“Hog!” Coco cried out, waving a discarded shrimp tail at Barton Winkle, one of the attorneys she was convinced had ordered the last shrimp poppers left in all of Shrimp Cocktails.
It also reminded me once more about the prawn in the bathroom by Myron’s body, and that I needed to remember to investigate that detail, too. I typed that into a memo on my phone and set a reminder on my calendar. I don’t know why that prawn troubled me so, but it did.
“Aw, c’mon, Coco. Don’t be like that. If you’d agree to go out with me, you’d have been here in time to share mine,” he joked back, smiling his easy smile as he held up the empty plate.
I like Barton. In fact, I liked most of the legal eagles in town. They were all pretty decent men and women. Well-dressed, smart, educated, good people.
But Coco turned her nose up at him. “I won’t be blackmailed, Mr. Winkle! You don’t think all it takes is some shrimp poppers and a happy hour to get this girl to go out with you, do you? You’d at least have to spring for something more than a few rubbery shrimps and a beer,” she joked back with a wink before pulling me past the attorney crowd to a high table with stools by the window overlooking the water.
The table burst out in laughter, becoming more distant as we moved farther from them and grabbed our seats.
As I settled in, I scanned many familiar faces from my years here in Fig. I loved that fishermen and professionals alike all gathered here in a strange, but workable meeting of two very different worlds.
We’d been coming to Shrimp Cocktails—or Shrimpies, as us locals call it—for years now. I’d forgotten how much I missed the local flavor as compared to the higher-end places in Seattle, filled with glass and steel, until I moved back home.
Not that I hadn’t loved living in Seattle. I had until my life had drastically, irrevocably changed.
Anyway, I loved the old barn-wood floors creaking beneath my feet, the enormous fireplace in the center of the square room, the overall rustic feel of this place.
From the old anchors on the walls to the equally old weather-beaten paddles wrapped in fish nets mounted above the booths and the rusty bell on the bar, rung when someone managed to finish a pail of ale, every inch of Shrimpies was like home for me.
That it sits alongside the docks, where you can hear the water lap at the shore and see the boats in the harbor, is what makes it perfect.
Cupping my chin in my hand, I stared out the window and allowed the peace of being at home to wash over me.
“Hey. You okay?” Coco asked with a tap to my arm, peering at me from beneath her chocolate-colored bangs.
I pushed the bowl of unshelled peanuts between us and tucked my hands inside the sleeves of my favorite Seattle Seahawks sweatshirt. “I’m good. Stop worrying.”
As the waitress dropped off our drinks, Coco leaned into the marble-topped table, her dark eyes somber. “Look, I’m just going to be honest with you here, and I don’t want to hear any protests. I have a right, as your friend since we were like two, to worry and express my worry openly. It’s called good communication.”
“Have we been friends since we were two?”
“Easily.”
“Do you even know how to make friends at two? Aren’t those social skills still undeveloped at that point?”
She grinned, flashing her evenly spaced teeth. “Yours were always undeveloped. If you’ll recall, I made you be my friend, and I’m pretty sure that happened when we were two. At least if the picture of me forcing you to put your arm around me is the first eyewitness documentation of our friendship. Now, don’t deflect, Lemon. It’s a tired ploy you’ve used time and again, but it won’t work with me. I know you almost as well as I know myself.”
I sipped at my watermelon margarita and laughed her off. “I’m not deflecting anything, and I don’t know what you’re talking about. You didn’t have to force me to put my arm around you or be your friend.”
Or maybe she did. Okay, truth? I’m slow to warm up to people. I don’t know why that is. I guess I like to observe them first—watch them when they think no one’s watching. It’s the only way to get a real read on a person. Coco is far more outgoing and gregarious than I.
“I did, too, Lemon. Just like I had to force you to come to my fifth birthday party. Remember, I bribed you with the magnifying glass and the fake pipe because you told me all good detectives had to have them? So, I told you they would help you solve mysteries faster, but you could only have them if you came to my party.”
I smiled at the memory. I’d always wanted to be a detective, even back then. “Oh, yeah. Totally remember that. It was a Barbie party, with pink everything and a cotton candy machine because you were convinced Barbie only ate cotton candy for every meal, right? Didn’t you throw up after eating too much pink cotton candy?” I teased.
