Killer Calories

Scrounging around in the refrigerator, Savannah found something that raised her spirits: a chocolate-chip, double-fudge muffin with cream cheese filling. She zapped a cup of stale coffee in the microwave and laced it with Bailey's and Half & Half.

Ah, breakfast.

After sinking into the comfort of her favorite chair, Savannah savored the anticipation of the chocolate cream cheese. But first there was the mail to deal with. Specifically an oversized beige envelope that had no postage or even a return address. But it was sealed, very well, with several passes of cellophane tape.

Savannah ripped open the envelope. Green. At first, that was all she could see. The envelope was stuffed with cash.

On the bottom of the pile was a small note, the same beige stationery as the envelope. On it were a few typed words:
Dear Ms. Reid, I have reason to believe that Kat Valentina was murdered. I would like you to prove this. If you do, there will be more where this came from. Please consider this money a retainer for your services. Begin working right away and I'll be in touch.

Murdered?
The word shot through Savannah's brain, verifying what some part of her had known all along. That was why she had been uneasy hearing of Jennifer Liu's “accidental” ruling. For some reason that was impossible to explain, Savannah knew that Kat Valentina had been a victim of homicide, not just her own carelessness.

And, apparently, whoever had left this in her mailbox knew it, too.

 

 

JUST DESSERTS
BITTER SWEETS
KILLER CALORIES
COOKED GOOSE
SUGAR AND SPITE
SOUR GRAPES
PEACHES AND SCREAMS
DEATH BY CHOCOLATE
CEREAL KILLER
MURDER A LA MODE
CORPSE SUZETTE
FAT FREE AND FATAL
POISONED TARTS
A BODY TO DIE FOR
WICKED CRAVING
A DECADENT WAY TO DIE
BURIED IN BUTTERCREAM
KILLER HONEYMOON
KILLER PHYSIQUE

 

 

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

G. A. McK
EVETT

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

 

 

The author would like to acknowledge the following:

 

Liza Jacobs—for the French stuff
David Jacobs—for the legal stuff
Dr. Ronald L. O'Halloran—for the medical/forensic stuff
Gwendolynn Massie—for the frog joke

 

Thanks, guys. I couldn't have done it without you.

“
F
our-inch high heels should only be worn by a woman who's lying on her back,” Savannah mumbled into the tiny microphone that was taped to her left breast, just below the lace edge of the ridiculous red, sequined bustier. The pointed toe of her accursed shoe caught in a sidewalk crack, and she had to perform a quick Highland jig to keep her balance.

“Hey, nobody said it was easy on the stroll,” replied a gravelly male voice from the miniearphone stuck in her ear. “They don't call them ‘working girls' for nothing.”

She glanced across the street at the pseudowino sprawled on the park bench and stuck out her tongue at him. It wasn't quite daylight, and she knew he couldn't see her, so the satisfaction was marginal at best.

“Working girls
get paid,” she reminded him in a down-in-Dixie drawl that was soft as a lilac-scented Southern night. “And as I recall, Dirk, this is a freebie.”

“A favor to an old friend,” the wino replied.

“You got the ‘old' part right. Why didn't you ask someone who's still a real cop to help you out with this?”

“Mike and Jake look horrible in drag. They couldn't pick up a sand flea at a beach party. Besides, you and me ran this scam a hundred times when we were partners. What's the big deal?”

“I was on San Carmelita's Police Department payroll then. Now I'm a private investigator with—”

“With nothing better to do and nobody better to do it with. Otherwise, you wouldn't be out here at five o'clock in the morning with me, strutting your stuff with that Georgia peach waggle of yours.”

“Why, sugar ...” With her hand on her hip, she struck a pose and giggled. “... you like my waggle?”

“Savannah, honey, I love your waggle. But right now I'd rather you waggle your butt than your tongue. It could go down anytime now.”

Savannah scanned the nearly deserted downtown street of San Carmelita. So far, so good. Nothing stirred but a couple of palm trees, rustling in the predawn ocean breeze. Only one shop was open at this hour on Lester Street in the quaint, Southern California town—Andy's Adult Bookstore.

Dirk had received a tip that the porn shop was going to be the fifth in a string of downtown, late-night business robberies. The small convenience store two blocks over had been hit, as had the open'til-two service station on Lester and a couple of bars. Andy was open all night; it was his turn by default.

Lonely for a bit of Savannah's verbal abuse, Dirk occasionally invited her to accompany him on a late-night stakeout. It wasn't exactly S.C.P.D. policy. But Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter lived to snoop, and he had enough dirt on the “suits” to bend the rules from time to time and get away with it.

And Savannah found it difficult to refuse him anything. For five years he had been her partner. Even when she had been ousted from the department, he had risked his own career and defended her. But his most endearing quality was that in all that time he had never noticed that her “waggle” had widened. And if he had observed her increase from a petite size seven to a somewhat-overly-voluptuous fourteen, he hadn't mentioned it. Now
that
was Savannah's idea of a true gentleman.

