A deliciously quirky whodunit by the bestselling author of SUGARLAND and THE HURRICANE LOVER…

Recently widowed private dick Shep Hartigate, a dishonored cop reduced to chasing cheating spouses for a ruthless Houston divorce lawyer, teams up with free-spirited pulp fiction writer Smartie Breedlove to find out who’s killing the inconvenient exes of Texas—including Smartie’s BFF, Charma Bovet, a centerfold with a heart of gold.

Could Shep’s gorgeous but unscrupulous employer really have a secret bimbo/mimbo hit list? Or is Smartie Breedlove a few peeps shy of an Easter basket?

A colorful cast of problematic lovers, longsuffering family, and stalwart friends (both two-legged and four-legged) close ranks around Smartie and Shep as they sift clues and maneuver to stay alive. Calling on her longtime companions Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Daphne du Maurier, Smartie finds a roadmap to the hardboiled plot twists and U-turns drawing her perilously close to a damaging past that left her scarred and now threatens to destroy her.

NYT bestselling ghostwriter, author and indie publisher Joni Rodgers is known for creating characters that resonate, dialogue that crackles with wit, and plots that surprise. If you love a great mystery woven with skill, humor and compassion, KILL SMARTIE BREEDLOVE will not disappoint.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

KILL SMARTIE BREEDLOVE

(a mystery)

Joni Rodgers

Prologue: The End

From the balcony of the Lady Bird Johnson Suite on the forty-fourth floor of the Bonham Hotel, the city of Houston was an ant farm teeming with red taillights. It sheered upward and expanded outward at the speed of glass and steel, an unstoppable network of cross streets and skyscrapers, parking lots, palmy backyards, broken bayous, taco trucks, shaved ice stands, girls in flip-flops, folks on porches. There was nothing in this corner of Southeast Texas to stop the parade of eroding neighborhoods and shiny shopping malls. Not a mountain nor a river nor a God nor much of anything until you got to the Gulf of Mexico.

From the forty-second floor, Smartie Breedlove could see it all.

Houston was the fourth most populous city in the United States and arm-wrestled Los Angeles for the dubious distinction of having the worst air quality. The city was over a hundred miles wide. Six million busy people. Eleven thousand restaurants. Almost that many churches. Smartie had gathered these factoids while conducting research for her first novel, Get Wilder, a moderately successful bit of pulp fiction in which late night classic rock disc jockey Smack Wilder solves the murder of the Pentecostal televangelist with whom she’s been sleeping.

By the thirty-eighth floor, Smartie’s silk slip dress had ridden up under her arms. She wore no panties, and wickedly, she was glad for that. She’d gotten her roots done a day or two earlier and was sporting a fresh mani-pedi just a few hours old. Also a good thing; cell photos would undoubtedly leak onto the Internet within minutes.

Lighted windows flashed by like comic book panels, and in them Smartie saw her life unreel: the secret struggles of her childhood and boozy hijinks of her youth, fleeting lovers, book covers, contracts and rejections, fan mail and hate mail, blogs and twitter streams, screen shots and publicity stills from movie versions of the “Smack Wilder: Voice of the Graveyard Shift” series.

By the twenty-first floor, her eyes were as dry as red clay on account of the wind, so she couldn’t see the couple on the eighteenth floor balcony, but she heard the woman’s scream whip by like the startled shrill of a seagull. Loud music from a thirteenth floor stag party rose and fell past her ear like a speeding train.

As the glass roof of the dining solarium rose up to meet her, Smartie remembered that the human brain is believed to function for up to sixty seconds after decapitation, firing fine electric signals, searching out its last sight, registering every fast-fading sensation. She’d learned this while researching Smack Wilder #7: Splatter Cat, in which Smack solves the murder of a Jackson Pollock forger with whom she’s been sleeping. Or maybe it was Smack Wilder #9: Doggy Style, in which Smack solves the murder of the Weimaraner breeder with whom she’s been sleeping.

