Read Online Carcass Trade by Noreen Ayres - Free Book Online Page B

would that do?”
    â€œI just thought . . . I don’t know. We could get coffee, something.”
    â€œI don’t need taking care of. I need answers.”
    â€œYou’re sure I can’t come over?”
    â€œGo to bed, Joe.”
    â€œâ€˜American Gladiators’ is on. We could watch together. They’ve got new games.”
    I said, crankily, “They keep changing the male gladiators. I liked that older black man, what was his name?”
    â€œI know who you mean, but I don’t remember.”
    â€œAll those women have implants, you know.” Implants. I said it.
    â€œWhatever they’ve got, it’s all right by me.”
    â€œYou like all those muscles? You like that look?”
    â€œWhatever they’ve got, it’s all right with me. What about tomorrow?”
    â€œI have to do stuff.”
    â€œSo do I. But you’re coming here for dinner.”
    â€œI am?”
    â€œThat’s better. Glad you agree.”
    Early Sunday I phoned the morgue. I learned that a deputy coroner had reached Miranda Robertson’s physician husband to ask if he was missing a wife.
    Miranda was on vacation in Italy, Dr. Robertson said, and, no, he didn’t know who would have been driving her car. His wife was in the habit of loaning her car to people, even the help.
    Afterward, I left a message on Nathan’s answering machine repeating all this and saying I’d let him know the minute I knew anything else. The rest of the day I did bills and laundry, read the paper, and at dusk took my neighbor’s dog, Farmer, for a run. Someone told me there’s a fictional P.I. from Chicago who takes her landlord’s dog for runs. Mystery loves company.
    Later, showering, I genuinely looked forward to the evening with Joe. While dressing, I heard on the radio an old song called “Me and Mrs. Jones.” It was a pain-racked tune about infidelity. My brother’s pained face came to mind, and then his calmer face, the way he looked when the girl carpenter on the island gave him the long once-over.
    I put on a green silk shirt, green jeans, gold bracelet and earrings, and a touch of one of those expensive perfumes you get as a free sample while fleeing through the makeup section of a department store. A song by Nat King Cole came on, one of romance with fewer complications than the one with Mrs. Jones.
    When I got to Joe’s, he had wine waiting. He fed me grilled shrimp in lemon sauce, nutty rice, tangerine salad, and a chocolate truffle, the last an after-dinner aphrodisiac, he said. My kind of man.

8
    Joe told me about a nasty one off Ortega Highway in South County. It was Monday morning and I was in my car and Joe in his, but he was sitting in the Cleveland National Forest and I was on the freeway headed back to the lab from a scene in Laguna Hills, a meth death easy to conclude. “I phoned your boss and requested you,” Joe said, “because I know you were down this way.”
    â€œYou keep pretty good tabs on me.”
    â€œAbsolutely.”
    I thought about the scene I’d just left. Deputies had staged an early-morning raid on a modest stucco house off Moulton Parkway and Alicia that fronted for a speed lab. They seized firearms, cash, cars, and enough methamphetamine oil to make forty pounds of crank, the addict’s answer to fast food, worth half a million dollars.
    Worse news was that one of the amateur chemists took a breakfast snort of crystal intended to last all day. Instead of the usual euphoria and excitation of the brain, the magic diet pill shorted out her cardiac circuits and she keeled over onto the flagstone patio while still in her robe and nightie. It was not clear how long she’d lain there while her brother and husband were cooking up in the lab, but the dog was looking depressed and soulful under a canopy of trumpet vine as though he’d already surmised there’d be no ball today.
    In a bedroom