The Big Kill Read online

  The Big Kill

  book nine of the matchmaker mysteries series

  elise sax

  The Big Kill (Matchmaker Mysteries – Book 9) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Elise Sax

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1985705739

  Published in the United States by 13 Lakes Publishing

  Cover design: Elizabeth Mackey

  Edited by: Novel Needs

  Formatted by: Jesse Kimmel-Freeman

  Printed in the United States of America

  elisesax.com

  [email protected]

  http://elisesax.com/mailing-list.php

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  @theelisesax

  For Meital

  Also by Elise Sax

  Matchmaker Mysteries Series

  Road to Matchmaker

  An Affair to Dismember

  Citizen Pain

  The Wizards of Saws

  Field of Screams

  From Fear to Eternity

  West Side Gory

  Scareplane

  It Happened One Fright

  The Big Kill

  It’s a Wonderful Knife

  Ship of Ghouls

  Goodnight Mysteries Series

  Die Noon

  Five Wishes Series

  Going Down

  Man Candy

  Hot Wired

  Just Sacked

  Wicked Ride

  Five Wishes Series

  Three More Wishes Series

  Blown Away

  Inn & Out

  Quick Bang

  Three More Wishes Series

  Forever Series

  Forever Now

  Bounty

  Switched

  Moving Violations

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  Also by Elise Sax

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  Remember that a match is the sum of his parts, bubbeleh. I’m talking about his past. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not eating at him like Marty Goldblatt working through a brisket sandwich. Forget it, let go, leave it behind…this is the advice we’re all given. It’s good advice, but impossible to do. Kind of like losing weight and getting more sleep. Impossible. Without a doubt, your match is going to have something in his past that’s affecting his chances for love. Bad father, bully in second grade, the list goes on. So, be patient with your matches, dolly. Dig a little and try to find the truth. For sure, you’ll find a shocking something in their past. You can’t fix it, you can’t change what’s already happened, but you can understand, and understanding is the key to love.

  Lesson 77, Matchmaking advice from your

  Grandma Zelda

  Everything I thought I knew about my life changed during one day in June, and it all started because I was determined to finally organize my Grandma Zelda’s matchmaking business.

  That’s why I was sitting in her attic, sneezing.

  “I’m not allergic to dust,” I told myself and sneezed, loudly again, sending a small pile of scrap paper flying off a folding table to the floor. So much for the power of positive thinking.

  I had started organizing her “files” almost a year before, but I had given up in the face of the impossible. Now I was at it again, and this time I was determined, like a guy climbing Mt. Everest, even though his nose might freeze and fall off. My grandmother must have sensed my determination because she had given me a new laptop for the project. The computer was sitting on the table, along with stacks of old papers and notecards, after I had tried for hours to figure out how to create an Excel spreadsheet.

  I never figured it out.

  I had recently begun to have some success as a matchmaker, and I guessed organizing the business was part of me finally staking ownership as my grandmother’s partner. Either that, or I was hiding in the attic from my fiancé.

  Spencer Bolton was the love of my life. And he was hot. And he believed that I should have an orgasm before he had an orgasm. So, in other words, he was perfect. Not to mention that he had bought me a house across the street, and he wanted to marry me in one month.

  One month.

  In one month, I would be living in a big house with a pool—that I owned--and a husband for as long as we both shall live.

  My heart beat loudly in my chest, and I took my pulse to make sure I wasn’t dying. My pulse was fast, but I had lost track counting the beats, so I took a swig from my beer bottle. I wasn’t normally a drinker, but thinking about a house and a husband had driven me to consuming domestic beer on the sly in the attic while I was hiding. I mean, organizing.

  Dropping to the floor, I crawled to the little window and snuck a peek outside. Across the street, Spencer was standing on the sidewalk with the contractor, and he was waving his arms around. The contractor was nodding his head back at him. There was an army of construction workers going in and out of the house like ants. Spencer had insisted on a double team of workers, striving toward a strict deadline, two days before our wedding.

  I had never seen Spencer more excited about anything than he was about building a custom-made house. Ordering the plate warmer for the kitchen had sent him over the moon. I had made the mistake of telling him I didn’t care about paint colors or bamboo flooring when the renovations started, and Spencer took it as a statement on my love and devotion to him. In other words, he moped. So, since then I pretended to be thrilled about mini-blinds and garage doors. But the truth was that blueprints and decorating just made me want to drink cheap beer and hide.

  I watched through the window as Spencer scratched the back of his neck and then turned around, looking up. I dropped down to the floor, hoping he hadn’t caught me spying on him. On my tombstone, it was going to read: Here lies Gladie Burger, coward. Or would it say, Here lies Gladie Bolton? I hadn’t thought about changing my name. Was that expected?

  I crawled back to the table, grabbed the bottle of beer, and drank the rest. It didn’t help. I was still engaged.

  Pushing a pile of papers aside, I lifted a box onto the table and sneezed. Just like the other boxes, it was old and crammed with papers and notebooks. But the handwriting was not my grandmother’s. I recognized my mother’s handwriting, and she had written my father’s name on the side of it.

