Read Harley Jean Davidson 03 - Evil Elvis for Free Online Page B

the seat. Harley’s heart thudded into overdrive. Her stomach twisted when she got close. He certainly looked dead. His mouth hung open and his eyes were half-closed. She leaned closer.
     
    “Sir? Elvis?”
     
    Nothing.
     
    She didn’t want to touch him. You’d think she could tell a dead person from a live one by now, but apparently it didn’t work that way. He could just be asleep. Her cousin Maddie slept with one or both eyes open, a really freakish thing to see in the middle of the night.
     
    Finally, she squelched her squeamishness and put out a hand to give him a slight shake. It didn’t help that Lydia screeched from the bus door, “Don’t touch him!”
     
    “If that voice doesn’t wake the dead, he’s past help,” Harley muttered, but determinedly gave Elvis a gentle shake.
     
    His head lolled forward on his chest at a crooked angle, and that was when she saw the tiny object sticking out from his neck. It looked like a penknife that kids used to carry, but obviously it could be pretty lethal. A thin stream of blood trickled down his neck and under the collar of his white jumpsuit. Oh boy.
     
    She turned to look at Lydia still hanging back in the doorway. Eyes as big as duck eggs looked back at her. Lydia’s lips worked, and then she whispered, “Is ... is he...?”
     
    “Dead as last Sunday’s dinner.”
     
    * * * *
     
    “ Why are you here? This isn’t even your jurisdiction.” Harley couldn’t believe Bobby had shown up. As if she wasn’t already feeling queasy and lightheaded. She’d never get used to death up close and fresh. Now he’d make it worse. “Isn’t Graceland in the South precinct?” she asked crankily.
     
    “Yes. I’d ask why you’re here, but that’d be redundant. There’s a body here, so of course you’re here, too.”
     
    “That’s not fair.”
     
    “The list of unfair things is too long to contemplate right now. Who found the DB?”
     
    “Lydia Free.”
     
    “And again, why are you here?”
     
    “I had a van full of tourists. They’re up at the mansion right now.”
     
    “Where is this Lydia Free?”
     
    “Follow the shrieks. The EMTs had to give her oxygen. They shouldn’t have. It’s only made her louder.”
     
    For a moment, Bobby stood looking at her where she sat in the driver’s seat of her own van. He didn’t look angry, but sort of perplexed, like he was trying to figure out the square root of an isosceles triangle or some other complicated math problem.
     
    Harley stared back at him warily since he got so testy whenever she was in the vicinity of a dead body. “Harley,” he finally said in a tone she recognized as bordering on the edge of angry, “are you trying to piss off everybody you know, or just me?”
     
    “Just you, of course,” she snapped back, “no one else is as much fun.”
     
    “One more reason you go through boyfriends so fast,” he observed. “You’ve never forgotten how to make men go crazy. Still trying to get over me?”
     
    She glared at him. Apparently, he’d already talked to Morgan. How else would he know they’d split up? Not that she cared. It wasn’t like Bobby could brag about longevity in relationships. If it wasn’t for the fact they’d long ago decided platonic worked better than any of that physical stuff, he’d probably be just a faint memory anyway. At the tender age of sixteen, she’d spent a most interesting night on the backseat of Bobby’s car with Meatloaf playing Paradise By the Dashboard Lights on the radio. Not long after that they’d both come to the mutual conclusion they did a lot better as just friends. Bobby had that sexy Italian charm going on, but he tended to get a little too possessive, a trait that made her a little too homicidal.
     
    “Don’t flatter yourself, Bobby,” she replied in reference to his conceited inference that she’d never gotten over him. When he kept looking at her, she said, “What? Do I have dirt on my nose?”
     
    “I’m trying