The men in Smack’s life were handsome and caddish and rarely around long enough for a second martini. The same could be said for most of the men in Smartie’s life, but they were fewer and far between, and little mystery surrounded the circumstances of those hasty departures.

One man in particular did cross her mind at the moment she breached the steel-framed ceiling of the dining solarium, which gave way in a cascade of shattered glass and scattered voices.

Whiteness.

Darkness.

The precious presence of roses.

Sixty seconds later, Smartie Breedlove was dead.

…

1 (Thirteen months earlier)

“The human brain functions for up to sixty seconds after decapitation,” Smartie Breedlove told the man in the dove-gray suit.

“That’s disturbing,” he said. “If it’s true.”

“It’s true,” she assured him. “During World War II, Pravda documented a soldier continuing a bayonet attack with his head hanging by a thread. Just like… like that.”

Smartie slid a pained glance toward the oddly angled body on the table.

Charma Nicole Bovet lay in an abstract tableau of blood and broken china, wearing a brief silk slip dress, no panties, and a punch bowl. A chilled drizzle descended through the jagged fissure Charma’s body had left in the glass roof of the Bonham Hotel’s dining solarium, and as moisture settled like dewdrops on the broken stems and bluebells of the decimated centerpiece, a soft, Charma-like aroma arose, causing Smartie’s breath to snag and form a small sob inside her chest.

If the sixty second rule held true for Charma—if her wide open eyes did trickle information to her shattered brain for one last minute after she quite literally crashed the Smith-Putzke wedding rehearsal dinner—Smartie hoped that those last flickering images were of roses.

“Do you need to sit down, Ms. Breedlove?” asked the man.

Smartie nodded, bottom lip trembling.

Firmly supporting her elbow, the man steered her toward a table in the corner and pulled out two chairs, setting them to face each other. Both of them went for the chair with the better view of the scene, but Smartie was faster, and the man didn’t seem surprised or dismayed.

In less time than it took to cross the room, Smartie had sized him up and caught an unmistakable whiff of ex-cop. Blend-into-the-woodwork gray suit. Thin Man tie. High mileage black shoes. His white shirt was clean, but not quite crisp; there was a melancholy sense of second day about it. A weathered leather notebook was stashed in his breast pocket instead of a handkerchief. He smelled pleasantly of precinct. The dark of a wooden desk drawer. Cool blue carbon paper. Black ink ribbon in an old-school typewriter. In his hand was a perfect white rose that had somehow survived the chaos.

Interesting, Smartie decided.

“Is Smartie Breedlove your given name?” he asked.

“Someone gave it to me.” She shrugged one shoulder.

“Why?”

“Elmore Leonard was taken.”

He smiled patiently.

“It’s because of the candies,” she said. “Those little sugar vertebrae.”

He offered his card. Just his name: MARTIN SHEPARD HARTIGATE, followed by a cell phone number.

“My friends call me Shep,” he smiled.

“Why are you tailing me, Mr. Hartigate?”

“Actually, I was tailing her.” Shep Hartigate thumbed a reverse hitchhike gesture back over his shoulder, indicating Charma. “I’m a private investigator for Salinger, Pringle, Fitch & Edloe.”

“Ah.”

No further explanation was needed. The law firm of SPF & E was well known in Houston for handling high profile divorce cases. Charma was a floozy savant married to a decrepit tycoon.

“You’re here to catch her cheating,” Smartie bristled. “To screw her with the pre-nup.”

“That was the plan,” said Hartigate, because well before Smartie had sized him up, he’d sized up Smartie and knew that trying to schmooze her would be a waste of time.

Her lively blue eyes were sharp and intuitive, despite a swimmy skim of tears. She was remarkably small in stature, barely at his shoulder even in her black stiletto boots, but she sat up straight in her chair in a way that engaged the room around her, an act of occupation. Dressed in jeans and a suede blazer over an easy V-necked shirt, she wore no makeup except a blaze of red lipstick. Something at the corners of her Clara Bow mouth gave Shep the odd feeling that he was entertaining her.

