Final Appeal by Joanne Fluke

and watched them go around on the carousel. When Toni left, he’d check the clothes in his closet to see if anything was damp. The sensation of cold rain hitting his face had been very real. He sure hoped he hadn’t been sleepwalking again.

    Lenny closed the door to his tiny office and poured himself a cup of coffee. Ten o’clock. Time for his mid-morning break. The bozos out there could handle the customers while he read his morning paper.
    Trouble with the Arabs again. And the Israelis. Too bad we didn’t have a president with muscle enough to straighten them out. If JFK were alive, he could do it. He was the only president Lenny could remember who hadn’t taken lip from anybody.
    Lenny blinked hard as he thought about Kennedy. It was the first time and only time he’d cried. All those years ago, and he still remembered where he’d been and exactly what he’d been doing when he’d heard the news.
    He had been five years old, riding in a truck with his father. His father was a pickup man back then, running loads from Miami to Chicago. The boss had told his father to drive straight through, so they’d been on the road all night with the radio on for company. They’d been on a clear stretch of highway just outside of Atlanta when the announcer had said the president was dead. Lenny’s father had pulled over to the side of the road and bawled like a baby, and Lenny had cried, too. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he hadn’t liked seeing his father cry. His father was a tough guy, a careful guy who’d never been in trouble, but that morning he hadn’t even cared that the Georgia cops might stop to ask what was wrong and search the truck.
    Lenny sighed as he turned to the sports section and flipped to the scores. He added up his winnings and losses and shrugged. He’d broken even today and he guessed that was better than losing. He didn’t bet that much anyway, never more than he could afford. He just did it to make the games more interesting. It was like going to the track and betting on a horse because you like the color the jockey was wearing. Sometimes you won and sometimes you lost, but it all evened out in the end.
    The comics were next, but they weren’t very funny today. Lenny read them all, but he didn’t find anything to make him laugh out loud. They used to be better. He was sure of that. This political correctness thing was ruining everybody’s sense of humor.
    Lenny flipped to the obituaries, and he read each one carefully. Then he gave a relieved sigh. No one he knew had died. That was great. And almost everyone who’d died, with the exception of a kid on a motorcycle who was probably high on something or other, had been older than he was. That made Lenny feel good.
    One quick glance at the weather and he was through. The weather guys in the paper were the worst of the lot. Lenny wasn’t even sure why he bothered to look. He shoved the paper to the back of his desk and got up to go back to work when an article in the Metro section caught his eye. Some woman had been murdered last night in Westwood. That was where Margo lived. Too bad it wasn’t her.
    Lenny’s mouth dropped open as he read the name of the victim. It was Margo! There it was in black and white. Margo Jantzen on Morningside Drive. And he’d been talking about killing her just last night. He was sure glad he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone but Eddie!
    It took a second to sink in, but then Lenny began to sweat. He’d laid out the whole thing, and Eddie’d said he knew the right guy for the job. And when Lenny had given him those tickets, Eddie had promised to do him a favor. They’d been sitting there talking when Eddie had jumped up to make a phone call, one he didn’t want to make from Lenny’s apartment. It didn’t take a lot of brains to figure it out. That stupid little scum had put out a hit on