Razor Girl Read Online Free Page A

handed a Ziploc baggie to Clippy. “Hold this open for me, please.”
    “He used our herb scissors, too! You’ll need those for evidence.”
    “Oh, absolutely.” The shears were a top-of-the-line German brand. Yancy set them aside, thinking Rosa might need a pair.
    Then he reached into the vat and began to remove the offending adulterant—damp clumps of wiry hair. The strands were silvery gray flecked with black, and they smelled of stale booze. Yancy ended up filling three baggies.
    Clippy whispered, “Please tell me it’s from a human.”
    “That, or an alcoholic opossum.”
    “God, this is so revolting.”
    Yancy was sympathetic but firm. “You’ve got to eighty-six all the quinoa for tomorrow.”
    “Well, certainly.”
    “Then spray down your countertops and nuke this tub at, like, a zillion degrees.”
    “Done and done,” Clippy said. “Neil told me to tell you we definitely want to prosecute. Your lab people can get the DNA from the hair, right?”
    Yancy suspected that the Division of Hotels and Restaurants employed no laboratory techs, and had zero budget for genetic testing.
    “You can nail him for trespassing, obviously,” Clippy was saying, “tampering with food products, malicious whatever they call it…‘misbehavior.’ Throw the book at this perv.”
    “I’ll let you know if we come up with an ID.”
    “Dust the shears for fingerprints!”
    “Of course,” Yancy said, knowing it wasn’t going to happen.
    Clippy, who apparently watched every CSI show on television, would have been crestfallen to learn that the roach patrol held no police authority. Yancy could shut down a restaurant for gross health-code violations, but he couldn’t throw anybody in jail. Nor was forensic work part of his job description, unless counting mouse turds qualified.
    “You should probably file a police report,” he suggested to Clippy.
    “What—and see it all over the news? Neil would never forgive me, Andrew. It would devastate our business.”
    By the time Yancy drove back to Big Pine it was two in the morning. He placed the bags of vandal hair in his refrigerator and drifted off to sleep. At some point Rosa called to tell him about her night in the E.R., another rough one. For months he’d been trying to persuade her to relocate to the Keys, where assault-rifle wounds and spousal eviscerations were rare.
    But Rosa was a city girl.
    “I miss your legs,” Yancy said.
    “Are you behaving?”
    “Some moron dumped like a kilo of dirty hair in the kitchen at Clippy’s.”
    “Thanks for the visual,” Rosa said.
    “He used the steel bowl as a mirror while he gave himself a trim. Hey, you need some herb scissors?”
    “Night, Andrew.”
    He fell asleep while writing his report. He dreamed of tarpon rolling in Pearl Basin until he was awakened by a knock. It was a harsh intrusion, so soon after sunrise. He stalked cursing to the front door and flung it open.
    The woman who’d lost her diamond engagement ring was standing there. Her eyes crawled up and down Yancy, who was nude except for his reading glasses.
    “I’ll take that cup of coffee now,” she said.
    —
    It was assumed by locals that Buck Nance had made his way to the airport, hopped a chartered jet and fled the island. Everybody figured that, like all celebrities, he employed savvy handlers to whisk him away whenever a crisis occurred.
    The incident at the Parched Pirate didn’t make the morning print edition of the Key West
Citizen,
but a headline was bannered on the newspaper’s website along with two videos of Buck’s brief performance, provided by disgruntled bikers with iPhones. Soon the whole Internet was crackling. What Buck had considered harmless saloon jokes were now being denounced as racial and homophobic slurs. The network vice president in charge of
Bayou Brethren
told the vice president in charge of corporate relations to release a statement expressing dismay at Buck’s crude remarks. An overcooked apology was made to