Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) by Tim Cockey Read Free Book Online

for that.”
    “I’m too cute,” she said sourly.
    I held my palms up to the ceiling. “You’re too cute. It’s a hell of an albatross, but there it is.”
    Bonnie skidded her chair away from the table. “We’ll see about that.” She stood up. “Come on.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “You’ll see.”
    As we headed out of the bar, a fat guy by the jukebox called out, “What’s the weather, honey?”
    Bonnie snapped back, “Screw you, dirtbag!” She turned to me. “Cute, huh?”
    Bonnie and I took the Baltimore-Washington Parkway south to the airport exit. A long time ago the airport went by the name Friendship Airport. It was ten times smaller then, as was the world it serviced. As things developed, the demands of the hemorrhaging population along the Baltimore-Washington corridor required that little old Friendship be swallowed by a gigantic glass and girder terminal along with a whole new pinwheel of departure and arrival gates, the entire affair given a snappy new name: Baltimore-Washington International Airport. BWI to most. “Bweee!” to a few.
    Bonnie and I followed the airport tradition of misreading the signs on our first pass, and we found ourselves cruising by the passenger pickup area not once, but twice. At this hour it was pretty much empty. We read the traffic signs out loud this time, pointed left and right and finally took an exit that swung along past the commercial hangers and out onto a frontage road. Once we had passed the Ramada, the Marriott and the Airport Sheraton, things took a turn for the dingy, and we pulled up in front of a motel that time had forgotten. The Charm Inn appeared to have started life as a Holiday Inn, back in the days when their wedge-shaped signs were as ubiquitous as the golden arches. Now the word “Holiday” had been replaced with the big fib, “Charm.” The rooms were laid out in a two-story, single horizontal strip looking out onto a parking lot and a metal fence-enclosed swimming pool that was covered with a tarp for the winter. Or possibly forever. The curtains in all the rooms were pulled shut. The fluorescent light on an ice machine was blinking spasmodically.
    “Lovely. I’ll have to remember this place the next time I’m contemplating suicide.”
    Some thirty feet to the left of the motel—sharing its parking lot—was a rectangular, windowless stucco cube, trimmed with brown plastic shingling and landscaped with dead dwarf shrubbery. A yellow spotlit sign on the side facing the frontage road read SINBAD’S CAVE, painfully spelled out in letters resembling sabers. Below this the sign promised “Music, Dining, Entertainment.”
    “Are you ready for Señor Sinbad?” I asked.
    Bonnie was smearing off most of her makeup. She gobs it on for television. She found an Orioles cap in my glove compartment and put it on, tucking her hair in it as best she could. She pulled up the collar on her Burberry coat and popped a piece of gum into her mouth. She gave me a thumbs-up.
    “Let’s do it.”
    If I were expecting a motif—some sort of Arabian pirate decor—I was disappointed. Sinbad’s Cave looked like any other uninspired restaurant lounge out on any other airport’s frontage road. Dim lighting. Drop ceiling. Several dozen tables on the main floor, half as many in the small, elevated section to the left as you walked in. The bar ran along the far wall, lit in ugly amber lighting. Muffled music pulsed from a jukebox.
    “Up or down?”
    Bonnie chose up. “The view.” For what it’s worth.
    We took a table at the railing. At the far end of the main floor stood an electric piano, a pair of amplifiers and an empty stool with an acoustic guitar propped up against it. I pointed this out to Bonnie.
    “You know those old movies where the couple go to the nightclub in New York or Los Angeles and sit at their table and watch the floor show?”
    “Yes.”
    “I think this is going to come up short.”
    The place was half empty. Or half full. Depending