoulders. Breeden got to tell his mother truthfully that it was out of his hands, which didn’t do much to get her off his back, but did remove Aunt Marge. Rucker got to crow about his big case. Even Aunt Marge voiced approval, since it meant I wouldn’t be getting myself into more “trouble”, as she calls it. The only people not happy were the personnel of the Sheriff’s Department of Crazy, Virginia. And we didn’t get a vote.
    I don’t drink. Being raised by Aunt Marge, a dietitian and borderline health nut, does that to you. You also don’t smoke, take recreational drugs, trust traditional medicine and pharmaceutical companies, eat anything processed or anything ending in –os, unless it’s avocados. I reckon I’ll live to be 113, or die at 50 from sheer lack of pre-embalming. But I do have my vices. Chocolate is the biggest one.
    So when we decided to drown our sorrows, we did it at Old Mill, in a booth in the back . There is no tavern in Crazy. When you can buy cold beer at the grocery store and drink it on the way home, bars are superfluous. But Seth understands people need to drink somewhere besides their cars and homes, so he’ll keep Old Mill open till about eleven at night. After eight, you’re out of luck if you want hot food, but he keeps vats of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream handy, and there’s always plenty of “nibbles”, as he calls them. Pretzel nuggets, chips and salsa, mixed nuts. Good beer food to go with the three beer brands Seth had on offer. He had a few low-end wines, too, but no hard liquor. Kept the church ladies happy that way.
    Across the table from me, Tom nursed a bottle of Sam Adams, as preferable to Coors or Budweiser. Punk stared at a ginger ale. I poked at a hot fudge sundae made with chocolate ice cream. Next to me on the bench, Boris popped his head up over the edge of the table and lapped at a small saucer of heavy cream.
    I sighed. “Sucks.”
    Punk said, “Yeah.”
    Tom grunted.
    Boris