“No offense to your friend,” said Hartigate, “but she’s a D-list centerfold married to a wealthy man in his late seventies. Why tiptoe around it? His family is quite reasonably concerned.”

Smartie played with a renegade corkscrew of blond hair, tried to thread it behind her ear, but it immediately sprang loose, like birthday ribbon dragged across a scissor blade.

Shep Hartigate had helmet hair, Smartie observed: unmistakably mashed down on top, curled out little at the nape of the neck. A man who was willing to fly by the seat of his pants, but only with proper safety gear. This appealed to Smartie. She decided to use that for Smack Wilder’s current crush.

With his impeccable dove-gray suit, Thin Man tie and helmet hair, Tag Mason was a square-jawed, Hog-mounted rebel without a flaw, the kind of man who’d ride to Hell and back, but wore clean underwear just in case.

“Ms. Breedlove, how did you know Mrs. Bovet?”

“We were roommates.”

“When?”

“A long time ago.”

“In college or…” He paused for her to fill in the blank. “Someplace else?”

“The second one.”

“When did you last see Mrs. Bovet?”

“It’s been too long.” Smartie shook her head, and her eyes clouded. “We used to go out a lot, but then she went on the wagon and got married. We email. We play Words With Friends on Facebook. I call her up and say let’s do coffee, let’s do lunch, let’s pretend to walk the dog so we can watch the roofers climb up and down their ladders next door.” She shrugged her small-boned shoulders. “Seems like she’s been busy lately.”

“Did she confide in you about any troubles she was having?”

“D-list centerfold marries a wealthy man in his late seventies,” said Smartie. “What troubles could she possibly be having?”

“Can you think of any reason for her to jump off the balcony tonight?”

“I can think of a thousand reasons, Mr. Hartigate, but she didn’t jump. Don’t expect me to help you make it look like she did.”

“Miss Breedlove, I’m not trying to make it look like anything,” said Shep. “My task was to observe Mrs. Bovet, not to make judgments.”

“Tasked by whom? Belinda Bovet or her father?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“I don’t know, does it?”

“Not to me,” Shep said. “I’m just gathering information.”

“And what have you gathered?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

Tag would die a fiery death, Smartie decided. He would crash and burn. She flashed on the title Dead Sexy for Smack Wilder #12 and jotted that in her notebook.

“Ms. Breedlove, no one had a problem with this industrious young woman collecting what she earned should that horny old goat kick the bucket while still married to her, but she entered into a legal agreement with specific parameters. My job is to find out if she was in breach of that contract.”

“So without making any judgments, you’ve decided she was an unscrupulous opportunist.”

“Is there another kind of opportunist?”

“Yes. Lots of kinds,” Smartie exclaimed. “Jesus rutabagas. I know of a Baptist girl who married a rabbi when she was nineteen. A forty-nine-year-old rabbi marries a teenage girl, Southern Baptist born and born again every summer at Bible camp. It’s not a bit unreasonable to draw whatever conclusions you might, but maybe the Baptist girl genuinely loved that rabbi. Maybe he understood her in a way other people didn’t. Maybe he thought she was worth something, and it had nothing to do with his freckle fetish. You don’t know the backstory. And I’m here to tell you, backstory is everything.”

“And what’s the illuminating backstory on Mrs. Bovet?” asked Shep.

“She was an unscrupulous opportunist.” Smartie unzipped her cavernous handbag. “Aren’t we all? Don’t we all gravitate toward certain people because of what they do for us? How they make us feel?”

“So she married him for love, but she loved him for money.”

“It’s not that simple. People aren’t always what you think. People are a mystery.”

