Explosive Eighteen

TWENTY-THREE

I DITCHED LANCER AND SLASHER in midtown Trenton, and got onto Broad. We picked Route 295 up in Whitehorse and went south.

“I’m feeling like those guys aren’t trying real hard to tail you,” Lula said. “Seems to me they don’t got a lot of motivation.”

“They’re security guards who got promoted beyond their level of incompetence.”

“Why are we going to look at this warehouse?”

“Lancer and Slasher are employed by a guy named Chester Billings. Billings owns a gourmet food-distribution company, and his warehouse is in Bordentown. Turns out Brenda Schwartz is his sister.”

“Hunh,” Lula said. “What’s all that mean?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“So we’re goin’ pokin’ around his warehouse?”

“Not so much poking around as riding by. I’d like to get a sense of the operation.”

The Billings warehouse and office were in a light industrial park. I found the service road and wound my way through the complex, finally coming to Billings Gourmet Food at the end of a cul-de-sac. The buildings were relatively new. Grounds were minimally landscaped but neat. The office was attached to the warehouse. Maybe two thousand square feet for the office. A lot more for the warehouse. Large parking lot. I drove around back to see the loading docks. Two loading docks and two roll-up garage doors. Woods behind. I thought about the charge of receiving stolen goods. He had the perfect setup.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ve seen enough.”

Lula looked at me. “That’s it?”

“Yep.”

“We rode all the way down here to do this? You don’t want to go in or nothin’?”

“Nope.”

What would I say to big bad Chester Billings? I haven’t got the photograph, but I’m pretty sure the guy looked like either Tom Cruise or Ashton Kutcher. And I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me alone. I couldn’t see Chester Billings having a sense of humor about that message.

“I got the ribs place programmed into my phone,” Lula said. “Just in case you’re interested.”

Ninety minutes and ten pounds later, we were back on the road.

“That was excellent,” Lula said. “Nothing like lunching on ribs and fries and all that other shit to make me feel like a new woman.”

I’d had absolutely no self-control. I’d eaten everything that was put in front of me, with the exception of the napkin, and I felt like two new women.

“What wild-goose chase we going on next?” Lula asked.

“I want to break into Brenda’s house.”

“Now you’re talking! WHAM. What about the nosy neighborhood, and the fact it’s daylight?”

“We’ll be in disguise.”

“A covert operation,” Lula said. “I like it.”

I drove back to Trenton, stopped at my mom’s house, and borrowed a mop, a bucket, and a cleaning caddy filled with a bunch of cleaning products.

“This here’s sexist,” Lula said. “Why do we have to be cleaning ladies?”

“Because we look like cleaning ladies. Do you have a better idea?”

“I was just sayin’. No need to get huffy. Usually, we’re ’hos when we go undercover. I’m good at being a ’ho.”

“I didn’t think ’ho would work here.”

“I guess you got a point.”

I found Brenda’s little green house, and I parked in the driveway. We went to the front door and rang the bell. No answer. I felt around the doorjamb for a key. Nothing. I scanned the ground for fake dog poop or a fake rock. Nada.

We carted our buckets and mops to the back and tried the back door. Locked. I lifted the doormat and looked under. There was the key. We opened the back door and walked into the kitchen. A couple bowls and coffee mugs in the sink. A box of cereal on the counter.

“What are we looking for?” Lula asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“That makes it easy,” Lula said.

It was a small, traditional ranch. Two bedrooms and one bath. Crammed with furniture. Probably whatever Brenda had loaded on a truck before the foreclosure police padlocked her out of her former house. There was a picture on an end table in the living room of Brenda and a young man. Her son, maybe. He was slim, with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing jeans and ratty sneakers and a brown T-shirt. They looked happy.

Brenda’s bedroom was as expected. Her closet stuffed with clothes. Shoes lined up everywhere. A bureau crammed with undies, dressy T-shirts, sweaters. The top of the bureau loaded with hair products, nail polish, a professional makeup chest, a spice-scented candle. A jewelry chest containing costume jewelry. So far no pictures of her and Crick. No engagement ring in the jewelry box.

I moved to the bathroom. Medicine chest stuffed with over-the-counter decongestants, pain pills, laxatives, antacids, sleep aids, diet aids. Some makeup scattered on one side of the sink. Hairbrush, hairspray. Electric toothbrush. A second toothbrush, small tube of toothpaste, razor, and travel-size shave gel on the other side of the sink. Man stuff. Toilet seat up. Damp towel on the floor in front of the tub and shower. Definitely a guy here.

