Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“This pissy-ass mood is just my personality,” Gav shot back, but I was already walking out the door.
When I got to Dennis’s road, I found that the plows had come through, removing the giant mound that had blocked the road, and doing exactly one half-assed small line down the center of the side street, leaving everything else high and the center icy.
I should have taken the SUV.
Especially because no one had bothered to snow blow or shovel out Dennis’s driveway.
His car wasn’t buried under a sea of snow in the drive. But that wasn’t that unusual. A lot of people parked in their garage. Especially before a big storm, leaving one easy path to clear for your snow blower or the neighborhood kid or some landscaping company you paid to come in with a plow.
I’d come up with some inventive fucking names to call Dennis by the time I made it up to the front door, laying on the bell, and listening to it let out its loud, melodic jingle.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
“The fuck?” I hissed, taking a step back to look at the house.
If anyone thought that his place was a little nice for a florist, they didn’t say anything.
It was a somewhat simple, but large, white colonial with black shutters and a bright red door with a black knocker. Which I went ahead and pounded the door with for a while before moving away.
While it looked like some of the houses had plowed themselves out to get back to their lives, there were still several snowy driveways. Which meant some people were still home. Still possibly looking out their windows. Where they didn’t need to witness my breaking into Dennis’s place.
So I followed my steps back, saving my pants from getting any wetter, and went around to the side of the garage, finding a door there, and making short work of getting the lock undone.
I couldn’t say I needed to pick locks all that often anymore. But it was a skill I’d taken pretty fucking seriously when I’d been a teenager, and it was one that was hard to forget.
I moved inside quickly, wanting to get out of view of any nosy neighbors, so I didn’t notice the car until it was right in front of me.
Black.
Sleek.
Again, too expensive for your average florist, but people either didn’t notice, or figured Dennis had a solid investment portfolio.
“Shit,” I hissed as I looked at it. Parked. Not snowy. Not salty. Clean. Like it hadn’t been driven in a while.
Was Dennis dead somewhere in the house? Heart attack? Stroke? Slipped in the shower and whacked his head too hard?
I hadn’t considered that possibility before. I guess I figured that someone would have noticed if the man was MIA for a while.
But Dennis was a reclusive guy. No wife. No girlfriend. No kids. From what I could tell, no family in the area.
The shop seemed to be functioning on autopilot, and the girl there said that Dennis was never around much anyway, so they wouldn’t have noticed anything being off either.
As for the neighbors, well, I guess that depended on what kind of relationship he had with them.
Dennis wasn’t the friendliest guy. He was reclusive by nature, and had this ugly habit of glazing over and not paying attention when other people were talking.
I could see how the neighbors wouldn’t give a shit enough to pay attention to his comings and goings.
Taking a deep breath, I moved to the door that would lead into the house, bracing myself for the pungent smell of decaying flesh.
I got the lock open, then pushed the door open, but… nothing.
I’d been around quite a few dead bodies in my day. There was no way a corpse was in the house for more than a day and the whole place didn’t make you want to vomit.
Oddly enough, though, that didn’t seem to shake any of the tension that was growing in me, making my shoulders ache and my jaw crack when I opened my mouth to call out his name.
“Dennis! Where the fuck you at?” I called, moving in through the mud/laundry room off of the garage and into the kitchen.
It was then that I did catch an odor.
Not a dead body.
But the distinct scent of rotting garbage, ripe and tangy.
The kitchen wasn’t much to write home about. Dennis wasn’t an interior decorating sort of guy. He didn’t seem to have an eye for what made something look nice. Which was why his flower shop had been such a train wreck when he’d been in charge of handling the day-to-day operations.
Clearly, it was not a calling for him.
The fact of the matter was, Dennis had inherited the shop from his uncle who had run it successfully for many decades before his death. With no kids of his own and a late spouse, he had left the business to his slacker of a nephew who had never been able to hold down a steady job, in the hopes that the responsibility would help make him grow up.