Sizzling Sixteen

TWENTY

WHEN I RETURNED to the office a little after noon, the tables were gone from the sidewalk and the cars and trucks were also gone. Mooner’s RV was still parked in front of the bookstore, but Mooner wasn’t in sight. Most likely, he was inside the Love Bus planning out Hobbit Con. I carted the bags of food into the office and set it all out on Connie’s desk.

Connie was working with a calculator, adding in money she’d arranged in stacks on the floor. She had a Glock on the desk beside her phone. Lula was asleep on the couch. Lula woke up when she heard the food bags rustling.

“Is that food? God bless whoever brought food. I’m starved.”

“I have meatball subs and potato salad and macaroni from Pino’s,” I told her.

Connie took a sub and kept working, plugging numbers into the calculator.

“How are we doing?” I asked her.

“I think we’re going to make it. The guns and the motorcycle helped a lot.”

“That whole back room is just about empty,” Lula said. “Only thing left is dust bunnies.”

I sat back and ate my lunch and watched traffic move past the bonds office. The rhythm on the street was normal again. I imagined the militiamen were on their way back to Idaho with their dynamite, and some woman in the Burg was setting her new service for eight in her china closet.

“That’s it,” Connie said. “We have a million three for Sunflower and fifty-two dollars left over. I have the fifty-two dollars on my desk. Everything else can get packed. Count it as you go. We want to give Sunflower a million three. No more. No less.”

“What are we gonna put it in?” Lula asked.

Connie collected the lunch wrappers and stuffed them into the Pino’s bag. “We have a couple duffel bags in the back that were holding guns. We sold the guns, but I kept the bags.”

“Do you think Sunflower will recognize his money?” Lula asked.

“No. It’s all been rebundled,” Connie said to Lula. “So far as we know, we weren’t seen at Chopper’s, and you were the only one seen at the funeral parlor. I doubt they’d attribute the robberies to you.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “Sunflower’s one of them chauvinistic underestimators.”

Lula and I set to work packing the duffel bags, being careful to count as we packed, and Connie called Sunflower.

“He sounded happier this time,” Connie said when she got off the phone. “I think he needs the money.”

“Where are we making the switch?” I asked her.

“He wants us to bring the money to the back door of the bar. I told him we wouldn’t go inside, so he’s going to have his man waiting for us.”

“We’ll take the Mercedes,” I said to Connie. “Ranger monitors all his cars. If anything bad goes down, we’ll have Ranger backing us up.”

I drove the Mercedes to the parking area behind the bonds office, and Lula and Connie lugged the duffel bags out and put them on the backseat. Connie got in the front passenger seat and set her Uzi on the floor, between her feet. Lula squeezed herself onto the backseat next to the duffel bags filled with money. Lula had her Glock in her purse and a sawed-off shotgun wedged between her legs.

I had my gun with two bullets.

“Vinnie better appreciate this,” Lula said. “I’m expecting a raise. And I want a company car. Not just any car, either. I want a good one. And I want one of them tower of treats at Christmas. You know, where you get it in the mail, and it’s a stack of boxes with all kinds of shit in ’em.”

“I don’t want a raise,” Connie said. “I want to rescue Vinnie, and then I want to kick his perverted ass all the way from the bonds office to the hospital.”

I drove across town and turned up Stark Street. I had my eye on my rearview mirror. No Rangeman tail in view, but I knew Chet was following my blip on his screen. Connie and Lula were silent. We were all in alert mode. I rolled past the bar, took the next cross street for half a block, and turned into the alley.

Three goons were waiting outside the bar’s back door. No Vinnie. I crept down the alley and stopped at the bar. Connie powered her window down, and the men stepped forward. Connie poked her Uzi out the window, and the men stopped in their tracks.

“Do you have the money?” one of the men asked.

“Yes,” Connie said. “Do you have Vinnie?”

“No. Why would we have Vinnie?”

“You recaptured him.”

“Not that I know of,” the guy said. “I’m just supposed to get the money from you. You give us the money, and we don’t blow up the bail bonds office with all of you in it, including Vinnie.”

“I need a moment,” Connie said to the men. And she powered her window up.

