Three To Get Deadly

CHAPTER 6

When my heart resumed beating I got to my feet and cautiously looked over the edge of the Dumpster. Mrs. Karwatt was coming toward me, halfway across the lot, picking her way around icy spots on the macadam, clutching a small plastic bag of garbage to her chest.

“Did you see that?” I asked, my voice approaching a level audible only to canines.

“What?”

“That man in the car. He shot at me!”

“No!”

“Didn’t you hear it?”

“For goodness’ sakes,” she said. “Isn’t that terrible. I thought it was a backfire. I had my eyes fixed on the ice. Gotta be careful, you know. My sister slipped and broke her hip last winter. Had to put her in a home. Never did recover right. It’s not so bad, though. She gets green Jell-O for dessert twice a week at lunchtime.”

I ran a shaky finger over the holes in the Dumpster where the bullets had impacted. “This is the second time today someone’s shot at me!”

“Getting so a body can’t go out of the house,” Mrs. Karwatt said. “What with the ice and the shooting. Ever since we put a man on the moon the whole planet’s gone to heck in a handbasket.”

I was looking for someone to nail for my sorry life, but I didn’t think it was fair to lay it all on Neil Armstrong.

Mrs. Karwatt pitched her bag into the Dumpster and headed back to the building. I sort of wanted to go with her, but my knees were shaky, and my feet weren’t moving.

I wrenched the door open on the Buick and collapsed onto the seat, hands clutching the wheel. Okay, I said to myself. Get a grip. These were two freak incidents. The first shooting was mistaken identity. And the second shooting was…what? A death threat.

SHIT.

I pulled the cell phone out of my shoulder bag and dialed up Morelli.

“Someone just shot at me!” I yelled into the phone at him. “I was getting into my car in my parking lot, and this guy in a ski mask drove up and told me to lay off looking for Mo. And then he shot at me. Warning shots, he said. And then he drove away.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you in immediate danger?”

“No.”

“Did you make a mess in your pants?”

“Came damn close.”

We were silent for a couple beats while we digested all this.

“Did you get his plate number?” Morelli asked. “Can you give me a description of the guy?”

“I was too rattled to think to get the plate. The guy was average build. White. That’s all I’ve got.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah.” I nodded my head in the car. “I feel better now. I just…I had to tell somebody.”

“While I have you on the phone…” Morelli said.

Damn! I forgot I was avoiding Morelli! I snapped the cell phone closed. No sweat, I told myself. No harm done. But probably it’s not a good idea to hang out in the lot. That left me with two choices. I could go with my plan to visit my parents, or I could return to my apartment and hide in my coat closet. The coat closet held a lot of appeal short-term, but at some point I’d have to venture out, and by that time I’d most likely have missed dinner.

Go with dinner, I thought. Do the coat closet later.

My mother wasn’t smiling when she opened the door.

“Now what?” she said.

“I didn’t do it.”

“You used to say that when you were a little girl, and it was always a fib.”

“Cross my heart,” I said. “I didn’t shoot anybody. I accidentally got knocked out, and when I came to I was sharing a hallway with a dead guy.”

“You got knocked out!” My mother smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I have to have a daughter who goes around getting herself knocked out.”

Grandma Mazur was in line behind my mother.

“Are you sure you didn’t pop him one? I could keep a secret, you know.”

“I didn’t pop him!”

“Well that’s a big disappointment,” she said. “I had a good story all ready to tell the girls at the beauty parlor.”

My father was in the living room, hiding in front of the TV. “Unh,” he said, never moving a muscle.

I sniffed the air. “Meat loaf.”

“Got a new recipe from Betty Szajack,” my mother said. “She puts sliced olives in her meat loaf, and she makes it with soaked bread instead of crackermeal.”

The best way to defuse my mother is to talk about food. For thirty years, we’ve expressed love and anger in terms of gravy and mashed potatoes.

“So are you staying for supper?” my mother wanted to know. “I have spice cake with chocolate mocha icing for dessert.”

“Sure,” I said. “That would be nice.”

