The Morgue and Me by John C. Ford Read Free Book Online

said something. I make everyone call me Christopher. It fits the savvy NSA operative I hope to be someday. “Chris” feels neutered, like the professors who ride bikes around campus with straps around their pant legs. But something about the woman turned me to jelly, and I made my first-ever exception to the name rule.
    “Umm, okay. About what?”
    “What do you think? C’mon, we’re going to lunch.” She walked over to her car, not bothering to check if I was following her. On the way, she pulled out a cell phone and tossed the gum she’d been smacking into some bushes.
    The car was a black Trans Am. It had a T-top roof and a gold falcon painted on the hood.
    It fit her perfectly.
     
     
    Five minutes later, I still didn’t know her name. She had simultaneously lit a cigarette and dialed on her cell before we left the Lighthouse parking lot, precluding any introductions. Without checking for traffic, she raced out of the lot and headed toward town on a stretch of Route 14 that she treated like the autobahn. The Trans Am’s hood started rumbling when the needle hit seventy. She paid no mind to that, or to the dark hair swirling across her aviator sunglasses. I had no idea where she was taking us, and I didn’t care.
    Her face was a cross between a china doll’s and a vamp’s. The china doll was in her sapphire eyes and her porcelain cheeks. The vamp was in everything else. She gripped the steering wheel with one hand set at twelve o’clock, oozing confidence. She had the fishnet hose on. I was never going to associate those things with the chunky Goth chicks from Petoskey High again.
    I pegged her at twenty-six, but I was hoping she was younger. She had to yell over the wind to be heard on the phone. From what I gathered, she was calling the Detroit News , and she kept getting transferred from one person who said they didn’t have her résumé to a second person who said the first one had it. With each new transfer, she slammed the steering wheel and cursed.
    It felt weirdly intimate to be in the car as she went about her daily business, which from my brief experience seemed to involve a fair amount of drama and shouting matches. Not that I minded. I was nervous being so close to her, though. A cold sweat was spreading from my palms to my chest to my forehead, when I noticed the laws of inertia thrusting my body forward at a distressingly powerful rate. The vamp had angled off the road and jammed on the brakes. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and I had to brace myself against the dashboard. The Trans Am skidded for fifteen yards across a dirt parking lot, into one of the four spaces provided for customers of Ray’s Beef Burgers.
    Dead center. Very cool.
    I was still clinging to the dash with white knuckles when she said, “Screw this,” and ended her call.
    “Sorry about that,” she said. “That’s rude as hell, I know, talking on the phone with you right there. Anyway . . . Tina McIntyre. Let’s get some grub. I know it’s early, but I’m starved.” And then she grabbed a bag from the backseat and was out of the car.
    Inside Ray’s, she plunked down in a booth with her back against the wall and her spiked-heel boots up on the plastic.
    “So, when’s your birthday, Chris?” she said.
    “Uh . . . September twenty-fourth.”
    “Libra. Hmm. Very nice.” She pointed to herself. “Taurus, like you couldn’t tell.”
    We weren’t the only ones in the place, but it was close. In a far booth, two old men drank coffee and shot bull with the cashier. When a waitress came, her eyes darted between us as if to confirm the age difference and speculate as to the nature of our liaison.
    Tina ordered two house specials (beef burgers) and an outrageous amount of other stuff. Luckily I had left the house without breakfast that morning, so I joined in. The waitress gave us a final questioning look and scurried away on toothpick legs.
    A crusted ketchup dispenser and two paper-thin napkins sat on the speckled