Fat Free And Fatal. G. A. McKevett

to sleeping, Dirk usually followed directions.

      “Who can that be?” Tammy said.

      “A dead person walkin,’” Savannah replied, dumping the cats onto the floor and heading to the front hall. She mentally checked the fact that her Beretta was in its holster, lying on the table next to the door. If it was a burglar or a door-to-door salesman, they were living their final moments on earth.

      When she opened the door and saw the faces of the people standing on her porch, Savannah instinctively slammed the door closed, threw the bolt and reached for the gun. She had it out of the holster and had chambered a round before she could form any conclusion about what she had just seen.

      “Who is it?” Tammy asked.

      Who? Savannah wasn’t even sure what it was.

      Her mind was churning with the possibilities. A person in a Halloween mask? It wasn’t even close to Halloween. A burglar?

      Violent, disturbing visions of all the home-invasion robbery scenes she’d ever processed raced through her mind, along with plans of action.

      “Call nine-one-one!” she told Tammy. “And run to the back door. Don’t open it. Make sure it’s locked and turn on the porch light.”

      Then she pointed the gun at the center of her closed front door—her finger off the trigger, but ready.

      “Who the hell are you?” she shouted. “And what do you want?”

      “Your sister, you idiot,” yelled back a voice with a thick Georgia accent. “Open up.”

      Sister? Sister?

      Savannah’s brain whirred, trying to process the vision of the white-faced, black-lipped, monster-clown faces on her doorstep with the concept of “sister.”

      And it just didn’t compute.

      “Open up, Van! What’s the matter with you, girl? Slam the door in my face, will ya?”

      Okay, the voice was right. The Southern twang, the bossy indignation—all rang Savannah’s memory bells.

      She ventured a look through the peephole, a definite no-no when expecting that the person on the other side might be an armed and dangerous criminal. More than one person had done so, only to find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun.

      She saw the snow-white face again, with its black-rimmed eyes and black lips, surrounded by spiky black hair. The face was grinning and sticking its tongue out at her.

      “Savaaa-nn-ah,” it said. “Open the door this very minute! I want you to meet my new husband!”

      Savannah looked past the first face to the one behind it, equally adorned with the macabre makeup. She could tell from the square set of the jaw and the strange goatee that it was male.

      Husband? For half a second she considered that her sister, Vidalia and her redneck, mechanic husband, Butch, had gone stark raving crazy. Vidalia was the only one of her siblings who was married at the moment, Marietta being between hubbies.

      “It’s me, Jesup. Girl, have you plumb lost your mind? Let us in!”

      Suddenly, the loose pieces snapped into place.

      Jesup.

      Over her shoulder, she shouted, “Skip the nine-one-one call, Tammy.”

      “I’ve already got them on the line,” was the answer.

      “Tell them it’s a false alarm.”

      Tammy came into the hallway, the phone to her ear. “Then I should tell them that we aren’t in life-threatening danger?”

      Savannah sighed as she replaced her gun in its holster, laid it on the table, and opened the door. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But, hopefully, you and I can handle it.”

      “Does Granny Reid know that you ran off and got yourself hitched?” Savannah asked, once she had her sister and her newfound brother-in-law sitting on the sofa, tall glasses of lemonade in their hands and a plate of pecan brownies on a plate in front of them.

      “Nope,” Jesup replied, munching on a brownie. “It’s gonna be as big a surprise for her as it was for you.”

      “Dear Lord, I hope not! She’s too old for a shock like I just had. Her ticker would seize up and stop for sure. Where does she think you are?”

      “Oh, she knows that I went to Las Vegas. She just thinks I’m still there, gambling and dabbling in the devil’s stagnant scum pond of wickedness and pure D iniquity—as she calls the place. And she thinks I’m alone. She doesn’t know nothin’ about Bleak. Nobody back home does. We met on Monday. It was love at first sight.”

      Savannah cast a critical eye over the object of her younger sister’s affection, the latest member of her family, and she tried not to gag. He reminded her of a certain jewelry thief she had recently wrestled to the ground. The leather vest, the tattoos that crawled from his wrists up his arms and onto his neck, images of snakes, snarling demon faces, bats and spiders, vampire fangs dripping with blood—all without a “Mom,” a heart, or a flower among them. Not to mention the spiky hair that, with the help of a jar of gel, defied gravity as well as society.

      She also had to resist the urge to walk across the floor and slap her sister stupid. One whack would probably suffice.

      She glanced over at Tammy, who was known for being far more tolerant and less judgmental than Savannah ever could be, even on her most benevolent, Sunday-go-to-meetin’ behavior.

      And she could tell that even Sister Tammy the Munificent was put off by his appearance.

      Both Bleak and Jesup wore white, chalky foundation makeup, as well as lipstick that was the color of coagulated blood and black, dramatic eyeliner. But Bleak had used the liquid eyeliner brush to draw a spiderweb on his right cheek, complete with a spider, whose eyes were tiny rhinestones, apparently glued to his face.

      All Savannah could think was that he looked like a demon-possessed drag queen. And an ugly one at that.

      Yes, Gran would roll over in her grave—if she weren’t still alive.

      “You met on Monday,” Savannah repeated in an ominously monotone voice that she usually reserved for questioning perps she suspected of child molesting or puppy drowning. “Monday, you say. And it’s only…Friday. Now, if that don’t just beat all. And you got married when?”

      “Yesterday,” Jesup announced proudly. “We wanted to on Tuesday, after spending the night together Monday night, but we decided to wait and think about it some more, you know.”

      “Oh, yes, wait, think about it, mull it over, weigh the pros and cons. Lord knows you wouldn’t want to just jump into something as all-fired serious as marriage with both feet on a moment’s notice like that. That would just be plain ol’ loco.”

      “Exactly. It’s a real commitment, marriage is, and—”

      “No, Jessie,” Savannah said, “bringing home a kitten from the city dump, that’s a commitment. Marriage is a life sentence. At least, it’s supposed to be.”

      Jesup looked at Savannah as though she had lost her mind, then rolled her eyes. “Well, duh, Van. Of course it’s for life. Once you meet your soul mate who completes you, you’ll never want to be without them. Not even for a moment.”

      “Soul mate?” Savannah shook her head. “What constitutes a soul mate? Somebody who shares the same tube of lipstick with you? The same bottle of black nail polish? Does that constitute a ‘mate’ who was ordained to be with you since the creation of the universe or some such hooey?”

      Jesup reached over and grasped Bleak’s hand in hers. Yes, their red-black nail polish was the same shade, although hers were extremely long dragon claws, and his were bitten to the quick. “Yes, we are soul mates and the very fact that you have to ask what a soul mate is means that you haven’t met