Smokin' Seventeen

ALSO BY JANET EVANOVICH

Sizzling Sixteen

Finger Lickin’ Fifteen

Lean Mean Thirteen

Twelve Sharp

Eleven on Top

Ten Big Ones

To the Nines

Hard Eight

Seven Up

Hot Six

High Five

Four to Score

Three to Get Deadly

Two for the Dough

One for the Money

Wicked Appetite

Plum Spooky

Plum Lucky

Plum Lovin’

Visions of Sugar Plums

Metro Girl

Motor Mouth

How I Write

Smokin’ Seventeen is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Evanovich, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52769-1

[http://www.bantamdell.com] www.bantamdell.com

Jacket design and art: © Jerry Todd

v3.1

Thanks to Shirley Eng

for suggesting the title for this book

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

About the Author

ONE

MY GRANDMA MAZUR called me early this morning.

“I had a dream,” Grandma said. “There was this big horse, and it could fly. It didn’t have wings. It just could fly. And the horse flew over top of you, and started dropping road apples, and you were running around trying to get out of the way of the road apples. And the funny thing was you didn’t have any clothes on except a red lace thong kind of underpants. Anyways, next thing a rhinoceros flew over you, and he was sort of hovering over top your head. And then I woke up. I got a feeling it means something.”

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but it can’t be good.” And she disconnected.

So that’s how my day started. And to tell you the truth the dream pretty much summed up my life.

My name is Stephanie Plum. I work as a bond enforcer for my cousin Vinnie’s bail bonds office, and I live in an uninspired, low-rent, three-story, brick-faced chunk of an apartment building on the edge of Trenton, New Jersey. My second-floor apartment is furnished with my relatives’ cast-offs. I’m average height. I have an okay shape. I’m pretty sure I’m averagely intelligent. And I know for sure I have a crummy job. My shoulder-length curly brown hair is inherited from the Italian side of the family, my blue eyes from the Hungarian side of the family, and I have an excellent nose that’s a gift from God. Good thing he gave me the nose before he found out I wasn’t the world’s best Catholic.

It was early September and unseasonably hot. I had my hair up in a ponytail. I’d forgone makeup and opted for lip balm instead. And I was wearing a red stretchy tank top, jeans, and sneakers. Perfect clothes for running down bad guys or buying doughnuts. I parked my hunk-of-junk Ford Escort in front of Tasty Pastry Bakery on Hamilton Avenue and mentally counted out the money in my wallet. Definitely enough for two doughnuts. Not enough for three.

Loretta Kucharski was behind the counter when I entered the bakery. Last year Loretta was vice president of a bank. When the bank went belly-up, Loretta got the job at Tasty Pastry. To my way of thinking it was definitely career advancement. I mean, who doesn’t want to work in a bakery?

“What’ll it be?” Loretta asked me. “Cannoli? Italian cookies? Doughnut?”

“Doughnuts.”

“Boston cream, chocolate cake, jelly, lemon glazed, cinnamon sugar, blueberry, pumpkin spice, chocolate glazed, cream filled, bearclaw, or maple?”

I bit into my lower lip. I wanted them all. “Definitely a Boston cream.”

Loretta carefully placed a Boston cream in a small white bakery box. “And?”

“Jelly doughnut,” I said. “No wait! Maple. No! Either Maple or pumpkin spice. Or maybe the chocolate glazed.”

The door to the bakery opened, and an old woman who looked like an extra out of a low-budget mafia movie marched in. She was small and wiry and dressed in black. Plain black dress, black scarf on her steel-gray hair, sensible black shoes, dark stockings. Snapping dark eyes under bushy gray eyebrows. Mediterranean skin tone.

Loretta and I gasped when we saw her. It was Bella—the most terrifying woman in Trenton. She’d immigrated to the States over fifty years ago, but she was still more Sicilian than American. She was devious and sly and possibly flat-out crazy. She was also my boyfriend’s grandmother.

Loretta made the sign of the cross and asked the Holy Mother for protection. Considering my lack of church attendance I didn’t feel comfy asking the Holy Mother for help, so I gave Bella a weak smile and a small wave.

Grandma Bella pointed a bony finger at me. “You! What you doing here?”

To say that my relationship with Grandma Bella was tenuous would be a gross understatement. Not only am I the harlot who, to her way of thinking, seduced and corrupted Joseph Anthony Morelli, her favorite grandson, but even more damning, I’m Edna Mazur’s granddaughter. Grandma Bella and my Grandma Mazur do not get along.

“D-d-doughnut,” I said to Bella.

“Get out of my way,” Bella said, pushing me aside, stepping up to the counter. “I was here first.”

Loretta’s eyes were as big as duck eggs, darting back and forth between Bella and me. “Um,” Loretta said, still holding the bakery box containing my Boston cream.

“Actually, I was here first,” I said to Bella, “but you can go ahead of me if you want.”

“What? You telling me you first? You dare to say such a thing?” Bella hit me in the arm with her purse. “You have no respect.”

“Cripes,” I said. “Get a grip.”

“Christ? You say Christ?” Bella crossed herself and pulled her rosary beads out of her pocket. “You burn in hell. You gonna get smite down. Get away from me. I don’t want to be near when it happens.”

“I didn’t say Christ. I said cripes.”

“You heathen,” Bella said. “Like your Grandma Edna. She should rot in hell.”

Okay, so Bella was a crazy old lady, but that was going too far. “Hey, watch what you say about my grandmother,” I said to Bella.

Bella shook her finger at me. “I put the eye on you. I fix you good.”

Loretta sucked in air and ducked down behind the counter.

“I’m going to tell Joe on you,” I said to Bella. “You’re not supposed to be giving people the eye.”

Bella tipped her head back and looked down her nose at me. “You think he believe you over his grandma? You think he believe you when you ugly with boils? You think he believe you when you fat? When you stink like cabbage?”

Loretta whimpered from behind the counter.

“Stay down,” Bella said to Loretta. “You good girl. I don’t want you to get in the way of the eye.”

So here’s the thing with the eye. I’m pretty sure it’s a bunch of baloney. Still, there’s the outside chance that Junior Genovisi didn’t lose his hair from male pattern baldness. I mean no one else in his family ever went bald, and it happened right after Bella put the whammy on him. Then there was Rose DeMarco. She accidentally mowed Bella over with her motorized wheelchair, and the next day Rose broke out with shingles.

Loretta popped up, stuffed a bunch of doughnuts into the bakery box, and threw it at me. “Run for it!”

I caught the box and looked over at Loretta. “How many are in here? What do I owe you?”

“Nothing. Just get out of here!”

“Hah, too late for her,” Bella said to Loretta. “She got the eye now. I’ll take an almond coffee cake. I want the one in front with the most icing.”

• • •

Under normal circumstances, at this time of day I would head for the bail bonds office on Hamilton. Unfortunately the bonds office burned down to the ground not so long ago, so for the moment we’re operating out of a motor home owned by a guy named Mooner. I’ve known Mooner for a bunch of years, and he wouldn’t be my first choice for landlord, but desperate times call for desperate measures. My cousin Vinnie needed to find a place with cheap rent, and Mooner needed gas and burrito money. Voilà! A mobile bail bonds office. Problem is I never know exactly where the office is parked.

I drove down Hamilton and cruised past the lot that had been the site of the original office. Mooner’s bus was there. There was a construction trailer parked at the curb behind Mooner’s bus, the charred rubble had been carted away, and there were stakes stuck into the dirt. Vincent Plum Bail Bonds was in rebuilding mode.

It was Monday morning and business as usual, except today there were two cop cars, Joe Morelli’s green SUV, and the medical examiner’s meat wagon parked at odd angles around the construction trailer and Mooner’s bus. Four uniformed cops, Morelli, the M.E., my cousin Vinnie, the bail bonds office manager, Connie Rosolli, and Mooner were all standing in front of a small backhoe, looking into a shallow pit.

I’ve known Morelli all my life, and he’s one of those men who gets better with age. He was a handsome, reckless, heart-breaker in high school. He’s even more handsome now that his face shows some character and maturity. He’s lean and muscular with black hair waving over the top of his ears and along the nape of his neck. His brown eyes are sharp and assessing when he’s working. They soften when he’s aroused. He’s a Trenton plainclothes cop, and he was wearing jeans and boots and a blue buttoned-down shirt with his gun clipped to his belt. This was in sharp contrast to my cousin Vinnie, who is four inches shorter than Morelli and looks like a weasel with slicked-back hair and pointy-toed shoes.

I parked behind Morelli’s SUV and joined the group.

“What are we looking at?” I asked Morelli.

“I’m guessing Lou Dugan,” he said.

A half-rotted hand was poking out of the disturbed dirt, and not far from the hand was something that might be part of a skull. I see a lot of bad things in my job, but this was right up there at the top of the Gonna Gork Meter.

TWO

“WHY DO YOU THINK it’s Lou Dugan?” the M.E. asked Morelli.

Morelli pointed to the hand. “Pinky ring. Diamonds and rubies. Dugan was at the pancake supper at St. Joaquin’s, told Manny Kruger he was going home, and that was the last anyone saw him.”

Lou Dugan wasn’t without enemies. He ran a topless titty bar downtown, and it was common knowledge that the women went way beyond lap dances. He was a flamboyant pillar of the community, and I’d heard he could be ruthless in his business dealings.

We all looked back at the grisly hand with the pinky ring.

“Okay, run the crime scene tape,” the M.E. said to one of the uniforms. “And get the state lab out here to exhume the body. Someone’s going to have to stay on the scene until the state takes over. I don’t want a screwup.”

“Awesome,” Mooner said. “This is like CSI: Trenton.”

Mooner has shoulder-length brown hair, parted in the middle. He’s slim and built loosey-goosey. He’s my age. He’s a nice guy. And his head is for the most part empty since his brain got fried on drugs in high school and never totally regenerated.

“I’m not paying for special-duty cops,” Vinnie said. “This isn’t my bad. Dugan got himself planted at the back of the lot, under where the garbage cans used to sit. Seems to me that’s city property. This isn’t gonna hold up construction, is it? They were supposed to start pouring foundation this week. I’m renting bogus office space from Scooby Doo here. Every extra day is a fork in my eye.”

Truth is Vinnie wasn’t in a good spot. He was on thin ice with his wife, Lucille, and his father-in-law, Harry the Hammer. Vinnie and Lucille were newly reconciled from a nasty split, and Lucille was keeping her thumb on Vinnie’s doodles. Even worse, at Lucille’s request, Harry had agreed to go back into the bail bonds business and finance Vinnie’s operation. And Harry had his boot on Vinnie’s doodles. So needless to say Vinnie was walking very carefully to avoid intense pain.

A red Firebird pulled in, double-parked next to my car, and Lula got out. Lula is supposed to do filing for the office, but she pretty much does whatever she wants. She was a blond today, her curly yellow hair contrasting nicely with her brown skin and her leopard print, spandex wrap dress. Her 5? 5? body is plus size, but Lula enjoys testing the limits of seam and fabric, squishing herself into size 2 petite.

“What’s going on here?” Lula wanted to know, sinking into the dirt in her four-inch Via Spiga stilettos. “This office-in-a-bus is a pain in the behind. I never know where anybody is. And nobody’s answering their cell phone. How the heck am I supposed to work like this?”

“You don’t work anyway,” Vinnie said.

Lula leaned forward, hands on hips. “That’s a disrespectful attitude, and I don’t tolerate no disrespect. I gotta work just to find your stupid office-on-wheels.” Her eyes moved to the pit and locked onto the hand. “What’s that? Are we getting ready for Halloween? This gonna be some kind of scary trick-or-treat place?”

“We’re thinking it’s Lou Dugan,” I said. “The backhoe accidentally dug him up.”

Lula’s eyes about popped out of her head. “Are you shitting me? Lou Dugan? Mr. Titty?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s disgustin’. Is there something attached to that hand? If there is I don’t want to know about it. Dead people give me the creeps. I might need fried chicken to take my mind off all this now. And anyways, what the heck was Mr. Titty doing under the bonds office?”

“Technically he was under the garbage cans,” Vinnie said.

“Let me get this straight. Some idiot dug a hole instead of throwing the body in the river or the landfill,” Lula said. “And they left the ring on his finger. What’s with that? That ring’s worth something. This here must have been a amateur job.”

Everyone stood silent. Lula was right. This wasn’t the way things were done in Trenton.

I turned to Morelli. “Did you catch this case?”

“Yep,” he said. “Lucky me.” His eyes dropped to my chest, and he leaned close, his lips brushing my ear. “You’re looking sexy today. I like this red shirt you’re wearing.”

I appreciated the compliment, but truth is Morelli thinks everything I wear is sexy. Morelli has testosterone oozing out of every pore.

“I’m going back to the bus,” Connie said. “I have new cases to process.”

“Where’s the bus goin’ next?” Lula asked. “I gotta get some chicken to settle my nerves, and then I might stop in to do some filing or something.”

“The bus is staying here,” Vinnie said. “I’m supposed to meet with the contractor this morning and go over some plans.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Lula said. “There’s probably all kinds of nasty juju leakin’ out of that decayin’ carcass. You hang around and you could catch something.”

Mooner went white. “Dude.”

Morelli wrapped an arm around me and moved me to my car. “I’ll buy you dinner tonight if you promise to wear this red top.”

“And if I don’t wear the red top?”

“I’ll buy you dinner anyway.” He opened the passenger-side door, removed the bakery box, and looked inside. “This isn’t your usual selection. You never get blueberry.”

“Loretta was in a hurry. It was a free sample, sort of.”

Morelli took the blueberry for a test drive, and I ate the Boston cream.

“Do you think Lou’s leaking bad juju?” I asked him.

“No more than he leaked it when he was alive.” Morelli finished off his doughnut and kissed me. “Mmm,” he said. “You taste like chocolate. I have to go back to the station to do paperwork now, but I’ll pick you up at five thirty.”

THREE

MOONER’D RECENTLY REDECORATED the interior of his motor home, and now the walls and ceiling were upholstered in faux black velvet. The furniture was upholstered in black velour. The floor was black shag, and the countertop was black Formica. Mooner said it was like coming home to the womb, but I thought it was more like working inside the Death Star. Vinnie had commandeered the rear bedroom as his office, and Connie had her computer on the dinette table. A heavy-duty electrical cord, serving as power source, ran like an umbilical cord from the bus to the used bookstore next to the office. Vinnie had worked out an arrangement with the owner, Maggie Mason, for electric.

Lighting was dim to nonexistent, so I felt my way to the couch and inspected it closely before sitting down. Mooner was a good guy, but housekeeping wasn’t a priority for him. Last time I was in his motor home I sat on a brownie that was camouflaged against the black velour.

“What’s new?” I asked Connie. “Any interesting cases come in?”

Connie passed two files to me. “Ziggy Glitch and Merlin Brown. Both failed to appear for court. Brown is a repeat. Armed robbery. Glitch is assault. Glitch is seventy-two years old. The police report says he’s a biter.”

Connie is a couple years older than me and a lot more voluptuous. Connie has bigger hair, bigger boobs, is a better shot, and has major cajones. She’s also related to half the mob in Trenton.

“Do you think Lou Dugan was a mob job?” I asked Connie.

“Usually there’s dinner table talk when someone’s eliminated, but I haven’t heard anything on this one,” she said. “I think most people thought Dugan was in trouble and hiding somewhere.”

I stuffed the files into my tote bag and called Lula on my cell phone.

“What?” Lula said.

“Are you coming back here?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I’m headed out. I’m on the hunt for two new FTAs.”

“Well I guess I should be on the hunt with you,” Lula said. “You probably don’t even got your gun. What if you gotta shoot someone? What then?”

“We don’t shoot people,” I told her.

“The hell.”

Ten minutes later I picked Lula up in the parking lot of Cluck-in-a-Bucket. She had her purse slung over her shoulder, a bucket of chicken tucked under her arm, and her hand wrapped around a liter bottle of soda.

“A girl needs breakfast,” she said, clicking the seat belt together. “Besides, I just come off a diet, and I gotta get my strength back.” She laid a paper napkin out on her lap and picked a piece of chicken out of the bucket. “Who we lookin’ for?”

“Merlin Brown.”

“Been there, done that,” Lula said. “We dragged him back to jail last year on that shoplifting charge. He was a real pain in the behind. He didn’t want to go. What’s he done now?”

“Armed robbery.”

“Good for him. Least he’s setting his sights higher. Who else you got?”

“Ziggy Glitch.” I handed her his file. “He’s seventy-two and wanted for assault. I thought we’d look for him first.”

Lula thumbed through the papers. “He lives in the Burg. Kreiner Street. And it says here he’s a biter. I hate them biters.”

The Burg is a chunk of Trenton attached to Hamilton Avenue, Liberty Street, Broad, and Chambersburg Street. Houses are small, streets are narrow, televisions are large. I was born and raised in the Burg, and my parents still live there.

I turned off Hamilton, passed St. Francis Hospital, and hit Kreiner.

“What’s Ziggy’s history?” I asked Lula.

“It says here he’s retired from working at the button factory. Never married as far as I can see. Has a sister who signed the bond agreement. She lives in New Brunswick. This looks like his first arrest. Probably he didn’t take his meds and got wacky and hit some other old geezer with his cane.” Lula leaned forward, counting off houses. “It’s the brick house with the red door. The one with black curtains hanging in all the windows. What’s with that?”

Ziggy lived in a narrow two-story house that had two feet of lawn and a small front porch. It looked like every other house on the block with the exception of the black curtains. We got out of the car, rang the doorbell and waited. No answer.

“I bet he’s in there,” Lula said. “Where else would he be? He don’t work, and there’s no bingo at this time of the morning.”

I rang the bell again, we heard some shuffling inside the house, and the door opened a crack.

“Yes?” the pale face on the other side of the crack asked.

From what I could see he fit the description of Ziggy Glitch. Thinning gray hair, bony at 5?10?.

“I represent your bail bond agent,” I said. “You missed a court date and you need to reschedule.”

“Come back after dark.” And he slammed the door shut and locked it.

“Good going,” Lula said to me. “I don’t know why you use that lame-ass line. It never works. Everybody knows you’re gonna drag their keister off to jail. And if they wanted to be in jail they would have kept their stupid court date in the first place.”

“Hey!” I yelled at Ziggy. “Come back here and open this door, or we’re going to kick it open.”

“I’m not kicking no door in my Via Spigas,” Lula said.

“Great. I’ll kick it open all by myself.”

We both knew this was baloney. Kicking down a door wasn’t on my list of skills mastered.

“I’m going to the car,” Lula said. “I got a bucket of chicken there with my name on it.”

I followed Lula to the car and drove us the short distance to my parents’ house. The Burg is a tight-knit community that runs on gossip and pot roast. Ever since my Grandpa Mazur rode the gravy train to heaven, my Grandma Mazur has lived with my mom and dad. Grandma Mazur knows everything about everyone. And I was betting she knew Ziggy Glitch.

FOUR

I PARKED IN my parents’ driveway. “Here’s hoping Grandma knows Ziggy and can get him to cooperate.”

Lula stowed her chicken bucket on the floor. “I love your granny. I want to be just like her when I grow up.”

Grandma Mazur was at the front door, waiting for us, driven by some maternal instinct sensing the approach of offspring. She’s sharp-eyed and slack-skinned, and her steel gray hair is cut short and set into curls. She was wearing a silky lavender-and-white warm-up suit and white tennis shoes.

“What a nice surprise,” she said. “I got a coffee cake on the table.”

“I wouldn’t mind some coffee cake,” Lula said. “I was just thinking coffee cake would be real tasty.”

My mother was in the kitchen ironing. Physically she’s a younger version of my Grandma Mazur, and physically I’m a younger version of my mother. Mentally and emotionally my mother is on her own. Lunacy seems to have skipped a generation and my mother is left to bear the burden of maintaining standards of decorum for the family. My grandmother and I are the loose cannons.

“So why’s there ironing going on?” Lula asked.

We all knew my mother ironed when she was upset. She ironed for days when my divorce went through.

