In the Midnight Hour

You'll Never Eat Lunch In this Town Again

Life gets complicated when the dead can talk to you any time they damn well please.

Remy needed to ward his brand-new RV, but the spell was painfully complicated, and he was busy. He hardly slept more than twenty minutes at a time anymore, which made it hard for the dead to visit him in his dreams – so what the hell.

It had taken him twelve hours to ward his previous RV from the voices and visions of the Trapped Dead. After the warding, the place had smelled like burned chicken feathers and rotting flesh for a week.

Remy looked around his pristine Mercedes Benz Sprinter. It seemed a shame to ruin its new car smell.

No. He'd ward it next month. Or the month after that.

Remy put his feet up on the seat and went back to carving his latest puzzle box, working through clues in the case with the pharmacist and his drug-smuggling scam. After all, the dead don't sleep, especially in a place like Los Angeles. Dead were layered upon dead in this place.

This morning a ghost had visited him in a dream and had given him a new connection in the case.

"It may surprise you to know," Remy told Marcus without looking up, "that the pharmacist case is connected to the naked dude with the Klingon sword found stuck in the millionaire's chimney."

"Nope." Marcus leafed through the piles of papers on the small table in the back of the RV. "No amount of twisted shit surprises me anymore."

Remy grunted and nodded, flicking away some wood shavings with the point of his whittling knife.

"So ... do you ever plan to call Kim back?"

Remy raised his eyes in a cold stare.

Marcus was grinning, but immediately lost the grin. "Whoa! Okay! I'll take that as a no."

Remy just exhaled. "Let's not ever talk about her again."

"Just because she tried to run you down with her car ...."

"I said, let's not talk about her ever again," Remy said.

Kim had complained that Remy was always too busy to spend time with her. But he had work to do. He couldn't just put things on hold to go on impromptu dates or whatever. It simply helped if they could schedule things a couple of weeks in advance. Maybe three or four weeks.

She completely lost it when he missed a nice date that he'd planned three weeks in advance – actually, it was her birthday. That afternoon, he found a lead on one of his cases that he absolutely had to follow up on. He didn't get back to her until after she'd been sitting at the restaurant for about two hours. So that led to an argument in the restaurant, then in the parking lot, then in the street.

The next thing he knew, Kim came for him in her car and chased him several blocks before he managed to escape her wheels of death.

Happens to everyone.

"Romance works better if you give a part of yourself to those who love you," Marcus said quietly.

Remy made a rude noise with his lips. "Romance is overrated. People need to learn how to take care of themselves. Look at me. I've taken care of myself all my life and I'm fine."

"Oh! Is that so?" Marcus asked wryly.

Just then Marcus's phone buzzed.

"Ms. Burnett just texted about her missing Bedlington Terrier," Marcus said, glancing up from his phone. Remy replied by grimacing at the chunk of wood slowly taking shape in his hands. "For the fourth time."