Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) by T'Gracie Reese, Joe Reese Page A
Authors: T'Gracie Reese, Joe Reese
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floor, Nina estimated, was fifteen feet square.
There were now eleven thousand people on it.
Where had they come from?
True, there had been customers, lag-abouts and stragglers, disreputable types scattered about this trail of rooms furnished like an alley…but nothing like this!
Annette had disappeared, sucked into the dance quicksand that was heaving and boiling so close to the musicians themselves that dancers, their heads cocked back and eyes boring straight up into heaven, had to neck-jerk slightly to avoid fiddle-bows jabbed into earrings.
“May I?”
A man was standing just before her with an arm outstretched.
He looked…
Oh, hell, what did it matter how he looked.
“Do you wish to dance, Miss?”
“Sure.”
She took his hand, felt herself being led forward, albeit, coincidentally and irrelevantly, backwards…and bathed in the dance as she would have in the ocean swell of a beach.
There was no room on the dance floor, and there was everywhere room.
It was, perhaps, his skill in guiding them; or it was the massed radar of the beings around them, who, like a cloud of bats, emitted and received in return navigational force waves operational only in fields of rhythm.
He held her closer to him, palm pressed firmly against her back. At that moment, she did not so much reconsider going to bed with him, as to postulate for the first time going to bed with all of them. They could every one…all of the bodies large and small, bespectacled and red haired, glamorous and wizened, mammal and near-reptilian…all sleep exhausted, some time far later in the night or early morning, in a bed of reeds and mango peelings, snoring out, like a huge multi-limbed Cajun bear, the muted syllables:
All bad things, all evil deeds, disappeared.
OH OH OH, de OH OH OH!
“You a good dancer, Miss!”
“Thank you!” she shouted to the six faces closest to her.
All of them smiled back.
Saturday morning.
Seven thirty, AM.
It was a little, dilapidated house and Nina loved it. What was this place where the strange Annette Richoux lived, and to which a taxi had dutifully returned her around midnight? A bungalow? No. A cottage? That would be putting an optimistic spin on the thing. It was literally no more than an outbuilding, a something that would have passed for slave quarters if slaves had existed at the time of its construction. It contained only one large room, partitioned by half walls and dotted here and there by what passed for a tiny kitchen, a questionable bathroom, a bed nook––and, at her first glance, it was semi-coated by badly peeling grey paint, seemingly bought as surplus from the German army.
Tucked away in the forest—well, all right, it wasn’t exactly a forest, but everything here in the swamplands, only some miles from the huge Atchafalaya Basin…everything in this coastal Cajun marshland seemed only a live oak, only a cypress spear away from what could have easily been called a swamp…tucked away in this near forest, with a crumbling red-brick wall separating it from the lane, and a delightfully dilapidated off-green swinging gate allowing entrance to the yard-patch––
…tucked away just far enough from the sight of those few students who might be passing en route to the mile distant campus…
…it looked exactly like what her own bungalow would have been, had it been surrounded by a swamp and not fronted by an ocean.
“So, you sleep ok, Nina?”
She was sitting beside the bed, having accepted a cup of tea.
“Best night’s sleep I ever had,” she replied. “I was dead tired.”
“Well, darlin,’ you looked good out on that dance floor.”
“I was just jumping around.”
“That’s all dancing is.”
“I don’t know…the rest of you made it look better.”
“Well, we were born here. Or close by, anyway.”
“What time did you get in, Annette?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”
“Where is Guidry?”
“Where is who?”
“Okay. I get
There were now eleven thousand people on it.
Where had they come from?
True, there had been customers, lag-abouts and stragglers, disreputable types scattered about this trail of rooms furnished like an alley…but nothing like this!
Annette had disappeared, sucked into the dance quicksand that was heaving and boiling so close to the musicians themselves that dancers, their heads cocked back and eyes boring straight up into heaven, had to neck-jerk slightly to avoid fiddle-bows jabbed into earrings.
“May I?”
A man was standing just before her with an arm outstretched.
He looked…
Oh, hell, what did it matter how he looked.
“Do you wish to dance, Miss?”
“Sure.”
She took his hand, felt herself being led forward, albeit, coincidentally and irrelevantly, backwards…and bathed in the dance as she would have in the ocean swell of a beach.
There was no room on the dance floor, and there was everywhere room.
It was, perhaps, his skill in guiding them; or it was the massed radar of the beings around them, who, like a cloud of bats, emitted and received in return navigational force waves operational only in fields of rhythm.
He held her closer to him, palm pressed firmly against her back. At that moment, she did not so much reconsider going to bed with him, as to postulate for the first time going to bed with all of them. They could every one…all of the bodies large and small, bespectacled and red haired, glamorous and wizened, mammal and near-reptilian…all sleep exhausted, some time far later in the night or early morning, in a bed of reeds and mango peelings, snoring out, like a huge multi-limbed Cajun bear, the muted syllables:
All bad things, all evil deeds, disappeared.
OH OH OH, de OH OH OH!
“You a good dancer, Miss!”
“Thank you!” she shouted to the six faces closest to her.
All of them smiled back.
Saturday morning.
Seven thirty, AM.
It was a little, dilapidated house and Nina loved it. What was this place where the strange Annette Richoux lived, and to which a taxi had dutifully returned her around midnight? A bungalow? No. A cottage? That would be putting an optimistic spin on the thing. It was literally no more than an outbuilding, a something that would have passed for slave quarters if slaves had existed at the time of its construction. It contained only one large room, partitioned by half walls and dotted here and there by what passed for a tiny kitchen, a questionable bathroom, a bed nook––and, at her first glance, it was semi-coated by badly peeling grey paint, seemingly bought as surplus from the German army.
Tucked away in the forest—well, all right, it wasn’t exactly a forest, but everything here in the swamplands, only some miles from the huge Atchafalaya Basin…everything in this coastal Cajun marshland seemed only a live oak, only a cypress spear away from what could have easily been called a swamp…tucked away in this near forest, with a crumbling red-brick wall separating it from the lane, and a delightfully dilapidated off-green swinging gate allowing entrance to the yard-patch––
…tucked away just far enough from the sight of those few students who might be passing en route to the mile distant campus…
…it looked exactly like what her own bungalow would have been, had it been surrounded by a swamp and not fronted by an ocean.
“So, you sleep ok, Nina?”
She was sitting beside the bed, having accepted a cup of tea.
“Best night’s sleep I ever had,” she replied. “I was dead tired.”
“Well, darlin,’ you looked good out on that dance floor.”
“I was just jumping around.”
“That’s all dancing is.”
“I don’t know…the rest of you made it look better.”
“Well, we were born here. Or close by, anyway.”
“What time did you get in, Annette?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”
“Where is Guidry?”
“Where is who?”
“Okay. I get
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