Kiss of Death

caught with the dead, driving. “This sucks,” Eve said. “The only thing that has decent trunk space is pink.” And not just a little pink, either; it looked like a pink factory had thrown up all over it.

Linda’s grandson wandered over, trailed by her. He caught the last bit of Eve’s complaint, and shook his head. “You don’t want that thing, anyway,” he said. “Used to belong to Janie Hearst. She drove it fifteen thousand miles without an oil change. She thinks she’s the Paris Hilton of Durram. Hi, I’m Ernie Dawson. Heard you’re looking for a car. Sorry about what happened to yours. Those fools are a menace—have been since I was a kid. Glad nobody was hurt.”

“Yeah, well, we just want to get the heck out of town,” Eve said. “It was my car. It was a really nice old classic Caddy, you know? Black, with fins? I was hoping maybe somebody could tow it in, fix it up, and I could pick it up later on, maybe in a couple of weeks?”

Ernie nodded. He had greenish eyes, a color that stood out against his suntanned skin; his hair was brown, and wavy, and got in his face a lot. Claire liked him instinctively, but then she remembered the last cute stranger she’d liked. That hadn’t turned out so well. In fact, that had turned out very, very badly, with her blood getting drained out of her body.

So she didn’t smile back at Ernie-much.

“I think I can set that up,” he said. “Earle Weeks down at the repair shop can probably work some magic on it, but you’d have to leave him a pretty good deposit. He’ll have to order in parts.”

“Hey, if you can make me a good deal on a decent car that isn’t pink, I’m all good here.”

“Well, what you see is pretty much what you get, except—” He gazed at Eve for a few long seconds, then shook his head. “Nah, you won’t be interested in that.”

“In what?”

“Something that I keep out back. Nobody around here will buy it. I’ve been trying to make a trade with a company out of Dallas to get it off my hands. But since you said big classic Caddy—”

Eve jumped in place a little. “Sweet! Let’s see it!”

“I’m just warning you, you won’t like it.”

“Is it pink?”

“No. Definitely not pink. But”—Ernie shrugged—“okay, sure. Follow me.”

“This ought to be good,” Shane said, and reached into his pocket for a cookie he’d hidden there. He broke it in half and offered it to Claire.

“Can’t wait,” she said, and wolfed it down, because Linda was world-class with the cookies. “I can’t believe I’m eating cookies for breakfast.”

“I can’t believe we’re stuck in Durram, Texas, with a burned-out car, two vamps, and the cookies are this good. ”

And... he had a point.

Eve had a look on her face as if she’d just found the Holy Grail, or whatever the Gothic equivalent of that might be. She stared, eyes gone wide and shiny, lips parted, and the glee in her face was oddly contagious. “It’s for sale?” she asked. She was trying to play it cool, Claire thought, although she was blowing it by a mile. “How much?”

Ernie wasn’t fooled even a little bit. He rubbed his lips with his thumb, staring at Eve, and then at the car. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I guess I could go to three thousand. ’Cause you’re a friend of Grandma’s.”

Linda said, “Don’t you go cheating this gal. I know for a fact you paid Matt down at the funeral parlor seven hundred dollars for the damn thing, and it’s been sitting for six months gathering dust. You ought to let her have it for a thousand, tops.”

“Gran!”

“Don’t Gran me. Be nice. Where else in this town are you going to sell a hearse?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been working on making it more of a party bus.”

It was gigantic. It was gleaming black, with silver trim and silver curlicues on the same, and faded white curtains in the windows at the back. Grandma Linda was right—it was covered in desert dust, but underneath it looked sharp—really sharp.

“Party bus?” Eve said.

“Yeah, take a look.”

Ernie opened the back door, the part where the casket would have gone... and there was a floor in there, with lush black carpet, not metal runners or clamps as there would have usually been for coffins. He’d built in low- riding seats down both sides, two on each side, facing each other.

“I put in the cup holders,” he said. “I was going for the fold-down DVD screen, but I ran out of money.”

Eve, as though in a trance, reached in her pocket and pulled out the cash. She counted out three thousand dollars and passed it over to Ernie.

“Don’t you want to drive it first?” he asked.

“Does it run?”

“Yeah, pretty well.”

“Does it have air-conditioning?”

“Of course. Front and back.”

“Keys.” She held out her hand. Ernie held up one finger, ran back to the shack, and returned with a set dangling from one finger. He handed them to her with a smile.

Eve opened the front door and started up the hearse. It caught with a cough, then settled into a nice, even purr.

Eve stroked the steering wheel, and then she hugged it—literally. “Mine,” she said. “Mine, mine, mine.”

“Okay, this is starting to seriously creep me out,” Shane said. “Can we move past the obsessive weird love and into the actually driving it part?”

“You guys go on and take it out for a spin,” Ernie said. “I’ll get the paperwork ready for you to sign. Be about fifteen minutes.”

“Shotgun!” Shane said, one second before Claire. He winked at her. “And you get the Dead Guy Seat.”

“Funny.”

“Wait until there are actual dead guys sitting back there.”

It wasn’t safe to say that, not in front of Ernie and Linda; after a second, Claire saw Shane realize that. He blinked and said, “Well, maybe not. But it would be funny.”

“Hilarious,” Claire agreed, and went around to the back. Getting in was a bit of a challenge, but once she was sitting down, it felt kind of like what she imagined a limo would be. She looked around for a seat belt and found one, then strapped herself in. No sense dying in a car crash in a hearse. That seemed a little too tragically ironic even for Eve. “Hey, there really are cup holders.”

“Fate,” Eve said with a sigh.

“I’m not sure fate had to burn up your car to get the point across,” Shane said, buckling his own seat belt.

“No, not that. The hearse. I’m going to name it Fate.”

Shane stared at Eve for a long, long few seconds, then slowly shook his head. “Have you considered medication, or—”

She flipped him off.

“Ah. Back to normal. Excellent.”

Eve pulled the hearse around carefully, getting used to the size of the thing. “It probably gets crap gas mileage,” she said. “But damn. It’s so dark!”

Claire moved aside the white curtains to look out the back window as they drove past the front of the used car lot. Linda and Ernie were standing in front of the shack, waving, so she waved back. “I’m probably the first person to wave from back here,” she said. “That’s weird.”

“No, that is awesome. Awesome in the deliciously creepy sense. Okay, here we go,