The door to Andy's opened, and a customer emerged, a guy in his mid-thirties, wearing a city sewer worker's uniform and a sappy, sated grin on his face. Apparently he had slugged a couple of tokens into one of Andy's peep booths. Nothing like getting the day off to a jump start.

Heading her way down the sidewalk, he spotted her, and his smile broadened as he gave her a thorough once-over. “Hey, lookin' good,” he said as they met. “Wanna date?”

Great. This was just what she needed. A first-thing-in-the-morning, two-time Charlie. “Get lost,” she told him, and kept walking.

He followed. “Ah, come on ... that's what you're standin' out here for.”

“You're not my type,” she said.

She heard Dirk snicker in the earphone. He'd pay later.

The guy took a step toward her and grabbed her forearm. “I got money, baby,” he said. “That makes me your type.”

With one twist of her wrist, she broke his grip, grabbed his pinkie, and bent it backward. She heard and felt something crack. He let out a yelp.

“I said get lost, perv,” she told him.

Looking down, she saw the glimmer of a wedding ring on the finger next to the one she had just mangled. “What did you do, tell the wife you were going to work at the sewer plant a little early? Is she still back at home in bed snuggled up with the kiddies while you're in there, jackin' off in one of Andy's booths?”

He winced just a little ... from conscience or his hurt finger, she couldn't tell. So, she decided to drive the shiv in a little deeper. “What would your mother think if she'd seen you five minutes ago, huh?”

For half a second, he flushed with shame, then he recovered. “Look, sister, you ain't exactly nobody to talk, prancin' around in that getup.”

“Yeah, and you're a disgrace to your uniform. Get the hell outta my face before I call a cop.”

The guy mumbled a few obscenities as he walked away. And not a moment too soon. An old, blue-green Oldsmobile—early seventies with a bashed right front fender—came around the corner and pulled in front of Andy's.

“Looks like our boys,” said Dirk in her ear.

Several witnesses had described the robbers as two Caucasian men, one skinny with short blond hair, one with a dark, stringy mop and a baseball cap, driving a green battleship of undetermined make and model.

“Yep, looks like,” Savannah whispered as she leaned nonchalantly against a lamp post and watched in her peripheral vision.

The blond guy exited the passenger's side and glanced up and down the street. For a moment, his eyes met Savannah's, and she did a quick mental estimation of his intelligence quotient. Probably on a par with his shoe size, she decided. He didn't have particularly large feet.

After fifteen years in law enforcement and now as a private investigator, Savannah still hadn't gotten over the shock of seeing how different real criminals were from the ones portrayed on Hollywood screens. Oh, she had met a few cunning, shrewd characters; but, by and large, those who habitually broke society's laws were numskulls. She assumed this was because most rocket scientists knew better than to try to knock over an all-night adult porn shop for spare change.

And one look in this guy's eyes told her that NASA wouldn't be recruiting him anytime soon.

After a two-second, salacious perusal, he dismissed her, turned around, and marched into Andy's.

According to some of the pair's previous victims, Bony-Blondie would enter the store, slip behind some sort of display rack, and don a black ski mask. Then he would pop out with a Saturday night special in his hand and demand their cash and jewelry. Savannah decided to be generous and give him 1.2 points for subtlety, 1.1 for originality.

But the jerk in the car—the one with the long, greasy locks, wearing wraparound shades, had slapped his girlfriend around last Friday night. She had confided in her fellow waitress, who passed the word along to a manicurist, who just happened to live in the same trailer park as Dirk.

Domestic violence didn't pay in a town as small as San Carmelita, where the native crops were avocados, lemons, and gossip. Not necessarily in that order.

Across the street, Dirk had risen from his bench and was drunkenly zigzagging a path in their direction.

“Attagirl,” he whispered in her earphone. “Show 'im that waggle.”

Employing her best Dixie sashay, Savannah strolled by the parked car, making sure that Creep Number Two had plenty of time to check out the merchandise. She had to work fast; Blondie wouldn't take long.

Once she was fairly sure she had piqued his interest, she meandered closer to the passenger's side. The window was down, so she leaned inside. The stench of stale sweat, cigarette smoke, and rotting fast-food containers prompted her to breathe shallowly.

Number Two was even uglier up close, dirtier, with bad skin, rotten teeth, a baseball cap turned backwards and wraparound sunglasses that were probably supposed to give him an air of mystery, but made him look like a pathetic Terminator wannabe.

It occurred to Savannah that Blondie might actually be the brains of the operation. Scary stuff.

“Hi there, handsome,” she said without choking on her own words. Yes, for this Dirk would owe her ... big time. “Wanna date?”