Rummaging the bag, she laid one item after another on the brocade table runner. Lipstick, iPhone, scribbled notes. Shep made a one-eyed inventory as she excavated a pack of cigarettes and a little yellow lighter.

“Charma saw an opportunity to live a big life, and she worked it, you bet,” said Smartie, “but she genuinely adored that horny old goat. There’s not a thing in the world she wouldn’t do for him, and let me tell you, for a man his age…” She put her hand on Shep’s arm and whispered, “He was remarkably spry.”

“You think he was satisfied with the situation then?”

“Satisfied? He was sated. He was smitten. He was gelatinous in love with her,” said Smartie. “They play this little game. When he gets off his flight, she sends him a text message: Catch me if you can. Then she sends him little clues, and he has to chase all over the city, buying lacy undies, chocolates, jewelry, champagne—like a scavenger hunt—getting closer and closer until he finally finds her, and then they make crazy perverse love. Does that sound like a woman who was about to kill herself? Does that sound like a man who wanted a divorce?”

Tucking a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, she hitched the lighter and watched it flicker for a moment before she pulled at the flame.

“It had to be Belinda,” she said, but Shep didn’t get the impression she was still talking to him. “She gets rid of Charma. Has the old man declared incompetent. Gets power of attorney. Gets everything. Am I right?”

Nothing in Shep’s stoic expression confirmed or denied.

“You know what’s ironic?” Smartie set her chin in her hand and sighed a churlish blue wisp of smoke. “The whole Charma thing, it was all about the superficial. T and A. All anybody saw was the dumb little bunny. But I’ve never known anyone who was more willing to look beyond the superficial in other people. She actually had this weirdly nerdy side. She had a thing for guys who were smarter than they were decorative, and whatever you think about Otis Bovet, a person doesn’t get that rich without being pretty dang smart.”

“Too smart to get taken in by a gold digger?”

“I’m telling you, they genuinely loved each other.” Looking past Shep’s shoulder at the swarm of worker bees from the coroner’s office, Smartie blinked back tears again. “Charma was a sexpot and a thrill-seeker and a party girl and a gold digger and everything else the tabloids said about her. But beyond all that, Charma was a Hoss.”

“A Hoss?”

“Like the big fat guy on Bonanza. A great big sweetheart, but a badass when needed. That was Charma. Mr. Bovet has a fourteen-year-old grandson with Down’s Syndrome. Marco. Belinda’s kid. Charma was great with him. She’d take him to play laser tag and paintball. She’d talk to him, while Belinda and everybody else managed him and schlepped him around like a retarded sack of potatoes. I suppose she understood what it felt like to be disregarded on principle.”

Shep glanced at his watch and pushed the notebook back into his pocket.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Breedlove.”

Smartie dragged on her cigarette without answering. Shep got up to leave, but a police officer standing guard at the yellow caution tape slanted a flat-handed traffic cop gesture in Smartie’s direction.

“Ma’am, you can’t smoke in here,” she said. “And where do you think you’re going, Hartigate? I told you, we need a statement from you.”

“Claire, give me a break. I need to get home.”

Smartie saw a definite shadow pass through the sea green part of the officer’s eyes. Above the stiffly pressed collar of her uniform, her mouth went narrow and snappish.

“I don’t care how short your leash is, Hartigate,” she said, one hand on the butt of her service revolver. “Have a seat.”

“Claire.”

“Officer O’Connell,” she corrected him. “Sit your ass down, Hartigate.”

Shep sighed and sat. As Officer O’Connell sauntered down the tapeline, warning off the milling paparazzi, Smartie snubbed out her cigarette on a saucer and said, “Interesting.”

“Sit your ass down, Mason,” snapped the lady in blue.

There was enough chemistry between them to pickle a meth lab. This infidelity dick was a study in “takes one to know one,” savvy to every trick in the Cheater’s Handbook because he wrote it.  

“Was Charma cheating?” Smartie asked. “Was she having an affair?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss it,” said Shep.

