Dead Sexy

by Samantha McCabe

Dead Sexy

  By Samantha McCabe

  Copyright 2016 Samantha McCabe

  Dead Sexy

  Rick never understood why his gorgeous wife Marilyn agreed to marry him. She’s a 10 to his generous 5 and a quarter. But now that she’s caught up in a racket with a shady dermatologist and his non-FDA approved skin care treatments, Rick’s life is beginning to resemble the plot of a zombie movie.

  Drool? Yes. Shambling bodies? Sure thing. Hungry for Brains? Ur, unfortunately. Beautiful skin? Wait, what?

  Now Rick must uncover the truth about this preternatural beauty procedure before his wife becomes the latest corpse with skin to die for.

  Chapter 1

  I always knew Marilyn was too good for me. That was the thought that kept running through my head as I tailed my wife’s beat up little Ford Escort into the swanky part of Hollywood. I wasn’t angry that she might be skipping her regular hot yoga night to have an affair. Instead, my brain kept saying, “Well, dude, it looks like you were right.”

  I called my buddy Spenser to tell him I was following through on my plan to, well, follow Marilyn, and he said, “Cool! I’ve never been on a stakeout. Text me when you get to wherever she’s going.”

  I had shared my suspicions with Spense before—he was my best friend. Of course, he’d been telling me that I was crazy. Maybe he’d believe me when he saw where she’d gone.

  It was the hot yoga that had first tipped me off. She’d been doing it for years, but about a month ago, she started coming home completely sweat free. I mean, I’ve never been to a sweaty hot yoga class, but she’d always come home smelling like a high school boy’s gym sock.

  I had to slam on the breaks when Marilyn pulled her car into the driveway of a honest-to-goodness mansion. Luckily, she never pays much attention to her surroundings, so I pulled off to the side of the street. Idling about half a block down, I watched her get out of her car and hoped mine wouldn’t give me away by overheating and spewing steam.

  She was wearing her pink yoga outfit all right, but she didn’t get her yoga mat out of the back. Instead, I watched her go up to the oversized front door, but I was too far away to see who let her slink inside.

  I texted this information to Spense, along with the address of the house.

  He just replied with a sarcastic emoji.

  I pulled the car as close to the house as I thought I could get away with and picked up the binoculars I’d thrown in the passenger seat. I’d found them at the bottom of my closet, a hand-me-down from my granddad. They must have weighed about 20 pounds.

  If I was going to do this kind of thing often, I needed to start working out more. Then again, maybe if I had been working out more, things wouldn’t have come to this in the first place.

  Wait, did I see a curtain rustle? I peered harder through the binoculars leaning until they clinked against the window glass.

  A knock on the passenger side window made me jump and ram my face into the eyepiece.

  “Son of a—” I yelped, blinking to get the tears out of my eyes so I could see who it was, hopefully not a neighborhood rent-a-cop.

  It was Spense. I reached across to roll down the passenger side window. Spense tried to lean his elbows on the window and stick his head in, but he was wearing some kind of large brimmed hat that he kept bumping on the frame.

  In a voice that sounded like he was trying to talk around a mouthful of marbles, he said, “What’s the damage, Jack?”

  “What?” I kind of caught “Jack” at the end, but the rest…

  “What’s the damage, Jack?”

  “What’s the what?”

  “The damage,” he said.

  “The damage?”

  Spense resumed his normal upwardly mobile slight Midwestern accent. “The damage. It’s detective slang for—oh nevermind.”

  “You scared the hell out of me. Where did you come from?”

  He reached through the open window and popped the door from the inside. The outside handle had quit working last year.

  “I parked around the corner,” he said, sliding into the passenger seat. “You know they can see you through that huge wall of glass if they bothered to look out. You’re not being particularly evasive.”

  The mansion did seem like it was made mostly out of glass with some improbably angled modern wood bits holding it together. But it was dark and shadowy inside, and since I hadn’t actually seen anything since Marilyn had disappeared into the maw of the mansion, I hadn’t really been thinking about anyone seeing me.

  Working on being more evasive, I said, “It’s 90 degrees outside.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So what’s with the trench coat and the hat?”

  “It’s called a fedora, man. Not a hat. I mean, it is a hat—fedora. Gees.”