  I sucked in air and stopped breathing. Everything I had found in the attic up until that moment had to do with matchmaking. From reading my grandmother’s chicken scratch notes on yellowed notecards and scraps of paper, I had learned more about every resident of our small town of Cannes, California than their therapists and mothers.

  And there were notes and notebooks in the attic that went further back than my grandmother. They went all the way back to the first woman in our family to be a matchmaker in town, who built her dream house—the house I was living in-- during the founding of Cannes in the late 19th century, much like Spencer was building our dream house today.

  “John West wants a woman with blond hair, but he’ll take any woman who still has her front teeth,” the first matchmaker had written in one notebook entry. The beau
tiful handwriting was barely legible because the pencil marks had become faded and smudged in the more than one hundred years since it had been written. I had put all of these kinds of notebooks in a plastic bin, but I had decided to throw out the scraps of paper. More recent business I put aside to organize later.

  But this was the first time I had seen anything with my father’s name on it and the first time I had seen my mother’s handwriting on anything in the attic. My father had died when I was a little girl in a motorcycle accident, and his death destroyed my family. My grandmother became a shut in, and my mother became a drunk and threw away her responsibilities as a mother. If I had been a little more introspective, I would have drawn a line from my father’s death to my commitment issues, but beer was better than introspection.

  I picked up the beer bottle but then remembered that it was empty. Taking a deep breath, I began to open the box with my father’s name on it, but my phone rang, and I answered. It was Bridget.

  “It’s time!” she shouted into the phone, hyperventilating. “It’s…it’s…it’s…time! Did you hear me? Are you there? Gladie! Gladie! It’s time! Run through the stop signs! Take Spencer’s police car and turn on the siren! It’s time!”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, softly.

  “Don’t you think I know when it’s time? It’s time! Get your butt over here before…oh ooh waw!”

  I broke out into a sweat, and my heart raced. “I’m coming!” I shouted into the phone. “Don’t do anything until I get you to a hospital!”

  “Ooooohhhh! It’s happening!”

  I high-tailed it out of the attic, tripping over boxes. “It’s happening!” I yelled, as I made it down the stairs and ran to my bedroom, where I got my purse and then ran down the stairs again to the bottom floor. My grandmother was in the parlor with her friend, Meryl, the blue-haired librarian. The house had been relatively quiet since the Easter egg hunt debacle two months before in April. Since then, volunteerism had taken a nosedive, probably because volunteers had a good dose of post-Easter PTSD. “It’s happening!” I shouted. “Bridget’s in labor!”

  “Again?” Meryl asked.

  “She says it’s real now,” I said.

  “That’s what she said yesterday,” Meryl pointed out.

  “And the day before yesterday,” Grandma said.

  “And the day before that,” Meryl added. “Guess what. Zelda found a great caterer for your wedding party. He makes pizza with caviar. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  It sounded delicious except for the caviar part. My grandmother had been handling the wedding, while I was hiding.

  “You and Spencer are such a romantic couple,” Meryl continued. “You’re just like Prince Charles and Lady Di.”

  “Meryl, it didn’t turn out well for Charles and Diana, you know,” I said.

  “What’re you talking about? They had a beautiful wedding. I have a commemorative plate.”

  My phone rang, again. It was Bridget. “I’m coming!” I yelled into the phone. “Gotta go,” I told my grandmother and Meryl as I ran outside.

  “Pinky, you want to put your two cents in about wainscoting?” Spencer called from across the street, as I fumbled with my car keys.

  “Wainscoting? I thought he was great in the last Star Trek movie,” I called back. “Bridget’s in labor. Gotta go!”

  “Again?”

  I sped out of the driveway and through the Historic District to Bridget’s townhouse. Luckily, I had only drunk one beer over three hours, and I was still sober. That didn’t stop me from running over a couple of curbs on my way to her home. When I got there, she was waiting for me on the sidewalk. She was wearing a blue pregnancy muumuu with her hand between her legs, as if she was planning on catching the baby before it hit the ground.

  “It’s happening!” she shouted, and I screeched to a stop in front of her. I jumped out of the car and helped her into the car. “Step on it! It’s happening!”

  I hopped back in the car and stepped on it, and we got to the hospital in less than three minutes. Bridget kept her hand between her legs as we walked through the parking lot and didn’t move it when we entered the maternity ward. “It’s happening!” she shouted.

  “Again?” the nurse at the front desk asked.

  Bridget slapped her free hand on the desk. “Get me a wheelchair and wheel me into exam room number one. Dr. Sara is on her way.” Her voice sounded like she was starring in The Exorcist. She was terrifying. I was expecting green vomit to spew from her mouth and her head to spin around at any moment. The nurses were scared, too, and they jumped into action.

  By the time that Bridget was settled in the exam room, dressed in a hospital gown that tied in the back, Dr. Sara arrived. Dr. Sara wasn’t actually a doctor. She was a woo-woo, la-la person who delivered babies, unless there was trouble and then she called for a real doctor. I was very suspicious of Dr. Sara. Maybe it was because of her heavy reliance on Reiki for pain or maybe it was the music she brought with her on her Alexa machine every time that Bridget thought she was in labor.