“Okay, then blink once for yes, twice for no.”

Shep folded his arms, and Smartie leaned in, scrutinizing his face.

“Was that the yes she was cheating blink?” she asked. “Or a normal blinking your eyes blink?”

“That was the ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss it’ blink.”

“She didn’t jump, Mr. Hartigate. I don’t know what happened, but I know that.”

“The police have been up to her room. They saw no sign of foul play.”

“Did they see any sign of fair play?” Smartie dismissed that with a flip of her hand. “Give me ten minutes and a martini, I’ll give you six fully-peopled scenarios in which a woman goes unwillingly off a balcony leaving nary a hint of foul play.”

“I’m sure you could, Ms. Breedlove, but courts don’t deal in pulp fiction scenarios,” said Shep, and he had to rub his eyes because now that she’d made him aware of it, he felt himself batting his lashes like a debutante. “Courts deal in evidence, and in this case, there isn’t any.”

“Did you leave any evidence, Mr. Hartigate?” Smartie asked tartly. “When you were two-timing your wife with Officer Claire?”

Shep rocked back a bit in his chair. He couldn’t say “How did you know?” because there was suddenly a lump in his throat, a white hot coal of sadness and guilt that lurked below his Adam’s apple almost all the time these days.

“Backstory is not everything,” he mumbled, carefully collecting the last undamaged rose, trying to keep his face in play as he walked stiffly toward the revolving door, ignoring Claire O’Connell’s voice over his shoulder.

“Hartigate,” she warned. “Sit down, or I will remember that you didn’t.”

Shep didn’t doubt she meant it, and he knew for a fact that Claire O’Connell had a scalpel-sharp memory. He pushed through the door anyway, and Claire barreled onto the sidewalk after him.

“Hartigate!”

“What?” Shep wheeled and gripped her shoulders. “What else do you want from me, Claire?”

She looked up at him and said, “Nothing.”

Beyond a slight, momentary quiver of her chin, the expression on her face was utterly flat and unfathomable. Shep let go of her, and they stood in the halogen-lit drizzle.

“Do they still talk the same shit about me downtown?” he asked.

“Now and then.”

“Don’t stick up for me.”

“Don’t worry.”

He nodded and walked away.

Smartie Breedlove stood at the window and watched him go. As Shep Hartigate disappeared down the teeming street, the desire for a cigarette needled up her spine, along with the need for a drink, the need to know. Curiosity consumed her. She needed to see what Charma saw on the way down: the face of the person who’d pushed her, the rapidly receding stars, the fleeting lights of the city, the moment of truth.

…

2

The half-lit kitchen was fragrant with cinnamon toast and coffee when Shep came in. He crept up the back stairs to the bedroom where Janny was sound asleep, her body curved in a protective fortress between the edge of the bed and the tiny figure in footy pajamas. She stirred only slightly when Shep kissed her lips and laid the filched white rose on the pillow beside her, but the baby puckered into the fiercely hiccuppy beginnings of a squall. Shep took him up, brushing his mouth against his impeccably soft crown.

“Shhhh, Charlie,” he crooned. “Put a cork in it, Tonto.”

Charlie moved his drooly mouth against Shep’s neck, bunching a bit of Shep’s shirt in a fierce little fist.

“We’re okay,” Shep whispered in the baby’s tiny seashell ear. “We can do this.”

Charlie tensed his little Buddha belly, brayed like a mule, and noisily filled his diaper.

“Whoa,” Shep recoiled. “Let’s go see mommy.”

Like Riverdance—feet moving fast while the upper body stays stone frozen—Shep supported Charlie’s hatchling neck as he hurried down the hall.

“Libby?” He rapped softly on the bathroom door. “Candygram.”

There was a slosh of bathwater, creak of the linen closet door, and a moment of whatever Shep didn’t care to imagine his little sister doing before Libby opened the door, piling a towel on top of her head. He proffered her malodorous cub at arm’s length.