“That’s the one. Still can’t look at cotton candy. Anyway, that’s also the one where I lost my favorite Barbie, and you threatened to beat up Evan Wexler once you’d deduced he’d stolen it to give to Emily Meeks because he had a crush on her.”
“If only all crimes were as easily solved as that one, right?”
“Not the point, Lemon.”
My eyebrow rose. “What was the point, Coco?”
Don’t kid yourself. I knew what she was going to ask me, and I accepted that while I didn’t always wear my heart on my sleeve, Coco, as my best friend in the world, is allowed to worry about me. She’s also allowed to express her fears.
Her brow furrowed as she repositioned herself in her seat. “I forget. Argh! Do you see what I mean? You’re always taking me off course.”
I giggled and pushed my glasses up on my nose. “I wasn’t even driving. How can I be responsible for taking you off course?”
She held up a finger, her lips going thin. “Shhh. I remember. I’m worried. And before you say anything, I want you to hear me out, and I’m not going to go gently into the good night until you do.” She paused then, as if she was trying to formulate her words—which isn’t at all like Coco, except when it came to this subject. But then she leaned into me. “You found Myron’s body, Lemon. That’s a scary thing without all the other…stuff. It can bring up a lot of memories. Bad ones. Now, I know you’d cut your tongue out before you’d tell May you were struggling. But it’s different with me. If you’re in pain, I want to be there. I want to know.”
My heart warmed and shifted in my chest. Coco was always there, no matter what, even when things got ugly. And there’d been a point in my life when they’d grown uglier than ugly.
“I’m really okay, Coco. Swear it. I’m not saying it wasn’t awful to find Myron that way. It was. Who wants to find a dead body—ever? But it’s nothing—nothing like Seattle,” I reassured her while I looked her straight in the eye. It was important she saw I was telling the truth. “So can we let it go for now? Promise, if I start to have any trouble at all, I’ll talk to you about it. Okay?”
“Deal,” she said, even though her eyes were watching me with caution as she sipped at her butterscotch martini and fiddled with the corners of her napkin. “So where are we with the face blindness and who do you suspect? You don’t have to hide the fact that you’re eyeball deep in this from me, you just have to be careful.”
Sighing, I shook my head in disgust, mostly with myself. “I have zero suspects. Zero, Coco, and a million questions. Like, how did Myron get in the bathroom anyway? What was the time of death? Did the killer dump him there because it would make it look like my mother’s guilty? I can see why Mom is a legitimate suspect for the police. She’s virtually the only one I can come up with at this point.”
Coco made a face, loosening her scarf from around her neck. “Fabritzia’s still in the running as far as I’m concerned. She didn’t marry Myron for his charm and prime rib.”
“Speaking of charm, young lady, why won’t you go out with Barton? He seems like a pretty nice guy. He’s got a lot of criteria on your list. Like a good job, a place of his own—he even has a boat, for Pete’s sake.”
Like I said, I liked Barton. He was funny and smart and not half bad to look at if you liked the kind of guy who looked like a surfer had mated with an accountant. He was actually pretty cute, and he’d certainly give Coco a run for her money with his sense of humor.
“Because he doesn’t make my stomach tingle. That’s why.”
“What if that tingle just takes time to simmer to a boil? Maybe you’d tingle if you went out with him. Sometimes tingles take time.”
She sniffed at me, peeking over her shoulder to look at Barton, laughing with his colleagues. “Tingles are or they aren’t. There’s no half measure here, Lemon. No tingle. No date.”
I dropped a peanut into my mouth. “Fair enough. But I still think he’s cute, and he’d give you—”
“Brains! Brains! Brains!” several voices yelled in rhythmic unison from the front of the bar.
Ah. The zombie hunters and their tinfoil hats had arrived.
Justice told us they were mostly staying over at the Fig Harbor Inn, combing the woods and trails surrounding the town for the zombie killer like a bunch of twelve-year-olds playing cops and robbers. Some were even camping out on the public trails, hoping to catch a glimpse of this government-engineered zombie.
I half expected Cappie to show up as their ringleader, and if he did, he was in for a good bit of sass from me. But given some thought, I decided Cappie loved to stir up trouble, but he didn’t necessarily want to aid and abet.
For the most part, he was too afraid of strangers who might be government plants to spearhead the campaign to catch a zombie—especially if he thought the government might arrive on the scene. At this very moment, he was likely holed up in his house, hiding from the chaos of his creation.
There was more shouting and words I couldn’t parse together, and then I heard, “Leave her alone!”