I helped Grandma Mazur set the table while my mother finished up in the kitchen. We were about to sit down when the doorbell rang.

“Probably the paperboy trying to juice us out of more money,” Grandma said. “I’m wise to his tricks.”

I answered the door and found myself looking into Joe Morelli’s brown eyes.

He grinned when he saw me. “Surprise.”

“What do you want?”

“You asking for the long list or the short list?”

“I don’t want any list.” I made an attempt to close the door, but he muscled his way into the foyer. “Out!” I said. “This isn’t a good time.”

He ignored me and strolled into the dining room. “Evening,” he said to my mother. He acknowledged my father with a nod of his head, and he winked at my grandmother.

“We’re having meat loaf with olives,” Grandma Mazur said to Morelli. “You want some? We got plenty.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Morelli said.

This triggered eye rolling on my part.

My mother pulled an extra side chair up next to me and laid out another plate. “We wouldn’t think of having you leave without supper,” she said to Morelli.

“I’d think of it,” I said.

My mother smacked me on the top of my head with a wooden serving spoon. “Miss Fresh Mouth.”

Morelli helped himself to two slabs of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans and applesauce. He made polite conversation with my mother and grandmother and discussed sports scores with my father. On the surface Morelli seemed relaxed and smiling, but there were unguarded moments when I caught him watching me with the offhand intensity of a tree toad eyeing a tasty insect.

“So what’s going on between you and my granddaughter?” Grandma asked Morelli. “Being that you’re here for supper I guess everything’s pretty serious.”

“Getting more serious by the minute,” Morelli said.

“Morelli and I have a working relationship,” I said to Grandma. “Nothing more.”

Morelli slouched back. “You shouldn’t fib to your grandma. You know you’re crazy about me.”

“Well, listen to that,” Grandma said, clearly charmed. “Isn’t he the one.”

Morelli leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Speaking of work, I have a matter I’d like to discuss with you in private. I thought maybe we could go for a ride together after the table is cleared.”

“Sure,” I said. And maybe I’ll poke out my eye with the turkey baster.

I gathered the plates together and hauled them off to the kitchen. My mother and Grandma Mazur followed with the serving dishes.

“You go ahead and cut the cake,” I told my mother. “I’ll get the coffee going.”

I waited a moment until I had the kitchen to myself, then I promptly did a quiet exit through the back door. I had no intention of going for a ride that would culminate in a body cavity search. Not that a body cavity search would be a new experience. Morelli had already performed this procedure on me at various ages, with varying degrees of success. The new twist would be that this time the search might be done by a prison matron—and that was even less appealing than falling prey to Morelli.

I was wearing jeans and boots and a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and my teeth were chattering by the time I’d cut through my parents’ backyard and run the two blocks to Mary Lou’s house. Mary Lou’s been my best friend for as long as I can remember. For six years now she’s been more or less happily married to Leonard Stankovic of Stankovic and Sons, Plumbing and Heating. She has two kids and a mortgage and a part-time job as a bookkeeper for an Oldsmobile dealership.

I didn’t bother with the formality of knocking on her door. I just barged in and stood there stomping my feet and flapping my arms in her living room, and saying, “D-d-damn it’s c-c-cold!”

Mary Lou was on her hands and knees picking up little plastic cars and men that looked like fireplugs. “Maybe it would help if you tried wearing a coat.”

“I was at my parents’ house and Morelli showed up, and so I had to sneak out the back door.”

“I don’t buy into that one,” Mary Lou said. “If you were with Morelli just now you’d be missing a lot more clothes than your coat.”

“This is serious. I’m afraid he might want to arrest me.”

Mary Lou’s two-year-old, Mikey, toddled in from the kitchen and latched onto Mary Lou’s leg dog style.

I thought kids were okay from a distance, but I wasn’t all that excited about the way they smelled up close. I suppose when they belong to you it makes a difference.

“You probably should stop shooting guys,” Mary Lou said. “You shoot a lot of guys, and eventually the cops get cranky about it.”

“I didn’t shoot this one. Anyway, I had to sneak out of the house, and I had to leave my coat and everything behind.”

