Some Like It Shot Read online

  Some Like

  It Shot

  Book Two of the Agatha Bright Mysteries

  elise sax

  Some Like It Shot (Agatha Bright Mysteries– Book 2) 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 © 2019 by Elise Sax

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1705548066

  Published in the United States by 13 Lakes Publishing

  Cover design: Elizabeth Mackey

  Edited by: NovelNeeds.com

  Formatted by: Jesse Kimmel-Freeman

  Printed in the United States of America

  elisesax.com

  [email protected]

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  @theelisesax

  Also by Elise Sax

  Matchmaker Mysteries Series

  Matchmaking Advice from Your Grandma Zelda

  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

  Matchmaker Mysteries The Complete Series

  Goodnight Mysteries Series

  Die Noon

  Doom with a View

  Jurassic Dark

  Coal Miner’s Slaughter

  Wuthering Frights

  Goodnight Mysteries The Complete Series

  Agatha Bright Mysteries Series

  The Fear Hunter

  Some Like It Shot

  Fright Club

  Partners in Crime Series

  Partners in Crime

  Operation Billionaire Trilogy

  How to Marry a Billionaire

  How to Marry Another Billionaire

  How to Marry the Last Billionaire on Earth

  Operation Billionaire Trilogy

  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

  Standalone Books

  Forever Now

  Bounty

  Switched

  Also by Elise Sax

  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

  Also by Elise Sax

  About the Author

  For Mary, my wonderful telephone buddy. Thank you for your friendship and support. I wish for you, peace and happiness.

  Chapter 1

  “Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them.”

  –Terry Pratchett

  “Agatha, hurry it up before the potheads go all reefer madness on us,” I heard Irving Lansing urge me from in front of the dark soup shop.

  “They’re not called potheads anymore,” his wife Doris insisted. “They’re weedheads.”

  It was four in the morning, and the town was pitch black. It was that moment after the street lights had been turned off but before the sun came up. Still, I could make out the stores along Sea Breeze Avenue and the bandstand across the street, which was still standing two weeks after the disastrous Punk Rock Knitting Championship. Close to that, I knew there was an empty space where the lifeguard tower used to stand before it was burned down.

  I had closed my eyes and stopped a moment to enjoy the sound of the waves crashing along the shore. The sewage-infected water might be filled with poop, but at least the waves sounded beautiful, I thought, right before I heard Irving call for me.

  Irving and Doris waited for me to open the soup shop on most mornings. I guessed they were morning people. They were always the first ones in the shop, eager for a cup of coffee and a homemade baked good.

  I had walked there, as usual. I carried a large basket of Auntie Ida’s homemade strawberry scones down the dark road that led from our home and the attached lighthouse, over large, mismatched flagstones into the small seaside town of Sea Breeze.

  Our little city was nestled in the lowest left corner of California, right along the border with Mexico. We had missed the enormous growth of the rest of California’s coastal cities because we were cursed with sewage from Tijuana. That was just fine with me. I was having a hard enough time dealing with the people that already lived there.

  My name’s Agatha Bright, and I’m a lot older than I look. I’ve lived in Sea Breeze, California, since before it was founded, running the lighthouse. But recently, my Auntie Prudence died under mysterious circumstances, and I had been running her soup shop in her place. I had also solved a few murders, which I enjoyed a lot more than I should have.

  But I didn’t have time to think about murdered people now. Not with the new marijuana dispensary that just opened next door. As I stood at the door to the soup shop, I noticed the long line of cannabis enthusiasts waiting for the dispensary to open, even though they had five hours to wait.

  “They’re not weedheads,” Irving told Doris. “A weedhead is a gardener who weeds too much. Kills the lawns, you see.”

  “There’s no such thing as a weeding weedhead,” Doris spat. “Pot is called weed now. That’s all I meant to say. The reefer madness drug addicts smoke weed now. They don’t smoke pot anymore.”

  “Hey,” one of the reefer madness drug addicts interrupted Doris, stepping out of his place in line in front of the dispensary. “I’m not a reefer madness drug addict. I have glaucoma, dude.”

  Irving wagged his finger at him. “The pot gave you that glaucoma, young man. Pot will suck the eyeballs right out of your head. It happened to two fellows I know.” Irving made a sucking sound. “Just like that! Right out of their heads.”

  There was a general murmuring in line, as word got around the line of customers that their marijuana was being accused of sucking eyeballs out of smokers’ heads. I quickly dug my skeleton key out of the shallow pocket of my dress and unlocked the door to the soup shop on the double before the weedheads could start a riot.

  I urged Doris and Irving to get into the shop quick. Once inside, Irving went to turn on the gas lights, and Doris took a seat at a center table. The soup shop was located in an old one-story building, but the ceiling was three stories high. The ceiling was crisscrossed with thick, mahogany beams, and there was no shortage of shadows there once Irving lit the gas lights.

