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I knew it was going to be a long day when I saw Reggie Caldwell come bumbling through my front door. He was a lanky, awkward man in his mid-thirties who wore wire rimmed glasses and an ill fitting blue suit two inches too short in the sleeves. H was armed with a law degree I was certain had been the prize at the bottom of a box of Cracker Jacks and had used every half baked legal precedent he could find to try and put me out of business. He was the local deader’s rights advocate and had a big, dopey smile pasted across his face as he blew past Gladys and plopped down in front of my desk. Wielding his beaten briefcase like a battle axe before him he slammed it onto my desk without so much as an acknowledgement and opened it, looking for the day’s legal "screw you" with my name on it.

"I've got you this time, Stone," he said in a triumphant, nasal whine. "I've got you nailed on a precedent that even you can't worm your way out from under."

"Well, as always it’s a pleasure, Reg," I said, taking a sip from my coffee mug and staring at the clock just beyond his oily, black hair. "Isn't nine in the morning a little early to be starting this crap, though?"

As if on cue he produced a legal document and slapped it on my desk with as much force as his slender, narrow limbs could muster. There were red-orange stains at the corners that could only have come from some sort of Italian food; a rather unprofessional document to come from a lawyer defending the rights and liberties of the undead. Only in America, I thought to myself as I lifted the page and read aloud.

"Monroe versus the State of Kentucky," I said taking another sip from my mug which read PISS OFF in bold, beautiful red lettering along the rim. "What's this all about?"

"Glad you asked," he said with a shrill smugness that begged to be beaten out of him. "Charles Montgomery Monroe was a simple, backwoods Kentucky farmer making an honest living until an undertaker came and violently ended his life on faulty information. An anonymous source told the undertaker that Mister Monroe was raising more than crops on his farm and the afore mentioned undertaker executed the farmer and his daughter in the basement of their quiet Kentucky home. His family sued for wrongful death, was awarded twenty million in pain and suffering as well as lost wages, and the undertaker responsible was disbarred from his practice. You killed a young man at Franc’s a few weeks ago. He was suffering from what appeared to be the initial stages of contact with the undead virus. No other reanimants were located and there were no apparent bite marks on his body. You violently ended that boy’s life without proof of him posing an immediate danger to yourself or others and as soon as I get the coroner's report I'm going to nail you to the highest tree."

I smiled, familiar with the game he wanted to play and licked my finger tips before flipping to the second half of the document and reciting from memory what I knew it would say. "Well, I'm actually quite familiar with this one," I said, passing back the lasagna stained pages. "The undertaker did shoot the wrong person but in the end the entire family, wife, two sons, and one infected step-daughter were all deemed a bio-hazard. They’d been hiding darling daughter in the basement while she gradually degenerated into a festering, hungering disease carrier. The step-father, Mister Monroe had been hiding his infected step-child and had even been taking fresh animal parts to keep her fed. They'd kept her locked in the basement for a month while the disease ate away at her body and mind. See, when a person is bitten they become a psychological and later physiological danger to their friends, family members and neighbors before death and re-animation occur. When the undertaker, Bart Jones I believe, real nice fella’ I met him last year at a convention in Detroit I think. Anyhow, when he arrived he found the ghoul chained at the throat to a support beam in the basement and Mister Monroe was feeding her. Within a month of their initial ruling, the courts reconvened, reviewed the facts, tried the case again and exonerated the undertaker of any wrong doings."

I opened up the top drawer of my desk, flopped out a copy of the coroner’s report on the incident at Franc’s and placed it in the pile in Reggie’s open briefcase.

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