Page 1 of The Undead

Chapter One

The Living

It was my eighth wedding anniversary, and I was late as hell for dinner. That wasn’t really surprising, since I could count on one hand how often I’d been ontimefor dinner, but I was eager to see my wife and perform some intimate apologies. I held the mail in my teeth while I juggled the wine in one hand and my keys in the other; I finally got the front door open, and kicked it shut behind me.

I dropped the mail out of my mouth and realized that the house was still dark. Damn.

“Maggie?” Echoes answered me. I sighed and lugged everything into the kitchen, which Luisa had left spotless as always. Some people, my in-laws among them, thought having a maid was a “yuppie extravagance.” I looked on it as a sanitary necessity: the way Maggie and I kept house, we’d probably have been the first private household shut down by the health department. I stuck the wine in the refrigerator and tossed the mail across the room toward the table. Half of it even made it.

While I was reaching up for a glass, the security alarm went off. I swore and ran for it; we’d only put the damned thing in three days ago, and I was definitely security-challenged, couldn’t seem to remember to punch in the code to disable it when I came in. Not only that, I couldn’t remember the damned code word to placate the alarm company. By the time I managed, I knew the cops were on the way. Well, it was a good excuse to call the station, anyway.

“False alarm,” I announced to the sergeant. He grunted as if he’d already known that. Word of my reliability with technical things had obviously spread. “Is my wife logged in, by any chance?”

“Yeah, Doc, she’s here. Hang on, I’ll get her—”

Click, buzz, a breathless and harried contralto hello. I closed my eyes and pictured her. It worried me when it was hard to do.

“Mike? Oh, goddammit, I’m sorry. Nick! Nick, I’ve got to—Nick!” A brief, fierce exchange on the other end of the phone, incompletely muffled. “No, Idon’twant to haul in Angelo tonight. You take care of it! Nicky, it’s my anniversary, for God’s sake, have a heart—”

“Maggie, if you can’t make it, we can go out this weekend” I put in helpfully, if not honestly. She was silent for a moment, listening to her partner’s low rumble in the background.

“What? No, Mike, I’m on my way now. Really. Jeez, give it a rest, Nick, will you? I’ve got to go!” Maggie was really getting pissed. Her voice always got lower when she got mad. Right now she sounded like Katherine Hepburn’s meaner sister. “Angelo will wait until tomorrow. What’s he going to do, skip town? The little creep hasn’t got any money except what he cons out of us. Michael?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m on my way, hon. You go ahead and get ready, and it won’t take me thirty minutes after I get there, okay?”

I looked at my watch, raised my eyebrows, and contemplated the virtues of being fashionably late.

“I’m on my way to the shower now,” I hesitated for just a second. “Maggie? Are you sure you can get away? We really can do this later.”

“Yes, I’m sure!” She sighed loudly in my ear, which wasn’t nearly as sensuous as it should have been. “Hey! Dvorak! I’ve already got three homicides on my desk, give me a break, will you? Thus isn’t even my file!”

When I winced, it was both for the unfortunate Dvorak and for my ringing ear. I said something suitably loving that couldn’t possibly have been heard over the uproar on the other end of the line, hung up while she was still shouting, stared at the phone blankly, and then wandered off into the bedroom. I’d readied a state of exhaustion that in most people is accompanied by uncontrollable drooling and twitching; Ihadto make a recovery before my notoriously hyperactive wife got home.

Midway through my shower (I take very long showers, as Maggie constantly complains), the shower door slid back and a long slender hand held out a tall glass of wine to me.

“Peace?” my wife asked, eyebrows arched and elegantly questioning. I took the glass and tossed the wine back without savoring it—it was that or watch it swirl down the drain along with the soap—and then grabbed her hand and pulled her into the spray. She gasped as the hot water hit her, plastering her blouse and skirt hard against her skin, but she didn’t look especially surprised—or displeased.

“Hi, Doc,” she said; her voice matched her smile, warm and welcoming. She put her arms around my neck. The kiss was long and warm and apologetic on both our parts, and I slid my hands up over her hips to the wet satin of her shirt; The buttons were tricky, but I eased them open and found the skin below. It tasted like rain.

“Happy anniversary” I murmured.

“What about the show, Romeo? I thought you were hot to see this thing.” Maggie’s smile reached her eyes, and the effect was luminous and beguiling. I shrugged and kissed her again. At length.

“Show? What show?” Now, as to the hot—Maggie opened her mouth to remind me, then changed her mind and finished opening the buttons on her blouse.

“How was your day?” she asked, which was kind of a silly question to be asking while arching her back like that. The water turned the tan nylon fabric of her bra into a transparent and very interesting display of smooth rounded flesh. I helped her peel the wet satin sleeves off her arms, then turned her gently around and began easing the zipper down on her skirt.

“Fine” I answered blandly. “How was yours?”

The zipper caught halfway, to my exasperation, but I wasn’t about to quit. With the application of a little force, it came free and slid smoothly down. I was distracted from the fascinating process of pulling the skirt down by Maggie’s hands, which slid up my legs and pulled me tight against her.

“Oh, it was all right. The usual, you know,” she said, and made a slow, torturous circle of her hips that made my heart—and organs coming into contact with those beautiful buttocks—receive a disproportionate share of blood pressure. “Kind of boring, actually. Nicky got all excited about busting Angelo, but—hell. Not much of a challenge, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” I replied. I had not the vaguest idea what I was replying to. Instead of pulling her skirt down, I reached for the hem and pulled it up. Ah, that was better. Maggie had the delicious habit of wearing absolutely nothing under her pantyhose, and today was no different; the silky feel of her hose against my wet skin was only bettered by the erotic sight of what was in the nylons.

“And how was your day?” Maggie purred. I slid my hands around her hips and down into the hollow between her legs. Her head fell back against my shoulder, and I felt her shiver convulsively. She was trying to keep her breathing steady, but she was breaking out into soft panting noises.

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