The Dirt on Ninth Grave by Darynda Jones

I’d been waiting for four weeks, three days, seventeen hours, and twelve minutes. But if I were married, where was my husband? Why had he not come for me? Thankfully the clothes and the wedding ring did not. I had nothing but the clothes on my back, a honking big diamond on my ring finger, and a blinding headache. As fucked up as it sounded, they were all I had.Ī little over a month ago, I woke up in an alley, soaked to the marrow of my bones with freezing rain pelting my face and no memory of who I was. Whenever one walked into the café I felt a little less lost, a little less broken, as though family had come to visit. And hygiene, but only when I woke up late and was faced with the heart-wrenching decision of either making a cup of the key to life itself or taking a shower. “Thanks, Janey.” He gave me a saucy wink and doctored his coffee, an elixir I’d grown to love more than air. I pulled three creamers out of my apron pocket where I stashed them, mostly because keeping creamers in my jeans pocket never ended well.

Thanks to a hundred-foot drop and an unfortunate placement of rebar, I had another image to add to my things-I-can-never-unsee collection. In my own defense, the first dead guy I saw had fallen to his death at a construction site in Kalamazoo. P would scream like a twelve-year-old girl and lock himself in a bathroom. He was a tough-as-nails, real-life superhero, and I couldn’t picture any situation in which Mr. More depravity and desperation and degradation.

I admired the rascally old man, a decorated war veteran and retired NYPD detective. I screamed like a twelve-year-old girl and locked myself in the bathroom. He could react the way I did the first time I saw a walking corpse a little over a month ago. It wasn’t every day a dead stripper accosted one of my regulars, but telling Mr. Pettigrew, about the dead stripper sitting next to him. I stood beside the booth and poured coffee into a beige cup that had the words FIRELIGHT GRILL written across it, wondering if I should tell my customer, Mr. Remember, it’s never too late to give LSD a shot.

The Dirt on Ninth Grave by Darynda Jones