The second bedroom was being used. Bed unmade. Laptop on the bed. Men’s flip-flops on the floor, along with tropical-themed boxer shorts. Backpack in the corner, partially stuffed with clothes. Nothing hanging in the closet. Nothing in the small chest of drawers.

“Somebody living with Brenda,” Lula said.

“She has a twenty-one-year-old son. Jason. I’m guessing he’s visiting. Doesn’t look like he’s planning an extended stay.”

“That’s nice he’s visiting his mama, though. It’s gotta be hard when your kid grows up and leaves.”

I looked over at Lula. She never talked about kids.

“Would you like to have kids someday?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I can have kids,” Lula said. “Remember, I was hurt when I was a ’ho. I would have died if you hadn’t found me and saved me.”

“You could adopt.”

“I don’t know if anybody’d let me.”

“You’d be a wonderful mom.”

“I’d love the shit out of a kid,” Lula said. “I’d try real hard. I never knew much about my own mom. She was a crackhead ’ho, and she overdosed on heroin when I was young. I was a better ’ho than her, on account of I never did the drugs like that.”

I walked out of the bedroom, past a closet that held a washer and dryer. A few more steps down the hall, and I came to another door. I opened the door and peeked in. Garage. It looked like there was a car under a tarp. I switched the lights on, lifted the tarp, and gave a low whistle.

“That’s a Ferrari,” Lula said. “It’s no ordinary Ferrari, either. It’s one of them special-edition ones. This is a majorly expensive car. I bet Brenda has a orgasm drivin’ this car.”

“She doesn’t drive this car,” I said. “It hasn’t got plates.”

“Then I bet she has a orgasm sitting in it in the garage.”

We grabbed our buckets and mops, I locked Brenda’s house, and we got into my truck.

“I’m tired of fooling around with this,” I said to Lula. “This is bullshit. I’m going to Brenda, and I want answers.”

“Wham,” Lula said. “Kick ass.”

I motored out of Brenda’s neighborhood, took Route 1, and turned into The Hair Barn’s parking lot.

“I’m coming with you,” Lula said. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“There won’t be much to miss. I just want to talk to her.”

“Yeah, but if she won’t talk, we’ll rough her up.”

“We will not rough her up.”

“Jeez Louise,” Lula said. “It’s no wonder you go around in the dark all the time. You got a lot of rules.”

Brenda was sitting in her styling chair when I walked into the salon.

“You came back,” she said. “You decided to get something done with your hair, right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“I don’t need to talk anymore. I don’t care about the photograph. You can keep it.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Well if you did have it, you could keep it,” Brenda said. “It’s not important to me.”

“What about Ritchy?”

“Who?”

“Your dead fiancé.”

“Oh yeah, poor Ritchy.”

“Talk to me about poor Ritchy. What was he doing with the photograph?”

“He just had it, okay? And then he didn’t have it, because he gave it to you.”

“Why did he give it to me?”

“That’s a real good question. I think the answer is that he was an idiot.”

“There’s more of an answer.”

Brenda stood. “I can’t talk to you with that hair. It’s disturbing. Look at your friend. She has amazing hair.”

I glanced over at Lula. She looked like she was wearing a giant wad of tutti-fruiti-colored cotton candy.

“I take real good care of my hair, too,” Lula said.

“You don’t take care of your hair,” I told her. “Every four days, you dye your hair a different color. You have indestructible hair. If you set your hair on fire, nothing would happen to it.”

“I can’t believe you two hang out together,” Brenda said.

“It’s embarrassing sometimes,” Lula said. “She don’t know much about dressing, either.”

“Sit down here,” Brenda said to me. “I’ll get you fixed up. I don’t have any clients for the rest of the day.”

“Gee, thanks, but I don’t think so,” I said.

“On the house,” Brenda said.

“It’s not the money,” I told her. “I sort of like my hair the way it is.”

“Honey, your hair is no way,” Brenda said. She cut her eyes to Lula. “Am I right?”

“Yep,” Lula said. “You’re right.”

Brenda ran her fingers through my hair. “First thing, you need highlights. Big, chunky highlights.”

“About the photograph?”

“Put a cape on and sit down while I mix this up,” Brenda said. “We can talk when I come back.”

