Three Witches and a Killer: Wicked Western Witches Book 1 (2 page)

It’s a short walk from the Raven’s Nest to my office and since I could barely walk at all last night, my office made more sense than trying to make it home. I figured it was a lot safer too. Sleeping on my desk hadn’t been so much fun though.

My little black dress was wrinkled and appeared to have a ketchup stain on the front. I had no problem with having some fun once in a while but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea to get so falling down drunk that I woke up with disgusting ketchup stains on my clothes and blue hair.

At least my eyes were only a little bloodshot. Still, the stoner look didn’t do a lot to make my weird - burgundy colored eyes any more attractive.

After pulling the paperclips from my hair, I used a wet paper towel to wipe away as much of the ketchup stain as possible. The effort didn’t do much to make me look any more presentable, but it was better than doing nothing.

Before turning my attention back to the white cardboard envelope with the little blue and white stripes, I chewed a couple aspirin and put on a pot of coffee. Only then did I feel alert enough to take on the mysterious envelope.

Inside the cardboard envelope, there was a smaller white envelope. It was thick, as if someone had printed out an entire book and stuffed it in the envelope.

When I tore it open I was confronted with green and lots of it. The envelope was full of hundred dollar bills. There had to be well over a thousand dollars.

I was thrilled, but there had to be some kind of mistake. No one just dumped thousands of dollars in your lap, especially in cash.

Stuck behind the stack of bills was a single piece of paper with some handwriting on it.

Ms. Costello

I apologize for the unusual method of contacting you, but it is necessary. I need your help, but it is imperative that no one know my identity, including you. Someone is targeting the heads of the five families with the intent of destroying the Council of Five. The police are fumbling this case and not making the connection, but I’m sure you will. Please look into this. I have included the first half of your payment. You will, of course, receive the other half at the conclusion of our business. You can forward reports on your progress to the return address on the package this letter came in.

Sincerely

Your New Client

I should have known this would have something to do with the CO5, which was short for Council of Five. They were the heads of the five families that oversaw all supernatural business. It was the only way to keep order.

That’s how it had been for centuries, although these days they were more like the five organized crime families.

Three of those families had their base of operation in Shadow Crossing.

Only a couple weeks ago the head of the Petrova family was killed in a mysterious accident. It was front-page news when Canton Petrova drowned in his swimming pool.

The suspicious part of it was that Canton Petrova had been confined to a wheelchair, yet his body had been discovered in the pool with his wheelchair nearby. The police were being pretty closed-mouthed about the incident.

It was possible this anonymous client was right.

Unfortunately, my own auntie was the head of one of those families, which meant this was more than just another job. This was personal.

Aunt Selena was the oldest of the Costello clan, which made her the head of the family. Although she was technically a Rathmore now, she was a Costello witch and that meant she was a force to be reckoned with.

If someone was really killing the heads of the CO5, I felt sorry for them when they came face to face with Aunt Selena, especially if she was having one of her bad days.

Wicked witch didn’t even come close to describing Selena when she was pissed. The thumping and moaning coming from the coat closet in my office were testament to my aunt’s over the top temper.

I’d nearly forgotten about Mickey D – D being short for Dickhead, as I’d started calling him since he tried to destroy my entire life during our divorce.

Who knew such evil really existed?

I guess some people just didn’t like getting dumped and I did dump him like a hot potato when I figured out how much of a liar and control freak he was.

Sighing, I made my way to the closet and pulled the door open just enough to see what Mickey D was up to. Sunlight filtered in through the crack to highlight his rotting face.

He needed brains, which wasn’t really anything new, but at the moment he needed them literally, or at the very least some fresh roadkill.

“You really do deserve this, Mickey. I warned you not to get mouthy with Aunt Selena. When she told you to get over it, you shouldn’t have threatened to turn her in for being a witch.”

His response was a groan and a depraved gnashing of his teeth.

“I’ll see what I can do to find you something to eat today,” I told him, though I wasn’t so sure how I was going to do that. Abducting neighborhood pets probably wouldn’t be a good idea, not that I would do that anyway.

Maybe the butcher would have some left over cow innards that I could slip the brain dead zombie in my closet.

To be honest, it wasn’t just Aunt Selena’s fault. I should never have told her about Mickey D filing false police reports against me, or how he’d lied in court to get all our marital assets.

Of course, Selena had to confront him, and as stupid as Mickey is, he hit her with a bunch of threats. Not the smartest thing he’d ever done.

Most of all, I shouldn’t have asked Aunt Selena for a spell to turn him into what he really is. I was figuring something more like a frog or possibly a weasel. Who would have guessed he would turn into a zombie?

No doubt I should have known. It was obvious he was soulless, but equating that to a zombie wasn’t something I’d anticipated.

Imagine my surprise when I cast on him and he’d risen from my living room floor as a member of the shuffling dead.

The problem came when I couldn’t remember how to reverse the spell. When I left Reno to return to Shadow Crossing, I had no choice but to hogtie him and stick him in the back of the moving van.

I made sure to stay far away from his teeth. There was no way to know if his zombie condition was contagious or not. All I knew was on TV it was definitely contagious, and I wasn’t taking any chances.

Keeping my ex hidden from my dad wasn’t easy, but I had no choice. The last thing I wanted was to give my dad a coronary, which is exactly what would happen if he found out that I’d turned someone into a zombie, even if that person was my no-good ex.

My cousin, Pax helped out for a few days, but that hadn’t lasted long before he gave Zombie Mick back to me. I guess keeping a zombie hidden in his basement just creeped him out too much.

Aunt Selena was in the process of searching for a way to reverse the spell, but until then I was stuck with him.

Selena insisted that I had to have changed the words since her usual spell reversal wasn’t working.

