Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (top ebook reader .TXT) 📕

“It’s important, Kels. I promise. What you’re doing out here will pay big dividends in the future, I promise.”

“Okay,” I said, and closed the door. “I hope so.”

Dawn smiled up at me, the worry line on her forehead gone, and she smiled up at me with her million-watt smile. “Trust me.” Then she put the rumbling sports car in gear and roared off into the night.

Me? I clicked on my seat belt, because I’m a good girl, and that’s what we do. Then I headed back to the bus to try and get a few hours’ sleep before church, knowing in my heart that I’d spent the night doing the Lord’s work here on Earth.

Foxglove’s Henna Worshipper

inspired by Neil Gaiman and Chris Bachalo

The girl with the long gloves

came to the city

to get away from the man

with thick porkchop hands

and sing her song

in coffeeshops to crowds of one.

The callouses on her fingertips

plucked notes from sweaty air;

her solitary spectator

drank spiced cider in the corner

and dabbed his eye with paper napkins.

On A Hill Far Away

A Dead Old Ladies Detective Agency Short Story

Well, I have to admit, this is not how I expected my night to end,” I said as I watched my boyfriend tighten a climbing harness around his waist and slide down a rope into a deep, kudzu-lined gully on the side of Highway 49. We were almost exactly halfway between Lockhart and Union, which is to say the absolute middle of damned nowhere, South Carolina, and I was watching Sheriff Willis Dunleavy, the aforementioned boyfriend and apparently secret rock-climbing aficionado, slide down a rope to where Clyde Peabody, the owner of the originally named Peabody’s Wrecker Service, stood beside an overturned vehicle about thirty feet below us.

We’d been finishing up dinner at this new Italian place called Luigi’s in Union when the radio in Willis’s Prius went off. I may have made some threatening statements about him letting some asshole caught in a speed trap interrupt date night, but I only meant about half of them. But when Ethel told us there was a car wreck that looked an awful lot like a fatality, I quit griping. Mostly.

Ten minutes later I was standing by the back of the car as Willis took off his necktie and dress shirt, handed them to me, then slipped on a spare uniform shirt to go with the boots he changed into.

“You always keep a change of clothes in the back of your car?” I asked.

“Yep,” he replied, pulling a complicated net of straps and buckles out of a bag and shaking it until it looked like the climbing harness it was. “Ever since the first time I had to notify a victim’s spouse that her husband was dead while I was still wearing her husband’s blood on my shirt.”

I sometimes forgot that before taking the job as sheriff of Union County, SC, Willis was a homicide detective in Milwaukee, a place that saw a lot more murders in some city blocks than the whole town of Union. “Well, that makes sense, I reckon. And the climbing gear? I can’t imagine there was a lot of call for that in the big city?”

“No, that’s all recreational. Me and Tommy were planning on riding up to Crowder’s Mountain tomorrow and doing a little climbing. Wanna come?” he asked, grinning at me as he clipped something to something else and slid down the rope.

“No!” I hollered at him. “And what in the hell are you doing climbing rocks with a deputy barely half your age? Willis Dunleavy, you are sixty-one years old. You don’t have anything left to prove to that young’un, and I am not going to deal with you falling off a mountain and breaking a hip!” He just grinned at me and waved, then pointed to his ear and shook his head like he couldn’t hear me. I gave up. There was no way I was going to win against a man who was married and divorced twice before we ever met. He learned a long time ago how to be deaf when it suited him.

I turned and walked back to the side of the road, the red flashing lights from the ambulance and firetruck bathing everything in an eerie crimson glow. “Leon, what’s the story?” I asked as I approached the short man with the giant mustache standing by the firetruck. Leon Fuques was the chief of the Lockhart Volunteer Fire Department, and he was the man in charge on most accident scenes in this part of the country.

“I don’t rightly know, Lila Grace,” he said. “We got the call that somebody’d seen headlights down off the side of the road, and we got here ‘bout the same time as the Highway Patrol.” He waved his hand over at a tall man in a big hat standing beside Clyde’s tow truck talking to Mark Ferber, a SC Highway Patrol officer who frequently rode the local highways. Officer Ferber and I might have had one or more less-than-friendly conversations about my speed over the years.

“Do you know who called it in?” I asked.

“Well, it ain’t like the county 911 dispatch gives that information to the volunteer fire department, and I reckon even if they did, I wouldn’t share it with you, even if you are stepping out with the sheriff,” Leon replied, his mustache quivering in disapproval at my “stepping out.”

“Well, Leon, I can’t say as I disagree with either of those statements. But we’re not stepping out,” I said, reaching down to pat the short man on his ruddy cheek. “We’re sleeping together.” Then I turned and walked over to the side of the bank and looked down. Willis had made it safely to the bottom and was standing next to an overturned car next to Clyde and a battery-operated lantern he’d carried down with him. I couldn’t tell anything about the car except that its lights were on and pointed up the hill, and