Perilously Fun Fiction: A Bundle Pauline Jones (the red fox clan txt) 📖

trace his route from the Seymour garden and Luci’s intransigence, to this room in the Seymour house overseeing the protective detail guarding the Captain’s newly discovered daughter.

He pushed back the sheets and swung his feet over the side of the bed, the smooth wood cool against the soles of his feet. He rubbed his aching head, wondering how serious the threat to Luci was, with its mix of the absurd and the serious apparently orchestrated by a couple of octogenarians with a taste for joke glasses? There seemed to be a plethora of elderly mucking about in this case. All except their naked John Doe.

And a dearth of suspects since their prime one had turned up under a bush.

Death was stalking the perimeters of the Seymour house and all he had for witnesses were three crazy old ladies, one presumed ghost, a couple of inarticulate faithful retainers, his uncle’s inanimate fiancée, and a partner who was in love with a ghost. With Velma and Luci for contrast.

Whether he needed it or not.

And if all this weren’t bad enough, they had to protect the innocent—always assuming they knew who the innocent were—in the midst of a wedding. With the dogs of political patronage nipping at their heels.

Then there were the logistics problems. The department was shorthanded anyway, with sixteen officers under indictment and/or on suspension for various charges ranging from rape to theft to murder. And the problems with their fleet of cars, most of which weren’t running because of budget shortfalls. And the ones that were running were driving politicians around so they wouldn’t get mugged.

Pryce had only been able to produce one other pair of detectives to watch tonight. They were outside right now. Tomorrow he was hoping to scare up a female officer to relieve some of the pressure on the four men, but he was making no promises—while radiating unspoken threats about their fate if something went wrong.

And there were so many things that could go wrong around the Seymours.

Mickey’s thought processes reached this unsatisfactory point when it occurred to him that it was not a good thing for there to be music coming in from outside. His sore muscles protesting, Mickey padded over to the window and heard a very familiar laugh from outside before he could jerk the curtain back.

“No—”

But it was.

Luci.

Dancing directly under a street lamp with some young stud in shorts and a muscle shirt.

Luci’s aunts’ aversion to technology extended to air conditioning. The house was cool—thanks to Gracie—but that couldn’t come close to six thousand feet above sea level cool. That, humidity-dampened sheets, and thoughts that tended to circle around the question of Mickey’s captain and her paternity drove Luci outside where she found the frat boys having another party. She was tired of thinking, tired of wondering if Henry Pryce were her mother’s Pooh Bear.

How could she not have realized that finding her father would bring her face-to-face with her mother’s lover? There’d been no Immaculate Conception in her case. No comforting fictions to tell herself. She was a “love” child, an outcome of passion.

Her thoughts kept getting caught up in images of Lila and Pryce tangled in sheets. She had to move, to push out thinking, and untie the knotted fragments and figure out what she was going to do. The party seemed like the perfect way to push it all out.

Young firm bodies clutched each other, dancing in the street. Other young bodies sprawled in abandon across the long-suffering lawn in front of their even more long-suffering house. A keg poked out a window, and pizza boxes were stacked four and five deep on the porch.

In other words, it was just what the doctor hadn’t ordered.

A couple of slices of pepperoni and a beer later, Luci hooked her bandaged arm over the massive shoulders of someone everyone called Tank, who was large enough to have his own weather system, and started swaying to Roy Orbison’s “Mystery Girl.” It seemed appropriate on a variety of levels.

Mixed with the smell of beer and pizza, her nose picked up several hundred different plant smells, but magnolia, she decided, was her favorite and it didn’t clash with Tank’s aftershave which was called, he told her, Mighty Dog.

She felt the disturbance in the force before Mickey tapped Tank on the shoulder—then banged him on the shoulder to get his attention. With a prehistoric grunt, Tank ambled off after a sweet young thing, each step causing minor concussions in the soggy ground.

Without missing a beat, Luci transferred her arms to Mickey’s smaller, less rock-like, but infinitely more pleasant shoulders. His aftershave, she was sure, had nothing to do with dogs or other animals. It was, she decided, smiling dreamily up into his frustrated face, probably called Suit.

It was playing with fire to smile at him, but she couldn’t seem to give a care. The night, the smells, the sound of the music, the feel of the air were so far out of her time and place that she didn’t feel like herself at all. Besides, she was trying not to think about herself. That’s why she’d come outside. To become one with the night and forget her troubles and just be a girl with a guy. To pretend she was ordinary, as normal as the next girl.

Mickey spun her in a circle. “Do you think you should be out here dancing when someone wants to kill you?”

“I thought you were in bed.”

He could have gotten angry and ground his teeth. His dentist could probably use the money with that new office to pay for, but it was too hot and in this light Luci looked good enough to eat and almost normal. So he grinned and spun her again, liking the feel of her body brushing his and how easily she followed him. “You thought wrong. Aren’t you worried about what I might do to you?”

“I don’t know how to worry.” Her smile dared him to make her.

The air was heavy with moisture and