Devil With a Gun by M. C. Grant

was my father who had gone missing, I would desperately want to know what happened. And I would want someone like me looking into it, too; someone who was too pig-headed and stubborn to know when she was out of her depth.
    I had already made progress. Lebed slipped when he admitted his knowledge of Brown’s family, and I’m sure he figured that all it would take to get me off his back was to deliver a bit of a scare.
    And though I admit it wasn’t pleasant and my body aches from fighting back, I don’t scare that easy.
    In fact, all Lebed has done is piss me off and make me even more determined to get to the truth.
    There’s a Father’s Day story in there that replaces the usual cuteness factor with heartbreak, pain, and loss—possibly even murder. My publisher may not be thrilled, but hopefully, in the end, neither will Lebed. Physically, I may not be intimidating, but with a pen in my hand, I can make the mighty and powerful quake.
    Now I just have to make sure that I grow an extra pair of eyes in the back of my head before returning to work.
    Prince’s tongue darts out and licks some bubbles off my bare knee. I open one eye to see him making a face as he scrapes the soapy foam off his tongue with his paw.
    When he notices me laughing, he immediately spins around, throws his tail high in the air, and jumps from the tub’s edge to exit the room in disgust.
    I close my eye again and sink under the bubbles to the warm embrace below.

    There’s a quiet knock before I hear my apartment door opening and a voice call out, “Hey, Dix, you home?”
    â€œIn the bath.”
    â€œYou alone?”
    I laugh. “Completely.”
    The bathroom door opens wider and Kristy pops her head in.
    â€œYou okay?” she asks. “You realize you’re taking a bath at three in the afternoon.”
    I sit up a little straighter. “Fine,” I say. “Just needed a stress break.”
    Kristy glides over to the toilet, drops the lid, and sits. She’s wearing baggy sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt with a neck hole that was designed for a claustrophobic linebacker. If I wore the same outfit, I would look like a shipwrecked hobo, but Kristy manages to pull off the whole Flashdance, Jennifer Beals, cute-and-sexy thing. Life, truly, isn’t fair.
    Kristy wrinkles her nose and sighs, which tells me that Sam has been at work all day and she’s tired of being alone.
    â€œBusy day?” I ask.
    â€œNo, just a bit dull. Computer work mostly.”
    â€œWhat are you researching?”
    She wrinkles her nose in the opposite direction. “Bacon.”
    â€œThat’s an odd one. Which author wants that?”
    Kristy is a freelance research assistant for fiction writers who want to get the facts straight but can’t afford the time away from meeting deadlines. She researches everything from chicken farms and chocolate factories to handguns, sex toys, and race cars. She might seem a bit of a ditz, but when you consider her crazy research skills and insatiable curiosity, she’s more like the absent-minded professor. If the
absent-minded professor were a busty, blond lesbian.
    â€œYou know that’s confidential, Dix.”
    â€œBacon sounds like Stephen King or Stephen Hunter, maybe Karen Slaughter or even Matt Hilton. What does he or she want to know about bacon?”
    Kristy rolls her eyes, knowing that I’m throwing out names to see if any of them cause a reaction. “Unusual things that are made from or contain bacon.”
    â€œAre there a lot?”
    â€œYou’d be surprised. I’ve already found maple bacon doughnuts, bacon salt, bacon toffee brittle, bacon lip balm, bacon chewing gum, bacon beer, bacon sex lube—even a bacon coffin. I’ve ordered samples of most of them, except the coffin, so I can describe the taste.”
    â€œBacon beer sounds disgusting, but bacon brittle I could go for.”
    Kristy smiles.