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ignore the drool working its way from the corner of his mouth to his chin and focus on his watery gray eyes.
    “Since you lost it, my bronco’s been on display in the lobby of the Cowboy Pension Fund on the dang top floor of the North by Northwest Financial Center in Miami. Stewart James took it to spite me because I never supported his pissant pension fund. The concept sucks. All a cowboy needs is a bedroll and a good horse.”
    I thought if that were true, I would have heard about it. It wasn’t like I didn’t try to find it after it was stolen. Hic was way overdue for a fistful of senility meds. In a brilliant diversionary tactic I asked, “How can an afterlife coach predict your time of death?”
    “There are many unexplained things out there. Mrs. MacGuffin has been to the afterlife many times.”
    This MacGuffin dame was beginning to smell as fishy as the red tide. “Where’d you meet her?”
    He snorted. “She said you’d ask that. She said to tell you, you’ll find out when it’s your turn to dance in the light.”
    “I don’t dance,” I grumbled. Time to run a background check on his fortune teller.
    Hic studied my face and zeroed in on my eyes. “Just get the bronco, memorize the password, and bring the statue back here. We’ll throw it in the hotel furnace. I want to see it liquefy before I go. No one except my lawyer will know you are the executor of my will. And I told him I didn’t want to ever see him again once the will is signed.”
    My stomach was flipping like a team of Chinese acrobats. If word got out that I held the key to the Hiccup fortune every conman on the planet would camp on my doorstep.
    “Do whatever you have to do to get the bronco back. That includes maiming and killing.” He grinned a wicked grin, patted my hand and withdrew his crepey fingers. “I’m counting on you like I never counted on anyone before. You’re my link to my next life.”
    No pressure. This was his last wish and I was a chronic people pleaser going down with the ship. Glug, glug, glug.
    He patted my hand again. “Let’s get you some sleep. Morning will come soon enough.”
    A giant sigh escaped my lips. The bronze bronco was stolen on my watch. Hic’s assertion about the location of it was sinking in and computing. Stewart James, CEO of the Cowboy Pension Fund, was an avid Remington collector. He was also a white-collar bully and not someone to be confronted head-on. If he had it, the decent thing to do was to steal it back. Hmmm, I could enjoy besting that son of a…
    It was pushing two in the morning when I followed Hic to my assigned room, banging my luggage and stomping my feet as advance warning to critters of the night that I was coming, and not in a good way. The meal was terrible but I feared the room would be worse.
    I have this little, you might call it quirky, thing about holes in fabric. I get grossed out if I’m near any material that has a hole in it. What, that doesn’t happen to you? Nothing bothers me more, not roaches, snakes, or my ex-husband. So given the condition of this hotel, I was heading into a world of holey sheets, Batman. My hands shook.
    Hic stopped short and I plowed into him scraping my cheek on the rough surface of his cigar-stinky zoot jacket. He omphed, placing the flat of his hand on what must have been at one time an elegant carved mahogany door. The etchings of two large bucks, their horns entangled in battle dressed either side of the double-door. One swung open with a hinges-pulling-out-of-wood creak.
    Hic flipped a switch on a panel to his right and a bank of sconce lights flickered on, revealing a room the size of a football field with a hardwood floor comprised of rippled planks and missing boards. Dust motes thick as a San Francisco night filled the air. Only thing missing was a foghorn. The ballroom was naked as a newborn except for a cot in the middle of the room under a chandelier the size of the Times Square ball, its unlit bulbs choked with fifty