Grandma cut a wide swath around my mother and set the coffeepot on the table. “Margaret Gooley’s daughter got engaged, and they already got the Polish National Hall for a November wedding.”

“And?” Lula asked.

“I graduated high school with her,” I said.

Lula sat at the table and cut herself a piece of coffee cake. “And?”

My mother pressed the iron into a pair of slacks with enough force to set a seam for the rest of its days. “I don’t know why everyone else’s daughter gets married but mine!” she said. “Is it too much to ask to have a happily married daughter?”

“I was married,” I said. “I didn’t like it.”

Grandma slathered butter on her piece of coffee cake. “He was a horse’s patoot.”

“You’ve been seeing Joseph Morelli for years now,” my mother said. “It’s the talk of the neighborhood. Why aren’t you at least engaged?”

That was an excellent question, and I didn’t have an answer. At least not an answer I wanted to say out loud. Truth is Morelli wasn’t the only man in my life. I was in love with two men. How screwed up is that?

“Yeah,” Lula said to me, “you need to make a decision about Morelli or someone else is gonna snatch him up. He’s a real hottie. And he’s got his own house and a dog and everything.”

I liked Morelli. I really did. And Lula was right. He was hot. And I thought he’d make a good husband … probably. And there were days when I suspected he might actually consider marrying me. Problem was just when I thought marrying Morelli held some appeal, Ranger would ooze into my mind like smoke under a closed door.

Ranger was not husband material. He was a heart-stopping handsome Latino, dark-skinned and dark-eyed. He was strong inside and out, an enigma who kept his life scars pretty much hidden.

“I need to bring Ziggy Glitch in for a reschedule,” I said to Grandma. “I thought maybe you could call him and get him to go with me.”

“I could do that, but you have to wait until it gets dark. He don’t go out during the day.” Grandma paused. “He’s got a condition.”

I nibbled on a piece of coffee cake. “What kind of condition? A medical condition?”

“Yeah, I guess it could be considered medical. He’s a vampire. If he goes out in the sun it could kill him. He could burn right up. Remember when Dorothy threw water on the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, and the witch shriveled up? It’s sort of like that.”

Lula almost spit out her coffee. “Get outta here! Are you shitting me?”

“That’s why he never married,” Grandma said. “Soon as a woman saw his fangs she wouldn’t have any more to do with him.”

“So when the cops said he was a biter they meant he was a biter,” Lula said.

Grandma topped off her coffee. “Yep. He’ll suck the blood right out of you. Every last drop.”

“That’s ridiculous,” my mother said. “He’s not a vampire. He’s a man with a dental problem and a personality disorder.”

“I guess that’s one of them politically correct points of view,” Lula said. “I don’t mind presenting things that way so long as I don’t get holes in my neck while I’m tryin’ not to offend some mother-suckin’ vampire. ’Scuse my French. And this is real good coffee cake. Is this Entenmann’s?”

“I didn’t see any fangs when he answered the door,” I told Grandma.

“Well, it’s daytime so maybe he was fixing to go to sleep, and he had his dentures in a cup,” Grandma said. “I don’t wear my dentures when I sleep.”

Lula leaned back in her chair. “Hold the phone. This guy has fake fangs?”

“They used to be real,” Grandma said, “but a couple years ago Joe’s granny, Bella, gave Ziggy the eye, and all his teeth fell out. So Ziggy went to Horace Worly—a dentist on Hamilton Avenue just down from the hospital. Anyways, Horace made Ziggy some new choppers that looked just like his old ones.”

I looked over at my mother. “Is that true?”

My mother sighed and continued to iron.

“I heard they found Lou Dugan,” Grandma said. “Who would have thought he’d be planted right there on Hamilton Avenue.”

“We saw him,” Lula said. “It was like he was trying to climb out of his grave with his hand sticking up outta the dirt.”

Grandma sucked in air. “You saw him? What did he look like?”

“He was all wormy and raggety.”

“They’re gonna have to work like the devil to make him look like anything for the viewing,” Grandma said.

“Yeah.” Lula added cream to her coffee. “We might never even have known it was him except for his ring.”

Grandma leaned forward. “He was wearing his ring? That ring was worth money. What numbskull would bury Lou Dugan with his ring still on?”

Lula cut a second piece of coffee cake. “That’s what I said. It would have to be someone in a panic. Some amateur.”

Or someone sending a message, I thought. It looked to me like the grave had been fairly shallow. Maybe Lou Dugan was supposed to be discovered.

“It sure is cozy here in the kitchen,” Lula said. “I bet if I stayed here long enough I could forget all about Lou Dugan and his wormy hand.”

My parents’ house is small and stuffed with comfortable, slightly worn furniture. The windows are draped in white sheers. The polished mahogany end tables hold lamps and candy dishes. An orange, brown, and cream hand-crocheted afghan is precisely folded and arranged over the back of the champagne-colored couch. My father’s favorite chair has maroon and gold stripes and an impression of his ass permanently imprinted in the seat cushion. The couch and the chair face a newly purchased flat-screen television, and the television fits into a newly purchased mahogany entertainment center. Coasters and magazines are neatly arranged on the narrow coffee table. A laundry basket filled with toys has been placed against the wall in the living room. The toys belong to my sister’s kids.

The living room leads into the dining room. The dining room table seats six, but can be enlarged to accommodate more. My mother keeps the table covered with a tablecloth. Usually rose or gold. And she places a lace cloth over the colored cloth. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember.

The dining room is separated from the kitchen by a door that’s always open. Just as my father lives in his maroon-striped chair, my mother and grandmother live in the kitchen. When dinner is being prepared and potatoes are boiling, the kitchen is hot and humid, smelling like gravy and apple pie. This morning the kitchen smelled like freshly ironed clothes and coffee. And Lula had added a hint of fried chicken scent.

“I hear Dave Brewer just moved back to Trenton,” my mother said to me. “Do you remember Dave? You went to school with him.”

Dave Brewer had been a big deal football player and entirely out of my league when I was in high school. He went on to college, married, and moved to Atlanta. Last I heard he was being investigated for illegal foreclosures in the state of Georgia.

“I thought he was going to jail for swindling people out of their houses,” I said to my mother.

“He beat that rap,” Grandma said. “But Marion Kolakowski said he got fired and lost his big house in Atlanta. And then his wife left him and took the dog and the Mercedes.”

My mother ironed a nonexistent wrinkle out of my father’s slacks. “Dave’s mother was at mass yesterday. She said it was all a mistake—that Dave didn’t do anything wrong.”

Lula took a third piece of coffee cake. “He must have done something wrong if his wife took the dog and the car. That’s harsh.”

“He comes from a good family, and he was captain of the football team and an honor student,” my mother said.

I was starting to get a bad feeling about the direction of the conversation. It had all the signs of my mother on a mission.

“You should call him,” my mother said to me. “He would probably like to reconnect with his classmates.”

“We weren’t friends,” I told her. “I’m sure he wouldn’t remember me.”

“Of course he would remember you,” my mother said. “His mother was even asking about you.”

And there it was. The fix up.

“Mrs. Brewer is a nice lady,” I said. “And I’m sure her son is innocent, and I’m sorry his wife took the dog, but I’m not calling him.”

“We could have him here for dinner,” my mother said.

“No! Not interested.” I wrapped my piece of coffee cake in a napkin and stood. “Gotta go. Got work to do.”

“I don’t suppose you took a picture of Lou Dugan,” Grandma said to Lula.

“That would have been a good idea,” Lula said, “but I didn’t think of it.”

I hustled out of the house with Lula not far behind. I jumped into the car and cranked the engine over.

“Maybe you should call that Dave guy,” Lula said when we got to the corner. “He might be the one.”

“I thought I found the one but he turned out to be a jerk so I divorced him. And now I have two guys who might be the one but I can’t decide between them. The last thing I need is a third one.”

“But maybe you can’t decide because neither of them’s right. Maybe Dave Whatshisname is the right one. What then?”

“I see your point, but I have an understanding with Morelli.”

“Which is what?”

Truth is, the understanding was vague. It was a lot like my status as a Catholic. I carried a decent amount of guilt and fear of eternal damnation but blind faith and total commitment were in scarce supply.

“We say we can date other people, but we don’t do it,” I told Lula.

“That’s stupid,” Lula said. “You got a communication issue. And anyways how are you sure he don’t be out dating other people? I mean he got permission, right? Maybe he’s dating that skank Joyce Barnhardt. What then?”

“I’d kill him.”

“You get ten to life for that one,” Lula said.

I turned toward Kreiner Street. “I’m giving Ziggy another try.”

FIVE

I PARKED IN FRONT OF Ziggy’s house for the second time that day, got out of the car, and walked to his front door. He was dumb enough to answer his door the first time, maybe he’d be dumb enough to answer it again. I rang the bell and waited. No response. I rang again. Nothing. I tried the doorknob. Locked.

“Stay here and bang on the door,” I said to Lula. “I’m going around back. If he cracks the door, shove it open and go in.”

“No way,” Lula said. “He’s a vampire.”

“He’s not a vampire. And even if he is he probably can’t do much damage if he’s got his teeth in a jar.”

“Okay, but if he smiles at me, and he’s got fangs, I’m outta here.”

I jogged around to the back of the house and scoped it out. Windows were covered in blackout shades just like the front. A small stoop led to the back door. I could faintly hear Lula banging on the front door. I tried the back door. Locked, just like the front. I stood on tiptoes, ran my hand over the top of the door-jamb, and found the key. I opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. Dark wood cabinets, yellow Formica counters. No dirty dishes. No containers indicating blood bank withdrawal.

I had cuffs tucked into the waistband of my jeans and my stun gun was in my pocket. I moved through the kitchen into the dining room. I could hear the television in the living room.

“Ziggy?” I yelled. “It’s Stephanie Plum. I need to talk to you.”

I heard a gasp and some cussing and someone moving. I stepped into the living room and saw Ziggy standing to one side of the couch, poised to run, looking unsure where to go. Lula was still hammering on the door.

I went to the front door and pointed a finger at Ziggy. “Stay. Don’t move from that spot.”

“What do you want?”

“You need to go with me to reschedule your court date.”

“I told you to come back at night. Or maybe I could chance it on a real cloudy day,” he added, as an afterthought.

I went to the front door, slipped the deadbolt back, and before I could open the door, Lula gave it a shove and knocked me on my butt.

“Oops,” Lula said, looking down at me. “I thought you were the vampire.”

Ziggy sprang into action and streaked past us, heading for the stairs to the second floor.

“Grab him,” I yelled to Lula. “He might be going for his teeth.”

Lula did a flying lunge and caught Ziggy’s legs. They both went to the ground and rolled around with Lula holding tight and Ziggy squirming to get away.

“Zap him!” Lula said. “Cuff him! Do something. This is like trying to hold on to a snake. He’s all wriggly.”

I had my stun gun in hand, but I couldn’t get a clear shot. If I tagged Lula by mistake I’d be the one wrestling with Ziggy all by myself.

“What’s he doing?” Lula shrieked. “Is he suckin’ on my neck? I feel someone suckin’ on my neck. Get him off me.”

I pressed the stun gun prongs against Ziggy’s flailing arm and hit the go button. Ziggy squeaked and went inert.

Lula hauled herself up off the floor and put her hand to her neck. “Do I got holes? Am I bleeding? Do I look like I’m turning into a vampire?”

“No, no, and no,” I told her. “He doesn’t have his teeth in. He was just gumming you.”

“That’s disgustin’,” Lula said. “I been gummed by a old vampire. I feel gross. My neck’s all wet. What’s on my neck?”

I squinted over at Lula. “Looks like a hickey.”

“Are you shitting me? This worthless bag of bones gave me a hickey?” Lula pulled a mirror out of her purse and checked her neck out. “I’m not happy,” Lula said. “First off I don’t know if I got vampire cooties from this. And second, how am I gonna explain a hickey to my date tonight?”

I cuffed Ziggy and stood back. He was still on the floor, not moving.

“We need to get him out to the car,” I said to Lula.

“His eyes are sort of open, but he don’t look like he’s seeing a lot,” Lula said. “Give him a kick and see if he feels it.”

I bent over Ziggy. “Hey!” I said. “Are you okay? Can you get up?”

Ziggy’s hand twitched a little, and his mouth opened, but no words came out.

“I haven’t got all day here,” Lula said. “I need to Google vampire bites, and then I need to get some makeup for my neck.” She grabbed Ziggy’s foot. “Get his other foot, and we’ll drag him out.”

We dragged Ziggy across the room, and I opened the front door. The second the sunlight hit him, Ziggy started shrieking. It was a high-pitched, keening eeeeeeh of the glass-breaking variety.

“Holy shit, holy crap, holy moley!” Lula said, dropping Ziggy’s foot, jumping away. “What the hell’s wrong with him?”

I kicked the door closed, and Ziggy stopped screaming.

“I almost got diarrhea,” Lula said. “That was horrible. I never heard anyone make a sound like that.”

Ziggy’s eyes were narrowed and his breath hissed from between clenched gums. “No sun,” he said.

“Okay, now I’m freakin’,” Lula said. “I don’t know what to do. On the one hand I’m thinkin’ we need to drag him into the sun and burn him up, and the world has one less vampire. But then on the other hand I don’t want to see him get all oozing and gnarly like in a horror movie. I hate them horror movies where people get crispy.”

“So what’s the deal?” I asked Ziggy. “Are you a vampire?”

Ziggy shrugged his shoulders. “I might be,” he said.

“How about we wrap him in a quilt,” Lula said. “That way we won’t cook him.”

“Is that going to work for you?” I asked Ziggy.

“I guess. Just don’t leave any holes where the sun can get to me. Wrap me up real good. And would you mind going upstairs and getting me my teeth?”

“Hell no,” Lula said. “We’re not getting you no teeth. You already gave me a hickey. That’s as far as I’m goin’ with this whole creepy vampire thing.”

We wrapped Ziggy in the quilt from his bed, carried him to my car, and loaded him into the backseat. Ten minutes from the police station he started to thrash around in his quilt.

“What’s going on back there?” I asked Ziggy.

“I’m restless,” Ziggy said. “I got restless leg syndrome. And I’m hungry. I need some blood.”

“Pull over,” Lula said to me. “I’m gettin’ out.”

“For the love of Pete, he’s in a quilt, he’s toothless, and he’s handcuffed!” I said to Lula. “And besides, he’s not a vampire.”

“How do you know he’s not a vampire?”

“I don’t believe in vampires.”

“Yeah, me either, but how can you be sure? And anyways, he freaks me out no matter what the heck he is.”

SIX

BY THE TIME we dropped Ziggy off at the police station and made a makeup run for hickey cover-up, it was almost noon.

“Where are we going for lunch?” Lula wanted to know.

“I thought I’d stop at Giovichinni’s.”

Giovichinni’s Deli was on Hamilton, not far from the bonds office. It was a family enterprise, and it was second only to the funeral home for feeding the Burg gossip mill. It carried a full line of deli meats and cheeses, homemade coleslaw, potato salad, macaroni salad, and baked beans. It also had Italian specialty items, and it served as the local grocery with all the usual staples found in a convenience store.

“I love Giovichinni’s,” Lula said. “I could get a roast beef sandwich with beans and potato salad. And they got the best pickles, too.”

Five minutes later Lula and I were at the deli counter ordering sandwiches from Gina Giovichinni.

Gina was the youngest of the three Giovichinni girls. She’s been married to Stanley Lorenzo for ten years, but everyone still calls her Gina Giovichinni.

“I heard they found Lou Dugan,” Gina said to me. “Were you there when they dug him up?”

“No, but I got there soon after.”

“Me, too,” Lula said. “His hand was reachin’ up outta the grave. It was like he’d been buried alive.”

Gina gasped. “Omigod. Is that true? Was he buried alive? Supposedly he was involved in some big deal that went bad.”

“Must have gone real bad,” Lula said. “They planted him under the garbage cans.”

“What kind of deal?” I asked Gina.

“I don’t know. One of the girls who danced at the club was here getting an antipasto platter last week, and she said Lou was real nervous just before he disappeared, talking about losing a bunch of money, making travel plans.”

“Where was he going?”

“She didn’t say.”

• • •

Lula and I took our sandwiches back to my car, and I drove the short distance to the bonds office. Mooner’s bus was still parked at the end of the block, the medical examiner’s truck was still on the scene, a bunch of men huddled on the sidewalk, and a state crime scene van was parked on the sidewalk just beyond the men. The yellow crime scene tape blocked off the entire construction site, and two men wearing CSI jackets were working at the excavation area.

“Life sure is strange,” Lula said. “One day everything is going along normal as can be, and then next thing you know your place of business is firebombed and Mr. Titty gets buried there.” She thought about it for a couple beats. “I suppose for us that is normal.”

A disturbing thought, and not far from the truth. Maybe my mother is right. Maybe it’s time to stop stun-gunning men who think they’re vampires, get married, and settle down.

“I could learn to cook,” I said.

“Sure you could,” Lula said. “You could cook the crap out of shit. What are you talkin’ about?”

“It was just a thought that popped into my head.”

“It should pop back out ’cause now that I’m thinking about it, I’ve seen you cook and it wasn’t pretty.”

I parked behind Connie’s car, and Lula and I hauled our food into the RV. Connie was behind her computer at the dinette table, and Mooner was lounging on the couch, playing Donkey Kong on his Gameboy. It didn’t take a lot to entertain Mooner.

“Where’s Vinnie?” I asked Connie. “I didn’t see his car.”

“He went down to the station to re-bond Ziggy.”

“Wow, that was fast.”

“Yeah, Ziggy made his one phone call, and court’s in session, so Vinnie should be able to get Ziggy released right away.”

The deal with a bail bond is that the court sets a dollar amount on freedom. For instance, if a guy is arrested and charged with a crime he then goes to court and the judge tells him either he can stay in jail or else he can pay a certain amount of money and go home until trial. He only gets the money back if he shows up for trial. We come in when the guy doesn’t have enough money to give to the court. We give the money to the court on his behalf, and charge the guy a percentage for the service. Good for us and bad for him. Even if he’s innocent he’s out our fee. If he skips out on his trial, I find him and drag him back into the system so we don’t lose our money to the court.

“How’s Ziggy gonna get home?” Lula wanted to know. “He got that whole vampire thing going with the sunlight and all.”

“I don’t know,” Connie said. “Not my problem.”

I ate my ham and cheese sandwich and washed it down with a diet soda. Lula plowed through a Reuben, a tub of potato salad, and a tub of baked beans.

“How do I look?” Lula asked. “Do I look like I’m getting to be a vampire? Because I don’t feel so good.”

“You don’t feel good because you just ate a bucket of fried chicken, half a coffee cake, and a Reuben with over half a pound of meat on it. Anyone else would have to get their stomach pumped.”

“I’m an emotional eater,” Lula said. “I had to settle my stomach on account of I had a upsetting morning.” Lula leaned forward and stared at me. “What’s on your forehead? Boy, that’s a mother of a pimple.”

I felt my forehead. She was right. There was a big bump on it.

“It wasn’t there when I got up this morning,” I said. “Are you sure it’s a pimple? It’s not a boil, is it?”

Lula squinted. “Looks to me like a pimple, but what do I know.”

Connie studied it. “I’d say it’s a pimple that has the potential to approach boil quality.”

I pulled my compact out of my purse and looked at the pimple. Eek! I dabbed some powder on it.

“You’re gonna need more than powder to cover that,” Lula said. “It’s like that volcano that exploded. Krakatoa.”

I smeared concealer on Krakatoa, and I thought about Grandma Mazur and the dream about the road apples.

“That’s better,” Lula said. “Now it just looks like a tumor.”

Lovely.

“As far as tumors go, it’s not a real big tumor,” Lula said. “It’s one of them starter tumors.”

“Forget the tumor!” I told her.

“It’s hard to forget when you gotta stare at it,” Lula said. “Now that I know it’s there I can’t see anything else. It’s like Rudolph with the red nose.”

I looked at Connie. “How bad is it?”

“It’s a big pimple.”

“It’s just a big pimple,” I said to Lula.

