Page 28 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Uh. Okay. I…” I gestured over my shoulder. “Let me shut everything down. I can finish it in the morning.”

I was admittedly a little disappointed that our rendezvous with Leon didn’t happen at Waffles?

“Do we at least have time to swing into a drive-thru?” I asked as I drove us across town. We’d left his car at my place and taken mine. Everett was a sweet guy, but I wasn’t getting into a vehicle he was driving. My neck hurt just thinking about it.

“We’ve got time.” He wrinkled his nose. “You’re hungry? After, uh…”

“Oh, God, yeah. I’m always starving after I’ve been at a scene.”

He said nothing. When I turned to him, he was staring at me in horror, and I thought he’d turned a little green.

I rolled my eyes and chuckled. “It’s a lot of physical work. Trust me—you work up an appetite.”

“Blech.”

“What? You’re around bodies and stuff all the time!”

“Yeah, but I don’t hit up the drive-thru with a body in the hearse!” He paused. “Well, except that one time, but that scene wasn’t, you know, messy.”

“Okay, yeah, I wouldn’t do that either.” I glanced at him as I got into the turn lane. “But do you get hungry if you’ve been cleaning your house for a few hours?”

“Of course.”

“Same deal.”

“Right, but I’m not cleaning up… pieces of people.”

“That’s good.” I reached over and patted his arm. “It’s very encouraging to know you don’t have pieces of people in your house.”

Everett snorted.

“Or, wait…” I pulled into the lane for the drive-thru. “Do you liveatthe funeral home?”

“Yeah, we have a living space on top. The building was actually a restaurant first, and my parents added the?—”

“Hold up.” Iverynearly hit the curb, which he would’veneverlet me live down. “The funeral home used to be arestaurant?”

“Well, yeah.” He shrugged innocently. “It already had a walk-in refrigerator, so…”

“Oh God,” I groaned.

“I’m kidding!” He snickered. “No, no. My dad ran a restaurant, but it didn’t do very well, so he renovated the place and went into the funeral business.”

“Huh.” I rolled down the window as I pulled up to the speaker. “I feel like there’s a story there.”

“I’ll tell you one of these days.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” I placed my order for a burger and a soda, paid, and collected my food.

“You sure you don’t want me to drive while you eat?”

“No, no, it’s fine.” I didn’t want to be mean and point out that his driving terrified me. Steadying the wheel with my knee, I unwrapped my burger partway. “I eat and drive all the time.”

“Eh, fair enough.” As I drove, he asked, “So, did you look at that link I sent? I didn’t want to be presumptuous and buy something for your fish, but it looked really cool.”

“I didn’t get a chance to. What was it?”

“Another castle kind of like the one you have now, but it’s a little bigger. So your guys might actually fit in it, you know?”

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