Excerpt of Dead on Delivery by Eileen Rendahl

Chapter 1

"Do you want to explain this?" Ted dropped a folded copy of that morning’s Sacramento Bee onto my kitchen counter and jabbed a finger at an article in the Our Region section.

I picked up the paper and looked at the article. Some dude in Oakdale had died under suspicious circumstances. Crap. Another one had bitten the dust. Neil Bossard was the second person I’d made a delivery to in Oakdale in the past two month that had ended up dead. Coincidence? Possibly. Not likely, but possibly. I wasn’t crazy about the odds though. Oakdale was tiny. It had been weird enough to make two deliveries there within such a short time period. To have both of the recipients of the deliveries wind up dead? Not likely to be a wacky fluke. Still, I didn’t know for sure and there was no point in upsetting Ted before I knew that there was something to get upset about.

"Why do you ask?" I avoided looking up into his cornflower blue eyes. Not because I couldn’t look directly into them and lie, though. I could do it. Probably. The real problem was the way my heart did that weird flip flop thing in my chest every time I looked directly into his baby blues.  The flip flop thing was what made it hard to lie. I needed to focus to lie and Ted was nothing, if not distracting to me.

"The case is weird, which always makes me think of you." He took a step closer and lifted my chin.

Now I had no choice but to look into his eyes and there went the damn flip flop. "Is that a nice way to talk to your girlfriend?" That gave me a shiver. I was someone’s girlfriend. Who’d a thunk it was possible? It never had been before.

I am twenty-six years old, nearly twenty-seven. Ted Goodnight is my first boyfriend ever. There have been a few dalliances before, but never a boyfriend. I still can’t decide if it’s the best good fortune that has ever befallen me or the worst mistake of my short life, and there have been some doozies before, starting with the day I decided to sneak into the swimming pool behind my mother’s back and drowned. That was pretty much the mother of all mistakes. It’s the one that started me down the road to all the other mistakes.

On that day, I was legally dead for three minutes. They resuscitated me and everyone said it was a miracle that no harm had been done. The doctors couldn’t detect any brain damage. I would be "normal." Ha! If only they’d known. Apparently, the ability to sense supernatural creatures and see all the crazy-ass paranormal doings that go on around most people without them noticing doesn’t show up on an MRI.

No other guy has been able to get past the freaky things that happen around me or my crazy schedule or what my mother refers to as my "moods." In fact, the only guy I can remember making it past two dates was David Bounds in eleventh grade and he was bipolar. Even he couldn’t hang in there with me, not even with medication to help him.

I’m not saying Ted hasn’t had his occasional problems with who and what I am. The first time he saw me truly in action almost killed our relationship before it ever really started. Maybe it’s because he grew up in such a crazy family (seriously clinically crazy). Maybe it’s because he’s just so amazingly accepting. Maybe he really really likes me.

Whatever it is, it’s working and while I am not the type to skip joyfully through fields of daisies, I’m feeling pretty good about the whole thing. I do try to keep most of the woo-woo things I’m up to separate from him so I don’t freak him out too much, but I’m used to compartmentalizing.

The big drawback to having Ted Goodnight as a boyfriend? He’s a cop.

I have always mistrusted cops. Cops mean trouble. It’s not that I’m into breaking the law, it’s the order part of the police department that I have issues with. Or maybe order has issues with me. My very existence is about the disorderliness of things. I don’t fit neatly anywhere. Trust me, I wish I did. I think I’ve spent most of my life wishing that, but this beggar isn’t riding and I never quite belong anywhere. All of which makes it even more interesting that I’m now dating a cop, especially one who I’m pretty sure wanted to hear that I had nothing to do with some guy running into traffic on Highway 120 and being turned into road pizza by a semi which was exactly what had happened to Neil Bossard. According to the article, they didn’t know what he was doing running onto the highway. I didn’t either. I didn’t like it, though.

"Looks like a traffic accident to me, Ted. What could I possibly have to do with it?" It did look like a traffic accident, just one that made me a little bit itchy and uncomfortable.

"Not every detail made it into the paper. The local cops think that maybe somebody was chasing the guy. Or, at least, he thought he was being chased. Someone saw him running down the road, screaming that something was after him, but he was all alone. Before the witness could do anything to help, the dude had run out onto the road and gotten creamed by a big rig." Ted smoothed by hair back behind my ear and I felt a little gooey inside. "They were canvassing the guy’s neighborhood to see if they could figure out who might have been chasing him and somebody mentioned seeing a car that sounds an awful like yours. Weird plus an old Buick tends to equal you in my book, babe."

Fabulous. What more could I want than to be the solution to a funky equation? He wasn’t wrong though. I weighed my options. I could lie. Chances were that this whole thing would completely blow over and he’d never know. Of course, if it didn’t and Ted found out that I’d lied to him . . . well, suffice it to say, I didn’t think he’d be pleased. I could tell him the truth, as far as I knew it, which really wasn’t all that far. I didn’t have to mention Kurt Rawley, the other guy I’d made a delivery to who was now six feet under.