Lula thought for a beat. “Maybe it would help if you had bangs to cover it up.”

“But I don’t have bangs,” I said. “I’ve never had bangs.”

“Yeah, but you could,” Lula said.

I dropped the concealer into my bag and pulled out Merlin Brown’s file. Vinnie had written bond for Brown two years ago without a problem. The charge had been shoplifting, and Brown had done some minor time for it. Hard to know what the issue was now that he’d been brought in for armed robbery. Either Brown simply forgot his court date, or else he wasn’t excited about the idea of doing more time. I tapped his number into my cell phone and waited. A man picked up on the third ring, and I hung up.

“He’s home,” I said to Lula. “Let’s roll.”

SEVEN

MERLIN BROWN LIVED in a low-rent apartment complex that made my cheapskate apartment building look good. The buildings were red brick, three stories tall, and utterly without adornment unless you counted the spray-painted graffiti. No balconies, no fancy front doors, seventies aluminum windows, no landscaping. They sat perched on hard-packed dirt in no-man’s-land between the junkyard and the gutted lead pipe factory on upper Stark Street.

A discarded refrigerator and sad-sack couch had been left by the dumpster at the end of the parking lot. Four men sat on the couch, chugging from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. The guy on the end weighed somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred pounds and the whole couch sloped in his direction.

“Maybe I should be more careful what I eat,” Lula said. “I don’t mind being a big woman, but I don’t want to get to be a huge woman. I don’t want no couch slopin’ in my direction.”

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed about Lula. I’ve seen her when she’s on a healthy eating plan, holding her calories down, I’ve seen her on ridiculous fad diets, and I’ve seen her when she eats everything in sight. And so far as I can tell, her weight never changes.

“He’s in Building B,” I told Lula. “Third floor. Apartment three-oh-seven.”

“Who we gonna be? Pizza delivery? Census taker? Local ho?”

“I thought I’d just ring his bell and see what happens.”

“He might be happy to see you. Going to jail might be a treat after living here.”

We entered a small lobby with a bank of mailboxes on one side and an elevator on the other. There was a sign next to the elevator that said it was out of service. The sign looked like it had been up there for a long time. Lula pushed the elevator button anyway, and we waited a couple minutes. Eventually we heard groaning and creaking and the elevator doors opened. We looked into the dark interior of the elevator and decided to take the stairs.

“This isn’t so bad,” Lula said when we got to the third floor. “So far I haven’t seen any rats or blood splatter. No alligators, either. Mostly from what I can tell the problem is this place don’t have amenities, aside from the recreational area by the dumpster.”

We walked halfway down the hall and stood outside unit 307, listening at the door. A television was droning inside the apartment.

“Probably he’s got a gun,” Lula said, “being that he’s wanted for armed robbery. I guess if I’m turning into a vampire I don’t have to worry so much about getting shot, so maybe I should be the one to go through the door first.”

“Okay. You can go first.”

“But then suppose I’m not turning into a vampire? There might not have been any vampire venom transferred since I just got a hickey.”

“No problem. I’ve got it.”

I knocked on the door, and Lula stood to one side. The door opened, and Merlin looked out at us.

“What?” Merlin said.

Merlin Brown was 6?2? and built like a linebacker for Dallas. His skin was a shade past Lula’s, he had a lightning bolt carved into his forehead, two gold teeth in the front of his mouth, and he’d answered the door buck-naked. His Mr. Happy was hanging at half-mast and was about the size of a wanger on a champion stud Clydesdale.

Lula looked Merlin up and down. “Mother of God!”

“B-b-bond engorgement,” I said. I blew out some air and corrected myself. “Bond enforcement.”

“I’m busy,” Brown said.

That was pretty much stating the obvious.

“You got a lady friend here?” Lula asked him.

“Nope.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Nope.”

“You always walk around like this?”

“Pretty much. I got laid off a couple months ago and I haven’t got a lot to do. I rob a store once in a while but that’s about it. So I pass the time doing … you know.”

“Well this here’s your lucky day,” Lula said. “We got a activity for you. All you gotta do is put some clothes on and come with us.”

“I go with you and I’m gonna end up in jail. I already been in jail and I didn’t like it. Anyways, I got a better idea,” Brown said. “How about you take your clothes off and we stay here. In fact, how about if I help you. How about if I start off helpin’ myself to Miss Skinny Ass Bounty Hunter here.”

I took a step back and talked out of the side of my mouth to Lula. “Do you have your g-u-n with you?”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “You think it’s time to use it?”

“I know what you spelled,” Brown said. “You spelled gun. Like you’d shoot me, right? First off, you’re girls. And second you can’t shoot an unarmed man. I could do whatever I want and you can’t shoot me.”

Lula pulled her 9mm Glock out of her purse, aimed it at Brown’s foot, and fired off a shot. It missed by about six inches, so she made a course correction and squeezed off another round. The second round was also off the mark. No surprise since Lula was the world’s worst shot. Lula couldn’t hit the side of a barn if she was standing three feet away from it.

“You fat chicks can never shoot worth anything,” Brown said. “It’s been one of my observations.”

“Excuse me?” Lula said, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring. “Fat chick? Did you just call me a fat chick? I better have heard wrong because I don’t like being called a fat chick.”

And then Lula got lucky, or unlucky depending on your point of view, and she shot Brown’s pinky toe off.

“YOW!” Brown yelled. “What the fuck? Are you fuckin’ nuts?”

And he fainted. Crash. Flat out on his back with his foot bleeding, and his flagpole standing at attention.

Lula stared down at Brown’s stiffy. “He must have taken one of those pills on account of that’s just not normal.”

“You’ve got to stop shooting people!” I said to Lula. “It’s against the law.”

“He said I was a fat chick.”

“That’s not a good reason to shoot someone’s toe off.”

“Seemed like it at the time,” Lula said. “What are we gonna do now? We gonna drag his ass out to the car?”

“If we bring him in now we’ll have to take him to the hospital first. And then we’re going to have to explain the missing toe.”

“Yeah, and the giant boner. I don’t mind so much taking responsibility for the toe, but I don’t want nothin’ to do with the boner.”

His cell phone was lying on the coffee table. I dialed 911, gave a phony name, reported a shooting, and gave the address.

“Uh-oh,” Lula said. “Mr. Big got his eyes open.”

Brown blinked up at Lula. “What happened?”

“You fainted.”

“My foot hurts.”

“You must have stubbed your toe on the way down,” Lula said. “That’s why you should be wearing shoes.”

“Now I remember,” he said. “I didn’t stub my toe. You fuckin’ shot me.”

Lula stuffed her hands on her hips. “You said I was fat. I got a mind to shoot you again.”

Brown catapulted himself off the floor and lunged at Lula. “Arrrrgh!”

I grabbed Lula by the back of her shirt and yanked her to the door. “Go! Run!”

“Outta my way,” Lula said, rushing past me. “He got crazy eyes.”

Between the missing toe and the male enhancement issue, after the initial lunge Brown wasn’t able to move all that fast. Lula and I thundered down the stairs, chugged across the parking lot, threw ourselves into the car, and took off.

Lula was breathing heavy. “Do you think he’ll tell the police on me?”

“No. Brown doesn’t want to have anything to do with the police. By the time the police get to his apartment he’ll be long gone.” Good for Lula, I thought, checking the pimple out in the rearview mirror, but not so good for Vinnie.

“You keep lookin’ at your pimple and we’re gonna have an accident,” Lula said.

“Now that I know it’s there I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“At least you don’t have a vampire hickey on your neck. I got a date with a hunk of lovin’ tonight. He might be Mr. Wonderful.”

“Maybe you could put a scarf around your neck.”

“What happens when hunk of lovin’ undresses me?”

“Maybe you could decorate it to look like a tattoo gone bad.”

EIGHT

TO GET BACK to the bonds office from Merlin Brown’s apartment, I had to drive down Stark, past the junkyard, and cut through the combat zone. This was a mixture of graffiti-covered, rat-infested, three-story brick rooming houses, garbage-strewn empty lots, and sketchy businesses operating out of barred storefronts and back alleys. It was shocking to think anyone lived in this destroyed neighborhood, and even more shocking to know some of them were good, decent people. They were victims of time and circumstance, struggling not to succumb to the wreckage around them.

It was less shocking to know that most of the residents were drugged out deadbeats, crackhead hookers, dope dealers, gangbangers, and homicidal maniacs. If I had to go after an FTA on this part of Stark, I usually asked Ranger for help.

Ranger was a bounty hunter working for Vinnie when I first met him. He has his own security firm now, but he still does the occasional felon apprehension. He’s my mentor, my friend, and my onetime lover. He’s the guy I go to when I need professional help. I’m all in favor of women holding their own in the workplace, but I don’t have a death wish. Ranger is a far better bounty hunter than I could ever hope to be. And if I was being honest about it, sometimes I went to Ranger just because I liked working with him.

“You going back to the office?” Lula asked.

“Yeah. I thought I’d check in and then head home.”

“I got a plan,” Lula said. “I’m going to the mall, and I’m gonna get a feather boa to match this new sparkly outfit I was gonna wear tonight. A feather boa will dress it up better than a scarf. And then I can get undressed all except for the boa. I could work the boa into my whole routine of seduction, and my neck’ll be covered.”

“You have a routine of seduction?”

“Yeah, well you know I was a professional, and I still got moves.”

I didn’t want to think too hard about Lula and her moves. On the one hand it was way too much information. On the other hand I felt inadequate. My big move was to get out of my underpants without snagging my foot and falling on my face.

I followed the cross street to Hamilton and turned toward the bonds office. Minutes later I parked behind Mooner’s bus. Morelli’s car was angle-parked in front of the bus, and Morelli was standing in the middle of the field.

“That is one fine man,” Lula said, looking at Morelli. “I don’t know what your problem is. I wouldn’t have any trouble saying yes to him. I’d say yes to whatever he was askin’.”

I had to admit, he was definitely fine.

Lula cut her eyes to me. “So when was the last time you two got busy?”

“A while ago.”

“So why’s that?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Hunh,” Lula said.

When Lula said hunh like that it indicated total disgust.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s because I’m confused. I’m having commitment issues.”

“You mean you can’t choose between Morelli and Ranger. I’m telling you, girl, you know what you gotta do. You gotta have a bake off, a throw down, a love fest. Hell, just ask them if they want to go head-to-head in the sack and see what they say. You’d be doing them a favor on account of you’d be makin’ up your mind. And then just for the heck of it, maybe you can throw in that guy Dave that your mom likes.”

I cut my eyes to Lula. “You can’t be serious.”

“Damn skippy I’m serious.”

“Something to consider,” I said.

“While you’re considering you might want to do something about Krakatoa. Like if you put a little teeny skirt on that barely covers your doodah, no one’s ever gonna look at your face. And on top of that it gives a man incentive to be real nice to you.”

“Words of wisdom.”

“You bet your ass,” Lula said. “I’m going into the bus now before Mr. Titty’s ghost creeps up around me.”

I didn’t have a sense of Mr. Titty’s ghost, so I went over to say hello to Morelli.

“What going on?” I asked him.

“I’m trying to get a grip on this. The forensic guys think Lou was buried within twenty-four hours of his disappearance.”

“Cause of death?”

“Looks like broken neck.”

“Gina Giovichinni said Lou had a big business deal go south just before he disappeared. Word was he had travel plans.”

“I’ve heard that rumor,” Morelli said. “So far I haven’t been able to get any details.”

“How about Mrs. Lou?”

“Mrs. Lou would be the last to know anything,” Morelli said. “She’s been in a self-induced Xanax coma for years.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“Yeah. It was painful. And unproductive.”

I realized Morelli was staring at my forehead.

“It’s a pimple,” I told him.

Morelli grinned. “I hadn’t noticed, but now that you mention it.”

“Liar.”

“Fortunately for you I know the perfect cure for a pimple of that magnitude. Sweaty gorilla sex. Lots of it.”

“I got this from your crazy grandmother. She gave me the eye, and she said I was going to get boils!”

“Cupcake, there’s no such thing as the eye. And that’s not a boil. It’s a monster pimple. It’s that time of the month, right?”

“Wrong!”

“Good to know,” Morelli said, slinging an arm around my shoulders, hugging me into him. “I have plans.”

“Where are we going to eat tonight?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Pino’s?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Campiello’s?”

“No.”

“Sal’s Steak House?”

“No.”

Morelli wasn’t a surprise kind of guy. Maybe about doggy-style sex but that was it. So I was getting a weird feeling.

“Where are we eating tonight?” I asked him again.

Morelli blew out a sigh. “At my mom’s house. It’s my Uncle Rocco’s birthday.”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Oh man, I’m begging,” Morelli said. “I hate these parties. I’ll make a deal. You go with me, and I’ll give you a back rub.”

“No way. Your grandmother will be there, and she’ll put another curse on me.”

“Okay, a back rub and I’ll buy you a birthday cake.”

“No!”

Morelli looked down at me. Serious. “What’ll it take?”

“I’ll hook up with you after dinner. That’s the best I can offer.”

“Better than nothing,” he said. “Can I still give you a back rub?”

“Yes. Do I get the birthday cake?”

“No.” He looked over at the bonds bus. “Are you going in there?”

“Yes. I was going to take off for home, but I think I’ll touch base with Connie before I leave.”

“Try not to inhale the fumes coming off the upholstery and don’t eat anything he’s baking.” He pulled me close, kissed me, and whispered a couple innovations he was going to add to the back rub.

• • •

Connie was at her computer, Lula was sitting in a club chair, and Mooner was on the couch, working his way through an app on his cell phone when I swung into the bus.

“I can’t help thinking there was some significance to Lou Dugan getting buried on the bonds office property,” I said to Connie.

“I’ve wondered about that,” Connie said. “But I can’t think of a connection.”

“What about Vinnie? Did Vinnie have something going on with Dugan?”

“Vinnie was a regular at the titty bar before Lucille hooked him up to a leash and a choke collar, but I never got the feeling Vinnie and Dugan were friends or business partners.”

“Harry?”

“Don’t know about Harry,” Connie said. “He’s mostly a silent partner here. He puts the money up, so his son-in-law can be gainfully employed, but he doesn’t take much interest in the business.”

“Maybe Vinnie ran up a tab at the titty bar, and he didn’t want to pay it, so he offed Lou Dugan, and buried him in his backyard,” Lula said.

“It would work for me,” Connie said, “except I can’t see Vinnie digging a hole big enough to plant Dugan. Not a lot of muscle going on in that weaselly body. And Vinnie wouldn’t have left the ring on Dugan’s finger.”

“Maybe the killers were aliens, and they were following instructions from the mother ship,” Mooner said. “Like maybe they needed to do an anal probe. And you know, like, the ring might not have any value in another solar system.”

We all stared openmouthed at Mooner for a moment.

“You gotta cut back on the brownies,” Lula said to Mooner.

Connie made a small grimace and dragged her attention from Mooner to me. “How’d it go with Merlin Brown?”

“We found him but then we lost him,” I said. “No problem. I have a lead. I just need to make a couple phone calls.”

There are two hospitals in Trenton, Helene Fuld and St. Frances. I was guessing Merlin drove himself to one of the hospitals to get his foot patched up. If that was the case he was probably either still waiting, depending on how much he was bleeding, or else he was with a doctor. I called Helene Fuld first and asked for Merlin. They didn’t have anyone checked in by that name, and they didn’t have anyone with a toe amputation.

Connie had been listening. “Toe amputation?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

“You don’t want to know,” I told her.

“Hunh,” Lula said, arms crossed over her chest. “He said I was fat.”

“You’re right,” Connie said. “I don’t want to know. Were there witnesses?”

I shook my head. “No.”

I called St. Frances next and asked for Jenny Christo. I went to high school with Jenny, and now she was an ER nurse.

“Nope,” she said, “no one here named Merlin Brown. No one with a bloody foot.”

“Well?” Lula asked when I got off the phone.

“He wasn’t at either hospital. He must have gone to a clinic or private doctor.”

Unfortunate because if he’d gone to either of the hospitals I could have picked him up when he checked out and left.

The door to the motor coach opened, and Vinnie stumbled up a step. “Cripes, why don’t you turn some lights on,” he said. “I feel like a goddamn mole.”

“All the lights are on,” Connie told him. “Did you re-bond Ziggy?”

“Yeah. That guy is four cans short of a case. He told the judge he was a vampire.”

“What did the judge say?”

“He said he didn’t care if he was Winston Churchill or Mickey Mouse, he damn well better show up for his court appearance next time.”

My phone buzzed, and my parents’ number popped up on my screen.

“Your mother asked me to call and see if you want to come for dinner tonight being that she’s making meatloaf and rice pudding,” Grandma said. “It’s not every day she makes rice pudding.”

I loved my mother’s rice pudding. “Sure,” I said. “Dinner would be good.” This was a much better option than Joe’s Uncle Rocco’s birthday party, and I’d still get to see Joe after dinner.

NINE

I SWAPPED OUT the red tank top and jeans for a deep blue stretchy knit sweater with a low scoop neck, a little black skirt, and spiky heels. The only reason Morelli wanted me to wear the red shirt was because he hadn’t seen the blue sweater. I had cleavage in the blue sweater. Okay, so I had a little help from a push-up bra, but it was cleavage all the same. I had my hair long in big loose curls and waves, and I added extra gunk to my eyelashes. I was in date-night mode. I was going to get meatloaf, rice pudding, a back rub, and then I was most likely going to get naked. Shazaam. Could life possibly get any better?

I gave myself one last look in the bathroom mirror. Yes, in fact, life could get better. The pimple in the middle of my forehead could disappear. I’d tried makeup and that didn’t work. Only one thing left. Bangs. I sectioned off some hair, took the scissors to it, and the deed was done. A moment with the flat iron. Swiped the bangs partially to the side. Some hairspray. Good-bye pimple.

My parents eat dinner at six o’clock. Precisely. If everyone’s ass is not in the seat promptly at six, and the dinner is delayed by five minutes, my mother declares the meal ruined. The pot roast is dry, the gravy is cold, the beans are overcooked. It all tastes perfectly fine to me, but what do I know? My major cooking accomplishment is a peanut butter and olive sandwich.

I arrived at ten minutes to six, said hello to my dad in the living room, and paused at the dining room table on my way to the kitchen. The table was set for five people. My mom, my dad, my grandmother, me … and one other person. I immediately knew in my gut I’d been suckered in.

“Why is there an extra place set at the table?” I asked my mother. “Who did you invite?”

She was at the counter next to the sink, and she was bent over a steaming pot of drained potatoes, mashing them for all she was worth, her lips pressed tight together.

“We invited that nice young man, Dave Brewer, who swindled all those people out of their houses,” Grandma said, pulling a meatloaf out of the oven.

“He didn’t swindle anyone,” my mother said. “He was framed.”

I eyeballed the pudding, sitting in a bowl on the kitchen table, and gauged the distance to the door. If I moved fast I could probably get away with the pudding before my mother tackled me.

“There’s something different about you,” Grandma said to me. “You’ve got bangs.”

My mother looked up from the potatoes. “You’ve never had bangs.” She studied me for a beat. “I like them. They bring out your eyes.”

The doorbell rang and my mother and grandmother snapped to attention.

“Someone get the door,” my father yelled.

My father took the trash out, washed the car, and did anything associated with plumbing, but he didn’t get the door. It wasn’t on his side of the division of labor.

“I got my hands full with the meatloaf,” Grandma said.

I blew out a sigh. “I’ll get it.”

If Dave Brewer was too awful I could let him in and just keep right on going, out to my car. The heck with the pudding.

I opened the door and took a step back. Brewer was a pleasant-looking guy with a lot less hair than I remembered. The athletic body he’d had in high school had turned soft around the middle; in direct contrast to Morelli and Ranger who seemed to come into sharper focus as they aged. He was half a head taller than me. His blue eyes had some squint lines at the corners. What was left of his sandy blond hair was trimmed short. He was dressed in black slacks and a blue dress shirt that was open at the neck.

“Stephanie?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“This is awkward.”

“For the record, this wasn’t my idea. I have a boyfriend.”