Heaven help me, I was going to have to let her give me highlights to get her to talk.

“I don’t trust her,” I said to Lula. “She’s crazy. What if she poisons my hair?”

“I’ll go watch her,” Lula said. “I know what I’m doing when it comes to hair and pharmaceuticals. You just sit in the chair and don’t worry about nothin’.”

They both came back after a couple minutes, and Brenda streaked gunk into my hair and wrapped it in foil.

“It’s no big deal about the photograph,” Brenda said. “I thought I needed it for a business transaction, but turns out it wasn’t necessary.”

“What about your brother? Am I off the hook with him, too?”

“You know about Chester?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on with him, except he’s an asshole. I’m not talking to him. He’s only my half brother anyway. We found out my mother was doing the butcher.”

She picked up a different bowl of glop and streaked and foiled new gunk alongside the previous gunk.

I bit my lip and said a Hail Mary.

“I can see this isn’t gonna be as interesting as I hoped,” Lula said. “Bitch slapping’s unlikely, so I’m gonna go sit and catch up on all your trashy magazines.”

“You still haven’t told me anything,” I said to Brenda. “Chester hired two guys to follow me around. Why? Who’s the man in the photo?”

“The man is no one. It’s a composite. You know, somebody’s nose and someone else’s eyes. It’s done on a computer.”

“Tom Cruise and Ashton Kutcher!”

“I don’t know. I never saw it,” Brenda said. “Anyway, it’s real clever. It looks like a photograph, but it’s a computer program. You scan it into a computer, and the computer breaks the picture up into little itty-bitty thingies and sees a code. And then you can use the code to do things. Like open a car.”

“I don’t get why that’s so special. You can open a car with a key. You can open a car with a remote.”

“Yes, but this opens cars that have fancy doohickeys like GPS and security systems. You don’t necessarily have to own the car to be able to unlock it, if you get my drift.”

“You could steal a car with this?”

“Exactly, and after you open the car, you can start the engine and do all kinds of things… like work the gas and brake and steering without being in the car.”

Lula looked up from her magazine. “So I could use that photo to start any car I picked out of the lot and ram it through your plate-glass window?”

“Maybe not any car, but I suppose,” Brenda said.

“Nice,” Lula said. And she went back to reading her magazine.

I was beginning to understand the potential value of the photograph. It sounded like the photo held a program that enabled you to hack into the operating systems of cars remotely. You could use it to steal cars. Or you could use it to drive an unmanned vehicle into another car, or a pedestrian, or a building. And if you filled the car with explosives, you’d have a remote-controlled bomb.

“Is this technology well known?” I asked.

“I guess a lot of people know it’s out there, but not many people have hold of it. It’s, you know, cutting-edge.”

I thought about the megabucks Ferrari sitting in Brenda’s garage.

“You used it to steal a car, right?”

“I used it to get my car back. Do you know who Sammy the Pig is?”

“Sure. Everyone in Jersey knows Sammy the Pig. He’s famous. He runs the north Jersey mob.”

“Well, my genius husband, who is now dead, decided he wanted to expand his business, so he borrowed money from Sammy. We were doing just fine with thirty-five car washes and a big house and platinum credit cards. I didn’t want him to expand, but would he listen to me? No. He wanted to be the car wash king. He wanted to go national. He wanted car washes on the moon. So he got money from Sammy, and he started building car washes, and all of a sudden the economy is tanking and people are washing their own friggin’ cars. And then Bernie starts having construction problems and labor problems, and he can’t keep up with his loan payments to Sammy. So long story short, Sammy the Pig ended up owning Bernie’s nuts. We lost everything. All the damn car washes, the house, the time-share in Jamaica that we never used. Everything. And three months ago, he took my car. He had no business taking the car. Bernie gave it to me for my birthday. Two of Sammy’s guys came into the salon, took the keys out of my purse, and drove away with it.”

“What kind of car was it?” I asked her. As if I didn’t already know.

“A Ferrari. Red. And it was real expensive.”

“Why didn’t you just go get it back?”

“I was never able to find the papers for it. Bernie’s records were a mess by the time he offed himself. And the registration was in the car. And what am I gonna say to the police? My husband was in bed with Sammy the Pig, and Sammy took my car to pay off the vig? Anyway, I sneaked over to Sammy’s place and tried to steal my car back, but my key wouldn’t work. It set off the alarm system, and the door wouldn’t open. I guess The Pig had a new lock put in. Probably had a new VIN put on, too. He’s got a bunch of chop shops. The truth is, the car might have been hot even when I got it. Bernie won it in a poker game.”

