Why Electricians Should Not HONK OFF Their Mystery Writer Clients

Excerpt from my note to my contractor, Rob:

It was a dark and stormy day when they found a body washed up on shore. “Oh, my god, it’s that dreadful electrician,” she thought as she stared down into his white and bloated face with the black electrical tape wrapped around his neck. The fish had eaten his eyeballs out. He lay there half in and half out of the water but he was wearing his gray shirt with his name embroidered happily in red. That—and the fact he wasn’t all the way in or out of the surf--was how she recognized him. He always did things halfway. Two of her driveway lights, the outlets in her garage, and the fixture in her laundry room were all non-functional after his last visit. Of course, his bill was complete. He’d seen to that.


Watching him move back and forth with the force of the tide, she wondered: What happened to him? Could it be another homeowner tired of his complacency and threw him to the sharks off the coast of Jupiter Island? Or had the contractor grown tired of apologizing for the man’s ineptitude and decided to throw in the towel…and the electrician along with it? Was there a more sinister reckoning behind his demise? Perhaps he’d played with the wrong light switch, confused the wires, tripped the circuit breaker one too many times, and POOF!

A crab scuttled up, picked at his flesh and raced back to its hole. A seabird swooped down, landed on the man’s boot, hopped along his leg and pecked at the hairs in his nose.

With a shrug, the woman kicked sand in the corpse’s face and walked on, picking up shells, and thinking, “Hmm. Karma is a booger.”