What To Do If You're Buried Alive by Michael Meyerhofer

“You figure it out.”Īnd then she was gone, pedaling off into the dark horizon and leaving me to choke on her dust. “You’re the detective,” she said, boarding her trike. “You’re not giving me much to go on here,” I told her. She assured me that her business deals never soured when it came to her lemonade stand, she never shorted on the sugar. “Any grudges? Any business deals turned sour?” And one of the lessons is this: no one, no matter how sick, goes around smashing some poor dame’s pumpkin without a darn good reason for doing it. When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you learn a lesson or two. She paused, and in that moment of hesitation I believed we were finally getting somewhere. “Sweetheart, you mean to tell me that you can’t think of a single person who might have a bone to pick?” I raised an eyebrow I’d dealt with her type before. Still, I ran her through the usual line of questioning. The girl-let’s call her Fay-couldn’t have been a day over 4-years-old or an inch over three feet tall.

Thanks to some sicko with fresh gourd on his hands, now there was at least one home without a jack-o-lantern, and more to the point, one dame in desperate need of a detective. I mumbled some reply-“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it”- then hung up the phone and touched a match to the cigarette bowed between my lips.įrom my place beneath the lamplight, I peered out at the gashed smiles and triangle teeth that lit up every last home on the street. I was out minding my own business when the call came in-“We got a problem, chief”-and already, I had a pretty good idea of what that problem was.

I didn’t even see it firsthand, but I could imagine it: the way the tendrilled brains slopped to the sidewalk, its seeds spilling forth like a constellation among the gourded Rorschach test. There it was, its ribbed skin split from stem to end, its body turned inside out.

What To Do If You're Buried Alive by Michael Meyerhofer