“What the heck is this?” Lula said. “I’m confused.”

Connie looked over at me. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think they have him,” I said.

Connie gave a curt nod. “That’s what I think.”

“So who’s got him?” Lula asked.

“Don’t know,” Connie said, “but if we give them the money, they won’t blow us up.”

Lula opened her door and dumped the money out on the pavement. “I want a receipt,” she said.

“I don’t got a receipt,” the one guy said. “Mr. Sunflower didn’t give us no receipt. And anyway, we’d have to count it to give you a real receipt.”

“Are you sayin’ I’m a cheater?” Lula said to him. “Because you better take it back if that’s what you meant to say. You be in for a world of hurt if you slander me.”

“Cripes, woman,” the guy said. “I just don’t got a receipt. Cut me some slack here.”

“Hunh,” Lula said, and she slammed her door shut.

“Guess we’re done here,” I said.

And I drove off.

“That was sort of a letdown,” Lula said. “I expected to get Vinnie back. Not that I even want him back, but we gave those guys a lot of money, and seems like we should get something. I need a doughnut. If you turn onto Broad, there’s a doughnut place.”

“You can’t solve all your problems with doughnuts,” I said. “If you keep doing that, I’m going to get fat.”

“There’s four ways to manage stress,” Lula said to me. “There’s drugs, there’s alcohol, there’s sex, and there’s doughnuts. I go with sex and doughnuts. I tried the other two and it wasn’t any good. You being in a dry spell, you might have to rely on doughnuts.”

I turned onto Broad, and a block later, I pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through. Lula got a bag of doughnuts, and Connie got a bag of doughnuts.

I took a doughnut from Connie’s bag. “So what do we think about Vinnie?”

“I think he’s dead,” Lula said.

“He hasn’t turned up,” Connie said.

Lula finished off her first doughnut. “He could be in the morgue.”

Connie shook her head. “All the cops know Vinnie. He’d get ID’d if he showed up dead.”

“Then they must have shot Vinnie full of holes like Swiss cheese and weighted him down with cement boots and thrown him off the bridge into the Delaware. Or they could have taken him to a butcher shop and chopped him up into little pieces and put him into the meat grinder,” Lula said. “I’m gonna eat this jelly doughnut next. I love jelly doughnuts.”

“So dead is one possibility,” I said. “What else?”

“Somebody else could have snatched him,” Lula said. “Somebody other than Bobby Sunflower.”

“Why?” Connie asked.

“I guess to get money, like Sunflower. It could be a copy-cat snatching,” Lula said.

“No one’s gotten in touch with us,” Connie said.

“Hunh,” Lula said. “That’s problematic.”

“There’s something else that I always thought was problematic,” I said. “If we’re assuming someone took Vinnie, how did they know he was in Mooner’s RV? Mooner picked Vinnie up at my parents’ house. And Mooner said Vinnie never left the RV.”

“I see what you’re saying,” Lula said. “This had to be one of them opportunistic crimes. Like someone decided to rob Mooner’s RV when Mooner went into the bakery, and they come across Vinnie and decided on the spur of the moment to take him, and then they killed him and put him in the meat grinder.”

“What’s with the meat grinder thing?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m feeling like a burger for dinner, and I just keep thinking of meat grinders,” Lula said.

I drove down Hamilton and was happy to see the Love Bus was still in front of the bookstore. I maneuvered the Mercedes into a space at the curb and cut the engine.

“I want to talk to Mooner,” I said to Connie and Lula. “The pieces aren’t fitting into the puzzle.”

Mooner was at the door to the RV before I knocked. “I was hoping you’d come back,” he said. “I was wondering if I could plug into your electric. I’m, like, down on my battery, and the Cosmic Alliance doesn’t understand no juice.”

“Sure,” Connie said. “We’re all going down the drain anyway. You have to unplug when I leave for the night.”

“Understood. And no worries, I got my own extension cord.”

“Talk to me about Vinnie disappearing,” I said to Mooner. “Walk me through it again.”

“Well, like I said, we were groovin’. We were listening to some Dead and gettin’ mellow. I was, like, just drivin’ around spreading the word. And next thing, I spotted the bakery, so I wheeled the old bus into the lot.”