  Six assorted tables took up the center of the shop, and there were twenty-five rows of bookshelves to the right of the shop. Behind the stacks were another three tables, called the stacks tables. On the left side of the shop were four fireplaces of different sizes and depths. There was a cauldron in each for the four soups of the day.

  At the far wall was a little kitchen that was open to the customers and a cash register from 1890 on a butcher block counter. I put the basket of scones down on the counter.

  I wrapped a white apron around me and filled our one la
rge coffeepot with coffee grounds and water. The coffeepot had been given to my Auntie Prudence by an old prospector, and it made delicious coffee, regular or decaf, depending on the customer.

  I opened the safe that was hidden in the wall behind a picture of dogs playing poker and retrieved my Auntie Prudence’s book of recipes. Since her mysterious death, I had inherited the running of the shop, and I was still too timid to make the soups without the recipes. I wasn’t exactly what anyone would call a natural cook.

  I closed the safe, and my eyes settled on the space on the wall next to it. Five electronic tablets were attached to the wall. They were new, of course. The soup shop had never had a telephone, let alone Wi-Fi, and now we had five electronic tablets beeping and lighting up every few minutes. I sighed. Each tablet represented a different delivery app, and they were all making my life crazy. I had just gotten almost used to my new life running the shop when it had been turned upside down by technology.

  I poured coffee into Doris and Irving’s cups and put a plate of scones down on their table. “This Mary Jane business is going to be bad for your business, mark my words,” Irving told me, as he took a large bite of a scone.

  “He’s not half-wrong,” Doris said.

  “Business has been nonstop since the dispensary opened,” I noted.

  “The wrong kind of business,” Irving said.

  He wasn’t half-wrong. My shop had turned into a happy den for stoners. They never bought a book, but they didn’t stop eating. And they paid in change. I had three hundred dollars in pennies sitting in the pantry from the past week alone.

  “Maybe the demand will die down after a little while,” I suggested. “Maybe it’s just the newness of the whole thing.”

  “That’s not how drugs work, Agatha,” Doris said.

  I didn’t know how drugs worked. I had never even taken a Tylenol. I was more of an Irish whiskey kind of patient, even though I didn’t get sick. Never in my very long life. Not once.

  The door opened, and Mouse ran in. “Sorry I’m late,” she squeaked.

  “You’re not late. You’re early,” I said, surprised. Usually, Mouse ran really late.

  She dropped her purse behind the counter and tied an apron around her small frame. Mouse was about four-foot-ten with brown hair shaped into a pixie cut. She looked at me with her big round eyes and blinked rapidly.

  “I thought I should come early because of the truckers, the stoners, and the you-know-what,” she told me, glancing at the delivery app tablets on the wall.

  The delivery thing had been Mouse’s idea. She had been very enthusiastic about it. She had insisted the apps would modernize the shop and bring in new business. I didn’t feel the need to do either of those things. My aunts and I didn’t need more money, and modernity gave me hives. But I didn’t want to disappoint her since she was a great baker, and she never complained when I turned the shop over to her while I did an errand or chased a murderer. So, I tried not to complain about the beeping and flashing and the never-ending stream of unwashed deliverymen marching into the shop, demanding food.

  The delivery apps had achieved both of Mouse’s goals overnight. The shop was now wired to the internet, and we had more business than we knew what to do with. I had to make double batches of soup, and we still ran out every day.

  It turned out that there were a lot of people in Sea Breeze who wanted soup real bad but not bad enough to leave their homes. I pictured half of the population sitting on their couches, watching reality TV while they sipped soup out of plastic to-go containers.

  It confounded me.

  I hated the apps, and Mouse knew it, even though I tried to hide my frustration. I felt like Charlie Chaplin, falling into a factory’s works. Like with the marijuana smokers, I was hoping that the lazy soup eaters would either lose their taste for soup or decide to travel the couple of minutes to the shop and eat it there. After all, Sea Breeze was a tiny seaside town of only a few square blocks.

  “I forgot about the truckers,” I told Mouse, changing the subject from the deliveries. “I guess I should make three batches of chili.”

  The truckers made a detour off of the freeway every Thursday to come into the shop in order to eat the chili. I wished they would teach the couch potatoes how to eat. Truckers knew how to move to get good food.

  The morning passed in a blur as I made double and triple batches of the soups of the day to prepare for demand. I had to throw out one batch of beef & barley soup when the delivery apps tablets came to life at around ten in the morning, which surprised me and made my muscles spasm uncontrollably for a brief moment, knocking Mouse’s banana strawberry cheesecake into it.

