She might be a woman, but she’s trying to mansplain my own industry to me. I’ve been in insurance for over ten years, and though my focus is life insurance, I’m well-versed on auto insurance too. Package deals and all that shit.

“Fine. I’ll make sure you get the paperwork today.”

She laughs, a small little chuckle of ‘sure, you will, good luck with that’, and I press the End button on my phone a little too hard. I miss the days of being able to slam a phone down, that last bastion of ‘fuck you’ to end a wayward call and show the person on the other end of the line exactly what you think of their paperwork nonsense.

Someone should make an app for that.

A few clicks later, I have what I need, the address of the coroner’s office in Williamson County. Zoey Walker, while she might be a good driver—snort!—is shit for filing paperwork in a timely manner, and I’m going to call her on it.

In person.

Chapter 4

Zoey

No effin’ way. You’re not going to do it.

“Uh, yeah, I am. It’s literally my job,” I tell the body on the table. He’s not going to talk back. They never do. Sort of expected that way.

Well, there was that one time I had an old lady wake up on a side table and grumpily ask for a blanket before her ‘tits freeze off . . . again.’ I’d nearly jumped out of my skin and had been so shocked that I hadn’t even asked how her tits had frozen off the first time.

To be clear, I hadn’t been the one to declare her dead and bring her still-alive body to the morgue. But the doctor who did? By the time I got done with him, that nursing home quack was only able to find a job giving flu jabs in the middle of Siberia. Or somewhere where he couldn’t cause any harm.

Oh, sure, ‘she looked pretty passed,’ he’d argued. And yeah, she looked like she was a stiff breeze from coming back to the morgue even as they wheeled her into the nursing home transport van. It was a full-blown Weekend at Bernie’s situation, except she was mumbling about impatient nurses wanting to steal her pussy while staring blankly into space. The nursing home staff had patted her on the arm, reassuring her and explaining to me with a long-suffering sigh that ‘no one wants your porcelain cat figurine, Mrs. Jones.’

Still, Dr. Dumbass had to deal with a very pissed off county coroner. Or I guess I’d had to deal with him.

I shudder, returning my attention to the definitely dead man in front of me. I poke him in the shoulder with my gloved hand. Just to be sure, you know.