Brenda unrolled one of the foils and looked at my hair. “Still needs more time,” she said.

“But you got the car back, right?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I was complaining to this person I know, and he said he could override all the systems and get me my car. Only thing is, he was living in Hawaii, and he was worried about sending me information. So when my client Ritchy came in to get a haircut, and he said he was leaving for a conference in Hawaii, I had this brilliant idea that he could bring the information back for me.”

“Why didn’t your friend just mail it to you?”

“He said it wasn’t safe. Turned out this wasn’t safe, either. At least he was smart enough to do the photo thing. I guess you wouldn’t want this code stuff to get into the wrong hands.”

“Like your brother?”

“Yeah, he’d probably sell it to the Russians, or aliens from outer space, or whoever the heck the enemy is. I can’t keep up with it. Or he could keep it and use it to hijack shit.”

I looked at myself in the mirror and tried not to grimace. This was more than I’d expected. My whole head was covered in foil.

“Here’s the big question,” I said to Brenda. “Why did Richard Crick put the photo in my bag?”

“It was an accident. He was airsick, or maybe he was coming down with the flu or something. Anyway, he got off the plane for the layover and was too sick to get back on. He was looking through his bag for his boarding pass, to get it changed out, and he realized he didn’t have my envelope. And he said he remembered you had the exact same bag. A black Tumi messenger bag. And he realized he stuffed the yellow envelope into your bag by mistake in his rush to deplane. He said your bag was laying on the floor between the seats, just like his. So he called and told me. He said when he thought about it, he knew exactly what happened. He thought maybe I could meet you when you got off the plane, but I didn’t get his message in time. And then he was dead. What are the chances, right?”

Probably pretty good, considering the circumstances.

“How’d your brother find out?”

“He was with me when I played the message back. How was I to know he’d be such an asshole?”

“You told him about the photo with the code?”

“I’d had a couple Appletinis,” Brenda said. “I get chatty.”

“I love them Appletinis,” Lula said. “I could drink a gallon of them.”

“Over to the sink,” Brenda said to me. “You’re done processing. This is going to be awesome.”

I’m always amazed at the way life plays out. How so often a single decision sets people on an irreversible journey. Richard Crick agreed to do a simple favor for a friend, and it led to his death. And the whole ugly chain of events was set in motion when Bernie Schwartz borrowed money from Sammy the Pig. And what was the ultimate result? Highlights from Brenda.

When your hair is wet, you really can’t see exactly what the hairdresser from hell has given you. So when I left the shampoo sink and sat in the styling chair, there was hope. By the time my hair was blow-dried, ratted up, and sprayed, I was ready for serious alcohol consumption. The highlights were brilliant red and yellow, my hair looked like it had exploded out of my head, and I was at least six inches taller.

Brenda had tears in her eyes. “This is the most fabulous thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “I’m going to call it Route 1 Sunrise.”

“I never seen anything like it,” Lula said. “This here takes her to a whole other level. She’s not just another ordinary bitch no more. She’s, like, Super Bitch. She’s, like, got fire hair.”

“And you see how I gave her hair some lift,” Brenda said. “It gives her style some drama.”

“I could see that,” Lula said.

“What do you think?” Brenda asked me.

“I’m speechless,” I said.

Brenda put her hand over her heart. “My pleasure. I’m glad I could help you.”

Lula and I left the salon and climbed into the truck. I got behind the wheel, and my hair stuck to the roof.

“I can’t drive like this,” I said. “My hair’s stuck.”

“You need a bigger vehicle to go with your new look,” Lula said.

I slouched in my seat and drove to the edge of the lot, where Brenda couldn’t see me. I took a brush out of my bag and worked at my hair.

“I can’t get the brush to go through it,” I said to Lula.

“That’s the way hair’s supposed to be when it got some body. She kicked your hair up a notch. Wham!”

“You might want to dial back on the wham thing,” I told her. “I’m not in the mood.”

“How could you be Miss Crankypants when you got hair like that?”

“This is not my kind of hair.”

“Yeah, but it could be. It could be a whole new you.”

I didn’t want a new me. I still hadn’t figured out the old me.