Corpse Whisperer Sworn Read online

  Corpse Whisperer Sworn

  H.R. Boldwood

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  Copyright © 2020

  H.R. Boldwood

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  Third Street Press publication date:

  April 2020

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  Cover Design: Kristin Bryant

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  All Rights Are Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-948142-45-8 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-948142-46-5 (e-book)

  Praise for H.R. Boldwood

  “If Anita Blake and Stephanie Plum had a lovechild, it would be Allie Nighthawk. One of the funniest and freshest takes on the zombie genre I've read, with genuine heart at the core of the humor and gore.”

  Dana Fredsti, author of the Ashley Parker series and the Spawn of Lilith series

  “Anita Blake and October Daye, scoot over to make room for Allie Nighthawk, the fiercest and funniest heroine to hit the streets since Buffy first quipped while laying the undead to rest. The Corpse Whisperer is smart, witty, and so much fun you may just start it again as soon as you finish it.”

  Lisa Morton, Six-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author and co-editor of Haunted Nights

  “The Corpse Whisperer redefines the zombie genre. Allie Nighthawk is the hero we all need more of.”

  Tom Deady, Bram Stoker award-winning author

  “H.R. Boldwood is the Janet Evanovich of zombie hunters. She’s fierce and funny and smart, just like her heroine. She’s rejuvenated the zombie genre with her fresh new take, in a kick-ass, take-no-prisoners, balls-to-the-wall series you’re going to want to read, time and again.”

  Christiana Miller, author of Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie She’s Dead

  Summary

  Corpse Whisperer Sworn

  Follow Allie Nighthawk to exciting New Orleans where she raises the dead, puts down rotters, and dabbles in the mystical world of hoodoo. She’s on the trail of an evil necromancer who will stop at nothing to rule the world with his army of deadheads. Is her magick strong enough to save the day? Or will this necromancer from her past kill her before she gets the chance?

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  She figures she’s got a fifty-fifty shot. Make that forty-sixty.

  Contents

  1. Rules, Shmules

  2. Happy Horseshit

  3. The Full Moon Brings ‘Em Out

  4. Civics 101

  5. Meatbag Melee

  6. Injunction Dysfunction

  7. Secrets and Dreams

  8. Just Plain Awkward

  9. Holy Humping Hedgehogs

  10. Anger, Anxiety, and Asshats

  11. Saunter and Swagger

  12. The Odd Couple

  13. Liar, Liar Pants on Fire

  14. Coming Clean

  15. The Girl from Ipanema

  16. Riders on the Storm

  17. The Dark Angel

  18. Now We’re Cooking With Gas

  19. The Stuff of Nightmares

  20. Slam, Bam, and Wham

  21. Nowhere to Run

  22. Talk About Toxic

  23. The Flaming Arrows of Evil

  24. A Bunch of Crybaby Gossips

  25. That Dimwitted, Shit-for-Brains Horndog

  26. Someone Call for a Murderous, Life-Sucking Devil?

  27. The Sound of FUBAR

  28. That Crazy Hoodoo Mambo

  29. Glints of Gold and Stinky Yellow Dust

  30. Never Ever Ask That Question

  31. Prelude to a Clusterfuck in D Minor

  32. Code Zushi

  33. ‘For Like the Grass They Will Soon Wither’

  34. This Almost Never Happens

  35. I’ll Try to Bleed Slower

  36. Shit-Out of Miracles

  37. Casualties of War

  38. How Could You?

  39. Upside Down is Only a Point of View

  40. A Mama’s Love

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By H.R. Boldwood

  This book is affectionately dedicated to Lisa Morton, friend and mentor, without whose unfailing support and encouragement The Corpse Whisperer series would not exist. Thanks for believing in me and cheering me on.

  It’s also dedicated to Joseph Daniel Back, my spouse, whose eagle-eye and tireless logic reign in my ridiculously right-sided brain when it wanders off. Thanks for understanding and for reading these chapters so many times you could probably recite them by heart.

  Last but not least, it’s dedicated to the memory of two of Allie Nighthawk’s biggest fans:

  Rick Burdick who faithfully served as my law enforcement and weaponry expert, and Barbara Kuroff, a wonderfully gifted writer and delightful friend. I wish both of you were here to read the rest of the series as it unfolds. But I know you’re up there smiling.

  1

  Rules, Shmules

  “Get your hands off my Harley.”

  I leveled my gun at the intruder’s bald head and racked the slide. He froze at the metallic click-clack, inched his hands into the air and slowly pivoted toward me.

  “You…Allie Nighthawk?” he asked, squinting beneath the moonlight at the paper in his hand.

  “I’m not going to say it again. Step away from the Lowrider.”

  He backed off with a shrug. “Bank One says it belongs to them, now. You should’ve made the payments, lady.”

  It was just after midnight on a muggy May Saturday in Cincinnati, and the weekend was already in the crapper.

  Welcome to my world.