“Morelli.”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t want to tangle with him,” Brewer said.

I felt my eyebrows go up every so slightly. “But you’re here?”

“I’m temporarily living with my mother,” he said. “She made me come.”

Good grief, I thought, the poor dumb schmuck was worse off than I was.

At one minute to six the food was set on the table, and my father pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the dining room. My father took early retirement from his job at the post office and now drives a cab part-time. He has a couple steady fares that he takes to the train station five days a week, and then he picks his friends up and drives them to the Sons of Italy lodge where they play cards. He’s 5?10? and stocky. He’s got a lot of forehead and beyond that a fringe of curly black hair. He doesn’t own a pair of jeans, preferring pleated slacks and collared knit shirts from the Tony Soprano collection at JCPenney. He endures my grandmother with what seems like grim resignation and selective deafness, though I suspect he harbors murderous fantasies.

I was seated next to Dave with Grandma across from us. “Isn’t this nice,” Grandma said. “It isn’t every day we get to have a handsome young man at the table.”

My father shoveled in food and murmured something that sounded a little like just shoot me. Hard to tell with the meatloaf rolling around in his mouth.

“So what are you doing here in Trenton?” Grandma asked.

“I’m working for my Uncle Harry.”

Harry Brewer owned a moving and storage company. When I moved out of my house after the divorce, I used Brewer Movers.

“Are you moving furniture?” Grandma asked.

“No. I’m doing job estimating and general office work. My cousin Francie use to do it, but she had some words with my uncle, left work, and never came back. So I stepped in to help out.”

Grandma made a sucking sound with her dentures. “Has anyone heard from her?”

“Not that I know.”

“Just like Lou Dugan,” Grandma said.

I knew about Francie, and it wasn’t exactly like Lou Dugan. Francie’s boyfriend was also missing, and when Francie stormed out of the office she took almost $5,000 in petty cash with her. The theory going around is that Francie and her boyfriend were in Vegas.

“Who wants wine?” my mother asked. “We have a nice bottle of red on the table.”

Grandma helped herself to the wine and passed it across the table to Dave. “I bet you and Stephanie have a lot in common being that you went to school together.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nada.”

Dave stopped his fork halfway to his mouth. “There must be something.”

“What?” I asked him.

“A mutual friend.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You played football, and she was a twirler,” Grandma said. “You must have been on the field together.”

“Nope,” I said. “We were on at halftime, and they were in the locker room.”

He turned and looked at me. “Now I remember you. You flipped your baton into the trombone section during ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “It was cold and my fingers were frozen. And if you so much as crack a smile over this I’ll stab you with my fork.”

“She’s pretty tough,” Grandma said to Dave. “She’s a bounty hunter, and she shoots people.”

“I don’t shoot people,” I said. “Almost never.”

“Show him your gun,” Grandma said.

I spooned mashed potatoes onto my plate. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to see my gun. Anyway, I don’t have it with me.”

“She’s got just a little one,” Grandma said. “Mine’s bigger. Do you want to see my gun?”

My mother poured herself a second glass of wine, and my father gripped his knife so hard his knuckles turned white.

“Maybe later,” Dave said.

“You are not supposed to have a gun,” my mother said to my grandmother.

“Oh yeah. I forgot. Okay, I gave the gun away,” Grandma said to Dave. “But it’s a beaut.”

“What about you?” my father asked Dave. “Do you have a gun?”

Dave shook his head. “No. I don’t need a gun.”

“I don’t trust a man who doesn’t own a gun,” my father said, slitty-eyed at Dave, forkful of meatloaf halfway to his mouth.

“I don’t usually agree with my son-in-law,” Grandma said, “but he’s got a point.”

“Do you have a gun?” Dave asked my dad.

“I used to,” my dad said. “I had to get rid of it when Edna moved in. Too much temptation.”

My mother drained her wineglass. “Anyone want more potatoes?” she asked.

“I’ll have another piece of meatloaf,” Dave said.

“The way to good meatloaf is to use lots of ketchup when you’re mixing it up,” Grandma said. “It’s our secret ingredient.”

“I’ll remember that,” Dave said. “I like to cook. I’d like to go to culinary school, but I can’t afford it right now.”

My father stopped chewing for a beat and gave his head an almost imperceptible shake, as if this sealed the deal on his assessment of Dave Brewer.

“How about you?” Dave asked me. “Do you like to cook?”

Interesting question. He didn’t ask me if I could cook. The answer to that was easy. No. I for sure couldn’t cook. Anything beyond a sandwich and I was a mess. The thing is, he asked me if I liked to cook. And that was a more complicated question. I didn’t know if I liked to cook. Someone was always cooking for me. My mom, Morelli’s mom, Ranger’s housekeeper, and a bunch of professionals at delis, pizza places, supermarkets, sandwich shops, and fast-food joints.

“I don’t know if I like to cook,” I told him. “I’ve never had reason to try. I wasn’t married long enough to get the stickers off the bottoms of the pots.”

“And then her apartment got firebombed and her cook-book got burned up,” Grandma said. “That was a pip of a fire.”

“That’s too bad,” Dave said. “Cooking can be fun. And you get to eat what you make.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat anything I made.

“We got to get a move on with this dinner,” Grandma said. “Mildred Brimmer is laid out at Stiva’s, and I don’t want to miss anything. Everyone’s going to be talking about Lou Dugan, and I’m going to be the star on account of Stephanie was right on the spot.”

Dave turned to me. “Is that true? I heard they found him buried on the bonds office property.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The backhoe guy uncovered a hand and part of the arm. I wasn’t there when they exhumed the rest of him.”

“I heard they recognized him by his ring,” Dave said.

I nodded. “Morelli spotted it. I’m sure they’ll do more forensic work to be certain.”

“That’s the good part about living in the Burg,” Grandma said. “There’s always something interesting going on.”

We made our way through the dinner in record time, so Grandma could get to her viewing. No one spilled the wine or set the tablecloth on fire by knocking over a candlestick. The conversation was mildly embarrassing, since it was full of not-so-subtle references about Dave and me becoming a couple, but I’d been through far worse.

“Sorry about the matchmaking,” I said to Dave as I showed him to the door after dinner was over.

“By the end of the meal I was almost convinced we were engaged.” He stared down at my cleavage. “I was starting to warm to the idea.” He gave me a polite kiss on the cheek. “Maybe we can be friends. I can give you a cooking lesson.”

“Sure,” I said. “Cooking would be good.”

TEN

FIVE MINUTES LATER I was in my own car. I had a bag of leftovers on the backseat and Grandma next to me in the passenger seat as I wound my way through the Burg to Stiva’s Funeral Home.

“Dave wasn’t so bad,” Grandma said. “He wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the losers your mother’s dragged home for you. Remember the butcher?”

An involuntary shiver ran down my spine at the thought.

“And I think it’s real nice that Dave knows how to cook,” Grandma said. “It could come in handy for some lucky girl.”

I looked sideways at Grandma.

“Well you could do worse,” she said. “I don’t see you making much progress marrying what you already got on the string.”

“I’m not sure I want to get married.”

“Don’t be a ninny,” Grandma said. “Of course you want to get married. You want to take out your own garbage for the rest of your life? And what about babies?”

“Babies?”

“Sure. Don’t you want babies?”

Truth is, I was pretty happy with a hamster. “Maybe someday,” I said.

I dropped Grandma off at the funeral home and drove back to my apartment. I spotted Morelli’s green SUV parked in my lot, and I pulled up next to him. His truck was empty, and the lights were on in my living room. He’d let himself in. He had a key.

I took the elevator, walked the length of the hall, and Morelli and his dog, Bob, met me at my door. Bob adopted Morelli a while back. Bob’s big and shaggy and red, and he eats everything.

“I saw you pull into the lot,” he said. “Nice view from up here.”

Hard to tell if he was referring to me or the bag of leftovers I was holding.

“How did you escape from Uncle Rocco’s party this early?”

“I faked a call from dispatch.” He took the bag, set it on the kitchen counter, and reached out to me. “You’re looking really sexy tonight. I almost fell out the window watching you walk across the parking lot.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t because I was carrying dessert? I could share my pudding with you.”

He wrapped his arms around me and cuddled me into him. “Later.”

“A drink?”

He brushed a kiss across my lips. “Later.”

“So, then what would you like to do?”

“For starters, I’d like to peel this shirt off you. And then I want to see you shimmy out of this little skirt.”

“And the heels?” I asked.

“Leave the heels on.”

Oh boy. “That’s naughty.”

Morelli slid his hands inside my sweater. His eyes were dilated black, and his mouth was soft with just a hint of a smile. “Cupcake, I’m feeling way beyond naughty. We’re going to have to lock Bob out of the bedroom so we don’t corrupt his impressionable mind.”

Five minutes later I was down to the heels, and Morelli was wearing even less. Morelli tends to be playful during foreplay. When the foreplay gives way to more serious action Morelli makes love with a passion not easily forgotten. I was on my back on the bed, and Morelli was finger walking up the inside of my thigh. I had a grip on the sheet, and I think my eyes might have been rolled back into my head in anticipation of what was ahead.

“Do you like this?” he asked.

“Yeessss,” I said, breathless, every muscle in my body clenched.

Morelli kissed me a couple inches below my navel. “It’s about to get better.”

ELEVEN

IT WAS TUESDAY MORNING, and Lula was giving me her full attention. “Okay, let me figure this out,” she said. “From the goofy smile you got on your face, and the fact you’re not walkin’ all that good, I’d say you spent the night with Morelli.”

The bail bonds bus was still parked on Hamilton, and Lula and Connie were in residence. Vinnie and Mooner were absent. I was on the couch with my hand wrapped around a monster Starbucks.

“He’s the one,” I said. “No doubt about it.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t give no one else a chance yet. There could be something better. You’re already judging the bake off, and you haven’t tasted everyone’s cake.”

“I don’t think I could survive anything better.”

“I’m kind of disappointed,” Lula said. “I was looking forward to hearing about the comparisons.”

Not that I would give her comparisons, but I understood wanting to hear them.

“How was your date last night?” I asked her.

“It was a big dud. We went to a movie, and he fell sound asleep, and people were yellin’ at him for snoring. And then the manager came and asked us to leave. And he wouldn’t leave without getting his money back, although I don’t see where it mattered on account of he was sleepin’ through the movie and it wasn’t like he cared about seeing the ending. So the manager called the police, and that was when I left. I don’t want to get involved with no man snores like that anyway. It was like sitting next to a freight train. And it was a pity ’cause I was all set with my boa.”

I looked out the bus window and saw that the crime scene tape was still up and two men in khakis and CSI windbreakers were in the middle of the lot. “What’s going on out there?” I asked Connie.

“I don’t know. They’ve marked off grids and they’re poking around. I guess they want to make sure there aren’t any more bodies. Or maybe they’re collecting evidence. Morelli was here when I came to work and then he left.”

“Did he look happy?” I asked.

“Not especially. He had his work face on. He was with Terry Gilman. They spent a couple minutes talking to the CSI guys, and then they left.”

I felt like all the air got squeezed out of my lungs. Terry Gilman was blond and beautiful and from time to time I’ve suspected Morelli of straying in her direction. Terry Gilman also had mob connections, although just exactly how she was currently connected wasn’t clear.

“I think Gilman was related to Lou Dugan,” Connie said. “Second cousin or something. And I’m pretty sure she worked for him at one time.”

Lula had her nose pressed against the window. “I tell you, if one of those CSI guys turns up another body I’m going home, and I’m not coming back.”

“There isn’t anything for you to file here anyway,” Connie said. “We don’t have any file cabinets, and we don’t have a lot of case files. Business is in the toilet.”

“You’re still paying me, aren’t you? Because I got financial obligations. I got a handbag on layaway that I’m makin’ payments on.”

Vinnie called and Connie put him on speakerphone.

“I’m at the courthouse and I need someone to come pick up a package,” Vinnie said.

“What kind of package?”

“A big package. It won’t fit in my car. I need Mooner to drive the bus here.”

“Mooner’s at an all-day Lord of the Rings movie festival.”

“Then get someone else to drive the damn bus.”

“Who?” Connie asked him.

“Anyone! How hard can it be if Mooner can do it? Just get the bus down here. I haven’t got all day to waste standing around in front of the courthouse.”

“Hell, I’ll drive the bus,” Lula said. “I always wanted to drive a bus.”

I always wanted to fly, but that doesn’t mean I can do it without wings. “Don’t you have to take lessons and get a special license to drive a bus?”

Lula was on her feet, moving to the driver’s seat. “To my way of thinking this here’s a recreational vehicle and you don’t need nothing special to drive it.” She got behind the wheel and looked around. “Let’s see what we got. Gas pedal. Brake. Gear shifter doohickey. And the key’s in the ignition. This is gonna be a piece of cake.”

“Is this bus insured?” I asked Connie.

Connie was busy ramming her laptop and a bunch of files into her tote bag. “I’m moving to the coffee shop next to the hospital. They’ve got free WiFi, it smells better, it’s not always midnight, and it doesn’t move.”

Lula cranked the engine over. “Everybody strapped in?”

Connie pushed past me to the door. “Do not go over ten miles an hour,” she said to Lula. “Do not hit anything. Do not call me if you do hit something.”

I grabbed my purse and followed after Connie.

“Hey,” Lula said to me. “Where are you going? We’re supposed to be partners. What about all those times I got your back. And now here I am on a big adventure drivin’ a bus, and how could you be thinkin’ about not sharing this with me? Where’s the sharing? This could be a bonding experience.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Of course it’s a good idea. Just sit your skinny white hiney down. This is gonna be fun. I’m gonna be a good bus driver. I might even decide to take up bus driving professionally.”

Lula put the bus in gear, stepped on the gas, and backed into the state CSI truck.

“Did you hear something funny just then?” she asked.

“Yeah, I heard the sound of you backing into the crime scene van.”

“It was just a tap. I’ll ease forward a little.”

She changed gears and pulled away from the curb. “This thing don’t got a lot of get-up.”

The CSI guys were staring at us, mouths open, eyes wide. I looked in the side mirror and saw we were towing the van.

“I just gotta give it some juice,” Lula said.

She stomped on the gas, and the bus broke loose and jumped forward, leaving the van’s bumper in the middle of the road.

“Maybe you should pull over,” I said.

“No way. I’m getting the hang of it now.”

Lula cruised down Hamilton and sideswiped a bunch of parked cars.

“Holy cow,” I said. “You just ripped off two more bumpers and a mirror.”

“I guess this is wider than I originally thought. No problem, I’ll just make a course correction.”

She turned right off Hamilton, jumped the curb, and took out a mailbox.

“Um, federal property,” I said.

“People don’t use mail no more anyway. It’s all electronic. When was the last time you put a stamp on something? Remember when you had to lick them stamps? That was disgustin’.”

I looked behind us for police. “We sort of left the scene of a lot of crimes.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t big crimes. They didn’t hardly count. We could mail in those crimes, except we don’t mail anymore. But if we did mail shit that’s the way we’d take care of it.”

Lula rolled down Perry Street and spotted Vinnie in front of the courthouse. “What the heck is that next to Vinnie? I thought he said he had a package. That’s no package. That’s a big hairy guy on a leash. Probably I’m seeing things, but I swear he looks like a bear.”

It looked like a bear to me, too. It was big and brown, and it was wearing a red collar with a bow tie on it.

Vinnie led the bear to the bus and opened the door.

“ ’S’cuse me,” Lula said, “but that looks like a bear.”

“It’s Bruce the dancing bear,” Vinnie said. “I bonded out his owner, and this was all the guy could come up with to secure the bond.”

“And what are you expectin’ to do with that bear? Because you better not be wanting to take that bear on my bus. I don’t allow no bears on my bus.”

“First of all, it’s not your bus.”

“It is when I’m drivin’ it. Who do you see sitting in the driver’s seat?”

“I see an unemployed file clerk,” Vinnie said. “Get your ass out of that seat. I’m driving the bus.”

“You fire me and Connie’ll be all over you. And be my guest drivin’ the bus. I was tired of drivin’ the bus anyways. It don’t steer right.”

Lula and I squeezed out the door, past the bear, and Vinnie and the bear got into the bus.

Lula peeked back into the bus. “I need a ride.”

Someone growled. I think it was Vinnie.

“Get in,” Vinnie said to Lula, “but don’t crowd the bear.” Vinnie looked out at me. “What about you? Do you need a ride?”

“Nope. I’m good.”

I wasn’t comfortable sharing a bus with a bear, bow tie or not. I watched the door close, and I waved to Lula as the bus drove off.

TWELVE

I STOOD THERE stranded in front of the courthouse and considered my options. I could call my dad. I could call Morelli. I could call a cab. I had my phone in my hand when a black Porsche 911 Turbo eased to a stop beside me. The tinted window slid down, and Ranger looked at me from behind dark glasses.

“Babe.”

Babe was an entire conversation for Ranger. Depending on the voice inflection it could mean many things. At this moment in time I took it to mean nice surprise running into you like this.

I slipped onto the passenger seat, and Ranger leaned over and kissed me just below my ear. It was a hello kiss. Nothing serious. If I wanted it to get serious all I had to do was smile.

When I first met Ranger he had been working as a bounty hunter and his address was a vacant lot. He had his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and his dress varied between Army camies and black T-shirts and cargo pants. He’s a successful businessman now as part owner of an exclusive security firm. The ponytail and the Army camies have been retired, and Ranger has moved into a small but luxurious apartment on the top floor of the Rangeman office building. Usually he’s dressed in the Rangeman uniform of black T-shirt, cargo pants, and Rangeman windbreaker, but his closet also contains perfectly tailored black suits and dress shirts. He was in uniform today.

“Are you here fighting crime?” I asked.

“I needed to get a police report on a burglary. And you?”

“Vinnie had court business, and then he couldn’t fit the dancing bear in his car, so Lula and I picked him up in Mooner’s bus.”

The expression didn’t change on Ranger’s face. Possibly there was a minuscule upward twitch at the corner of his mouth indicating amusement.

“And you didn’t want to take the return trip on the bus?”

“It was a really big bear. Do you have time to drive me back to my car?” I asked him.

“Yes, but it’ll cost you.”

I raised my eyebrows a half inch. “Are we talking about sex?”

Ranger lowered his shades and looked at me. “I don’t have to bargain for that, babe.”

“Well then?”

“I’d like you to look over the security system on a new account. I know how to design a system for maximum safety, but you’re better at recognizing elements women find uncomfortable.”

“Sure. I’d be happy to check it out.”

“I’m tied up for the rest of the day. Maybe tomorrow after four.”

• • •

Mooner’s bus was parked in its usual spot on Hamilton Avenue. A squad car, the medical examiner’s truck, Morelli’s SUV, plus the CSI van minus its bumper were all parked in front of the bus.

Ranger pulled the Porsche in behind the bus and left it at idle. “This lot is getting more traffic than the landfill.”

“Do you have any theories on Lou Dugan?”

“He was an interesting guy. Active in community affairs, had his finger in a number of unsavory businesses, had a wife who turned herself into a zombie, and his son is in his final year of residency at Johns Hopkins.”

“You did some investigating.”

“There isn’t a building here, but I still provide security services. I wasn’t able to turn up anything to indicate a connection between Dugan and anyone associated with the bonds office. That isn’t to say there’s no connection between the killer and the bonds office.”

I looked at the bus, which was rocking back and forth. Probably the bear was dancing. “Do you want to see the dancing bear?” I asked Ranger.

“Tempting, but I’ll pass.”

I got out of the car, waved Ranger away, crossed over the crime scene tape, and joined Morelli. He was standing a few feet from a small red flag stuck into the ground. The M.E., the CSI guys, and Morelli were watching two men move dirt with picks and shovels. Peeking out of the pit was a patch of what might be gray suit material smudged with dirt and stuff I didn’t want to think about.

“This doesn’t look good,” I said to Morelli.

“There’s another body down there. Obviously buried after the fire because the building would have been over the grave site.”

“Any idea who it is?”

“Terry told me that Bobby Lucarelli, Dugan’s lawyer, disappeared at about the same time as Dugan. He’d be on my short list.”

