It was remarkable how strongly the young woman resembled O’Hara. It wasn’t just the hair and the cheerleader’s uniform; her face was the same Kewpie-doll oval and her eyes that piercing blue. She was a few years younger than the detective, but it was hard to tell by how many because of the way her eyes were bulging from their sockets and her mouth was twisted into an agonized grimace.
The cheerleader was flying, but gravity’s gentle hand could not bring her down. There was a rope around her neck, tied to a pipe that ran across the ceiling, and it held her a foot above the ground.
Chapter Five
Gus glanced at his watch, then looked down at the orange chicken congealing on the plate in front of him. When the kid in the paper hat with a panda on it had dropped it on his table forty-seven minutes ago, Gus had picked up the plastic fork and made an attempt to eat a little of it. Even after two tines snapped off somewhere between the outer layer of citrus-flavored goo and the inner shell of deep-fried chicken skin, he still thought he might nibble at a couple of the smaller pieces. But before he could yank a chunk of chicken out of the rapidly hardening sauce, his stomach growled a warning and sent a tendril of bile into the back of his throat. If he tried to swallow anything from this plate, he’d have reason to regret it.
It wasn’t the quality of the food that was turning Gus’ stomach. He’d eaten at several Chop Them Sticks outlets since they started popping up a few years back, and the Orange You Glad You Ordered the Chicken was always exactly the same-hardened nuggets of dubious poultry in a sauce that tasted like double-strength orange Jell-O. That was fine with Gus, who had long believed that an entree that doubled as dessert saved both time and money.
Gus looked back at his watch just in time to see the larger hand slide over the four.