“Happy Mother’s Day.”

“Wheesh. Stinky McGee,” Libby puffed a gentle raspberry against Charlie’s tiny palm. “How’s your day, big bro?”

“Long. Strange. How’s Janny?” asked Shep.

“Hypoxic. BP’s very low. She’s been asking for you.”

“Sorry. I had a thing I had to look into.”

“We’re at that place now, Shep.” Libby squeezed his hand with the loving but practiced candor of a registered nurse. “The hospice doc is fairly certain it’ll be tonight.”

“Okay.” He nodded and repeated it woodenly. “Okay.”

“Don’t do the emotional manhole cover, all right? She needs you to be with her. It’s time for you to start your family leave.”

“Tell her I’ll be in after I make the call.”

Libby kissed his cheek and took Charlie to her encampment in the guest room. Despite the lousy timing (or perhaps it was perfect timing because she was still on maternity leave from her job in the ER at St. Luke’s) she’d arrived like a Freon injection precisely at the moment when Shep had begun to feel utterly overwhelmed by Janny’s care.

The vocabulary alone was pulverizing. Cardiomyopathy. Idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis. Atrial fibrillation. Paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea.

Early on, Janny had mined the experience for material, as she did everything about their life. Using her illness as a storyline in Janny’s World, her syndicated comic strip, was a great opportunity to educate women about heart health. But after a few months, doctors had determined that even if a heart became available, Janny was no longer a viable candidate to receive it. She was removed from the transplant list, and the final months of Janny’s World served as a vehicle for thinly veiled thanks, farewells, and F-yous to a long list of people, including the middle school art teacher who’d dismissed her ambitions and the internist who’d dismissed early signs of the viral infection that eventually pulled the plug on Janny’s heart.

As each breath became a multi-phased project—formation of intention, execution of effort, aftermath of complete exhaustion—Janny worked diligently to finish the final week of Janny’s World to run after her death. Many of her readers had been dedicated to the comic strip through its ten years in syndication, and she felt strongly that they deserved a resolution to the story.

Fans felt like they knew Janny and “Skip,” comic Janny’s galumphing high school boyfriend, who graduated to galumphing college fiancé and eventually became her galumphing traffic cop husband. Over the years, Skip had been portrayed with increasing paunch and decreasing virility. Skip drank. Skip didn’t get comic Janny’s jokes. Skip, in fact, was the joke most of the time, especially on Sundays, when his bulbous nose was scuffed with a rosy glow and his five o’clock shadow was shaded reddish gold.

Back in the day, when Shep was still HPD and Claire O’Connell was his partner, Claire had found the whole Skip thing hilarious. But the teasing turned bitter after he ended up in bed with her, and the affair devolved to a ball-hammering, bullet-sweating powder keg. Claire pointed to Janny’s World as evidence that Shep’s wife didn’t understand him. The opposite was true. Skip was the man Shep couldn’t hide from Janny. The jerk who failed and drank and didn’t appreciate her but always came galumphing home.

Despite the not insubstantial ups and downs of their marriage, he loved her with a depth of feeling that threatened to buckle his knees at times. He had to stop, lean on a wall, teeth clenched against the void that had already begun to settle over him. She hadn’t eaten anything for several days now, and her Living Will precluded the insertion of a feeding tube or ventilation.

Shep felt the quiet house crumbling around him, the bricks and windows and two-by-fours collapsing into each other. The life he and Janny had made together. It was all slipping away now. They’d put all their financial resources into keeping her alive. Without Janny’s income, the house was unsustainable. Without Janny’s heart, Shep saw his own heart similarly foreclosed.

He fished his iPhone from his pocket, and Suri Fitch answered on the second ring, her clipped, birdlike accent equal parts India and Oxford.

“Mr. Hartigate. Where are you? I’m at the hotel to make a statement to the press. I expected you to be here.”