I made an effort not to use my crazy jealous voice. “Terry?”

“Terry Gilman. Lou Dugan was her uncle, and she worked for him a couple years ago. Mostly doing bookkeeping.”

“I bet.”

“Yeah, it’s hard to tell what Terry works at. Not that I care right now. She’s cooperating with the investigation.”

“I bet.”

Morelli grinned down at me. “Are you jealous?”

“I don’t trust her.”

“How about me? Do you trust me?”

I ran the question through my mind.

“Well?” Morelli asked.

“I’m thinking.”

Morelli blew out a sigh.

“Watch what you’re doing with that shovel,” the M.E. yelled to one of the diggers. “I don’t want this guy going in the bag in a million pieces.”

A wave of nausea slid through my stomach. “I’m out of here,” I said. “Will I see you tonight?”

“Yeah, but it’ll be late,” he gave me a quick kiss. “Don’t wait dinner.”

THIRTEEN

LULA’S CAR WAS GONE, and so was Connie’s. Probably they were at the coffee shop. The bus had stopped rocking, so I figured either the bear had eaten Vinnie or else they were napping. Either way I didn’t want to get involved.

I drove the short distance to the coffee shop and parked behind Lula’s Firebird. The coffee shop was across from the hospital and was classic Starbucks design except it wasn’t a Starbucks. Two leather couches and a coffee table had been positioned in one front window and a bunch of small bistro tables and chairs filled the other window area and ran down the side of the shop. Two women in scrubs were at the counter, ordering lattes. A curly-haired guy was at one of the tables, surfing the net on his laptop, and Lula and Connie had commandeered the couches.

“How was the ride back with the bear?” I asked Lula.

“As far as bears go, he’s pretty polite,” Lula said. “He didn’t growl at me or nothin’, but I don’t want to be around when he gotta go potty.”

“I have some new information on Merlin Brown,” Connie said. “I ran him through the system and turned up a brother-in-law. Lionel Cracker. Lives in the same housing complex as Merlin and works at a deli on upper Stark. It’s about a block down from no-man’s-land, next to Green’s Mortuary.”

“I know where that is,” Lula said. “I used to go to that deli all the time when I was a ho, and I was in the neighborhood. They got the best chili dogs ever made. I could eat those chili dogs ’til I throw up. If we go check this guy out now I could have a dog for lunch.”

• • •

I made a pass through Brown’s parking lot and looked for his car. When I couldn’t find the car I called his home phone. No answer.

“I bet he’s out for lunch,” Lula said. “I bet he’s eating with his brother-in-law.”

For the most part, if you park your car on Stark Street and you don’t keep your eye on it, at least some of it, if not all of it, will be gone when you return. If I had a black Cadillac Escalade, Mercedes SLS AMG, or a Porsche 911 Turbo no one would touch my car for fear I was high up on the gangsta’ food chain, and in that case, stealing my car was a death sentence.

Since I was driving a P.O.S. seen-better-days Ford Escort, I made sure I parked directly in front of the deli.

“I’m gettin’ a chili dog, a kraut dog, and a barbecue dog,” Lula said. “And I might get some curly cheese fries to round it out, so I get some extra vegetable and dairy. I decided I’m improving my diet by gettin’ a balance of shit in my meals. I bet I’ve just about got all the food groups in the meal I’m plannin’.”

“Cracker might not be friendly to us if he knows we shot the toe off his brother-in-law, so we need to be cool.”

“Sure. I can be cool. What do you want?”

“I want a hot dog. Any kind is fine.”

The deli was small. Take-out service only. Two gangly kids in homeboy clothes stood at the counter, waiting on their order. Two men in food-stained, sweaty T-shirts worked in the kitchen. Both cooks looked like they weighed in the vicinity of three hundred pounds. Hot dogs boiled on the stove and grease ran down the walls from the fryer.

I hung in the doorway, watching my car, and Lula stepped up to the counter. “I want a chili dog, a kraut dog, a barbecue dog, and curly fries with extra cheese. And my friend wants a chili dog. And which one of you guys is Lionel Cracker?”

One of the men scooped four dogs out of the water and looked at Lula. “Who wants to know?”

“I want to know,” Lula said. “Who the heck do you think?”

“Do I know you?”

“It’s that I know your brother-in-law Merlin. He said you work here.”

Cracker laid out four hot-dog rolls on his workstation and dropped the dogs into them. “What else did he say?”

“That’s it. I used to be friends with Merlin, and I haven’t seen him in a while, and I was wondering how he’s doing?”

“He owes you money, right? What are you, collection agency? Human services?”

“We just came in for a hot dog and I was wondering about Merlin.”

Cracker laid down a smear of yellow mustard on all the dogs. “I could tell you’re lying. I know body language, and you’re a big fat liar.”

“To begin with I’m about the best liar you ever saw. If I’m lyin’ you’re not gonna know. And on top of that, did you call me fat? ’Cause you better not have called me fat. ’Specially since you’re one big ugly tub of lard.”

“That’s mean,” Cracker said. “You can kiss these dogs goodbye. I don’t serve dogs to fat, mean, ol’ trash.”

Lula leaned over the counter to get into his face. “Fine by me on account of I don’t want your nasty dogs, but I don’t put up with no one disrespecting me.”

“Oh yeah? Well kiss my behind.”

And Cracker mooned her.

Lula grabbed the mustard dispenser and blasted Cracker in the ass with a double shot of mustard. Cracker scooped up a handful of chili and threw it at Lula. And after that it was hard to tell who was throwing what. Hot dogs, buns, coleslaw, pickles, ketchup, relish, sauerkraut were flying through the air. Lula was batting them away with her purse, and I was trying to pull her through the door.

“Let go,” Lula said to me. “I’m not done with him.”

Cracker dropped below the counter and popped up with a shotgun.

“Now I’m done,” Lula said.

We bolted through the door, jumped into the Escort, and I laid down rubber getting away from the curb.

I drove one block and turned off Stark. “You have to dial back on the fat thing,” I said to Lula. “You can’t go around shooting people because they say you’re fat.”

“I only shot one guy. The second was only mustard.” Lula swiped at some chili stuck to her shirt. “We didn’t get lunch. Where you want to go for lunch?”

“I’m going home for lunch, so I can take a shower and change my clothes. I feel like I’ve been rolled around in Giovichinni’s dumpster.”

Lula powered her window down. “One of us smells like sauerkraut. I think it’s you. You look like you got hit with a whole bowl of it. It’s stuck in your hair.”

Don’t for a moment think this is Bella’s work, I told myself. The pimple and the sauerkraut are coincidence. The eye is a bunch of baloney. Repeat after me. The eye is a bunch of baloney.

FOURTEEN

BY THE TIME I left my apartment it was mid-afternoon. My hair was clean and smelled only faintly of sauerkraut. I was in my usual uniform of jeans and T-shirt. And my plan was to stop at Giovichinni’s and get a sandwich for lunch and a piece of lasagna to save for dinner.

I passed Mooner’s bus on my way to the store. The bus looked normal enough. No indication of a bear inside. The M.E.’s truck was missing from the curb. Morelli and some uniforms were standing in the middle of the lot, watching the backhoe work. I took all this to mean the body had been removed, and the grave was getting filled in and graded.

I parked and joined Morelli.

“Was it the lawyer?”

“Probably, but we couldn’t make a positive ID.”

“No recognizable jewelry?”

“An expensive watch. No wedding band. No wallet.” Morelli leaned closer. “You smell like sauerkraut.”

“Does it make me undesirable?”

“No. It makes me hungry for a hot dog.”

“Do you think this is the last of the bodies buried here?”

“The CSI guys worked their way through the entire lot and found only this one.”

“Why do you suppose the two bodies had different burial spots?”

“They were probably buried at different times. We’re guessing he used the backhoe that was here doing debris removal, and he dug wherever the backhoe was parked.”

“Still no tie-in to the bail bonds office?”

Morelli shook his head. “No. But I’m going over some correspondence and financial records with Terry tonight. Something might turn up.”

Terry again. Unh. Mental head slap.

Morelli grinned down at me. “You’re such a cupcake.”

“Now what?”

“Every time I mention Terry your eyes cross.” He wrapped an arm around me and kissed me just above my ear. “Good thing I like sauerkraut,” he said.

• • •

I bypassed Mooner’s bus completely and went directly to Giovichinni’s. I ordered a turkey club and was in the middle of a critical dinner decision when Grandma Mazur called.

“We’re making lasagna tonight,” she said. “It’s a special recipe. And we’re having chocolate cake for dessert. Your mother wanted to know if you wanted some.”

I stared at the slab of lasagna in Giovichinni’s deli case and found it lacking. “Sure,” I said. “Set a plate for me.”

I carted my turkey club to the coffee shop and sat in the window area with Lula and Connie.

“They found another body on bonds office property,” I said. “Morelli thinks it might be Bobby Lucarelli, Dugan’s lawyer.”

“I knew he was missing,” Connie said. “He was Vinnie’s lawyer, too. Vinnie was using him for some real estate transactions.”

My phone buzzed with a text message from Dave. I HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU.

He probably meant well, but I had enough surprises in my life. I was sitting with my back to the window, and I felt a shadow pass over me. I turned to see what had caused the shadow, and I caught Bella standing outside, looking in. She put her finger to her eye and nodded and smiled at me.

“Holy mother,” Connie whispered.

Lula made a go away gesture at Bella. “Shoo!”

Bella glared at Lula, turned, and walked down the street.

“Do you feel any different?” Connie asked me. “Did you just get a hemorrhoid? Are you breaking out in hives?”

“I don’t believe in the eye,” I told her.

“That’s good,” Lula said. “You keep tellin’ yourself that. You’re gonna be fine. You don’t think she took offense that I shooed her, do you? Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I already got a vampire hickey. I don’t need no more weird juju shit.”

Connie looked at her cell phone. “Vinnie just texted me that the bear’s hungry. Someone has to make a chicken nugget run.”

“I guess I could do that,” Lula said, “but I don’t get the whole bear thing.”

Connie gave Lula a wad of cash. “It was a high bond and apparently the bear’s worth a lot of money. He’s part of some Russian circus act booked into Vegas. I guess the owner got a little drunk and shot a bartender because he wouldn’t serve him. Anyway Vinnie took the bear because the case is scheduled to go to court on Friday. Fast cash turnaround.”

“So how many buckets of nuggets does the bear want?” Lula asked.

“Get him four extra big buckets,” Connie said. “No coleslaw, but he might like biscuits.”

I went with Lula because I didn’t have anything better to do, and I wanted to snitch a biscuit. Lula cruised down Hamilton, pulled into the Cluck-in-a-Bucket lot, and parked.

“I’m not getting all this at the drive-thru,” Lula said. “They always short you chicken at the drive-thru. And they don’t give you the fresh, hot biscuits. They give you the nasty ass old ones.”

I got out of the Firebird, I looked through the big plate-glass window of Cluck-in-a-Bucket, and I saw Merlin Brown standing in line, waiting for his order.

“Do you see what I see?” Lula asked. “I see Merlin Brown getting two bags of chicken. He’s probably got a gun and wants to get even with me. And even if he doesn’t have a gun, look at him. He’s huge and most likely he don’t have a stiffy no more, and he could run fast and grab me, and rip my toes off. And I just got a pedicure, too.”

“We need a plan.”

“Yeah, too bad we don’t have a big net. We could catch him if we had a big net. Except for the big net I don’t have any ideas.”

Merlin pushed through the door, and I could see his foot was totally wrapped in a massive white bandage, and he was limping.

“Let’s get him,” I said to Lula.

“What? How?”

“We’ll tackle him. We have the element of surprise. We’ll take him down to the ground, and I’ll cuff him.”

“Seems mean, what with his toe bein’ shot off and all. Maybe we want to wait for him to be feeling better … like April.”

I gave Lula a shove. “Now!”

Lula and I ran at Merlin, and Lula was waving her arms and yelling. “Ga-a-a-a-a-a!”

Merlin saw us coming and froze. He had a bag of chicken in each hand and a look of total disbelief on his face. Lula went low, hitting him at the knees. I ran at him flat out and put my shoulder into his chest. And Merlin didn’t move. It was like hitting a brick wall.

Merlin shook us off and opened the door to his car. “Crazy ass bitches,” he said. And he drove away.

Lula picked herself up off the ground. “That was humiliating.”

“What was all that arm waving and yelling?”

“I was trying to scare him. They do that in the movies when the angry horde of marauders is storming the castle.”

We went inside, bought our chicken and biscuits, and returned to the Firebird. I ate a biscuit, and Lula ate a couple pieces of chicken, and we drove back to Mooner’s bus.

“You go on in and deliver the chicken,” I said to Lula. “I’ll wait here in the car.”

“Don’t you want to say hello to Bruce?”

“No.”

“As far as bears go, he’s a pretty nice bear.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Lula took the chicken buckets and bags of biscuits into the bus. There was a loud growwwwwl and a shriek, and Lula jumped out of the bus and hustled back behind the wheel of the Firebird.

“Is everyone okay in there?” I asked her.

“Bruce was hungry and forgot his manners.”

FIFTEEN

LULA AND CONNIE cleared out of the coffee shop a little before five, and I motored off to my parents’ house. I parked, let myself in, and stood for a moment in the small foyer enjoying the smell of chocolate cake fresh out of the oven.

I should learn how to make chocolate cake, I thought. I should go out and buy cake pans and a box mix. How hard could it be? And then my apartment would smell wonderful. And it would be fun to make a cake. And maybe I can’t commit to Morelli because I can’t cook. Okay, that was a stretch, but I hadn’t been able to come up with anything better.

My father was asleep in front of the television. I could hear my grandmother and my mother in the kitchen. And I heard a male voice mixed into their conversation.

“I like buttercream frosting,” he said.

I’d been suckered in again. It was Dave Brewer.

Grandma stuck her head out the kitchen door. “I thought I heard you come in. Look who we got here. It’s Dave, and he’s cooking with us. He’s real good at it, too.”

“Surprise,” Dave said.

He was wearing a white three-button collared knit shirt and jeans, and he had a red chef’s apron wrapped around him.

“Just in time,” Grandma said. “We’re icing the cake.”

This isn’t a surprise, I thought. This is an ambush. I took a moment to calm myself and make an attitude adjustment. A couple minutes ago I was thinking I wanted to bake a cake. So here was my opportunity. The cake was cooling on a wire rack, and Dave was in the middle of making frosting.

I looked into the frosting bowl. “Chocolate.”

“Not just chocolate,” Dave said. “This is my special fudge mocha icing. It goes on like icing but then it sets up like fudge.”

“He brought sausage from Frankie the butcher, and he made his own red sauce for the lasagna,” Grandma said. “And he got good Italian cheese to grate up. Too bad you didn’t get here sooner. We just put the lasagna in the oven.”

“Gee, sorry I missed all that,” I said, trying to sound cheery, not feeling cheery at all. Not only wasn’t I happy to have Dave foisted on me, I didn’t like him taking over my mom’s kitchen. I didn’t like him making his own red sauce, grating his good Italian cheese. That was stuff my mom was supposed to do. It was her freaking kitchen. Although truth is, she looked content to have someone make a meal for her.

Dave dribbled coffee into his icing, liked the consistency, and spread it on the layers. He made it look easy, but I’d tried it in the past, and it hadn’t turned out glorious for me.

He swiped a glob of icing up with his finger and held it out to me. “Want a taste?”

Okay, I know he was captain of the football team and he could bake a cake—that didn’t mean I was ready to suck his finger. I was picky about what I put in my mouth.

“I’ll wait,” I told him. “Wouldn’t want to spoil my appetite.”

I wandered into the dining room and set the table. I laid out plates, knives, forks, spoons, napkins, glasses. I fidgeted with each one and checked my watch. I was stalling. I rolled my eyes. This is ridiculous, I thought. I was a big tough bounty hunter. I faced off with vampires and guys with stiffies. Surely I could manage another evening with Dave Brewer. And if I didn’t already have two men in my life, I probably would be happy for the fix up. Probably.

I marched myself back into the kitchen. “Now what?” I asked.

My mother was at the sink, washing dishes, happily drinking booze from a water glass. My grandmother was slicing tomatoes.

“Dave’s making his original salad dressing,” my grandmother said.

“It’s not really original dressing,” Dave said. “It’s oil and vinegar, but I brought some olive oil infused with herbs and some twenty-five-year-old balsamic vinegar.”

“You’re going to make some woman real happy,” Grandma said to Dave. She cut her eyes to me. “Some woman who can’t cook.”

“I could cook if I wanted to,” I said.

Dave broke the seal on the vinegar. “I have some recipes that take almost no time.” He looked over at me. “I’ll print them out and bring them over to your apartment.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t have time to do much cooking right now.”

And I don’t especially want you in my apartment, I thought. He seemed like a perfectly okay guy, but I wasn’t interested, and I suspected he wanted to do more than cook.

“Margaret Yaeger called and said she saw the M.E.’s meat wagon back at the lot where the bonds office used to sit,” Grandma said.

I poured myself a glass of red wine and left the bottle on the counter. “They found another body.”

Grandma sucked in air. “It’s gotta have something to do with the bonds office. Maybe Vinnie’s burying people as a side job.”

“Maybe it was just an easy place to dump a body,” Dave said.

“It’s not real private,” Grandma said. “There’s always someone driving down Hamilton Avenue.”

Dave shook his head. “Not in the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, but you could go to the landfill and there’s never anyone there.”

“They installed security cameras at the landfill,” Dave said. “And besides, you have to drive the body to the landfill and then you get DNA traces in the trunk of your car. I guess you could steal a car.”

“I see you’ve thought this through,” I said to Dave.

Dave helped himself to the wine. “My cousin got a ticket for dumping toxic waste. They caught him on video. And everything I know about DNA I learned from CSI. I’ve been watching a lot of television since I moved home.”

An hour later, I pushed back from the table and took a deep breath. The lasagna had been way too good, and I’d eaten way too much. And I almost had an orgasm eating the cake. My jeans were uncomfortably tight. My thoughts were conflicted. Possibly it was the three glasses of wine I’d chugged, but I was thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to have a husband who loved to cook. Heck, I could even get involved. I could do the chopping, and he could throw it all into a wok or whatever. And I could buy some candlesticks, and we could have a dinner party.

I plugged Ranger into the picture, and I could see him as an expert chef, because Ranger is good at everything. I couldn’t see him at the dinner party. Two people is a party for Ranger. Morelli would be good at the dinner party, but he’d burn all the food if a ball game was on. Dave was a perfect fit in the kitchen and at the dinner party, but I wasn’t especially attracted to him. He felt bland compared to Ranger and Morelli.

• • •

I was asleep on the couch when Morelli slipped his arm around me, and Bob gave me a lick on the cheek with his giant tongue.

“Who? What?” I said, disoriented on waking.

Morelli clicked through channels on the television. “You must have had a hard day. It’s only nine o’clock.”

“I ate too much at dinner. Lasagna and chocolate cake at my parents’ house. It’s going to take me days to digest it.” I looked down at my jeans. The top snap was open and there was no hope of closing it. “I brought a piece of cake home for you. It’s in the kitchen.”

He kissed me on the top of my head, went to the kitchen, and returned with his cake. He forked some into his mouth and nodded approval. “This is really good.”

“It’s the icing.”

“Yeah. It’s like fudge.”

“Dave Brewer made it. Turns out he likes to cook.”

“I’m missing something. How did you get Dave Brewer to make you a cake?”

“My mom met Dave’s mom in Giovichinni’s, and they decided I should be his girlfriend. So I’ve gotten sucked into two dinners with him. One of which he made.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Morelli ate the last piece. “Are you going to be his girlfriend?”

“No. He makes great cake, but I’m sticking with you.”

“Just checking. Nice to know I don’t have to beat the crap out of him.”

“You can’t smack him around anyway. We’re supposed to have an open relationship, right? Were you and Dave friends in high school?”

“He was a year younger than me and a world away. I was the screwup with the bad reputation, and he was the football hero. He was dating Julie Barkalowski, the pom-pom queen.”