Lenny and the four-year-old were sitting in front of the TV watching a rerun of The Munsters. Lenny was an okay person but sort of a mouth breather. Mary Lou had always gone for that type, preferring brawn to brain. Not that Lenny was entirely stupid. It’s just that you’d never get him confused with Linus Pauling.

Mary Lou dumped the fireplug people into a plastic laundry basket that was filled with toys, and the two-year-old let out a howl. He cried flat out with his hands clasping and unclasping, reaching for who knows what. Mary Lou, I suppose. Or maybe for his toys that were being put away for the night. He cried with his mouth wide open and his eyes scrunched tight, and in between sobs he shrieked, “No, no, no!”

Mary Lou took a graham cracker from her pocket and gave it to Mikey.

Mikey shoved the cracker into his mouth and continued to blubber, chewing and rubbing his face with his fat baby hands. Cracker mush mixed with tears and baby snot worked its way into his hair and onto his face. Brown drool rolled off his chin and stained his shirt.

Mary Lou gave Mikey a “been there, seen this” look. “Mikey’s tired,” she said.

Like I said before, kids were okay from a distance, but I didn’t think they’d ever replace hamsters.

“I need to use your phone to call home,” I said to Mary Lou.

She wiped at the mush with her shirttail. “Help yourself.”

I dialed from the kitchen, straining to hear over the racket in Mary Lou’s living room. “Is Morelli still there?” I asked my mother.

“He just left.”

“Are you sure? He’s not hanging around outside, is he?”

“I heard his car drive away.”

I borrowed a sweatshirt from Mary Lou and ran back to my parents’ house. I cut through the backyard and jogged down the driveway to check the street. The street looked clear. No Morelli. I retraced my steps to the kitchen door and let myself in.

“Well,” my mother said, “what gives?”

“Never catch me walking out on a hunk like Joe Morelli,” Grandma said. “I guess I’d know what to do with a man like that.”

I guessed I knew what to do with him too, but probably it was illegal to neuter a cop. “You didn’t give him any spice cake to take home, did you?” I asked my mother.

My mother tipped her chin up a fraction of an inch. “I gave him the whole thing. It was the least I could do after you left him sitting here high and dry.”

“The whole thing!” I shouted. “How could you do that? I didn’t get a single piece!”

“That’s what happens when you walk out. And how was I to know where you were? You could have been kidnapped. You could have had a brain seizure and wandered off with amnesia. How was I to know you’d be back and want spice cake?”

“I had reasons for leaving,” I wailed. “Perfectly good reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“Morelli was going to arrest me…maybe.”

My mother took a deep breath. “Arrest you?”

“There’s a small possibility that I might be a homicide suspect.”

My mother made the sign of the cross.

Grandma didn’t look nearly so glum. “There was a woman on TV the other day. On one of them talk shows. She said she’d been arrested for smoking dope. She said when you get arrested the cops lock you up in a little cell and then sit around watching you on closed-circuit TV, waiting for you to go to the bathroom. She said there’s this stainless steel commode in one corner of your cell, and it hasn’t got a toilet seat or anything, and that’s where you have to go. And she said the commode faces the TV camera just so they can all get a good view of the whole thing.”

My stomach went hollow and little black dots danced in front of my eyes. I wondered if I had enough money in my bank account to buy a ticket to Brazil.

Grandma’s expression got crafty. “The woman on TV said what you needed to do before you got arrested was to drink a lot of Kaopectate. She said you needed to get good and plugged up so you could wait until you got out on bail.”

I sat down in a chair and put my head between my knees.

“This is what comes of working for your father’s cousin,” my mother said. “You’re a smart girl. You should have a decent job. You should be a schoolteacher.”

I thought of Mary Lou’s kid with the graham crackers smeared in his hair, and felt better about being a bounty hunter. You see, it could always be worse, I thought. I could be a schoolteacher.

“I need to go home,” I said, retrieving my coat from the hall closet. “Lots of work to do tomorrow. Got to get to bed early.”

