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

short time, its warmth touching her as it brushed past. Mickey turned back to Luci, the voltage fading as fast as it had arrived. It was a good thing. The world was unstable enough without another Seymour joining the battle of the sexes.

He pulled a notebook from one pocket, a pencil from another. “I have to get a statement from you about the attack.”

“Okay.” She gave him her attention. It seemed to disconcert him. “What do you want to know...officer?”

“I’m a detective. But—” He struggled, but good manners beat out personal desire. “You can call me Mick. If you want.”

“Mick?” Luci said it doubtfully.

“What?”

“Well.” She shrugged. “It sounds like a name for a gerbil.”

He stared at her, producing then discarding several replies to this. Perhaps if he just ignored the things that didn’t make sense he could get through this, deliver her to her aunts and then run for his sanity. It seemed like a good plan, so he went with it.

“Ross, then. Or Mickey—if it doesn’t remind you too much of a mouse?”

She smiled. His toes curled in his shoes in time with the slow curling of the edges of her mouth and sent his plan drifting up into the smoke that still hugged the cement rafters overhead.

“I always thought Mickey was kind of cute.”

He felt himself grin. Could tell it was the stupid one, but he didn’t seem to care. It was enough to look into her eyes while she looked into his. It was enough to wonder how a mouth so straight could curve like that and would it taste as good as it looked?

A clang of machinery made them both jump.

“Yes, well.” He shook himself, then said, “I just have a few questions for you, Miss Seymour—”

She twitched. If he hadn’t been watching her closely he would have missed it. “What?”

Her mouth pursed in distaste. “It’s just, being called that makes me feel like my mother.”

“Miss Seymour reminds you of your mother?”

“I’m afraid so.” Her sigh was just shy of dramatic.

He opened his mouth, remembered his plan and jumped right over this little bit of quicksand. He asked his questions, resisting her efforts to digress, until he got to his last question.

“Can you think of anyone who might want to kill you?”

She looked startled, then thoughtful, as if the question interested her in some distant, academic way. “I suppose anyone can have enemies and I am a Seymour, which means I bring out the homicidal in people.”

Mickey opened his mouth to ask, then realized what he was about to do and stopped himself.

“I also know a lot of excitable gun-toting types, you understand, but none of them drive a Yugo. They drive off-road vehicles with gun racks, wear orange hunting vests and never wear joke glasses.” She folded a blouse and tossed it in after the jeans, then picked up a silky scrap of white and lace. “Did you say you were in homicide?”

“Yes.” Mickey felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise in warning.

“Oh.”

“Despite the many TV plots,” he said, “most perps try to avoid shooting a cop. It just gets them more trouble than it’s worth.”

“So someone wasn’t trying to personally kill you?” The quantity of bullets fired at them seemed awfully personal to her, but she wasn’t a homicide cop.

“I can’t know for sure, of course, but I don’t think so.” He looked at her with a lot of wary in his eyes. “Why?”

“I was sort of hoping this—” she held up the white scrap to show him a bra with two blown cups, “would be covered under your insurance?”

No one came to the tiny French Quarter club for the drinks, though buying them at an exorbitant rate was required for sitting at ringside. Its claim to fame was its female mud wrestlers. Patrons had another good reason for buying liberally. They needed to get really drunk to get past their natural fear of getting down and dirty with said wrestlers, especially the one kicking patron ass at the moment. Even the dullest wit had to know she hadn’t lost her front teeth just because of poor dental hygiene.

Fern watched the woman toss the over-confident college student clear across the ring. It wasn’t possible for her to get drunk enough to crawl in there and get her ass tossed, but it was cathartic to watch someone else get tossed after their very public defeat. It didn’t help to have an prosperous looking Artie sitting across from them laughing his ass off about their failure at the airport.

Donald let Artie pay for their drinks, which wiped the grin off his face. He’d always been a tight bastard. When the waitress was about two steps out of earshot, Fern said, “A guy who keeps all his dollars in one place—”

Artie pulled his feet in to keep a passing patron from stepping on his new shoes. “Hey, it’s not easy to launder dollars. No one wants to bother with small bills anymore.”

“No kidding,” Fern said. “Let’s see, I wonder why that could be?”

“Gets me.” Artie leaned closer to confide, “Think about it. People freak if they lose five bucks in a scam. Have the postal inspector all over you. But for a buck? Not a peep. Just not worth their time to complain.”

It made enough sense to be scary. Fern wasn’t used to Artie making sense. She put down her drink. Maybe the cheap beer was affecting her more than she realized.

“Tell you what,” Donald said. “I won’t tell you how to scam if you won’t tell me how to kill.”

“Okay, okay.” Artie threw his hands up. “The AK-47 was a bad idea. You do your thing and when you’re done, let me know so I can do mine. Agreed?”

He pulled out a handkerchief and bent to wipe a speck of mud off his shoes.

Fern looked at Donald. He grinned. “What say we get ourselves an Uzi?”

A rare smile lit Fern’s face. She should have been looking at the ring instead of at