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A Mystery
by Minerva Koenig
"Helping the feds shut down that bunch of Ladders didn't buy me anything?"
She fixed her wise brown eyes on me. "Yeah, it bought you this chance. Don't fuck it up."
Before I could reply, she caught sight of her watch and got up, gulping her coffee. "I gotta go."
"Wait a minute," I said as she headed for the door. "How am I supposed to get downtown?"
"You can walk it in half an hour," she threw over her shoulder. "Make sure and give yourself enough time."
I waited until she was out of visual range to flip her the bird. Then I got up and poured out the coffee. I hate that shit.
IV
Around noon, I put my sneakers back on, wishing I had something a little nicer to wear. Hearing myself think that told me I was more stressed out than I'd realized. I've always been a pretty spectacular failure at femininity, what with the fat thing, the brain that won't shut up, and the obsession with machines and buildings; I'd successfully thrown in the towel after my torture-chamber puberty, and discovered that hauling plywood and Sheetrock instead of a purse didn't change anything except the way other people treated me. I only ever worry about how I look anymore when something else is bothering me. Right now, that included just about everything on the planet.
Chapped at having to think about it, I considered what to do with my hair. I'd worn it short and dyed dark since bailing out of Tucson for California after high school, but the feds had advised me to change my appearance as much as possible after going into protection, so I'd been letting it grow. It was past my shoulders now, an unruly pain in the ass with sprigs of gray silvering up its natural dead-grass color. I didn't mind the way it looked, but in this heat it was kind of like wearing a fur coat in hell, and putting it up required the kind of decision making I'd cut it off to avoid. I finally just twisted it up on the back of my head and clipped it there. It didn't exactly scream professionalism, but maybe failing my job interview would make it easier to talk some vocational sense into the Amazon.
On my way out, Jesse Reed popped into my memory, and I checked the stone foundation for basement windows. Sure enough, there they were, which I hadn't expected. Every now and then I'd come across a basement in Bakersfield, but they were rare because of the shallow frost depth, and I couldn't imagine that it got much colder here. I stopped to examine the house more closely. It was two stories with a steeply pitched roofVictorian, if you held a gun to my headeasily a hundred years old or more. It was in pretty good shape, but needed a new roof and some repointing on the foundation masonry and chimneys. Looking at it made my hammer hand itch.
At the end of the driveway, I paused under a solitary tree to absorb some shade. Flat landscape covered in yellow grass spread almost treeless to that weird, low horizon in all directions, knuckling under to a sky so bright that it was almost white. The few buildings that dared stand up under it did so timidly, keeping low to the ground and far away from their neighbors. I could smell cows, but didn't see any. Up the road to my right, a sunburned Cadillac DeVille slanted off the pavement, bumper-deep in the weeds. To the left, toward town, the white clapboard church where we'd turned the night before stood to one side of a blockwide cemetery surrounded by a fence of heavy black chain slung between low granite piers. It seemed miles away.
I started walking along the gravel shoulder, wondering if the Amazon had warned my prospective employer that I'd be on foot, overdressed, and underqualified. Resentment stung the back of my throat again. I knew my way around a saloon, but not so well that you'd want to pay me for it. I'm good at reading people, and when Joe and Old Pete, his dad, had a buyer they weren't sure about, they'd stick me behind the bar so that I could observe on the down low. I'm not psychic or anythingjust better than average at reading the unconscious, nonverbal information that every human being on earth throws out. It's a nice skill to have, but probably not worth its weight in actual bartending experience.
Excerpted from Nine Days by Minerva Koenig. Copyright © 2014 by Minerva Koenig. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Minotaur. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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