  By eleven o’clock, the soup shop was packed to the rafters with soup eaters. There wasn’t an empty table, and for the first time since I started working in the shop, people were standing near the front door, waiting for a seat to become available.

  Was this what they called the rat race?

  It made me nervous.

  “Today’s specials are chili, beef & barley, vegetable, and loaded potato,” I told a table of lifeguards. Ace, T.J., and Captain Steve had been holding daily meetings at the soup shop since their lifeguard tower went up in flames a couple of weeks ago.

  “What’s in the vegetable soup?” Ace asked me.

  “Vegetables,” I said.

  “Oh, not a big fan of vegetables,” Ace said shaking his head. “I’ll go for the beef & barley. Barley’s not a vegetable, is it?”

  “No. A good rule of thumb is, if you can put ketchup on it, it isn’t a vegetable,” I said.

  The other lifeguards ordered the chili.

  “Any word on the lifeguard tower?” I asked them.

  “No,” Captain Steve complained, drawing out the word. “And now we’re saving stoned swimmers right and left.”

  “They’re swimming? Do they know about the sewage?” I asked, alarmed.

  Ace slapped the table, hard. “I took this job because I never had to save anyone! During my two years here, I’ve binge-watched Netflix’s entire inventory of shows. While on duty. Every single show. Even the ones from Finland. Now, potheads are drowning from sunrise to sunset, and what about me? What about Netflix?”

  “That’s rough,” I said, even though I had never watched Netflix. I didn’t have a television.

  “They’re not called potheads,” Doris told Ace from the next table. “They’re weedheads.”

  “The point is that we’re tired,” Captain Steve said. “At least with the chili, we can fart on them while we save their hides. It’s not much, but it helps with the resentment.”

  “Good point,” Ace said. “I’m changing my order to the chili.”

  The door opened, and Augustus Flannery III walked in. He was the owner of the marijuana dispensary, and for some reason, he felt the need to come in every day to extol the virtues and benefits of cannabis to my customers.

  He never ordered a thing.

  Augustus walked around the shop, clapping his hand on shoulders as he said hello. “I have a tincture for hemorrhoids,” he told Irving, as he squeezed his shoulder blade.

  Irving slapped Augustus’s hand away. “My hemorrhoids are my business,” he spat. “My hemorrhoids are one hundred percent American, buddy. I don’t want your commie tincture. It was probably made in the Kremlin. It’s probably got a bug in it to spy on my American rectum.”

  “He talks a lot out of his rectum,” Doris told Augustus.

  Irving pointed at his wife. “What she said.”

  Augustus paused a moment and then turned his attention to a table of middle-aged marijuana users, who were on their third bowls of soup and had eaten through two loaves of Mouse’s sourdough bread.

  Augustus squeezed a couple of their shoulders and offered them a sale on hot gummy worms. Maybe he had decided it was easier to build a business out of existing customers than it was to get new ones, since Irving was so protective over his American rectum.

  “We could go for a coffee cake, kid
,” one of the stoners told Augustus. “How about you squeeze a coffee cake out of Mouse? She’s got to have one back there somewhere.”

  I served the lifeguards and checked on the stacks tables. Bud Spicoli was seated alone at a table behind the stack of biographies and historical fiction. Bud was new to Sea Breeze, and I got the impression that he had followed the dispensary to us.

  His eyes were bloodshot, and he broke out into giggles at random moments. I would have bet dollars to doughnuts that he regularly snacked on discounted hot gummy worms.

  He had a laptop open on the table and was tapping the keyboard with two fingers. “Hey, Agatha. How’s it hangin’?” he asked and giggled.

  “We’ve had thirty-two orders for deliveries,” I said. “One of the truckers punched a delivery boy in the mouth when he took the last bag of oyster crackers. I’m supposed to be happy because it means that business is booming.”

  “You’re out of oyster crackers?” Bud asked, his face growing serious.

  “No, Mouse ran out and got a new supply. Today’s specials are chili, beef & barley, vegetable, and loaded potato.”

  “I’m going to go for loaded potato,” Bud said. “That sounds like it’ll hit the spot. You got cornbread?”

  “Always. I’ll cut you a big slice. And you want oyster crackers, too?”

  “Sure.”

  Bud stared at my chest for a moment. “What do you think about bras?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m a reviewer,” he explained pointing at the screen on his laptop.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I get high and then review stuff online. That’s how I make a living.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m reviewing bras, now, but I don’t know a lot about them. My last girlfriend didn’t wear one,” Bud explained, still staring at my chest. “I thought the discounted hot gummies would help, but I’m having visions of jockstraps instead of bras. You think that says something about me?”

  “You review things online for a living?” I asked. “That’s a job?”