“Poor thing is shaking!” Danni said.
“But he’s okay?” Quinn asked.
“Seems to be fine. I’ll make sure he has water and food,” Danni said. Holding the cat, she walked into the kitchen.
“Strange,” Quinn called.
“What’s strange?” Danni asked.
He walked to the hallway, into the kitchen, into the one small downstairs bedroom, and then into the bathroom—all through the downstairs.
“Quinn?” Danni asked.
“Hang on,” he said.
He ran up the stairs and opened the doors to the three bedrooms there, the bathroom, back into the bedrooms, and into every closet.
He ran back down to Danni, frowning.
“Quinn?” she said again.
“I don’t see the doll either,” he told her. “It isn’t anywhere.”
“Maybe someone else—”
“No, no—the police locked the place tight when Kathy was taken to the hospital. Colby is friends with the police chief—he assured him that was true.”
“Then what?” Danni asked. “The zombie-nun walked out?”
Walked out…and headed up the island chain for Marathon…and Kathy Kennedy?
Chapter 2
David Gray crumpled his beer can in his hand and eyed the stacked sarcophagi in front of him. Key Westerners were weird, he thought. They couldn’t just make mausoleums—they just stacked people on top of people in big blocks—stone or cement or whatever. Some of the graves were in the ground, some were in strange things—like the hump of a brick tomb—or whatever—down the row, and some were stacked one on top of the other like file cabinets.
It was dark, and he could barely make out the shapes of things, but this was a good enough place to sleep. Some jock-ass frat boys or bachelor party jerks had tried to stay in for the night, boasting about how cool they were, but the cops had come by and kicked them out. Davy laid low to the ground behind the big red brick tomb after he’d hopped the fence, of course, to get in himself. And now, the drunken buffoon party boys were gone; no one bothered him here.
He stayed low and drank his beer and thought about what a god-awful place this had turned out to be—for him, at least. Everybody knew everybody here—even the damned Eastern-Europeans who worked in the frigging shops, the Russians, Hungarians, Albanians, and what not. Pretty people, most of them—except for his bear-hairy ex-boss. They barely knew English—but they all knew that he’d been fired from three clubs for drugs and alcohol. “I mean what?” He asked a decaying plaster angel at his side. “It’s Key West—a pile of buzzed-out frat boys or giggling girls running around someone in a cheap wedding veil sloshed out of their minds! You serve them better if you’re a little feeling-fine yourself, you know?”
He wasn’t even sure it was his habit of imbibing a bit before work that had gotten him fired from the last restaurant. It was probably because big-hairy-beefy guy had been jealous. The problem, a hotter-than hell Polish girl, had been the boss’s quasi girlfriend. She hated his hairy ass and liked Davy. That’s what had done it.
He popped open another beer and noted that the six-pack of cheap beer he’d managed to buy on a major sale was going down—down, down. Only a few left. That was all right; he’d sleep better for the beer and in the morning, try to figure out what he was going to do with his life. In truth, he loved Key West and the quirkiness of it. The thought made him grin—he actually even loved the cemetery. There was a stone in the row of tombs or mausoleums or whatever that read, “I told you I was sick.” Yep, now, there was someone who told the truth!
He leaned back. He was by one of the oldest tombstones. He wondered if anyone was really beneath it—supposedly some dude who had died in the 1850s. But—cool story, and Key West had plenty of cool stories!—a hurricane had ripped up graves in the middle of the 1800s and bodies had come washing down Duval Street. That’s when they had put the cemetery here—highest point on the island, though, hell, you could have fooled him. It wasn’t that high.
He squashed his beer can and almost threw it across the grass and stones. But, he didn’t. He set it with the collection at his side and almost laughed aloud at himself. Boozing loser that he might be, he didn’t litter in a cemetery.
He suddenly heard laughter and a bunch of tittering. The jock-ass jerk boys were back. They hopped the fence. There were four of them and he could hear them talking to one another.
“Jamesy, you gotta go back for that snooty bitch at the bar—tell her who your daddy is! Bet she’ll be all over you, splayed out on a bed with a big ‘come on in’ sign set up on her thighs!” One of them said.