  A trench coat and hat—a fedora—were not the weirdest things I’ve seen since moving to Los Angeles. Certainly not the weirdest thing I have ever seen Spenser wear, but it was pretty weird being the middle of August.

  He pulled the fedora even lower over his face, going back to the marble-mouth speak. “These are my detectin’ clothes.” At least, I think that is what he said.

  “I thought this stakeout would be awesome research for my new screenplay,” he explained.

  “Your new screenplay? What happened to the old one?”

  Another thing to know about Los Angeles is that everyone either wants to be an actress—like Marilyn—or is writing a screenplay—like Spenser. Except for me, that is. I’m just a programmer.

  Spense sighed. “Vampire flicks are over, man. I’ve got to beat everyone to the new vampire.”

  “And you think inappropriately dressed detectives are the new vampire?”

  Spense gave me the look—the one that he and Marilyn both gave me—the one that said, “Rick, you’re a nice dude, but you just don’t get it.”

  So, I went back to my surveillance and gave Spense a rundown of what I had seen. “That’s definitely Marilyn’s car out front, and this is not sweaty yoga.”

  “Ah, the ol’ car parked out front.” Spense said tilting up his hat—his fedora—with a single finger. “The dame’s definitely up to no good.”

  It occurred to me that he was trying to imitate that actor, the one in that black and white movie. But I couldn’t remember his name.

  “Look, Rick.” Spense cut the cheesy accent and pulled the fedora off, hooking it onto the rear view mirror and running a hand through his sweaty hair.

  “I know you have this complex about Marilyn—that she’s going to wake up one morning and realize that she’s married to a giant dork. But, dude, she already knew you were a giant dork before you got married, and she did it anyway. She’s probably just at some girly thing like a Tupperware party. If you’re lucky, it might even be one of those lingerie Tupperware parties.”

  “You’re saying that she’s been at a Tupperware party every Tuesday night for the past month. Wait, lingerie Tupperware?” I asked, picturing my mom’s plastic deviled egg tray stuffed with lacy black bras. “Is that even a thing?”

  “Yeah, it’s probably why she didn’t tell you, because then she would have to explain it to you, and that would take a while, and...Hey, where are you going?”

  I thought about it for a second and shook my head, now even more convinced that there was something going on. “There’d be a lot more cars around if it was a lingerie Tupperware party,” I said and slammed the car door, making a dash for the side of the house.

  The backyard was fenced in by a combination of prickly hedges and iron fence. The bars were too narrow to squeeze through (I tried). I thought about trying to climb the fence, but it was at least 8 feet high and kind of spiky at the top. I decided it would have to be the hedges.

  “Come on.
Give me a leg up. I’m going to climb over this hedge.”

  Spense stuck a shiny silver something in my face. “Cigarette?” he offered from an open old-fashioned case.

  “You aren’t taking this seriously. You don’t even smoke!”

  “Of course, I’m not taking this seriously. It’s Marilyn! She’s crazy about you for some reason. I’m just here for the LOLs, man.”

  It was easy for Spense to say that, but I didn’t feel so sure. So I backed up and, after a running start, threw myself at the top of the hedge. Hedges aren’t really solid at the top, but they are definitely kind of solid in the middle. I climb-swam the hedge and tumbled out the bottom inside the yard.

  Spense was already standing there.

  “You aren’t very good at picking up clues,” he pointed out. “There was a gate.”

  At this point, I wasn’t paying any more attention to Spense, because I could see something.

  Like the front, the back of the house looked like it was made up of tall windows with no curtains to block the view. There wasn’t really anything beyond the yard—just the million-dollar vista of the city stretching out below. The rooms were dimly lit and difficult to see because I’d stumbled into the pool area where bright floodlights illuminated the swanky patio and the blue pool water. Shielding my eyes against the glare, I could make out two figures silhouetted in the interior of the house. One of the shadow people looked familiar, or maybe I just expected it to look familiar. I couldn’t tell for sure, so I started creeping forward.

  The curvier shadow moved. She flipped a long ponytail over her shoulder, a gesture I had seen Marilyn do at least fifty times that week.

  “Did you see that?” I hissed at Spenser. “It’s Marilyn. She is here.” My detecting skills were validated. Until I failed to detect the edge of the pool and fell in.