Page 137 of A Dead End Wedding

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Daisy again refused to climb in the travel case. I got the feeling she was only pretending she didn't understand Human when it suited her, because she'd had no problem with the wordbreakfast. The twenty minutes it took us to drive to the office left me with a half-inch of dog hair on my skirt and jacket. Between the heat and the dog hair, I felt like I'd been tarred and feathered.

That's probably how I looked, too.

Max met me at the door, looking worried.

"Oh, no. What happened? I'm not sure I can take much more of this," I said.

"What? Nothing happened. I was just worried about the puppy. Remember the fish you had in high school?" She held out her arms to take Daisy, and I tried to brush the dog hair off my clothes.

"That's so unfair," I said. "You didn't tell me they would eat each other. How gross and cannibalistic is that?"

She was too busy making ridiculous cooing and baby talk noises at the dog to answer, so I grabbed my briefcase and followed her inside. "By the way, her name is officially Daisy.Emily's kids named her last night and, since they bought about a thousand dollars' worth of puppy supplies, I figured I owed it to them."

Max held Daisy out and studied her wrinkly face. "She looks like a Daisy. A precious wittle bittle flower."

"Okay, don't make me gag. Remember the deal; you and Mr. Ellison have to keep her occupied during office hours. She snores really loudly, by the way, so move her bed into the file room so she doesn't scare the clients."

The phone rang, and Max answered it, listened for a moment, then handed it to me. "There's furniture news. She doesn't sound happy."

I took the phone. "Yes? You found my driver? Please tell me you found my driver."

The dispatcher's familiar nasal tones grated in my ear. "Well, not exactly."

"Then what, exactly? This is ridiculous!" I grabbed a pen and Max's notepad to take notes. It was time to take some kind of action.

"I know, I know. Thisiskinda ridiculous. We have some news, though. Your guy got a speeding ticket, so he's in a hurry to get your furniture there, I'm thinking," she said.

"Where?" I asked.

"Where what?"

"Where did he get a speeding ticket?"

"Oh. Um. Houston."

"HOUSTON?" I started scribbling furiously on the page. "Are you kidding me? Can we agree that Kentucky to Texas to Florida isnotthe most direct route from Ohio?"

"Oh, yeah. We agree. Look, I understand how you might be a tad upset?—"

"A tad upset? Are you kidding? My furniture has been hijacked by a runaway truckdriver and you think I'm atadupset?" I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. "I'm going to have to take some kind of legal action, you know. No threat, just a fact. I've got to either receive my stuff or else the money to buy new stuff, so you'd better file a claim with your insurance company."

"Well, that's another minor problem," she said.

"What minor problem?"

"We don't have insurance."

Reviewing the day's mail brought another shocker in the Deaver case. BDC had filed a joinder against its distributor. That meant that BDC was, in effect, suing its own distributor. I'd never seen this before in eight years of practice in drug cases. Either Addison was firing blindly, or BDC was absolutely convinced that the insulin defect did not occur in its own production process. I was still staring at the pleading when Max walked into my office.

"Okay, this is weird," I said.

"Everything you touch lately has been weird," she said. "You may want to specify."

I explained about the recent development.

"That does sound odd."

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