It was possible since we’d been in the middle of a heated argument when I cast on him. Who is really thinking clearly when they are trying to reason with a brick wall?

Pushing the door shut, I made sure it was locked. The last thing I wanted was for the housecleaning service to come across a zombie in my office. That could get sticky.

The image of Mickey D feasting on the help brought on a shudder. I was definitely going to have to get this problem taken care of as soon as possible.

And now I had another problem. If my anonymous client was right, Canton’s death had been murder and more would follow.

Chapter Two

Although it was only 9:00 in the morning, I put the
Out to Lunch
sign in the window and locked up.

The day was already warm but not hot. Summer in Wyoming could be stifling, but usually the Red Rock Valley stayed cool. I figured that was due to its magical elements. It was those same elements that had drawn the witches and other supernatural creatures to the valley in the first place.

According to myth, the veil between this world and the unseen world was thinnest in Red Rock Canyon. Naturally, when news of the canyon made it to other parts of the world there was a massive migration of wicked witches, as well as not so wicked witches.

I wasn’t sure just how true the myth was but I did know that strange occurrences weren’t all that unusual in the canyon and the citizens of Shadow Crossing took full advantage of its reputation for being one of the spookiest towns in America. When it came to ghost hunters and Halloween tourists, Shadow Crossing ranked right up there with Salem and New Orleans.

The town council loved it. Tourists meant money.

This explained the off the wall names for most of the streets and businesses in Shadow Crossing. So what if our town square had one of the most bizarre names ever. As long as Specter Square brought in tourists dollars, the name was A-okay.

Why not just change the name of the town to Spookville USA?

Attracting attention didn’t seem like the smartest move to me, but as Mayor Cowpoke always said, hiding in plain sight is the best way to hide. Cowpoke was my personal nickname for Mayor Randall George, on account of his habit of wearing oversized cowboy hats and boots. Not that his attire was unusual for Wyoming, but for someone who’d never been closer than ten feet to a cow, it was a little odd.

I suspected he was right though. If the public believed everyone in Shadow Crossing was just out to make a buck, we probably didn’t have much to worry about in the way of modern day witch-hunts.

Stepping off the wooden plank sidewalk and onto the red brick road, I started across the street. Cutting through Specter Square was the fastest way to the city and county office building on the other side.

Most of the buildings in town had an Old West look to them, including the building that housed the county offices. Our town square looked similar to many you’d find in small towns throughout the country, with the exception of pine trees and the bronze witch statue erected in the square to commemorate the valley’s first settlers. Oh yeah, and there was the huge cottonwood tree with the plaque announcing its use as a hanging tree during the town’s wild west days.

The illusion of the 19
^th
century town quickly faded when I stepped through the glass doors of the Shadow Crossing Public Works building. Inside, it resembled something from the Roaring 20s. The floor was covered with black and white checkered tile and there was even a working elevator to take you to the third-floor. True, the elevator was ancient and a mite scary sometimes.

During its slow progress to the third floor, it did a lot of squeaking and rumbling but I wasn’t going to let it bother me today.

I had a killer to catch and to do that I was going to need some inside information. Who better to get that information from than the county prosecutor?

The third floor hall had the same ugly tile as the main floor. Like the elevator, I ignored it.

When I entered the Red Rock County prosecutor’s office, Sandy Jacobson looked up from the nail she was filing and painted on one of her fake plastic smiles.

Sandy was phony from head to toe. She was one of those loose women that just irked me something fierce.

“Well hello, Sadie. I didn’t know your father was expecting you today.”

“He’s not. I thought I’d surprise him,” I told her.

My words had a double meaning and she knew it. Sandy had been chasing my dad for years, but so far she hadn’t made any progress. I’d know it if she had, on account of the spell I’d put on her about ten years ago. If she started having an affair with my father, all that bleach blond hair of hers would fall right out of her oversized bobble head.

Unless she was just wearing a tasteless wig, I had to assume Dad was still safely beyond her grasp.

When I strolled into Dad’s office, I caught him, not so discretely, viewing race news on his computer. Race news, as in car races. Dad was fanatical about cars, which probably explained the names he’d picked for my sister and me.

Because my sister was the oldest, Dad had been given full reign to choose her name and he’d decided on Daytona Blue. We called her Day for short. Mom put her foot down when it came to my name though. She’d wanted something a little more elegant, so I was called Mercedes Rose. Needless to say, I was happy to shorten it to just Sadie.

Dad quickly clicked off the website but it was too late.

“I saw that,” I accused.

A mask of boyish innocence dropped over his face.” Saw what?”

“Never mind.” I waved away his question. I had bigger fish to fry.

Like most Costellos, Dad had shadow black eyes, and at the moment they were sparkling with good-natured mischief. Now that I’d caught him slacking on the job, he couldn’t exactly reprimand me for doing the same.

My Pops might slip here and there but he was still a professional; he looked the part too. From his flawless gray suit and red tie to his haircut, Dad was the perfect image of the successful lawyer. Not a single dark hair was out of place.

Mom would have preferred it if Dad had been a defense attorney. I could understand her reasoning. There was a lot more money in getting criminals off than prosecuting them, but that wasn’t Dad’s thing. Fredrick Costello was a fighter for justice, which was a good thing, most of the time.

Of course, there was that one time that I’d had one too many margaritas and jumped up on the bar at the Raven Nest’s to do a partial striptease. Apparently, there were a few conservatives in the house who had no appreciation for my efforts to liven things up.

In my own defense, it was soon after my divorce and I was a little crazy.

Who can blame me?

Anyone who has ever lived with a bore of a control freak would know what it’s like to finally get a breath of freedom. It’s intoxicating.

As fun as it had been to get in trouble that night, it was time to focus on the task at hand.

“You were right about that delivery. It was a job.”