Free Stuffed by Brian M. Wiprud

what?” If Pete Durban is a terrier, Angie can be a pit bull when it comes to puzzles, brainteasers, and the like. I sometimes kid her she’d be better off hitched to Alex Trebek. He drives a convertible, I’m sure.
    “Sarcastic. And blind. It’s just like that gallbladder thing. You didn’t want to see what was going on because you were afraid to find out.”
    “Damn right, Angie. And I’ve got a lot to be afraid of if that Fletcher guy came all the way to our house to steal that crow.” I glanced at some gawkers at the next table and stuck my tongue out at them. I lowered my voice. “If there are Colombians, Nazis, cultists, or terrorists who want the crow that bad, they can have it, because after what almost happened to us—”
    “Fletcher?” She arched an eyebrow. I hadn’t bothered to tell her about Frat Boy.
    “What?” It had occurred to me in the days since the robbery that maybe, just maybe, one of the attackers had been that Bret Fletcher who tried to fight me for the crow back up there in Bermuda. But that was pretty damn far-fetched.
    Our food suddenly arrived and I got busy putting ketchup on some cold, undercooked fries. Angie messed with her sticky-looking nachos.
    She was dead on, of course. There was the distinct possibility that they were after the crow and stole the other stuff to cover their motives. So if, for the sake of argument, one of the thieves had been Fletcher, who were the other two guys? As much as I was completely earnest about not tangling with these characters, that grub of vengeance was squirming in my brain. I don’t think of myself as that kind of guy. Life is too short to be spent defending every little slight. But when I pictured that guy’s hand on Angie’s neck . . . well, it made me want to have some Malay cone snails at the ready. Or at the very least, see these bastards in jail.
    “Garth?”
    She woke me from my dark reverie. “Hmm?”
    “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Fletcher.”
    And so it was that the Lincoln found its way back up to Bermuda.

Chapter 7

    T here’s something decidedly sinister about a New England village after dark. The byways are empty but awash in the light of eerie green streetlamps. Wizened old maples and sycamores shroud sidewalks in the sporadic shadows of branches swaying in the wind. Spatters of lamplight skitter like ghost crabs across picket fences and white clapboard houses, the surge of rustling leaves like waves breaking on rocks. Fix your gaze on each grizzled trunk as you pass: Is someone hiding there, sliding to the far side of the tree? Stop. Listen. Were those footsteps behind you, matching your steps? That guy in the window, reading, rocking back and forth: a zombie, normalcy’s pretense, the town in the grips of Satan’s most ominous coven?
    Angie and I looked up at the bear holding a scripted CLOSED sign. I imagined his eyes might just glow red with Cerberus’s incarnate evil, followed by the sound of a distant calliope and chanting clowns. In case you hadn’t already guessed, my psyche is burdened with formative years devoted to
Creature Features.
    “Things seem pretty damn quiet in Bermuda.” I shivered, the little hairs on my neck standing at full attention. “What say we drop in on Gunderson in the morning and ask about Fletcher then? Tonight we’d better backtrack to that roadhouse and nab a room.”
    “About five miles back,” Angie sighed in agreement.
    Wind whistling over the convertible top, I cranked the heat and we barreled down the country road.
    “Angie, what would you think if I, you know, took a job?”
    “A job?”
    “Yeah, you know . . .”
    She gave me a hard look. “I think you’d have to buy a real tie and mothball that pony-skin tie you have, that’s what.”
    “I’m serious.”
    I saw her roll her eyes in the dashboard’s lime glow.
    “Garth, you say that every year. What kind of job? Let me guess. At U.S. Fish and Wildlife?”
    “Pete Durban said if I ever get tired of