“Stop,” I said. “Picture the lot. Was it empty?”

“No. There were, like, two cars. The big car and the little car.”

“An SUV and a sportscar.”

“Correcto mundo.”

“Were the cars occupied?”

“Don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. I wasn’t paying attention. And suppose someone was, like, lying down on the seat taking a nap? I mean, I wouldn’t see them, right? So would that count?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, like, dude.”

“What was Vinnie doing when you left for the bakery?”

“He was riding shotgun. And I guess he was looking out the window. Except there wasn’t anything to see but the parking lot.”

“So Vinnie is in the RV in the shotgun seat and you’re walking into the bakery. Was anyone in the lot? Maybe going to their car?”

“No. The lot was empty except for me.”

“How about the bakery? Were there any customers in the bakery besides you?”

“No. But you know how the bakery has those two glass doors? So, like, suppose there were two people going in and out of those doors at exactly the same time? Would they be in or would they be out? And, like, would that count?”

“Yes, it would count,” I told him.

“Then there was someone else, and she was either in or out. Now that I’m thinking about it, she might have been a teensy bit more out. It was her gazongas that were over the line. She had, like, massive gazongas. They’d definitely crossed the midway line before the rest of her.”

“She was coming out when you were going in?”

“Yeah,” Mooner said.

“Did you watch her cross the lot?”

“No, man. I was caught in the cinnamon roll tractor beam.”

“Okay, so what did she look like?” I asked him.

Mooner grinned. “She had real big gazongas.”

“We’ve already established that,” I said.

“He got a gazonga fixation,” Lula said. “What is it with men and gazongas? It’s not like women got a nut fixation. It’s not like we go around looking for some guy with basketballs hangin’ down to his knees.”

“Back to the woman,” I said. “How old was she?”

“She was about our age.”

“Pretty?”

“Yeah. She was, like, porn-star pretty.”

“What the heck is porn-star pretty?” Lula wanted to know.

“Like, out there with the gazongas, you know?”

“You say gazongas one more time, and I’m gonna hit you,” Lula said.

“Moving on,” I said. “What else?”

“She was wearing a lot of eye makeup, and she had big fat shiny lips, and she was in one of those black leather tops with the shoestrings. And it was, like, hardly holding the… you-know-whats in.”

“She was wearing a bustier,” Lula said.

“And she was in a black leather skirt that was, wow, really short. And stilleto heels.”

“Yep, that’s a porn star all right,” Lula said.

I was pretty sure I knew the porn star, and she was only a porn star in her home movies. “What about hair?” I asked.

“Red. Like Lula’s, but there was, like, a lot of it, and it was all in waves and curls. Like a red-haired Farrah Fawcett.”

“Joyce Barnhardt,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mooner said.

“You knew it was Joyce?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask me if I knew her name,” Mooner said.

“Can I hit him now?” Lula wanted to know.

I cut my eyes to her. “You’d hit the brownie maker?”

“Yeah, good point,” Lula said.

“At least we know where Vinnie’s hiding out,” Connie said.

“Yeah, he took off sniffing after Barnhardt,” Lula said. “I’m just surprised he’s still there. Barnhardt uses ’em up and kicks ’em out.”

Joyce Barnhardt is my arch nemesis. I went all through school with Joyce, and she did her best to make my life a misery. In all fairness to Joyce, I wasn’t singled out. Joyce made everyone’s life a misery. She was a fat kid who spit on other people’s food, looked under the stall door in the bathroom, lied, cheated, and bullied. Somewhere in high school, she morphed into a sexual vampire, and eventually she lost weight, bought breasts, inflated her lips, died her hair, and honed her skills as a home wrecker and user to an all-time high. She’s had multiple marriages, each more profitable than the previous, and she’s currently single and hunting. She drives a flashy Corvette and lives in a large house not far from Vinnie.

“Let’s saddle up,” I said to Lula.

“You going to get Vinnie?” she asked.

“Yes. I don’t know why, but I feel compelled to retrieve him.”

“I hear you,” Lula said.