Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) Read Online Free Page A

thumps and shouts. I was so cold I couldn’t think. Some part of me thought it was Tall and Shotgun, come to finish the job, and I picked up the re-bar. It took me four tries to get my fingers around it. Yellow oozed out of my carpet-scraped hands and bruised palms. When I bent my fingers, some of the thin scabs burst and the fluid wept out. The pain startled me. I hadn’t felt any for what seemed like days.
    I tried to get to my knees, but I was too wrapped in my comforters. I fell, and landed on my poor hands when my feet refused to do their job. Stars exploded in my head. I lay gasping, spinning, suddenly very hot. A small voice in my head told me I was in much bigger trouble than the rest of me knew.
    There were more thumps and then a loud bang. I held onto the re-bar awkwardly. It was like trying to hold onto a needle while wearing mittens.
    A flashlight’s white-blue beam cut across the cellar. The battery-operated lanterns had died out the previous night. I hadn’t realized how gray the cellar was until that flashlight came to blind me.
    I heard a shout, and an uneven tread that nagged at memory. I knew that walk. Step-thunk. That was Punk Sims, who’d lost one leg at the knee in a car accident. He’d gone on disability, but he’d missed cop work enough to agree that being my part-time deputy was a new lease on life. Good man, Punk. Strange name, but good man. Who, I wondered, not for the first time, would wish the first name Purdy on anyone? No wonder he preferred Punk.
    Punk got down on the floor next to me and took my pulse. His face was white as the snow. He bellowed, “Tom!” at a volume I’d never known him capable of. A moment later, Tom’s round, red face was there, too, floating incongruously around like a demented moon. “Lil!” he cried hoarsely, and then snarled at someone behind them, “Get a stretcher and some rope!”
    To me, Punk said, “Lie still, okay? Just lie still. Let the paramedics do it all. We got you, Lil.”
    That sounded nice. I asked, “Boris?”
    “He’s fine, Bobbi’s got him.”
    I smiled. Then I went back to sleep.
    ***^***
    I woke up‌—‌again‌—‌in the big university hospital in Charlottesville‌—‌again.
    These things really have to stop starting that way.
    First time around, I’d gotten a wicked knife cut across the ribs from a nutjob small-time drug dealer. Second time, a Collier ran me off the road. Third time…
    I hurt . I mean I hurt like a broken rib or a knife cut couldn’t hurt. I thought my hands and feet were on fire. Live coals for bones and flames for flesh. Tears came out of my eyes without my permission. “Sweet Jesus!” I said through my teeth.
    Aunt Marge‌—‌again‌—‌wailed, “Oh, Lil!” and informed me that I was completely and totally idiotic, shouldn’t be allowed out without a keeper, and all the usual sort of lecture I’d gotten from her before.
    “Hurts,” I informed the world.
    Roger kindly pushed a button near my hand. “It’s going to, for a while,” he said helpfully. Dear Roger. Ex-military, and don’t ask what it was he did, because you’ll never find out. He paints amazing watercolors in his retirement, and helps Aunt Marge run the Littlepage Eller Animal Sanctuary just outside town. She named it for me, and gets a peculiar grin whenever she tells the story of how I gave up my accidental Eller inheritance to build it. As she often says, it’s good to have one building with both Eller and Littlepage above the door.
    A few moments later, the firestorm backed off to mere pain. “God A’mighty. What happened to me?”
    “Hypothermia,” said Roger, still handing tissues to Aunt Marge. She was for once not toting a large bag full of clanking thermoses of the soups and juices she made. Aunt Marge had been a dietitian, and still considered it her mission in life to nourish the world.
    I tried moving my feet. Holy Heavenly hosts, did that hurt. It hurt like eighteen toothaches in every toe, with some