  “Alexa, tambourines,” she commanded sweetly, putting the Alexa speaker down next to Bridget’s bed. Tambourine noises started, and Dr. Sara touched Bridget’s shoulder and smiled serenely. “How is the daughter of the Earth Mother doing?”

  “A baby is going to squeeze out of my vagina. How do you think I’m doing?” Bridget screeched and did her Lamaze panting-breathing. I wished I had brought beer with me. I wished Bridget hadn’t picked me as her labor coach. I was supposed to be coaching, but instead, I was gnawing at a cuticle and sweating through my shirt.

  “You want ice chips?” I asked her, finally remembering the classes I went to with Bridget. “You want me to massage your lower back? Maybe you should get an epidural. Epidurals are good, Bridget.”

  She shook her head. “Epidurals aren’t natural, Gladie. My baby’s going to be natural. You don’t want my baby to be unnatural, do you? Besides, look how wonderfully I’m handling the pain. I’m like a Zen master with the pain. I’ve practiced for this, and I’m one with the pain. One with the—Oooh! Sonofabitch! Yowza! Ow! Motherfucker!” she shouted, hitting the bed with her fists. She took a deep breath and turned back toward me. “So, I’m totally fine. No pain medication for me. I am--Ooooh! Here it comes, again! Holy hell! The pain! The pain!” Bridget shouted.

  The tambourine music kept playing, and Dr. Sara kept smiling. She wasn’t panicking at all. Meanwhile, I was biting down on my hand. In that instant, it dawned on me that Bridget was going to have an actual baby. A human being was going to come into this world because Bridget pushed it out. And I was the coach!

  “Here it comes!” I shouted, panic mixing with excitement in me.

  “Let’s take a little peek at our wondrous addition to the universe,” Dr. Sara sang, raising Bridget’s knees. I turned around to give Bridget her privacy. “I see. I see. Uh huh. Okay. You can put your legs down, now, Bridget.”

  I took that as my cue to turn back around.

  “Alexa, flutes,” Dr. Sara instructed and smiled at Bridget. “Another little false alarm. These things happen,” she said, but I noticed she was struggling to keep her patience. This trip to the hospital made seven false alarms in five days. I didn’t know much about pregnancy, but I was getting the impression that seven false alarms wasn’t normal.

  “Look, again, Dr. Sara. I can feel the contraction,” Bridget urged, turning her pelvis so that Dr. Sara could get an eye-full. “It’s happening right now, and if I push…” Bridget gave a little grunt, and instead of a baby shooting out of her pelvis, she farted. “Oh, that feels better,” she said and farted again. Her face changed from pain to relief to realization to humiliation.

  “Gas is a perfectly normal side effect of bearing life,” Dr. Sara said, nonchalantly covering her nose. “Alexa, stop music.”

  We knew the drill from there. Dr. Sara left after bestowing a Sanskrit blessing on Bridget, and I helped my best friend get dressed. It was on the tip of my tongue t
o point out to her that if gas pains were going to drive her to screams, I didn’t think she was going to make it through labor without an epidural. But somehow—maybe survival instinct--I kept my mouth shut. If it were me, and I was having a baby, I would get an epidural, a couple margaritas, and whatever drugs I could buy on the street corner.

  At the thought of labor, my heart raced. If I wasn’t ready to talk about bamboo flooring, I sure wasn’t ready to think about babies. Although a baby with Spencer would be so cute. Spencer would dress him in little baseball outfits and teach him to throw a ball, and I would…I would…what would I do?

  “I want deep fried gummy worms,” Bridget told me, standing face to face, her expression complete defeat.

  “Deep fried gummy worms?”

  “And I want them now. I need them, Gladie. I’m on my last nerve. They’re sold at one place in town.”

  Deep fried gummy worms were sold at Mart-n-Save, the mini-mart near the park. Bridget hadn’t said a word on the drive there. I assumed she was slightly embarrassed by and a lot fed up with her false alarms. “You can wait in the car, and I’ll go in,” I told her, turning off the motor.

  “Get Tums, too,” she said. “I’ll just sit here and fart.”

  “Good idea,” I said and opened her window.

  Inside, the clerk was a twenty-something man with greasy hair and a pimply face, and he was surfing through a nudie magazine next to the vertical hot dog spinner. “Do you have deep-fried gummy worms?” I asked. Without looking up from his magazine, he pointed to a place behind me. I turned around and walked down the aisle.

  I scanned the shelves of junk food, searching for Bridget’s treat, and bumped into a teenage boy, who was standing with two other boys around his age. All three were wearing matching T-shirts, which had DICK written on them, circled with a line struck through, like a No Smoking sign. The shirts looked they had been drawn with a Sharpie. No Dick? I figured it must have been a new hip hop band that I didn’t know about because I hung around old people every day, when I wasn’t hiding in an attic. I sighed and resolved to myself to stay young and current, somehow. At least, I decided, I would read Us Weekly and listen to hits radio from now on.