  “They’ll get their money,” I said, keeping the bastard in my crosshairs. “Go on now, leave—before Hawk here has second thoughts.”

  He eyed my gun, then turned and climbed back into the cab of his flatbed. “Nice piece. Semi-auto?”

  “Custom 9 mm. Nighthawk.”

  Baldy slammed the door of his truck and cranked the engine. It turned over slower than a ninety-year-old hooker, belched smoke and backfired, the sound echoing against the Cape Cod houses that lined Pitty Pat Lane.

  Little Allie, the mouthy voice that squats in the back of my head, couldn’t resist. Maybe the neighbors will think that was a gunshot and fall back to sleep.

  In Little Allie’s defense, my neighbors have heard worse sounds coming from my house.

  The brain bitch, as I like to call her, knows how to push my buttons. She’s also the closest thing I have to a conscience. The two of us are a package deal. We live in the real world where zombies aren’t just on television, where their numbers increase every day—a world where necromancers will stop at nothing to gain power. When it comes to corpse management, we’re number one. No brag, just fact. We do our best to keep our ‘work’ at the office, but every once in a while, a bit of the batshit crazy follows us home.

  By now, the blue-haired biddies of Pitty Pat Lane were surely craning their necks, peering out their windows, and watching the live edition of Repo Man Uncut. Come morning, the HOA’s mailbox would be bursting with a fresh batch of complaints against me. It’s har
d to blame my gum-grinding neighbors really. Like I said, when you live down the street from a corpse whisperer, you see some strange shit.

  “I’ll be back,” Baldy yelled, as he rumbled away in his truck.

  “We’ll be waiting,” I shouted, brandishing Hawk in his wake.

  Nonnie Nussbuam, my seventy-year-old, next-door neighbor, reached my side in record time. She was spry, for a fossil.

  “Miss Allie, that man stealing your motorcycle?”

  “That depends on your definition of steal,” I said, trudging back to the house.

  “Bah. You no fooling me. He repo man.”

  Nonnie, the Palermo-born widow of a low-level mobster, spoke a subset of English/Italian/Yiddish all her own. I suspected, given her knowledge of who and what a repo man was, that she learned most of her English from reality shows.

  She grabbed my arm and jerked me to a stop. “Is true?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I mumbled. “Go back inside. It’s late.”

  “Is true. You no look at me. What happened with big new FBI job?”

  “They haven’t paid me for the last job yet, and besides,” I said, wrenching my arm from her bony fingers, “they only want me as a consultant. It’s not a weekly paycheck.”

  Normally, I subcontract with the Cincinnati Police Department. But on my last case, CPD and the FBI formed a joint task force, headed by Assistant Director Horton (aka Director Dickhead), to babysit a mob informant named Leo Abruzzi. He’d been bitten by a rotter a few weeks earlier, and though he’d taken his medication to stave off the symptoms, he ended up dying before it was all said and done. I was still nursing some wounds from that case, the invisible kind that take a long time to heal.

  Nonnie trailed me into my house and was instantly greeted by my bulldog, Headbutt, and my African Grey, Kulu.

  “What about the zumbas?” Nonnie asked, scratching Headbutt’s roly-poly stomach. “Someone must kill the zumbas. Why not you?”

  “Zombies, Nonnie. And the police got pretty good at taking them down once I showed them how it’s done. Taught myself right out of a job, is what I did.”

  She took my hand and squeezed it. “I have monies. Plenty monies. My Mortie, God rest his soul, he left me—”

  “No. I refuse to take money from you. There’s got to be another answer.”

  Nonnie tightened her grip on my hand and stared deep into my eyes. “You also raise the dead, no?”

  “We’ve been through this before, and the answer is still no,” I said, prying her fingers loose. “I have rules. A moral code. I won’t raise every Tom, Dick and deadhead, just because I’m broke.”

  Shoulders slumped, Nonnie wandered back to her house. I should have known that would never be the end of the conversation. Unless Nonnie hears what she wants to hear, conversations never die; they just circle back like boomerangs, and slap you upside of your head when you aren’t expecting them.

  Not two mornings later, she showed up at my door, on the pretense of missing ‘the terrible twins,’ Headbutt and Kulu. She’d pet-sat them for me when I worked on the task force a month or so ago and the three of them had bonded.

  The twins are a lot like me—a little rough around the edges and not so fond of rules. But they tolerate Nonnie and love to chow down on her leftover rugelach. Nonnie does my laundry and cooks for me, too. We have a standing dinner date at her house every Tuesday at six.

  I spent my early years living next to Nonnie and her wise-guy husband, Mortie, before I went away to a very special school for whisperers. As far back as I could remember, her hair had always been bottle-blue and shellacked with Aqua Net, her knee-high pantyhose puddling around her cankles. Mortie passed away maybe eight years ago. Once I settled back in Cincinnati, the crazy old bat weaseled her way into my life so quickly, it was hard to remember how quiet my world had been before I’d invited her into it. I owed her a lot. That made it hard to tell her no.

