Read Online Stupid and Contagious by Caprice Crane - Free Book Online Page B

little bril iances, but I can tackle only one invention at a time. More on the Catch-It Cone later.
    “Good stuff. I’m sure it’l be a smash. Though you can always cross over to the dark side. Be the Sundance to my Butch.”
    “Why does that sound dirty?”
    “It might if we were lesbians,” he says. “I could see the correlation there. However, today we are not.
    Therefore, it is not dirty.”
    “I stand corrected,” I say. Zach and I think alike. We take turns being the straight man. (There has to be a better way to say that.) It’s only fair. That was a layup.
    “How’s the quest for the perfect crime today?”
    “Not so loud,” he says. “It’s not a quest. I’m not searching for the Holy Grail. Wel . . . I guess metaphorical y I am, but it’s not like that. I’m not out there searching in the hope of one day finding the perfect crime tucked away in the attic of some old lady who forgot she hid it there when the Alzheimer’s kicked in.” He takes a sip of his Mojito. “This is years of thought. Planning. Precision. And I’m almost there, my friend. Almost there.”
    “That would have had the desired effect,” I say, “had you not stopped to delicately take a sip of your fruity little drink.”
    “Fuck you,” he says. Then he leans close. “Okay, try this one: You kil a farmer’s wife. Then just before harvest time . . . set her out in a wheat field on one of those huge corporate farms, covered in straw . . . and have one of those enormous combines take care of her. Chopped up in a mil ion pieces, and served up on tables across this great land of ours. Not a chance of IDing the body.”

    I look at him quizzical y, then down at the bread basket. “That’s just a means—very unsettling, I might add—to dispose of a body,” I say. “Why would you kil the farmer’s wife? What’s the motive?”
    “Okay, okay,” Zach says. “You get a gig as a butler to a wealthy couple. After ten or fifteen years they total y trust you. You’ve got access to everything. So you pul off an inside job. Snare al the jewels . . . al the art . . . al the col ectibles—”
    “But wouldn’t you be an obvious suspect?” I ask.
    “That’s the perfect part,” he says. “You stay on the gig for another ten or fifteen years to avoid suspicion.”
    “So when do you get to enjoy the fruits of the heist?”
    I ask.
    “I said I worked out the perfect crime. Not the perfect getaway.” And he slumps back down in his chair.
    “How are the ladies?” I say, broaching another great crime—i.e., his charmed love life.
    “Beatin’ ’em off with a stick. And you? Heard from Psycho Sarah?”
    “Yes, actual y. She was kind enough to send me my toothbrush and a note requesting I die nineteen times.
    And then actual y wrote ‘cal me’ after she signed her name.”
    “In blood?”
    “No,” I say. “Not this time.”
    “Damn.”
    “Oh, and get this. My nutty new neighbor from hel delivered the letter to me . . . opened . . . and commented on it.”
    “She hot?” he asks, with a raised eyebrow and a grin that veers dangerously close to the outskirts of juvenile city.
    “No. Kinda.”
    “Knew it.” He laughs, which annoys me.
    “How?”

    “Because she is your ‘nutty’ new neighbor from hel as opposed to your ‘psycho’ new neighbor,” he informs. “Nutty implies wacky, quirky, Kate Hudson meets Drew Barrymore meets Christina Applegate meets—”
    “No, no, no. She’s psycho. She is. I was just being polite.”
    “I gotta meet her,” he says, and as he says “gotta,”
    his head jerks forward like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. “Gotta.”
    “Real y, you don’t.”
    “One of us needs to.”
    “I already have, and it was as unpleasant as could possibly be. I have to live next to this girl. So forget it.”
    “Fine.”
    “Good,” I say. But something tel s me that everything is not good. I can stil hear the wheels turning in his head. If I start counting backwards I doubt I’l get to