“How about you? Did you ever date Julie Barkalowski?”

“I dated every girl in that school. I was a horn dog back then.”

“And now?”

Morelli put his plate down and wrapped his arms around me. “And now I’m your horn dog.”

“Lucky me.”

He clicked the television off, slipped his hands under my T-shirt, and kissed me. Minutes later we were in bed, we were naked, and Morelli was doing a demo for me on the various ways I was lucky. He found the way I was most lucky and just as I was moments away from scoring a home run, a vision of Dave Brewer in an apron popped into my head and broke my concentration.

“Damn!” I said through clenched teeth.

Morelli picked his head up and looked at me. “Is there an issue?”

“I lost it.”

“No problemo. I’ll start over. I have to work off the chocolate cake, anyway.”

SIXTEEN

THE NEXT MORNING I dragged myself into the coffee shop and ordered a grande with extra caffeine. Connie and Lula were already hard at work, settled into the window seating area. Lula was doing the day’s Jumble, and Connie was tweeting on her laptop.

Lula stared up at me. “You look like you been run over by a truck.”

I eased myself down to the couch. “Long night. I couldn’t get Dave Brewer out of my head. It was like he was haunting me.”

“You’re just all clogged up with men,” Lula said. “You got confused hormones.”

“I don’t feel confused. Mostly I feel tired.”

“Hope you’re not too tired,” Connie said. “Ziggy violated his bond last night, and you need to bring him in.”

“What did he do?”

“He attacked Myra Milner at bingo. He said he just wanted to get cozy, but he had his teeth in, and he gave her a couple punctures. I guess he has a thing for the ladies. Anyway, she pressed charges. He was long gone by the time the police got to the bingo hall.”

“Myra Milner is eighty-two years old,” I said to Connie. “What the heck was he thinking?”

Connie gave me the RIGHT TO APPREHEND papers. “Probably he was thinking she was easy. Myra told the police the batteries conked out on her hearing aid, and she didn’t hear him sneaking up on her.”

“I don’t like this,” Lula said. “I had a close call last time, and I still don’t know if I’m outta the woods here. I had a real craving for a Bloody Mary and a rare hamburger last night.”

“There’s no blood in a Bloody Mary,” I told her.

“Yeah, but it’s the idea.”

Mooner’s bus pulled up at the curb, and Mooner and Vinnie got out and came into the coffee shop.

“We got a problem,” Vinnie said. “Genius here was walking Bruce, and Bruce wandered away.”

“He looked like he had to poop,” Mooner said, “but he was having a problem, like finding the right spot, and I thought maybe he needed privacy. I mean, not everyone can poop with an audience, right? So I turned my back for a minute. But then when I looked around he was gone.”

We all went dead still, absorbing the fact that a large bear was loose in the Burg.

“We’ve been riding around, but we can’t find him,” Vinnie said. “You need to help us look.”

A man sitting at a table in the other window area leaned toward us. “I couldn’t help overhearing. I saw a bear walking down Hamilton when I was on my way here. I thought I was seeing things. A white Camry pulled alongside the bear, the driver whistled, and the bear got into the backseat. And then the car drove away.”

“Describe the driver,” Vinnie said.

“He was in the car, so I couldn’t see all of him, but he was Caucasian with brown hair that was kind of long. Middle-aged. I think he had sort of a thin face. And when he talked to the bear it wasn’t in English. I think it might have been Russian.”

“Boris,” Vinnie said. “That’s Boris Belmen, the idiot who owns the bear.”

Connie typed Belmen into her computer and came up with his temporary address in Trenton and his cell phone number.

Vinnie called the cell phone. “I want my bear back,” Vinnie said to Boris.

Even from where I was sitting I could hear Boris yelling at Vinnie, how Vinnie let his prize bear loose to walk around on a busy street, how now he was going to Vegas with Bruce, and Vinnie could go screw himself. And then Boris hung up and wouldn’t answer his phone again.

“Don’t look at me,” Lula said. “I’m not going to get the bear. He growled at me when all I was doing was bringing him chicken. And on top of that he has bad breath.”

I capped my coffee and stood. “Give me the address. I’ll talk to Belmen.”

“I’m not going,” Lula said. “This job gets worse and worse. Vampires and bears and big guys with boners. Okay, so maybe I didn’t mind the big guy with the boner so much.”

Connie wrote Belmen’s address on a note card and handed it to me. “If you want the whole file I have to go into the bus to print it.”

“Not necessary. This is all I need.”

“And when you’re done tracking down my bear you’re gonna need to figure out who’s dumping bodies in my lot,” Vinnie said. “Business was bad before and now it’s nonexistent. It’s like we got death cooties.”

“Morelli’s on the case,” I told him.

“Well tell him to work faster. I’m dying here. We’re going under. Another week of this and Harry’s gonna pull his money and we’ll all be up shit’s creek.”

• • •

Belmen was staying in an inexpensive motel south of town, on the way to Bordentown. I pulled into the lot and parked next to a white Camry that shouted rental car and had bear slobber on the side window. The structure was classic 1970, two-story, pink stucco and white trim. Belmen was in unit 14A. I knocked on the door, and a trim forty-something man who fit Belmen’s description answered. A few feet behind him I could see Bruce sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Where’s the pizza?” Belmen asked, giving me the once-over.

“Excuse me?”

“Aren’t you the pizza delivery lady? I ordered pizzas.”

“Sorry. I work for Vincent Plum Bail Bonds.”

“Vinnie’s a bad man,” Belmen said. He stepped to the side and made a swooping motion to the bear. “Kill!”

Bruce lunged off the bed and rushed at me, mouth open. GROWL!

I jumped back and slammed the door shut.

“Jeez Louise,” I said to Belmen through the door. “I just want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Do I have to yell through the door?”

“Yes.”

I blew out a sigh and counted to five. “I know you’re anxious to get to Vegas, but you need to show up for your court date. If you don’t show up you’ll be considered a felon, and it will be one more charge against you. If you show up and explain what happened you might get off light since it’s your first offense.”

“I don’t think it was my fault,” he said. “I don’t even remember. It happened so fast.”

“The bartender said you were drunk.”

“I’d had a couple drinks. Maybe I was drunk.”

“Promise me you’ll show up for court.”

“All right. I promise, but if I go to jail you have to take care of Bruce.”

“I can’t take care of Bruce. They don’t allow bears in my apartment building.”

“I can’t just abandon him,” Belmen said.

“I’ll figure something out. And just out of morbid curiosity, would he have killed me?”

“No. Bruce is a pussycat. He was just playing with you.”

Yeah, right. I’ve never bought off a judge before but in this case I’d do whatever it took.

SEVENTEEN

I WAS RELIEVED to see Mooner’s bus was no longer in front of the coffee shop. I didn’t want to face Vinnie and explain to him that the bear was staying with Boris. Vinnie would have a differing opinion. Vinnie would go on a rant and send me back to get the bear. This would be a disaster because not only didn’t I have a clue how to wrestle the bear away from his owner, I also wasn’t sure Vinnie and Mooner were good bear parents. I was worried they’d feed Mooner’s homemade brownies to Bruce, and he’d hallucinate he was a hummingbird or something.

Aside from the missing bus nothing much had changed since I left. Lula and Connie were still camped out in the window.

“Hey girlfriend,” Lula said. “How’d it go with the bear?”

“It went okay. I talked to Boris, and he promised to show up for his court date.”

“Yeah, but what about the bear? Where’s the bear?”

“The bear’s with Boris. I made an executive decision to leave him there.”

The door to the coffee shop opened and Bella marched in. “You!” she said, pointing her finger at me, eyes narrowed. “I know what you do with my grandson. You take advantage. He don’t stay at birthday party like good boy. He come to you for nicky nacky. You slut. I fix you so he see. I give you vordo.” She waved her hand at me, she slapped her ass, and she wheeled around and left the coffee shop.

“She scares the crap out of me,” Lula said. “And you’re in big trouble. You did nicky nacky and now you got the vordo.”

I looked to Connie. “What’s vordo?”

“Beats me,” Connie said. “I never heard of vordo.”

“It has to be some Italian voodoo thing,” Lula said. “Like if you were a guy it would make your dick fall off.”

I hiked my bag up onto my shoulder. “I don’t want to think about it. I’m going to see if I can find Ziggy.”

Lula set a grocery bag on the table. “I’ll go with you. I went to Giovichinni’s while you were gone, and I got stuff for us.”

“Stuff?”

She pulled a couple ropes of garlic out of the bag and gave one to me. “All we gotta do is wear this and we won’t get no love bites from vampires.”

“I appreciate the thought, but I don’t think Ziggy is a vampire.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know for sure, right?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure don’t cut it,” Lula said, wrapping the garlic around her neck. “I already got one foot in the land of the living dead, and I’m not taking no chances.”

I drove the short distance from the coffee shop to Ziggy’s house and parked. We got out, rang the doorbell, and waited. No answer. I left Lula at the front door, and I walked to the rear. I knocked. Nothing. I felt for the key. No key. I snooped around, trying to see in the windows but no luck there. I returned to Lula in the front of the house, and Ziggy’s neighbor stepped out with her dog.

“Are you looking for Ziggy?” she asked. “Because he isn’t home. I saw him leave in the middle of the night. I was up with heartburn that would kill a cow, and I saw Ziggy go out with a suitcase. And his car is still gone. I can’t ever remember Ziggy going anywhere before. He was a real homebody.” She squinted at Lula. “Is that garlic?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lula’s making marinara tonight. She’s getting into the mood early.”

I called Connie and told her about Ziggy. “Do you have anything on him?” I asked. “Any idea where he might have gone?”

“I’ll run a family history.”

I meandered through the Burg looking for Ziggy’s black Chrysler. After forty minutes I gave up and returned to the coffee shop.

“Whoa,” Lula said to Connie. “What happened to you?”

Connie’s hair was like the wild woman of Borneo. Her lipstick was smeared, and she had crazy eyes.

“What?” Connie asked. “What do you mean?”

“You look like you stuck your finger in an electric socket and took a bunch of volts.”

“It’s the coffee. I sit here all day drinking coffee. I’ve got an eye twitch, I’m having heart palpitations, and I can’t unclench my ass muscles. I need a different office.”

“Now that the bear’s gone you could move back into the bus,” I told her.

“Not the bus,” Connie said. “I can’t go back to the bus. All that black fur and Mooner smell.”

“It’s not gonna smell like Mooner,” Lula said. “It’s gonna smell like bear.”

Connie looked around the coffee shop. “It’s not so bad here. I could try switching to decaf.”

I gathered Connie’s files and stuffed them into her tote bag. “You could work from home.”

“I’ve got my mother with me,” Connie said. “She’s staying while she recovers from her hip operation. I love my mother, but I’ll slit my throat if I have to spend more than twenty minutes with her. She hums. Do you know what it’s like to live with someone who hums all day?”

“I guess it depends if she’s a good hummer,” Lula said.

A muscle worked in Connie’s jaw, and her right eye twitched. “There are no good hummers. It’s all hummm hum hummm hummm. That’s it. Fucking all fucking day fucking long. Hummmm.”

“ ’Scuse me,” Lula said. “I didn’t know there was a issue. Maybe you need a pill or something.”

I unplugged the laptop. “You can use my apartment. It’s quiet. And it has everything but food.”

• • •

I got Connie settled in at my dining room table, and Lula and I took off to find Merlin Brown. I pulled into the lot to his apartment building and we immediately spotted his car.

“I guess it’s a good thing we found him home,” Lula said, “so why does it feel like a bad thing?”

“Because we don’t have any idea how to capture him?”

“Yeah, that could be it.”

I’ve seen Ranger make captures. Eighty percent of all felons immediately surrender at seeing Ranger on their doorstep. He’s not a man you’d want to take lightly. The remaining twenty percent are instantly taken down and cuffed. He makes it look easy. Sad to say, I’m not nearly Ranger. My successes are the result of luck and dogged perseverance. And the dogged perseverance has more to do with desperation to make an overdue rent payment than an innate strength. Still, I usually get the job done, and I’m a better bounty hunter than I was last year.

I parked beside a broken-down van on the opposite side of the lot from Merlin’s black SUV. “He knows us now,” I said, “and he’s not going to let us into his apartment. Let’s sit and wait for a while and see if he goes out for lunch.”

“Then what?”

“Then we figure it out.”

“This is gonna be boring,” Lula said. “Good thing I got a movie on my phone. And I got music. And I could check the weather. I could even surf the Internet, and maybe I could find Bobby Flay makin’ a burger. I’m into cooking.”

“I didn’t think you had a kitchen.”

“Well yeah, but I’m into watching cooking.”

We sat for forty minutes, and at high noon the door to the building opened, and Merlin limped out.

“I got an idea,” Lula said. “We could run him over with the car.”

“No.”

“Boy, you’re a real party pooper. You got a better idea?”

“He’s going out for lunch. I say we follow him and wait for a good place to take him down.”

“We aren’t gonna run at him and tackle him again, are we?”

“That wouldn’t be my first choice.”

Merlin drove down Stark, turned toward the government buildings, and after a block pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot. He cut his engine, left his car, and carefully walked inside, keeping his weight off his bandaged foot. I parked one space away, got out, and arranged my equipment. Cuffs tucked into the back of my jeans. Pepper spray in my sweatshirt pocket. Right to apprehend papers in my jeans pocket. Stun gun in hand.

“Cover the door,” I told Lula. “And for heaven’s sake don’t shoot him again.”

It was lunchtime, and the store was filled with government workers loading up on nachos, hot dogs, candy, junky drinks, and cigarettes. Merlin was in line for nachos. I sidled up to him and the man standing behind Merlin elbowed me aside.

“Back of the line, lady,” he said.

Merlin looked over his shoulder at me, and recognition registered. I reached out to stun gun him, he batted my arm away, and the stun gun flew off into space. I had pepper spray, but I couldn’t use it in a store filled with bureaucrats. By the time I retrieved my stun gun Merlin had already knocked Lula on her ass and was in his car, spinning his tires, leaving the lot. I was holding a lot of anger, and it was directed at the idiot who elbowed me aside. I casually sidled up to him and accidentally stun gunned him. He went down to the floor, wet his pants, and I felt much better.

“This is getting real old,” Lula said, back on her feet. “On the bright side we’re at 7-Eleven, and I can get nachos for lunch.”

Lula and I ate our nachos in my car and washed them down with Slurpees.

“This isn’t such a bad job,” Lula said. “We get a lot of personal freedom. We could eat lunch wherever and whenever we want. And we meet a lot of interesting people. Vampires and such. I don’t especially want them suckin’ on me, but aside from that it’s pretty good. And I already got some mileage out of seeing Merlin Brown naked.”

I scooped up the last of my nacho cheese and a small sigh inadvertently escaped.

“You on the other hand, don’t look so happy,” Lula said.

“I feel like my life isn’t going anywhere.”

“And?”

I did another sigh.

Lula drained her Slurpee. “Why do you gotta be going somewhere? Seems like it should be enough that we had nachos. And we got meaningful jobs. We catch bad guys. If it wasn’t for us there’d be vampires and all kinds of shit running around loose.”

“Actually the vampire is still at large.”

“Yeah, but we’re thinking about catching him.”

“And what about my relationships?”

“Here we are back to the relationships,” Lula said. “I knew it was gonna come to this. Your whole problem is you turned yourself into a glass-is-half-empty person. You got two hot men on the line, and you look at it like a bad thing, but I see it like hitting the jackpot. You probably could even have three hot men if you put an effort into Dave Whatshisname.”

I looked down at my jeans. I still couldn’t button them. “And on top of everything else, I’m getting fat,” I said.

“That’s not your fault. You had the hex put on you. Bella gave you the boils and all. And now you got the vordo.”

I put my phone to my ear and called Connie. “Have you had a chance to find out about vordo?”

“No,” she said, “but I’ll ask around.”

“Not that I believe in it,” I said to Lula, hanging up.

“Sure,” Lula said. “I don’t believe in it either. Whatever the heck it is. Still, I’m glad I don’t got it.”

I put the Escort into gear and drove Lula to the coffee shop so she could get her Firebird.

“What are you gonna do now?” she asked.

“I guess I’ll go home.” Okay, I guess I was feeling a little defeated. And I guess I was sort of embarrassed about stun gunning the guy in line, but if we’re going to be brutally honest here, I was just glad I wasn’t the one to wet their pants.

EIGHTEEN

I PULLED INTO THE LOT to my apartment building and realized Mooner’s bus was parked there. When I offered the use of my apartment to Connie I hadn’t anticipated Vinnie and Mooner hanging out there. I took the elevator to the second floor, walked down the hall, and even before I inserted my key, I caught the smell of pot.

I kicked the door open and stormed into my apartment. Connie was at the dining room table, working at the computer. Vinnie was slouched on the couch watching television. Mooner was slouched next to Vinnie.

“Who’s been smoking pot in here?” I yelled. “There is no smoking in my apartment. Especially pot. This is a total drug-free zone.”

“I wouldn’t let anyone smoke in here,” Connie said. “I made them go out to smoke.”

“Yeah,” Mooner said. “We like had to smoke in the hall.”

I felt my eyebrows go up into my hairline. “You were smoking pot in the hall? Are you insane? That is so rude. It’s illegal. It’s unhealthy. It’s smelly. It’s irresponsible. It’s unacceptable!” I was halfway through my rant when my attention was diverted to the television screen. Two huge-breasted naked women were trying to have sex with a monkey and a little man dressed up like a hobbit. “What the heck are you watching? That’s not pay-per-view, is it?”

“It’s like great that you’ve got cable,” Mooner said. “You can’t get quality film like this on network. Okay, so it might cost dinero, but dude, you’ve got hobbit movies. That is so like rare.”

The hobbit had his business hanging out, and it was hard to tell if he was interested in the women or the monkey. I didn’t especially care about the hobbit’s sexual orientation. What I cared about was that this was going on my bill. Not only was I going to have to pay for this, but it was going to be public record that I bought hobbit porn. Someone in the cable company billing department would know.

I wrestled the remote away from Vinnie, clicked the television off, and pointed stiff-armed at the door. “Out!”

“I have to meet with the contractor anyway,” Vinnie said, pushing up from the couch. “They’re taking the crime scene tape down tonight, and we can get back to work on the office tomorrow.” He stopped at the door. “Where’s my bear?”

I dropped a peanut into Rex’s cage. “I’m working on it.”

Rex rushed out of his soup can den, stuffed the peanut into his cheek, and rushed back into his soup can.

Mooner held the door open for Vinnie. “Dude, we could get satellite television for the Moon Bus.”

“Yeah, and we could rob a bank to pay for it,” Vinnie said.

“No!” I yelled into the hall, after them. “Don’t say that to Mooner. He’ll do it!”

“At least somebody’ll be bringing in money,” Vinnie said.

I closed and locked the door and looked in on Connie in the dining room. “You don’t think they’ll rob a bank, do you?”

Connie shrugged. “Anything’s possible, but Vinnie would be more inclined to hijack a truck.”

“Anything new come in?”

“No. It’s deadly slow.”

I took a nap and when I woke it was a little after five and Connie was packing up to leave.

“See you tomorrow,” she said. “Do you have anything fun planned for tonight?”

“I’m helping Ranger with a new account.”

“Good thinking to take a nap.”

“It’s business.”

Connie hiked her tote bag onto her shoulder. “I’ve seen him look at you. It’s like you’re lunch.”

I grabbed my sweatshirt and my shoulder bag and walked with Connie to the parking lot. Rangeman was located on a quiet side street in the center of the city. I took Hamilton and did a quick detour into Morelli’s neighborhood. His SUV was in front of his house, so I pulled in behind it and parked. Morelli inherited the house from his aunt and has since become surprisingly domesticated. There’s still some wild beast left in the man, and he doesn’t own a cookie jar, but he’s better than I am at stocking his refrigerator and from time to time he puts the seat down on the toilet.

He was pouring Bob’s dinner kibble into a bowl when I walked into the kitchen. Bob did his happy dance when he saw me, whipped around, and dove for his food when Morelli set the bowl on the floor.

