"Casey Daniels - Pepper Martin 01 - Don of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daniels Casey)

"You were doing fine right up until then, sweetheart." Like I was some kind of bigol ' disappointment,
Scarpetti shook his head. "You bought into that same line ofbullsh тАФтАФMadonn'!" He pressed a hand to
his heart. "I beg your pardon. I forgot myself. When there are ladies presentтАФ"

I couldn't help it. I started to laugh.

"Did I miss something?" Betty tapped her hearing aid. "Did I miss a joke?"

"No!" I tried my best to explain away my sudden fit of the giggles, but my panic got the best of me and
sent me into a serious laughing jag. How could I be serious when I felt myself on the brink of the mother
of all nervous breakdowns?
Not only was I hallucinating, now I was getting apologies from the hallucination.

I wiped away the tears I knew were smudging my mascara and so I could try to get a grip, I waved the
group back toward the bus.

At the last minute, I remembered the advice that had been drilled into me during my training. "Be
careful," I told them. "The ground at a cemetery is pretty uneven. It's easy to trip. Just a couple days
agoтАФ"

The truth hit me like a whiff of knock-off perfume. Just three days earlier, I was giving this very same
tour when I stepped in a hole and twisted my ankle. The heel of my right shoe snapped off and I went
down in a heap and smacked my head on the front step ofScarpetti's mausoleum. When I came to, I was
in the ER. The doc there told me I was just fine and at the time, I believed her.

Apparently, neither one of us figured leftover delusions into the mix.

The tour group walked ahead of me and now that I had finally figured out what was going on, when
Scarpetti walked past, I was ready for him. "I'm just seeing you because I hit my head," I told him.
"You're not really here."

He kept right on walking. "You think?"

I didn't just think it, I knew it, and it made me feel a whole lot better. I wasn't a whack job. I wasn't
cracking up. My walking, talking dead guy was nothing more than a figment of an imagination that got
scrambled like an egg when I thwacked my head.

Of course that didn't explain why I was wasting a perfectly good hallucination on something as weird as
a dead-and-gone mobster. You'd think if I was going to fantasize, it would be about something really
worthwhile.

Like my ex-fianc├й JoelPanhorst .

Wearing nothing but a Speedo that was two sizes too small.

Swimming in a lake full of piranha.

Wishful thinking, and I snapped out of it just in time to see myScarpetti fantasy disappear behind a
nearby marble column with a statue of a sad-looking lady at the top of it.