Both Coco and I narrowed our eyes, figuring they were headed straight for us, but that wasn’t the case at all.
They were headed straight for Fabritzia.
She was easy to pick out, tall and slender, gorgeous and doe-eyed—a beacon in the sea of average. I haven’t a clue why she’d be in Shrimpies only a day after Myron’s death, but at this moment, I didn’t care.
This particular group had cornered her near the bar, their eyes glassy from too much alcohol and too little sleep. But it was Fabritzia’s face that worried me as everyone shouted and demanded she answer questions about her conversations with the police.
She looked terrified. Absolutely panicked, and I couldn’t stand the thought. Things began to get ugly when the tide turned and the paranoia, rampant in this bunch, started to seep through the cracks in their crazy skulls.
“Maybe she’s with the government, and she’s in on it!” the guy who’d approached me this morning declared.
Coco and I only had to look at each other before we were sliding out of our chairs and pushing our way across the bar.
I ducked low while Coco went high, yelling an order. “Out of the way, varmints!”
When I reached Fabritzia, tears were streaming down her face, making me feel worse than ever. I grunted as I grabbed for her hand and instead, ended up falling into her when one of the thugs knocked against me.
Whirling around, I stood in front of her to keep them from getting any closer, for all the good that did me. I’m five foot two on a good day, maybe five three when my hair’s bent on revenge when it’s rained on. Meaning, the group of men looming around us towered over me by at least six or eight inches.
So I yelled as loud as I could over the raucous chanting and backslapping, “Back off! You’re scaring her!”
“You’re that one from this morning! The one whose mother they’re blaming for this!” a rather ragged, unkempt man seethed in my face as though he’d discovered the key to solving Myron’s murder. “Maybe you’re in on it with her!”
As he caught everyone’s attention and moved in closer, I grew more agitated. I sounded out a warning again. “I’m telling you, if you don’t back away from us, I’ll sock you in the face! Now back up!”
“Did you hear her? Back away, goon!” Coco yelled, grabbing at the back of the man’s dirty T-shirt.
In his attempt to shove Coco off, he ended up knocking her down, but all I had to hear was her grunt of pain and see his face glaring down in mine, and I swung before I gave it a single thought.
I swung hard, crashing my fist right into his nose, which in turn knocked his head back on his neck.
Of course, the second I’d knocked his block off, not only did my hand throb (because wow, his face didn’t look like concrete, but it was as hard as some for sure), I became horrified. I don’t get physical often. I usually don’t get physical ever, but my dad had taught me a little boxing here and there when I was a kid. I guess I’d retained more than I thought.
My intent was to instantly apologize, but that didn’t last as the bar erupted and Barton Winkle, who’d helped Coco up, grabbed the guy around the neck and dragged him backward, launching him to the floor with a dull thud. “The lady said back up!” he shouted down at him, his face an angry mask.
Both Coco and I looked at each other, her eyes filled with as much surprise as I imagine were in mine. I don’t know about Coco, but if we were to add pros to Barton’s list of already pretty great attributes, knight in shining armor had to move to the top.
After that, everything’s a little bit of a blur. I admit it got really hairy. Coco smashed a bottle over one of the zombie hunters’ heads when he went after Barton like a raging bull. The attorneys and the fishermen banded together and went into battle against the zombie hunters like gladiators.
And everything turned into a huge mess. Glass broke. Tables smashed. Food flew. Beer toppled. Shrimpie, the owner of Shrimp Cocktails, exploded from the kitchen in the back with a bat in his hands, shoving two of the waitresses behind him, only to stop dead in his tracks when he saw the brawl.
Until Justice and the rest of the Fig Harbor PD blew in the doors, and the sound of a single shot filled the air.
Right before the enormous circular wooden chandelier with the glass lanterns dotting it, secured to the ceiling by chains, crashed to the floor, narrowly missing Gaffney Peters, a fellow attorney and, after what I’d witnessed, in possession of a decent right hook.
As the light fell to the middle of the bar and bounced before splintering into a million pieces, the crowd parted, their raised fists lowering, their eyes wide with shock.
Almost everyone’s breathing was ragged from the tussle, but no one dared speak.
Justice stood on the fringe of the crowd, his nostrils flaring, his chest heaving beneath his uniform, his stance wide and aggressive.
“This is the Fig Harbor Police—stop in the name of the law!”