“What’s up?” Morelli asked.

“I just stopped in to say hello. I’m on my way to Rangeman. Ranger asked me to go over a security system.”

“After hours?”

“It’s never after hours at Rangeman.”

Rangeman ran a very specialized high-end security service, and unlike most large security firms, they monitored their accounts locally from a monitoring station in the Rangeman building. The building ran 24/7 and many of the men rented small efficiency apartments on site.

“Anything new on the bonds office bodies?” I asked Morelli.

Bob had scarfed up all his food and was pushing his bowl around on the floor. Morelli grabbed the bowl and put it in the sink. “Nothing earth-shattering. Positive IDs on both of them. Dugan and his lawyer, Bobby Lucarelli. No surprise there. Put into the ground a week to a couple days apart.”

“Dugan and Lucarelli were involved in something bad.”

“That’s a given,” Morelli said. “The question is which bad activity got them killed. Dugan had a laundry list of bad activities.”

I was having a hard time concentrating on Dugan’s activities, because I was thinking Morelli looked unusually hot. He was in jeans and sweat socks and a T-shirt that wasn’t tucked in. And he was developing a nice five o’clock shadow. I mentally undressed him, my eyes lingering over critical areas, my body heat notching up a couple degrees.

Morelli grinned over at me. “Cupcake, that is such a dirty smile.”

I dropped my gaze to his feet. “It’s the socks. Very sexy.”

“I’ll leave them on next time. The way my schedule is looking that’ll be next month. These bonds office murders are attracting attention. I have to be at a press conference tonight at seven. After the press conference I have a meeting with the mayor.”

“Wow, the mayor.”

“I’m one of many attending, and I’m not one of the more important. I’m cannon fodder. Someone to throw under the bus if it becomes necessary.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. At least Terry Gilman will be there. This time I’m going to get a better seat.”

I punched him in the chest, kissed him, and left.

NINETEEN

RANGEMAN HAS UNDERGROUND PARKING for private and fleet vehicles, all of which are black and immaculate. All are equipped with GPS tracking. Ranger has personal space at the back of the garage, directly in front of the elevator. His cars are also black and immaculate. He has four spaces, and he currently has three vehicles—a Porsche 911 Turbo, a tricked-out Ford F150, and a Porsche Cayenne. I parked my filthy, dented Escort in the fourth spot.

I entered the elevator, waved hello to the hidden camera and went to the fifth floor. Every part of Rangeman is monitored with the exception of the restrooms off the lobby on the ground floor, employees’ private apartments, and Ranger’s apartment on the seventh floor. The fifth floor is Rangeman command central. The monitoring station is here, plus Ranger’s office. The elevator door opened on five, and Ranger stepped in and pressed the seven button.

“The plans are upstairs,” he said. “I thought we could go over them while we ate. I’m sure Ella left enough for two.”

Ella and her husband manage the Rangeman building, and Ella personally manages Ranger. She keeps his apartment pristine, ensures that his clothes are perfect, delivers two gourmet meals a day, and attempts to humanize a space that without her would be sterile. Ranger isn’t a man who sets up family photos on the coffee table.

The elevator opened to a small marble-floored vestibule with one door. Ranger fobbed the door open, and I stepped into his apartment. It had been professionally decorated with little help from Ranger, but it felt right for him. It was calm without being enervating. And it was masculine but not overbearing. The furniture was contemporary and comfortable with clean lines. The color palette was all earth tones. Upholstered pieces were cream with chocolate accents. Wood was dark and glossy. Lighting was subdued. The front door opened to a short hall with nondescript art on one side and a cherry sideboard on the other. Ella kept fresh flowers on the sideboard alongside a silver tray with the day’s mail, and a second tray for keys.

Ranger dropped his keys into the key tray, leafed through his mail, and returned it to the mail tray unopened. For as many times as I’ve been in his apartment I’ve never once caught him looking at the art. I suspect he didn’t know it was there.

The hall led to an open-floor-plan living room and dining room with a small, but state-of-the-art kitchen to the right. Appliances were stainless steel, counters were black granite, dishes were white, stemware was crystal. Ranger lived well, not by his choice, but by Ella’s. She’d left a large spinach salad on the counter, a breadbasket in the warming drawer, and a casserole in the oven. I set the bread and casserole on the counter next to the salad, and Ranger opened a bottle of pinot noir. We fixed plates and took our dinner to the dining room table.

I buttered a dinner roll. “Tell me about the security system.”

“Large house. Twelve thousand square feet. Wealthy, politically ambitious client with a young second wife. Two teenage daughters and one teenage son by the first marriage. He wants maximum security. The teenagers want no security. Not sure what the wife wants.”

“So security can’t be intrusive.”

“It can’t be intrusive, but more than that it shouldn’t be in places a woman would find objectionable.”

“Like a camera in the bathroom.”

Ranger nodded. “I have photographs and preliminary floor plans. You can take a look at them later.”

“If you employed a woman you wouldn’t need to bring me in like this.”

“If I could find a woman with the right qualifications I’d hire her. In the meantime, you’re it.”

“Have you asked Ella to help with this?”

“Yes. She thought my client made bad choices on kitchen appliances. And she’d change the carpet color in the master bedroom.”

The photos were stacked at the end of the table. I finished eating and shuffled through them. I got to the bedroom photos and grimaced. “Ella’s right about the rug in the bedroom.”

Ranger cleared the plates and spread the blueprint out on the table. He stood behind me, leaning over my shoulder, pointing out security cameras. “Every exterior door is under surveillance, plus there are roof-mounted cameras scanning the yard and driveway. The windows are impact glass but they maintain security only if they’re closed and properly locked. With three teenagers in a house that size it’s likely there will be security breaches. My client would like more interior cameras, but I’m worried I’ll be catching his daughters sneaking down to the kitchen for a midnight snack in their underwear.”

“That’s very sensitive of you.”

“Sensitivity doesn’t have much to do with it. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen if one of those kids thinks their right to privacy has been violated. I don’t want my technicians accused of spying on a thirteen-year-old.”

“Does the video feed into your monitoring station?”

“No. It records for a set amount of time and recycles, but a technician could have access to it on a service call. The client can also have select locations available to him for monitoring.”

I was trying to concentrate on the security system, but I was already a little buzzed from the wine. Ranger was close, and I wanted him even closer. He was warm, and he smelled faintly of something unbelievably appealing.

“Babe?”

His face was inches from mine. “Mmmm?”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.” No.

My relationship with Ranger is well defined. We both acknowledge the desire existing between us. Ranger’s made it clear he’ll take advantage of any opening given. And I’ve struggled to keep my openings closed. My position has more to do with self-preservation than my allegiance to Morelli. Morelli chose to back off on commitment, and I agreed. Maybe some day that will change, but for now we have a comfortable working arrangement. My arrangement with Ranger isn’t nearly so comfortable. It’s frustrating at best and borderline scary at its worst. Ranger lives by his own code of conduct. He’s an honorable guy … just not by normal standards.

“What did I just say?” he asked. And the corners of his mouth almost smiled.

I leaned into him a little. “I love the way you smell. It’s sweet and citrusy and clean and very sexy.” My lips accidentally skimmed across his ear when I spoke, and I think I might have sighed a little.

He lifted me out of my chair, pulled me into him, and kissed me. His lips were soft on my mouth, his hands were firm on my back, his tongue touched mine, and heat swirled through me and went straight to my doodah.

Ranger is good at just about everything, but Ranger is outstanding at making love. He knows when to go slow, when to be gentle, when to stop being gentle, and best of all … Ranger instinctively knows when he’s on target.

His hands slid under my shirt and moved to my breasts. He was hard against me, his mouth at my ear, his breath warm on my neck. He stripped my shirt off, and then my bra. His mouth returned to mine. The kisses were hotter and deeper. And then my jeans were gone, tugged over my hips and discarded. We moved from the dining room to the bedroom, both of us naked. His hands were everywhere on me. His mouth followed his hands.

I had a whisper of a thought that this might not be a good idea, but the thought was immediately banished, pushed out of my brain by the knowledge that I was about to experience the mother of all orgasms.

When we were done he rolled me on top of him and wrapped the quilt around us. I drifted into sleep and was awakened by my cell phone ringing far off in the dining room.

“Let it go,” Ranger said, his lips grazing across my temple.

I glanced at his bedside clock. It was almost nine. “It could be important.”

“Such as?”

“My grandmother could have had a heart attack. Or my apartment could have caught fire.”

“Babe, none of those things are going to happen.”

“You don’t know that for sure. My apartment catches fire a lot.”

The phone rang a second time, and I wriggled out of his arms, picked his T-shirt off the floor, dropped it over my head, and went to the dining room to get my phone.

The message was from Connie, telling me to call her back. I touched the redial and looked down at Ranger’s shirt. It still smelled like him, and it was triggering little stabs of desire that mingled awkwardly with globs of guilt. Morelli and I had a no-commitment agreement, but that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty.

“I found out about vordo,” Connie said. “My Aunt Pauline came to visit my mother, and she knew all about it. It’s one of those old country curses. It’s supposed to make you horny. If you’ve got a vendetta going against your neighbor, you put vordo on her daughter, and she turns into a slut. You might want to lock yourself up in your apartment until the vordo wears off, or you could be tackling guys on the street. And you want to stay away from Ranger.”

“Too late for that.”

“Omigod. Where are you?”

“Rangeman.”

“I want details. I want to know everything.”

“I couldn’t possibly do it justice,” I told Connie. “There are no words to describe where I’ve just been.”

I disconnected and went back to the bedroom. The lights were low, and Ranger was naked and lounging on the bed, waiting for me to return. I did a slow scan of his perfect body.

“It’s not my fault,” I said. “It’s the vordo.”

TWENTY

RANGER’S BEDSIDE PHONE rang at seven-thirty the next morning. We were in a tangle of sweaty bed linens, waiting for our blood pressure to drop below stroke level, having moments before dispatched some high-quality passion.

He reached across me, answered the phone, and listened for a beat. He disconnected and stood. “That was Tank. Someone dumped another body on Vinnie’s lot. Didn’t bother to bury it this time.”

“Do you have an ID?”

“Not yet. It just came across the police band. I’m going to take a fast shower and go downstairs. After the second body was found I had cameras installed on the adjacent building. So with any luck we’ve got a picture of the killer. Tank sent a tech out to get the images.”

Tank is Ranger’s second in command. He’s the guy who watches Ranger’s back, and he needs no further description because his name says it all.

I sat up in bed. “Would it be okay if I take a look, too?”

“Sure. Come down when you’re ready.”

I showered and dressed in my clothes from the previous day. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, took the stairs to the fifth floor, and stopped in at the small kitchen and dining area where Ella set out a full breakfast every morning. Hot cereal, cold cereal, fruit, healthy muffins and bagels, an egg dish and a meat dish.

I poured myself a cup of coffee, added cream, grabbed a morning glory muffin, and made my way to Ranger’s office. I’m sure everyone in the building knew I’d spent the night, but no one snickered or whispered. Anything other than a friendly smile and they would have to answer to Ranger. And no one wanted to tangle with Ranger.

Ranger was behind his desk with the video pulled up on his computer. He had also stopped at the kitchen, and he had chosen black coffee, a cup of plain, fat-free yogurt, and a plate of fruit. He glanced at my cream-enhanced coffee and giant muffin and almost rolled his eyes.

“It’s a healthy muffin,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it’s got carrots in it. And I got a lot of exercise last night. I deserve this muffin.”

Ranger smiled. “I’ll give you that. Why did you keep shouting go vordo?”

“It’s complicated.” I moved behind him so I could see the screen. “Is that the killer, leaving the scene?”

“Yes.” Ranger leaned back in his chair, his hand on the mouse. “I’ll replay this for you. As you can see we’re using infrared cameras. There are actually three cameras on a single mount. All three are activated by motion sensors. The time is shown in the upper right corner.”

“Five in the morning. There had to be light traffic on Hamilton at that hour.”

“Mooner’s bus is parked in front of the lot. Plus a construction trailer. Very little is visible from the road. And the killer doesn’t waste time dropping the body.”

I watched the video and saw a car appear in the alley behind the lot. The car swerved into the lot and stopped. The driver got out, ran to the other side of the car, and opened the back door. The car shielded him from the camera, but whatever he did took less than a minute. I was watching the time tick on the computer screen. He ran around the car, got back behind the wheel, and drove away. The body left on the ground appeared to be a woman with long blond hair.

“Any ideas?” Ranger asked.

“Play it again.”

I watched the clip three more times and was increasingly disturbed.

Ranger forked a piece of melon into his mouth. “Well?”

“The car looks like a light-color, late-model Toyota. You can see the emblem when he pulls into the lot. I’m guessing it’s a Camry. And with some enhancement you should be able to see the plate when he leaves. Have you given this to the police?”

“Yes. And we’re also running the plate.”

“Hard to tell on the infrared, but I didn’t see any blood. I couldn’t see her face. Slim body. Short skirt. Tank top. No shoes.”

“And the killer?”

“Male. Obviously disguised. He’s wearing a coverall that looks padded. And he’s wearing a rubber Frankenstein mask. His hands are hidden in gloves. Judging his height by the car I’d say he’s somewhere between 5?10? to 6? tall. And there’s something familiar about him.”

Ranger looked at me. “You know him?”

“I can’t exactly dial in on it, but the more I watch the video, the more I feel like I’ve run into him before.”

“You’ve met a lot of bad guys since you’ve worked for Vinnie.”

I ate some of my muffin. It would be comforting to think I recognized the killer from a previous takedown, but I wasn’t sure that was it. I felt like I knew this guy.

Ranger closed the file. “What’s your plan for the day?”

“I thought I’d do my bounty hunter thing.”

“You know where to find me if you want to do your vordo thing.”

The hideous truth was I wanted to do my vordo thing at this very moment. I wanted to do it bad. I had memories of Ranger in bed, his voice a whisper against my ear, the small of his back slick with sweat, his silky brown hair falling across his forehead when he took control and moved over me. The only thing stopping me from closing his office door and straddling him as he sat in his chair was the knowledge that we were out of raincoats.

He read my thoughts, and it dragged another smile out of him. “Babe.”

“Vordo is a bitch,” I told him.

• • •

I passed by the office on my way home. Mooner’s bus was still there, plus a couple cop cars, the M.E.’s truck, the state crime scene van, a satellite truck from Fox News, Morelli’s SUV, and Vinnie’s Caddie. I thought it best not to stop since I was wearing yesterday’s clothes, coming from the wrong direction, and even though I’d taken a shower I worried that I smelled like sex, or at the very least like Ranger, since I’d used his shower gel. Okay, so I have an agreement with Morelli and technically I didn’t do anything wrong. And last night was all his crazy grandmother’s fault. That didn’t mean it was a good idea to stand next to him reeking of Ranger first thing in the morning. If the situation was reversed and I knew for sure he was doing Terry Gilman, I might be inclined to pry her heart out of her chest with a butter knife. I assumed Morelli had similar issues with Ranger.

I swung into the lot to my apartment building and parked. The plan was to make a fast pit stop, turn myself into a brand-new Stephanie, and head back out to the crime scene. I hustled to the lobby and took the stairs two at a time to the second floor. I burst into the hall and saw that a gold foil gift bag had been placed in front of my door. There was a red apron inside the bag and a card.

LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU WEAR THIS. OTHER CLOTHES WOULD BE OPTIONAL. DAVE.

Good grief. I took the bag to the trash shoot and tossed it.

Forty minutes later I was back on the road. Rex had been fed, I’d re-showered and dressed in clean clothes, I’d checked my phone for messages, and I’d checked my email. I’d had sixteen junk emails advertising male enhancement drugs. This was like trying to sell sand in a desert, because my males needed no further enhancement.

I also had three messages from my mother asking if I had heard from Dave Brewer, that he was such a nice young man who came from a wonderful family. Clearly my mother had given up on Morelli as a source for future grandchildren. Ranger had never been in contention. Dave Brewer was up at bat.

I reached the bonds office lot and saw that everyone was still in place, plus Connie’s car had been added to the mix. I parked and crossed to where Connie and Vinnie were standing, looking not too happy.

“Someone dumped another body,” Connie said. “A young woman this time.”

“Anyone recognize her?”

“Juki Beck,” Vinnie said. “I wrote bond for her once, a couple years ago. Shoplifting. At the rate we’re going I’ll have to call in an exorcist before the union lets me build on this lot.”

“I need to download mail,” Connie said. “Does the bus still smell like bear?”

“No,” Vinnie said. “It smells like Mooner.”

I handed Connie my key. “You can use my apartment. Just don’t let Vinnie in.”

“Nice way to treat your relative,” Vinnie said. “You know, I gave you this job, and I could take it away.”

“You didn’t give me the job,” I said. “I blackmailed you into hiring me. And you’re not going to take it away, because you can’t find anyone else stupid enough to work for you.”

“Not true,” Vinnie said. “There are a lot of stupid assholes out there. And where the hell’s my bear? Why aren’t you tracking down my bear?”

“It’s on my list.”

Connie went to her car, Vinnie went back to the bus, and Morelli broke away from the knot of cops and forensic techs and walked over to me.

“This guy’s pushing his luck,” Morelli said.

“Vinnie said he was able to ID the woman.”

“Yeah. Vinnie and half the cops on the force. She got around.”

“Did she have a connection to Dugan?”

“Nothing apparent. She waited tables at Binkey’s Ale House. Divorced. No kids. Twenty-six years old.”

“Maybe this was a different killer.”

“Cause of death is the same. Dugan, Lucarelli, and Beck all had their necks broken. Dugan and Lucarelli were decomposed enough not to show a lot of detail. Beck had severe rope burns on her neck. Probably choked unconscious and then had her neck snapped.”

I felt a wave of nausea slide through my stomach.

“This guy is strong,” Morelli said. “It’s not that easy to choke someone, and Dugan and Lucarelli were big guys.”

I looked to the back of the property where Juki Beck had been pulled from the car. I know him, I thought. This monster. This serial killer. He’s moving among us, looking normal. He’s a shoe salesman, or a cop, or a gas station attendant.

“Why did he bring her here?” I asked Morelli. “I know the lot is shielded by Mooner’s bus, but it still seems risky.”

“This is the ugly part,” Morelli said.

“How could it possibly get uglier?”

“There was a note pinned to her shirt. It said For Stephanie.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s all it said. Two words. For Stephanie.”

TWENTY-ONE

I WAS ON MY BACK, looking up at Morelli through cobwebs, and my first thought was that the 7-Eleven victim had exacted revenge on me, and I’d been stun gunned. The cobwebs cleared, and I discounted stun gunning.

“What happened?” I asked Morelli.

“You fainted.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I agree, but if someone sent me a dead woman I might faint, too.” He was down on one knee, bending over me. “Are you ready to get up?”

“I need a moment.”

“Don’t take too long. People will think I’m proposing.”

I slowly got to my feet. “Why me?”

“I don’t know. Have you been getting threatening letters or phone calls?”

“The only one threatening me is your grandmother.”

“Ranger had cameras working and apparently captured the drop. I haven’t seen the video yet, but I’m told the killer was covered head to toe. The interesting thing is he delivered the victim here in her own car.”

“Have you found the car?”

“Not yet. And if we don’t it’ll be following the pattern because we never found Dugan’s car or Lucarelli’s car. Disappeared without a trace.” He kissed me on the forehead. “I have to get back to the station. I want to see the video, and I’m going to run some names through the system. See if I can connect someone to you and Dugan. There are only a handful of people who know about this note, so keep it to yourself.”

“Ranger?”

“You can tell Ranger.”

Lula was standing by the bus, waiting for me. She was dressed in poison green spandex pants, five-inch leopard stilettos, a low-cut scoop neck stretchy lemon yellow shirt, and she’d had her hair done up in braids that made her look like she was wearing a giant spider on her head.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Another body. This one wasn’t buried. Just deposited.”

“We have a sick individual here. He’s killing too many people. He might even be over the legal limit for Trenton.”