Come to think of it, his death had been weird as well. Had it been arson? I remember it had something to do with a fire.

"I made a delivery to him," I blurted. "It was days ago."

"What was it?" Ted leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest.

I shrugged. "Hell if I know."

"You don’t look?" He looked incredulous.

I shook my head. It wasn’t a rule, as far as I knew. Nobody had ever told me I couldn’t look inside packages that were left for me to deliver. I simply chose not to peek. Peeking signaled curiosity and perhaps an interest in becoming involved. I generally had neither.

If someone hands me something, all unwrapped, then I know what it is. If someone has taken the trouble to put it in an envelope or wrap it up in a little box, like whoever had needed me to make a delivery to Neil Bossard had, then I don’t know. I don’t care. Or, at least, I don’t want to care. With information comes responsibility and I’ve spent twenty-seven years avoiding as much of that as I could and now have more than I ever wanted.

My last experience with getting involved with a delivery hadn’t gone well. I’d lost someone very dear to me and damn near gotten killed myself. It didn’t make me want to change my habits now. The fact that this particular package had given off a little hum of power didn’t exactly make me more interested in opening it.

"How did you know where to take it?" He wasn’t quite using his cop voice on me, but it was getting close. I liked that about as much as I liked it when Alex Bledsoe used his vampire voice on me, which was not much.

I smiled at him, even though I didn’t totally mean it and said, "Gee, I don’t know. Maybe it was some special magical divining process. Maybe it spoke to me. Or maybe I just used the address that was written on the package."

His eyebrows went up. "I don’t think sarcasm is called for."

Norah, my roommate, strolled into the kitchen, hair disheveled and pillow crease across her cheek. "She always thinks sarcasm is called for." She made straight for the coffeepot and poured herself a cup.

I attempted not to let my jaw hit the floor. Norah hadn’t been herself lately and poisoning her body with the evil drug caffeine was one more hint that all was not right in the sunshine and rainbow-strewn world of my yoga-loving BFF. "You want some cream or sugar for that?"

She shook her head. "Black is fine."

I looked at her closely. Had she been possessed by some other being? Would I find a Norah-shaped pod in the basement of our apartment building if I ever got up the guts and energy to go through it? Stranger things had happened and some of them had happened right here at our apartment. My Norah had a sweet tooth and I couldn’t imagine her drinking coffee with out girlying it up at least a little.

"Hey, Ted," she said and gave him a weak smile.

No, my Norah was not herself at all. She likes cops less than I do, or she had until Ted had saved her soy-bacon last summer when we were fighting off Chinese vampires as they rose out of tunnels beneath Old Sacramento.

Now? Now she not only tolerated him, she often seemed happy to see him and not in an icky I’m-going-to-steal-your-boyfriend way.

"Hey, Norah." He smiled back at her, but then turned directly back to me. "Who gave you the delivery?"

I shrugged. "I don’t know. The box was sitting on the hood of my car when I came out of the dojo one night." Which was pretty much exactly how the package for Kurt Rawley had come my way, come to think of it.

"Was there a note?"

"No. Just the box with the address marked on it."

"That was it. There was a box on your car so you drove it all the way out to Oakdale and . . .," he hesitated. "What do you do with it once you get there?"

"I left it on the doorstep." Both times, I added silently.

"And then hung out for long enough for someone to notice your car." His eyes narrowed a bit.

"I hung out on the street for a little while and watched to make sure some guy who at least looked like he could be Neil Bossard picked it up. I don’t exactly ask for ID." Again, contact with message recipients might constitute some kind of caring beyond fulfilling what was basically expected of me. Not my thing.

"Who left the box for you?"

I was so done with the third degree. I threw up my hands. "How the hell should I know? And if I did know, what difference would it make? Someone needs something taken some place, I take it there. End of story."

"Until someone ends up dead." Ted’s eyes narrowed.

Norah’s head shot up. "Who’s dead?"

I shot Ted a nasty look. Now he had upset Norah. Who knew how long it would take me to calm her down? "No one you know. No one I know. Some guy that I happened to deliver a box to last week got hit by a car."

She blinked at me, her eyes big and round. "That’s it. No undead creatures ate him or anything?"

"Not according to the Bee. It was a simple case of man vs. semi. The semi won."

"Well, okay then." She went back to swirling her coffee.

 "It’s just a coincidence," I said with way more confidence than I felt. Ted started to open his mouth, but I shook my head at him. "Not now," I mouthed at him.

He pressed his lips together in a tight line and headed back toward my bedroom. As he brushed past me, he whispered, "I don’t believe in coincidence."

I didn’t bother telling him that I didn’t either.