“Ah ... no ... not now. I'm kinda busy.”

She could tell he was weighing his one ounce of common sense against his more urgent needs that were arising, thanks to the abundant cleavage she was displaying in the open window.

“Don't worry, Babycakes. With a girl like me, you won't take long at all.”

Ignoring his mumbled half-objections, she jerked open the car door and slid onto the passenger's seat. She allowed her short leather skirt to creep upward, displaying the tops of stockings and garter fastenings. Even through the dark lenses, she could see his eyes bug. Good. He was a stockings kind of guy. They were
all
stockings guys.

He shot a quick glance at Andy's front door, then at her legs. “I don't have a lot of money ... not yet, anyway.”

“Then you're in luck, 'cause I don't charge much. Not for what you need. How about thirty bucks?”

“Well ... I don't know. I—”

“Twenty.”

“Like I said, I'm sorta busy, and you ...”

“Yeah?”

“And you've kinda got a big butt.”

She resisted the urge to feed him his own face, feature by ugly feature. “Yeah, and you got zits and a beer gut. But then, we ain't exactly going on a date to the prom, right? Now, unzip it and let's get this show on the road.”

After only a moment's hesitation, he muttered, “All right, I guess,” and started to fumble with his fly.

“Not that, sweet thing,” she said as she pulled her Beretta from her red, sequined purse and shoved the barrel against the side of his neck. “You can just leave your pants on for this one.”

“Wh—wha—what?”

With her left hand, she jerked down the zipper of his decrepit Dodgers jacket. “It's your coat I want, and the cap and the glasses. Hand them over and make it snappy.”

 

When Franky Morick—a.k.a. Frank the Crank, a.k.a. Creep Number One—exited Andy's Bookstore with his pillowcase of loot in one hand and his .22 in the other, he thought Buzz had taken off without him. The car was gone! That stupid—

But no, it had been moved a few yards down, toward the comer. Why, he had no idea, but he'd have a talk with Buzz about it later. And after they had that conversation, and Buzz got back from the hospital emergency room, he'd hire himself a better driver. Like one with a brain.

He ran to the Olds, threw open the door, and jumped inside. “Go! Go, you asshole!” he yelled.

But the car didn't budge. Neither did Buzz. He just sat there, staring straight ahead, wearing those stupid sunglasses, which were useless as the sun hadn't risen yet.

Frank glanced back at Andy's and saw the shopkeeper's rotund form filling the doorway, taking down the license number, no doubt. Damn! He'd forgotten to switch the plates with his mom's, like he usually did before a job.

“Go, dammit! Don't sit there picking your nose for chrissake! Step on it!”

Still, Buzz didn't budge.

Frank shoved his pistol into the waistband of his jeans and tossed the pillowcase with the cash onto the floor. When he did, something caught his eye.

He blinked, sure he was seeing things in the dim semidarkness of the car's interior. Along with Buzz's lame shades, his baseball cap, and mangy Dodgers jacket, he was wearing black stockings ... garters ... and high heels.

“What the hell!”

Frank raised his eyes and stared down the cavernous barrel of a 9 mm pistol. Frank thought he had lost his mind completely. One too many cranks for Frank the Crank.

When “Buzz” lowered his glasses onto his nose and peered over the top of them, Frank found himself looking into the coldest, bluest eyes he had ever seen.

A soft, feminine voice with a Southern drawl said, “Put your hands on the dash, sweetie, before I rearrange your brain cells for you ... both of them.”

“But you're a ... who are ... where's ... ?”

“Where's your friend?” She chuckled and nodded toward the corner, where Frank saw Buzz standing beside a wino in a rumpled raincoat. Buzz didn't look happy, and Frank assumed it might have something to do with the handcuffs he was wearing.

“What the fuck is this?” Frank turned to the woman with the blue eyes and the gun at his head. “Are you a cop or something?”

“I'm an ‘or something,' ” she said. “The bum's a cop.”

“So, am I under arrest, or what?”

“At the moment, you're ‘or what.' If you stick around, you'll be under arrest. And if you move, you're dead. What's it gonna be?”

She looked like she meant it.

Frank the Crank decided just to sit.

 

Savannah pulled her red 1968 Camaro into her driveway and cut the ignition, but the old car continued to chug, wheeze, and shudder, refusing to give up the ghost.

“Stop, or I'll take a sledgehammer to you,” she threatened it, pounding the steering wheel. It responded with a rude honk that grated on her nerves.

“I must be getting old. These all-nighters kill me,” she mumbled as she pulled her tired body from the car and limped up the sidewalk to the tiny Spanish-style bungalow that she called home. When she wasn't calling it other, more foul, names because of leaking roofs, sagging foundations, and termite infestation. Actually, she was grateful for the termites. If it weren't for the fact that the little boogers were holding hands and square dancing under there, the whole house would probably cave in.