For the sake of keeping the note secret I was trying to look calm, but I was actually very rattled. In a back corner of my mind there’d been a nagging thought that Vinnie or the bonds office might have been involved somehow. It never occurred to me that I was the connection. And pinning a note on a dead woman and addressing it to me as if it were a gift tag was hideously disgusting and beyond frightening.

“You look real freaked,” Lula said. “Are you okay?”

“I have problems.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

There was a laundry list, ending with the big one I couldn’t talk about. “For starters, I’ve got the vordo.”

“So you be a good time. What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m too much of a good time. It’s even more confusing than when I wasn’t a good time at all. And I think I might be getting a bladder infection.”

“A bladder infection’s no good. Maybe you should cut back.”

“I can’t cut back. I’ve turned into a sex addict. I get within a foot of Ranger or Morelli and I’m ready to go … and go, and go, and go, and go.”

“That’s a lot of going. I’m a retired professional, and it’d be a lot of going even for me. What you need are granny panties. You put on a big ol’ pair of ugly granny panties and you won’t be dropping your drawers no more. And even if you forget in the heat of the moment, and you pull your skirt up over your head, you’re not gonna see no action on account granny panties have a deflating effect on a man. Your man’s gonna be going unh ah, no way am I getting busy with a woman wearing granny panties.”

Call me crazy, but it made as much sense as anything else going on in my life. And it was better than thinking about Juki Beck. “Okay, sign me up. Where do I get granny panties?”

A half hour later we were at JCPenney, wandering around in the lingerie department.

“This is the perfect all-purpose store,” Lula said. “They got panties to fit any occasion. They got everything from thongs to granny panties and everything in between.” She picked a pair of pink cotton panties off the rack and held them up for inspection. “Now this is what I’m talking about. You don’t want to be seen in these panties. You have to turn the lights out when you put them on so you don’t even see yourself.”

“They look big.”

“Yeah, these suckers are gonna come up to your armpits. Try ’em on, and we’ll take ’em for a test drive. See if you want to hump anybody while you’re wearin’ these panties.”

I took the panties to the dressing room, tried them on, and checked myself out in the mirror. Not a pretty sight. I was definitely moving into birth control territory.

“Well?” Lula asked when I came out.

“They’re perfect.”

“They got them in red and white, too. I bet you put the white ones on, and you want to jump off a bridge.”

I bought one in each color, and I wore the pink ones out of the store. Better safe than sorry was my motto. Although truth is there wasn’t much to be sorry about considering the night I’d just had. And the night before that with Morelli hadn’t exactly been shabby.

“Now that you been back to back with Morelli and Ranger who’s winning the sack race?” Lula asked.

“The food and the bed linens are better at Rangeman, but Morelli has Bob.”

“All those things are important, only I’m talkin’ about the big O.”

I took some time to think about it. “They’re different, but equal.”

“That don’t tell me nothing,” Lula said. “Sounds to me like you gotta do more research.”

Oh boy.

“And what about boyfriend number three?” she asked.

“Dave Brewer? I don’t know him very well.”

“He’s good-lookin’, right? And he’s big and strong and manly?”

“I guess.”

“And he can cook. Seems like that equates to Ranger’s sheets and Morelli’s dog. And your mama likes him.”

“My mother’s endorsement doesn’t count for a lot. One time she fixed me up with Ronald Buzick.”

“The butcher? The fat, bald guy?” Lula followed me out of the mall. “He’s not a real attractive man. Your mama must have been thinking about free sausage. I got some kielbasa from him once that was outstanding.”

I unlocked my Escort, and I thought about Ronald Buzick. He was about the same size as the killer. The jumpsuit had looked padded, but maybe those lumps were actually Ronald. He was strong enough to break someone’s neck. And he was a little odd. He seemed jolly on the outside, but I was guessing he had a lot of anger on the inside. I mean the man had his hand up chicken butts all day long.

“Do you think Ronald Buzick could kill someone?” I asked Lula.

“I think anyone could kill someone. People get a little wacky, and bang someone’s dead. At least in my neighborhood. What are we gonna do now? Do we need lunch?”

“We just ate lunch at the mall.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

I put the car in gear and drove out of the lot. “I think it’s time to visit Merlin Brown again.”

“That’s a good idea on account of I haven’t been knocked on my ass yet today. It wouldn’t be right for a day to go by without him knocking me on my ass.” She looked over at me. “Do we have a plan?”

“No.”

“Probably you still don’t want me to shoot him or run over him with your car.”

“Right.”

“I got a new idea. How about we bring him a poison pizza. I’m not saying we want to kill him or anything. I’m thinkin’ we could just slip him some pepperoni roofies.”

“That’s illegal.”

“Only a little. People eat roofies all the time. At least in my neighborhood.”

“You need to move into a new neighborhood.”

“Yeah, but I got real cheap rent.”

“I bet.”

“And my apartment got a big closet.”

“It also hasn’t got a kitchen.”

“A girl’s gotta have priorities,” Lula said. “I happen to be a stylish person. And I have my whole professional wardrobe from my previous vocation.”

“I used to be a stylish person. And now I’m wearing granny panties.”

“First off, you never been a stylish person. You don’t own a bustier or a single thing in leopard. And second you be out of those panties in no time. You just need to give your lady parts a rest.”

TWENTY-TWO

MERLIN’S CAR WAS PARKED in the lot to his apartment building.

“We got some good news, and we got some bad news, and it’s all the same news,” Lula said. “Looks like Merlin’s home. Now what?”

“We go talk to him.”

“Say what?”

I cut the engine and grabbed my shoulder bag. “We aren’t having any luck wrestling him to the ground, so I thought I’d talk to him.”

I crossed the lot with Lula trailing after me. We took the stairs to Merlin’s apartment, and I knocked on the door.

Merlin answered on the second knock. He was naked again, and he had a boner.

Lula checked Merlin out. “Must be that time of day.”

“I was hoping we could talk,” I said to Merlin.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

He gestured to his wanger. “I don’t suppose you could help me out with this.”

“No,” I said. “Not even a little.”

He looked at Lula. “How about you?”

“I don’t do that no more,” Lula said. “I gotta be in love now. In the meantime I’d appreciate it if you’d put it away on account of it’s distracting waving around like that.”

Merlin looked down at himself. “It kind of has a mind of its own.”

“Well take it into the bathroom and talk to it,” Lula said. “It’s not like we got all day.”

Merlin sighed and shuffled off to the bathroom.

“Sometimes it’s good to have an ex-hooker for a partner,” I said to Lula.

“You bet your ass. How are the panties working for you? You feel any twinges lookin’ at Merlin’s big boy?”

“No. Did you?”

“I felt something, but I’m not sure what it was. It’s kinda like lookin’ at a train wreck. Horrible but fascinating all at the same time.”

There was a lot of grunting coming from the bathroom. “Oh yeah,” Merlin said, behind the closed door. “Give it to me. Do it. Do it.” Slap! “Do it again, bitch.” Slap! And then more grunting. “Unh, unh, unh.”

I shifted foot to foot and gripped my purse strap. “I’m feeling uncomfortable.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “I can’t tell if he’s whackin’ off or he needs more fiber in his diet.”

“That’s it. I’m out of here.” I whirled around and bolted for the door. “I’ll talk to him on the phone. I’ll send him an email.”

We hustled out of the building, rammed ourselves into the Escort, and I laid rubber out of the lot.

“I either need something to eat, or I’ve gotta take a shower,” Lula said. “That wasn’t an uplifting experience.”

• • •

I made an emergency run at a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru. We got twelve donuts divided up into two bags, so we wouldn’t fight over them, and we sat in the parking lot, and we ate our doughnuts.

“Okay, I feel better,” Lula said.

“Me, too, except I might throw up.”

“You’re out of shape. You don’t eat enough doughnuts. I feel fine because I’m in condition. I could put just about anything in my body, and it only says oh boy, here we go again.”

A text message from Dave buzzed onto my phone. DID YOU GET MY SURPRISE? MORE TO COME.

Oh joy.

“Bad news?” Lula asked.

“I think Dave is turning into a stalker.” If it wasn’t for Juki Beck and the note I would have thought Dave was a more serious problem. As it was, he got back-burnered as a minor irritation. I powered my window down to get some air. “I’ve been thinking about Boris Belman.”

“The bear guy?”

“He can’t remember shooting the bartender. And he said it wasn’t his gun. He didn’t know where the gun came from.”

“This is our problem, why?”

“The only way I could get Belmen to show up for court was to promise I’d take care of the bear if he got convicted.”

“People in your apartment building aren’t gonna be happy about you having a bear. Probably you could shave him and dress him up in clothes except you might get arrested when he drops his pants to poop in the parking lot.”

“If I could prove Belmen didn’t shoot the bartender I’d be off the hook.”

“Proving people innocent isn’t our specialty,” Lula said.

I’d hate to list our specialties. Wreck cars, eat doughnuts, create mayhem.

I pulled Belmen’s file out of my bag and read through the police report. “The shooting took place at Bumpers Bar and Grill on Broad.”

“I’ve been there,” Lula said. “That’s a real nice bar. They got crab cake sliders and about seven hundred kinds of beer. I was there once with Tank when we were seeing each other.”

I drove the length of Stark and turned onto Broad. Bumpers was a couple blocks down, set into an area of mostly office buildings. I parked half a block away, and Lula and I got out of the car. Something compelled me to look across the street, and standing there, staring at me, was the ghost of Jimmy Alpha.

Alpha was the manager of a boxer named Benito Ramirez. I’d killed Alpha in self-defense a bunch of years ago. I was a novice bounty hunter, way over my head in bad guys, and in a moment of sheer terror and blind panic I’d managed to shoot Alpha before he shot me.

And now here he was glaring at me from across the street. He made a sign with his fingers to his eyes, letting me know he saw me and recognized me. And then he walked away and disappeared around the corner.

“Did you see him?” I asked Lula.

“Who?”

“It was a man who looked like Jimmy Alpha.”

“You killed Alpha.”

“I did. But this man looked like him.”

TWENTY-THREE

“THEY SAY EVERYBODY got a double somewhere,” Lula said. “You just saw a double of Jimmy Alpha. Or maybe you got some kind of stress syndrome, and you hallucinated a repeat of a traumatic moment.”

Here’s what I knew … I needed to keep it together. I was having a bad day, and I had to do some deep breathing and move forward. One thing at a time.

Right now we were checking on the Boris Belmen shooting.

We walked the half block to Bumpers, pushed through the heavy oak doors, and made our way past booths and tables to the bar. I hitched myself up onto a stool.

“Where was the bartender shot?” Lula asked me.

“In the leg.”

We both leaned over the bar and looked at the bartender.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re trying to see if I’m the one who got shot.”

He was too tan, in his twenties, and blond. He had a tribal tattoo on his wrist and a gold chain around his neck.

“You look healthy,” I said.

“Phil is the one who got shot. He usually works nights, but he has the week off. Can’t hustle with his leg throbbing.”

“How did it happen? I heard it was some drunk.”

“That’s what they tell me. I wasn’t here.”

“Do you know anyone who was here?”

“Melanie. She was waiting tables. What’s with the questions? Are you cops?”

“Honestly,” Lula said. “Do we look like cops? You ever see a cop in shoes like this? These are genuine Louboutin.”

I looked down at Lula’s shoes. I was with her when she bought them out of the back of Squiggy Biggy’s van two days after an eighteen-wheeler got hijacked on its way to Saks.

“These are hot shoes,” Lula said.

This was true.

“I’m a bond enforcement agent,” I told the bartender. “I’m conducting an investigation on behalf of the accused and his dependent.”

Lula raised her eyebrows. “He got a dependent?”

“Bruce,” I told her.

“Oh yeah. I almost forgot.”

“Melanie’s taking a break,” the bartender said. “She’s out back.”

Lula and I walked around the side of the building and found Melanie sitting on a beer keg, smoking. The first delicious rush of nicotine was behind her, and she was mechanically working her way through the remainder of her cigarette.

I introduced myself and asked if she had witnessed the shooting.

“I was there,” she said, “but I didn’t see how it happened. I was waiting on a couple in a booth, and I heard the gun go off. And then I heard Jeff yelling how he was shot. And at first I was panicked, you know? I mean it could have been some loon looking to wipe out a room.”

“Did you see anyone holding a gun?”

“No. By the time I looked around Jeff had fainted and was laid out behind the bar. And there was this guy in a red shirt looking shell-shocked, standing in front of the bar.”

“Anyone else around?”

“No. It was closing time, and the place was just about empty. The people in the booth called 911, and I went to see if I could help Jeff.”

“And the guy in the red shirt?”

“It was like he was glued to the floor. His eyes were big, and his mouth was open, and he was hanging onto a barstool.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Let’s just say if he was the one who got shot he wouldn’t be feeling any pain. When Jeff came around, he said the guy in the red shirt shot him.” Melanie took one last drag on her cigarette, dropped it onto the blacktop, and ground it out with her shoe. “I gotta get back to work.”

“One last thing,” I said to her. “While all this is going down, where’s the gun if it’s not in anyone’s hand?”

“It was on the floor by Jeff.”

Lula and I walked back to my Escort, and I called Morelli.

“Do you know who has the Boris Belmen case?” I asked him. “Belmen is accused of shooting a bartender.”

“Jerry caught that one. Belmen put his bear up as a guarantee against his bond, right?”

“Right. I just spoke to the waitress on duty when the bartender got shot, and it doesn’t add up to me. The gun was found behind the bar, next to Belmen.”

“I’ll pass it on to Jerry.”

“Did you get a chance to look at the Beck video?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’ve got it up on my computer.”

“Anything jump out at you? Do you recognize the killer?”

“No and no, but I think the Frankenstein mask is a nice touch.”

“Does the guy in the video remind you of Ronald Buzick?” I asked Morelli.

There was total silence, and I imagined Morelli as looking incredulous in a horrified kind of way.

“He’s a butcher,” I told Morelli. “He’s strong. He could choke someone. And he’s used to being around dead meat.”

“The killer moved like a younger guy. Maybe an athlete. Ronald moves like an overweight guy with hemorrhoids. And Ronald’s got his arm in a cast. He fell off a hydraulic lift and broke his arm in two places.”

“Bummer. One other thing. I could have sworn I saw Jimmy Alpha just now.”

“Alpha is dead.”

“I know, but this man looked like him. And he made a sign that he saw me. Honest to goodness, I don’t think he liked me. He looked angry.”

“If someone else said that to me after the morning you’ve just had, I’d pass it off as hysteria, but you’re not prone to hysteria. Except maybe when you see a spider.”

“Do we have plans for tonight?”

“I’m meeting with Terry tonight. I want her to look at the video, and she’s not available until six o’clock.”

I disconnected and blew out a sigh. Terry. Probably nothing. Business.

“Well?” Lula asked.

“It’s not Ronald Buzick.”

“Too bad. I was listening, and I thought you had sound reasoning. I especially was impressed with the part about the dead meat.”

I took Stark to Olden and cut across town to Hamilton. “I’m going back to my apartment to check in with Connie,” I said to Lula. “She sent me a text message that we got a new FTA.”

TWENTY-FOUR

CONNIE WAS WORKING at my dining room table and Dave Brewer was cooking in my kitchen.

“How? What?” I said to Connie, pointing at Dave.

“He called to see if you were home, and we got to talking, and one thing led to another, and we decided to surprise you with dinner.”

“Guess Connie didn’t get the stalker memo,” Lula whispered to me.

“I’m running late,” Dave said. “I had an estimate in Ewing Township that took longer than planned. I have corn muffins baking in the oven, and I’m almost ready to put my stew together.”

“Well hell-O,” Lula said. “I smell bacon.”

“It’s my special recipe,” Brewer said. “I put jalapeños, bacon, and a smidgeon of cheddar in my corn muffins.”

Lula sniffed in the direction of the oven. “Yum. That’s three of my favorite food groups.”

Dave was wearing jeans and a khaki T-shirt. He had a red chef’s apron tied at the waist, and he was artfully dusted with flour. He didn’t measure up to Ranger or Morelli, but he was a decent-looking guy. Fortunately, I was wearing the granny panties. It would be bad if Bella’s spell encouraged me to get it on with Dave Brewer.

“I’m making enough for everyone,” Dave said. “It’ll be ready at six, but I can’t stay to eat. I have to get to another estimate tonight.” He glanced over to me. “But I’ll try to get back for late dessert.”

There was going to be no late dessert. The door would be locked and bolted. Still, I had to admit whatever he was cooking smelled pretty darn good. I watched him take chopped onion, red peppers, and mushrooms to a skillet heating on the stove. “What are you making?”

“Tex-Mex Turkey Fiesta. Plus there’s a salad in the refrigerator. This is a celebration for me. I signed a lease to rent an apartment today. This time next week I’ll have my own kitchen.”

Lula looked over his shoulder. “You know how to cook onions and everything.”

He stirred the onions in the hot oil. “It’s my hobby. It keeps me calm. When I get too crazy I cook something.”

“It’s a good hobby,” Lula said. “You got any others?”

“I like football. And I used to play golf, but my ex-wife threw my clubs away when I was in jail.”

“I would never have done that,” Lula said. “I would have sold them.”

Connie came into the kitchen and handed me a folder. “Regina Bugle. Original charge was domestic violence. She ran her husband down with her Lexus and then backed over him.”

“See, now there’s a take-charge woman. I bet he deserved it,” Lula said.

We all considered that for a moment.

“Anyway, she didn’t show up for court yesterday,” Connie said. “She was a first-time offender, so she shouldn’t be difficult. Just don’t try to apprehend her when she’s in her car.”

I took the folder and thumbed through the information. She was thirty-two years old. Caucasian. Her photo showed a pretty blond wearing lots of makeup. She’d run over her fifty-nine-year-old husband and left him with two broken legs, a couple cracked ribs, and a bunch of bruises. My guess was she’d signed an unfavorable pre-nup.

“She has a Lawrenceville address,” I said to Connie. “Is she still there?”

“Yes. I spoke to her this morning. She said she forgot the court date, and she’d stop around to sign new papers when her schedule opened up. I interpreted that to mean never.”

“Where’s the husband?”

“He’s at some fancy rehab facility in Princeton.”

“Let’s roll,” I said to Lula.

“Only if you promise we’ll be back here by six. I don’t want to miss the bacon muffins.”

• • •

The Bugles lived in a large brick colonial on a sizable landscaped lot, in a neighborhood filled with expensive homes. A black Lexus was parked in the driveway.

“Looks like she’s home,” Lula said. “And good news. She’s not in her car.”

I rang the bell. A blond woman opened the door and looked out at us.

“Regina Bugle?” I asked.

“Yes. What’s it to you?”

“Rent money,” Lula said. And she zapped her with her stun gun.

Regina crumpled into a heap on the floor, eyes open, fingers twitching.

“Jeez,” I said to Lula, “you ever hear of unnecessary force?”

“Yeah, but I barely used any force. I just touched her with the prongs.”

I pulled cuffs out of my back pocket and clapped them onto Regina. “Watch her while I check the house,” I said to Lula. “Do not zap her again.”

I walked through the downstairs checking to make sure doors were locked and appliances were off. I returned to Lula, and we got Regina to her feet. Her knees were wobbly, and her feet weren’t connected to her brain, so we pretty much dragged her to my Escort.

“This is gonna change our luck,” Lula said. “We were in a slump, but now we snagged someone, so we’ll get all the others. That’s the way it goes. When it rains it pours.”

Ten minutes from the police station Regina regained control of her mouth muscles.

“Don’t think you won’t pay for this,” she yelled from the backseat. “I ran my asshole husband down, and I’ll run you down, too. Both of you. The first one’s going to be the bitch who rang my doorbell.”

Lula looked over at me. “That’s you. You’re in trouble.”

“I’m going to find out where you live, and I’m coming after you,” Regina said. “I’m going to run you down, back over you, and then I’m going to get out and shock you with my stun gun until your hair catches fire.”

“You got a lot of anger,” Lula said to Regina. “You need to take up yoga or learn some of that tai chi shit I see old Chinese ladies doing in the park.”