The Hard Way (Box Set) by Stephanie Burke Page A

discovers that everything isn’t always “prefect”. Between Voodoo Priestesses, the white woman who swears she’s Shaquandra’s sister, the four Fairy Godfathers, the Italian Mob, the Demon Lawyer, and the KGB, Shaquandra will be lucky if she gets out alive. Things really get interesting when she falls madly in lust with the Egyptian Assassin who keeps saving her life.

Chapter One
     
    “Just in time for another fast-paced episode of… Perfect!”
    “Well, it’s not like I have anywhere else to go,” Shaquandra murmured as she settled deeper into her comfortable couch.
    Dressed in all of her ratty, terry-clothed splendor, the out-of-work accountant cuddled her closest friends closer. Her friends being three bags of assorted potato chips, one bag of barbecue pork rinds, two packages of popcorn, cheese and caramel flavored respectively, one box of pocky… and a fifth of tequila. She poured another shot of tequila into a tumbler, took the shot, and chased it with a swig of lime juice from the nearby plastic lime-shaped squeeze bottle. She had no place to be since she got downsized by corporate America.
    All of her resumes were electronically filed, her interviews from headhunters were conducted by phone, and her unemployment check came straight to her front door.
    Now, with her snackable friends gathered around, she settled down for the next round of relentlessly sexist pointless soft porn known as the daytime soaps.
    “You know,” she gurgled to her pet potato chip Chippy Three Thousand, named thusly because she had eaten his two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine predecessors, “look at that chick.” She pointed to an overly developed blonde with underdeveloped acting ability. “She was a drunk prostitute turning tricks for her younger brother on the Perfect Strip. Now she’s a millionaire heiress with a handsome, mysterious fiancé. Damn, I wish I was in a soap opera. Five minutes after you get there, you’re a millionaire and everyone loves you.”
    Chippy had nothing to say, so she tossed him into her mouth and poured out a little liquor for her newly fallen brother who didn’t make it. And she poured it right down her throat.
    She was adding a second memorial shot to her tumbler when the first fly buzzed around her head. Absently, she swatted it away and returned to her TV viewing. Brad was about to announce to the world that he was a product of the first male birth, an experiment gone wrong back in the seventies… and that he was the mother of Christy’s baby, and that Christy was really Christian and had only married the aged oil baron for his money and not for love.
    Christy, neé Christian before the sex change operation, was about to rise up and invite the alien horde waiting just out of range of the Star Wars defense grid to come and make slaves of the human race when the second fly dive-bombed her.
    Did I forget to close a window or something ?
    The third fly landed in her drink.
    Cursing, she tilted the glass to peer inside and saw something that almost made her swear off drinking for life. The fly in her drink was reclining on a melting ice cube and smoking a cigar, and damned if it didn’t smell like those Cuban things her ex-boss loved.
    She was about to let out the prerequisite B-movie scream when someone speaking behind her pulled her attention in that direction.
    “Ignore Murray, love,” the gravelly voice rasped. “You got the good top shelf stuff and Murray needed to wet his whistle.”
    “M-Murray?” she stuttered as she slowly turned her head toward that voice.
    Maybe it was Chippy coming to claim revenge for all his fallen brethren. But all she saw was another fly. This one was also smoking a cigar and brandishing a metal wand with a heart on the tip.
    Okay, she decided, slowly putting down the tumbler. It was definitely time to give up on spirits of a Latin origin. Time to switch to good old-fashioned German beer. She never saw flies with wands smoking cigars and resting on