“Sorry. It’s Janny.” Shep cleared his throat. “They’re telling me this is it.”

“Oh, God. Shep, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” Shep shook his head, half expecting it to rattle like a tackle box. “I hate to bail on you in the middle of this Bovet thing. I’ll upload my notes and photos with the previous surveillance items for Barth and get back on task next week. I might need ten days.”

“Upload the products of surveillance and take your family leave,” said Suri. “There’s nothing else you need to do on the case.”

“Suri, there’s a lot of unresolved questions here.”

“It’s as resolved as it needs to be. The coroner’s ruled it a suicide.”

“Already? How is that even possible?”

“Because it’s obvious. Particularly in light of the damaging information you brought us last week.”

“I told you, something is off with that. I’m not buying—”

“Shep.” She stopped him gently but firmly. “It’s not your concern. Mrs. Bovet is dead, which renders the property issues moot. My job now is to protect our client from the media. Your job is to be with your wife. Your contract allows for eight weeks bereavement leave. I don’t expect to see you here one day sooner.”

“If I sit in this house for eight weeks, I’ll be a worse basket case than I am now.”

“Then go somewhere,” Suri said. “Clear your mind. Do what you have to do, then go to India. Take the train from Chennai to Pondicherry. I could arrange for you to stay with friends.”

They both knew it wasn’t something he would do, but there was kindness in the offer and comfort in the tilted melody of her voice.

“Shep, I had a word with the partners about your wife’s expenses. They’ve agreed to cover a hundred thousand, which I’ve had deposited to you through payroll. I persuaded the insurance company to relent and cover the rest, so you’ll be reimbursed for the hundred grand you already kicked in. Consider the matter resolved.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Shep found it a bit easier to breathe with that particular cinderblock lifted from the back of his neck. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are. I know you went outside the box for this, for the specialists, getting Janny moved up on the transplant list.”

“I only wish it could have made a difference. God, Shep, I’m so bloody sorry.”

“Thank you, Suri. During this whole process, you’ve been a Hoss.”

“Pardon?”

“A good friend. But a badass when needed.”

“Well. In that spirit, I forbid you to show your face in this office for eight weeks.”

Suri clicked off without saying goodbye, which is what Suri did when she deemed a conversation over. Shep folded the phone back into his pocket, went up to the bedroom and lay down next to Janny.

“Hey, beautiful.”

“Hey,” she smiled. “Hand me the notebook. I thought of a few more items.”

“Janny. Enough,” said Shep, but she shot him a look, and he took up the blue spiral notebook in which she’d been recording basic instructions and reminders. Household, financial and personal issues were separated by tabs.

“Motorcycle helmet,” she said with some difficulty. “Promise to keep wearing the helmet.”

“I promise,” he said, though they both knew he wouldn’t.

“Don’t revert to beer and Tex Mex like you do when I’m out of town. And don’t look at porn, Shep. It’s so unseemly.”

“Damn straight,” said Shep, pulling her into the crook of his arm. “It’s the pirate’s life for me now. One big pay-per-view, leave-the-seat-up stag party, fueled by beer and Tex Mex.”

“Shep?” Janny wove her fingers through his hair and turned his face toward hers. “Is there anything you need to tell me before I go?”

Shep swallowed, his heart hammering hard. Salvation was at hand; he could see it in her face. This was his opportunity to tell the truth. Janny would forgive him, and the lies that weighed him down would evaporate off his back.

“You need to know… Janny… I have always loved you. Even during the bad times. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

It was too late to even wonder if it was too late. Shep knew he’d be left with a rotting hole in his soul, but he wasn’t about to unburden himself at her expense.

Janny smiled and with substantial effort took in her last insubstantial sip of air.

…

Continued….

Click on the title below to download the entire book and keep reading

Joni Rodgers’ Kill Smartie Breedlove (A Mystery) >>>>