Second Grave on the Left (Charley Davidson, #2)

by Darynda Jones

If his answers got any more vague, they’d resemble the food in school cafeterias everywhere.

If I had to call my uncle Bob, an Albuquerque Police detective, in the middle of the night one more time to get me out of one of these ridiculous altercations I tended to have with random cops, he was going to kill me. He told me so himself. With an orange peeler. Not sure why.

“Come here often?” I asked instead, humoring no one but myself. So it was totally worth it.

Guys made this stuff look so easy. The only things I liked to scale on a semi-regular basis were those same guys who made this stuff look easy.

we’d never really seen eye to eye. Mostly ’cause he was much taller than I was.

I wasn’t particularly fond of being watched. Unless the watcher was over six feet with a hot body and sexy smile. And he wasn’t a serial killer. That always helped.

I, on the other hand, had yet to reach that apex of the mother–daughter bond. I preferred my bondage stepmother-free and sprinkled with a little sexy.

fry a mean chicken.” “Oh, good. I hate it when the nice ones get fried.”

Bigwigs had to follow the constructs of the law just like medium-sized and little wigs.

I sort of got off on making bad guys sweat. Which was not unlike my love of making good guys sweat, just by very different means.

“What have you got?” “Besides great boobs?” I asked. “On the case.” He was so testy.

“You stir up more hornets’ nests than a twelve-year-old boy with a baseball bat. You’re like Lois Lane on crack.”

If I was Lois Lane, then Reyes Farrow was definitely my Superman. I just had to find him before the kryptonite demons finished what they started.

He was too young to be jaded and too old to be naïve. A darned good age, in my book.

I widened my smile, which in my experience could open more doors than an AK-47.

I had been called everything from schizoid to Bloody Mary—which was odd ’cause I was rarely covered in blood.

I could have kissed him on the mouth right then and there if he hadn’t been such a jerk to me in high school.

“Evil is simply the absence of good, the absence of God.”

May I remind you that the hour is much too ungodly to be happy?” “Oh, we’re not happy,” Bianca said happily.

I wasn’t just some random chick they were going to torture and bury in the desert. I was specially chosen to be tortured and buried in the desert. The self-esteem had already jumped a notch.

Oh, for the love of hush puppies.