Murder on Wheels by Kaye George & Kathy Waller & Kaye George & Reavis Z. Wortham & V. P. Chandler

Author:Kaye George & Kathy Waller & Kaye George & Reavis Z. Wortham & V. P. Chandler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, crime, murder, detective, short stories
ISBN: 9781479408313
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

APORKALYPSE NOW, by Gale Albright

My husband was in the garage playing with one of his things.

“Fred, why don’t you quit playing with those things and come in to dinner?” I asked, sticking my head around the laundry room door. “I fixed some real nice pork chops.”

“Quit calling them things,” he said. “They’re bicycles.”

He was sitting in front of his red bicycle with a toothbrush in his hand.

I laughed. “What are you doing, brushing its teeth?”

“I’m cleaning the wheel spokes. They get road film when I ride.” He dipped the brush in a bucket of sudsy water and kept stroking those spokes.

“Why don’t you use the hose? That’ll take all night. The chops will get cold.”

“I want to finish this. You go ahead without me.”

I shut the door and went back to the kitchen. The golden-brown pork chops, the black-eyed peas swimming in bacon, the buttery, garlicky mashed potatoes all just sat there, turning to ice.

He could be such a jerk. It would serve him right if I sat down and ate the whole dinner all by myself and left Mr. Bicycle Thing to starve. He had four bikes. Was he going to clean them all tonight?

An hour and forty-five minutes later, well after dark, Fred came in the house. He was filthy, as usual, after playing with his things. Excuse me, bicycles.

“Well, did you finish brushing the bicycle’s teeth? Did it need some mouthwash, too?”

He didn’t answer me. I was sitting in my recliner, trying to watch my favorite reality show. He made a bunch of noise in the sink, splashing around, using that Lava soap he kept by my liquid Dawn.

“If you’re looking for dinner, I put it up. I was afraid it would go bad,” I said. “It is summer, you know.”

“Yeah. And you keep this house freezing with the air conditioning, so what’s the difference? We might as well be living in the Arctic.”

I gritted my teeth and decided to play nice. “You want me to microwave you some dinner?”

Fred shook his head and dried off his filthy arms with one of my mother’s best dish towels.

“No, I’ll have a power shake. I’m not really that hungry. I keep telling you, pork’s bad. Too much fat clogs your arteries. I want to quit eating meat.”

The four pork chops I’d eaten rumbled in my stomach. Quit eating meat!

It was that damn bike riding that put these crazy ideas in his head. Ever since he started reading bicycle magazines he’d talked about going vegetarian. He e-mailed me articles from so-called health experts. They told you to drink ninety quarts of water a day, pump iron, and eat brown rice.

Fred proceeded to grind up frozen blueberries, flax meal, yeast, lecithin, and soy milk in the blender, ruining the climax of my show with all that crunching and whirring. Then he strolled in with a brimming glass of foamy pink stuff, sat in his recliner and promptly changed the channel.

“What are you doing? Cherie is about to tell all the other girls how Mona is messing around with her husband, and now you’ve spoiled it.

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