  She sat at my kitchen table, clucking at Kulu, and luring me into her web with rugelach and milk. When I least expected it, she sprang into boomerang mode.

  “Miss Allie, I hear you say no raising of the corpses, but Lucia Falconi, she want you to raise her boy, Rocco. God rest his soul.” Nonnie crossed herself, leaned in close, and whispered. “Lucia Falconi has monies.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Let it go. Raising the dead isn’t a game. I made my rules a long time ago.”

  “But you need monies.”

  Talk about an understatement. As it turns out, saving the world isn’t cheap. I had places to go and promises to keep, not to mention an old nemesis who needed to be stopped before he single-handedly destroyed the world. I’d sworn myself to that cause. But after Leo’s case, the bastard had gone underground. No matter. He could run and he could hide, but one day, I’d find Toussaint Le Clerc—or die trying.

  In the meantime, I had my rules, and doing what I do without those rules would make me no better than the bastard I was chasing.

  “Forget it. I won’t raise corpses for stupid reasons.”

  “Is not stupid. Is for Lucia.” Nonnie implored me with her wrinkled brown eyes. “Please, Miss Allie, I ask so little.”

  I got up and raided the refrigerator for another glass of milk. “Who is this Lucia, anyway?”

  “Good friend. Do anything for me. Like you.”

  “Nice touch,” I said, quashing a smile. “And why does Lucia want to raise Rocco?”

  “He die from too many of the drugs. Lucia, she think it her fault.”

  “Guilt is a crap reason to raise a corpse. What your friend needs is a shrink.”

  Nonnie wrinkled her brow.

  “A psychiatrist, Nonnie. She needs a psychiatrist.”

  Nonnie waddled up behind me, snatched my milk and the plate of rugelach, and held my breakfast hostage. “You raise the corpses for good reasons. Lucia is good reason. She wants the closure. You give her the closure. You need monies. She has monies. Is simple fix to big problem, no?”

  “But my rules—”

  “Bah! Rules, schmules. Stubborn shiksa.” Nonnie stomped out the back door, taking my breakfast with her. She made it about ten feet, then stopped and turned around. “Miss Allie, don’t listen to head. Listen to heart. Help Lucia.”

  As if Nonnie wasn’t holding her own in this conversation, Little Allie decided to add her two cents worth, scolding me about doing the right thing. That brain bitch had the audacity to remind me, in a very loud voice, that I had chucked the rules out the window more than once in my life. Okay, like lots more than once, but I didn’t need a lecture from that overbearing, domineering head hag.

  “Fine,” I said, wrenching my breakfast from her hands. “You win. Tell Lucia, I’ll raise Rocco. But it’s going to cost her two grand.”

  Nonnie beamed. “Is already set. Midnight. Tonight.”

  “Hold on, now. I’m not digging this kid up—”

  “No digging. Visitation tomorrow morning, at Templeman’s.”

  I stared, slack-jawed. “You want me to break into a funeral home to raise this kid? That’s illegal. You know that, right?”

  “Nonnie do the breaking,” she said, with a toss of her hand. “You do the raising.”

  Swell. What could possibly go wrong?

  2

  Happy Horseshit

  Nonnie pulled into my driveway at midnight on the dot, in her dirt-brown, wood-paneled, ’72 Pinto Wagon. A short, gray-haired fireplug of a woman I presumed to be Lucia Falconi slingshot out of the passenger seat, like a human projectile, and wallpapered herself against me.

  “Miss Allie. Oh, Miss Allie,” she gushed. “I Lucia. Grazie. Molto grazie.”

  “Nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Falconi,” I said, peeling her off me. “And don’t thank me yet. This operation has all the earmarks of a Class A clusterfu…” Little Allie dialed it back. “It’s risky. We get caught, it’s every man for himself. Capiche?”

  With a sober nod, Mrs. Falconi trundled herself back into Nonnie’s car.

  I
climbed into the backseat and cut to the chase. “You got my money?”

  “Si.” Lucia pulled a sock out of her purse and fished out a roll of bills. “One thousand, five hundred dollars.”

  “Excuse me?”

  These old broads. So tight, they’d squeeze a quarter ’til the eagle screamed. “We agreed on two thousand, Mrs. Falconi.”

  “Please. Call me Lucia.”

  “Unless you cough up the other five hundred bucks, I’ll be calling you a lot of names, not one of which is Lucia.”

  She threw me a wounded, puppy-dog look. “I old woman. Living on socials securities. Nonnie say fifteen hundred.”

  “Then maybe Nonnie should raise Rocco.”

  Lucia waited in stony silence, as if expecting me to break.

  Fat chance, sister.

  “Well, it’s been a real slice of life,” I said, opening the car door. “Gotta run.”

  “Wait. Wait.” Lucia dug into her purse and yanked out another sock. “Is Bingo money.”