A Carnival of Killing Read Online Free Page B

these clowns anyhow? It doesn’t sound like the kind of assignment we’d get from Don.”
    “The stated purpose is to provide depth to our coverage of the Winter Carnival,” I said. “The Vulcans are trying to polish up their image, and Don pointed out that we do have a stake in the Carnival. I suspect he was reminded of this by somebody higher up the food chain.”
    Our stake was a treasure hunt the paper sponsored every year. One of the guys in the advertising department hid a box containing the key to the treasure chest somewhere within the city limits and wrote a bunch of clues in verse. One of these clues would appear every day in the paper until some lucky soul found the box with the key and claimed the cash.
    “Okay,” Al said. “Onward and upward for Vulcan and the Carnival.”
    “And put on your long johns. It’s going to be colder than a penguin’s tail feathers tomorrow.”
    “Does a penguin have tail feathers or is it like the kee-kee bird?”
    “What the hell is a kee-kee bird?” I asked.
    “You haven’t heard of the kee-kee bird? The kee-kee bird lives in the Arctic, has no feathers on its butt and sits on a cake of ice all day yelling, ‘Kee, kee, kee, kee-rist but it’s cold!’”
    “Kee-rist, why did I ask? I’ll see your sorry butt at Vulcan headquarters first thing in the morning.”
    The temperature had peaked at nine degrees below zero in late afternoon and was beginning its evening descent when I left the office almost twelve hours after my wakeup call from Don O’Rourke. The thermometer beside the back door of my apartment building was showing fourteen below when I arrived home. However, it was as warm as the Fourth of July inside my apartment, where I was greeted by Martha Todd and Sherlock Holmes.
    Martha welcomed me with a hug and a lingering kiss. Sherlock met me with a “meow” and an invitation to scratch his furry belly.
    Martha is the dark-haired, dark-eyed love of my life. She had moved in with me after completing a three-year working commitment with the attorney general in her mother’s native country, Cape Verde, in payment for a law school scholarship. She has skin the color of coffee with cream, a smile so white that it puts every toothpaste ad to shame and the most exquisitely proportioned ass of any woman alive. The world’s premiere sculptors could not design such an ass, and painters wouldn’t even try to replicate Martha’s ass because a flat image on canvas could not do justice to such three-dimensional perfection. To look upon such an ass is a privilege. To touch it was heaven on earth.
    Sherlock is a fourteen-pound, short-haired, black-and-white neutered tomcat that adopted me several years ago when I made the mistake of feeding him at the back door. The three of us lived in my one-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in a two-story brick building that faces Grand Avenue.
    “What a hellacious day you’ve had,” Martha said. “Sit down and tell me all about it while we eat.”
    I sat across the small kitchen table from her, filled my plate with pasta, veggies, and salad, and proceeded to tell her everything. Well, almost everything. I decided that the item about one of the Vulcans with whom I’d be riding the next day possibly being a cold-blooded killer was better left unsaid. I’d had some uncomfortable moments with murderers in the past, and I saw no reason to start Martha’s worry wheels whirling.
    Later, sitting in bed, we watched the ten o’clock news and saw film of Lee-Ann Nordquist’s rigid body being carried to the ambulance. Martha shivered at the sight and snuggled so close that she almost got inside my skin, a perfect example of how one person’s great loss can be another’s magnificent gain.
    Despite the exhilarating contact with Martha’s naked body, I was half asleep by the time she flicked off the TV. “Want to try Number 58?” she asked.
    “I don’t think I’m up to it,” I said. “Been too long a day.”
    “Well, we