“Here,” my mother said, handing me a grocery bag. “Some meat loaf. Enough for a nice sandwich.”

I looked in the bag. Meat loaf. No spice cake.

“Thanks,” I said to my mother. “Are you sure there isn’t any spice cake left?”

“A homicide suspect,” my mother said. “How could such a thing happen?”

I didn’t know. I wondered the same thing. In fact, I wondered all the way home. I wasn’t such a bad person. I only cheated a little on my taxes, and I paid most of my bills. I didn’t cuss at old people (at least not to their face). I didn’t do drugs. So why was I having such rotten luck? Okay, so I didn’t go to church as often as I should, but my mother went regularly. I thought that should count for something.

I rolled Big Blue into the lot. It was late. All the good spots were taken, so I was back by the Dumpster again. What’s new. At least it afforded me cover from a drive-by. Maybe I’d park here all the time.

I looked up at my apartment and realized my lights were on. That was weird, because I was almost positive I’d shut them off when I left this afternoon. I got out of the car and walked to the middle of the lot. I looked up at my windows again. The lights were still on. What did this mean? It could mean the lights had been on when I left, and I was suffering from early onset of dementia. Probably I could add a touch of paranoia to the dementia.

A shadowy figure appeared briefly toward the far wall of my living room, and my heart skipped a beat. Someone was in my apartment. I was relieved to be able to rule out the dementia, but I still had a problem. I really didn’t want to do my own investigating and get shot at for the third time today. Unfortunately, the alternative was to call the police. Since I was low on Kaopectate, I didn’t think calling the police was a good alternative.

The figure reappeared. Long enough for me to decide it was a man. He moved closer to the window, and I was able to see his face.

The face belonged to Morelli.

Of all the nerve. Morelli had broken into my apartment. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. He was eating something. I suspected it was spice cake.

“PIG!” I yelled. “Creep!”

He didn’t seem to hear. Probably the TV was on.

I did a fast walk around the lot and found Morelli’s black Toyota 4x4. I gave the back bumper a kick, and the alarm went off.

Faces appeared in the windows above me while the alarm wailed away.

Mrs. Karwatt on the second floor threw her window open and leaned out. “What’s going on out there?”

A shotgun barrel poked from Mr. Weinstein’s window. “Whose alarm is that? It’s not my Cadillac, is it?”

The only window without a face was mine. I figured that was because Morelli was thundering down the stairs.

I ran to my car with my keys in my hand.

“Stay away from that car, or I’ll shoot,” Mr. Weinstein shouted.

“It’s my car,” I yelled back.

“The hell it is,” Mr. Weinstein said, squinting at me through his inch-thick trifocals. BOOM! Mr. Weinstein fired and took out the windshield on the car next to me.

I bolted across the grass median into the street and streaked for the houses on the other side. I stopped and looked back. Morelli was pacing under the rear overhang, shouting at Mr. Weinstein, obviously afraid to venture out into the lot for fear of getting shot.

I slipped into the shadows between two houses, hopped a backyard fence and came out onto Elm Street. I crossed Elm and repeated the pattern, bringing me to Hartland. I jogged a block up Hartland, crossed Hamilton and plastered myself against the brick wall of an all-night convenience store.

The previous owner of the store had been Joe Echo. He’d sold it in November, and the new Asian owner, Sam Pei, had changed the name to The American Store. I thought the name was appropriate. The American Store contained a sampling of everything an American might need at four times the price. A box of Fig Newtons for $7.50. No matter that there were only twelve in a box. I guess when you needed a Fig Newton in the middle of the night, you damn well didn’t care what it cost.

I pulled a knit cap out of my pocket and tugged it down over my ears. The battery was low on my cell phone, so I searched in my shoulder bag for a quarter, found one, dropped it into the pay phone and dialed my number.

Morelli answered on the fourth ring.

I unclenched my teeth enough to get a few words out. “What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”

“Waiting for you,” Morelli said.

“What were you eating just now?”

“Spice cake. There’s still some left, but you’d better hurry.”

I neatly clicked the phone back into the receiver. “Ugh!”

I bought a Snickers from Mr. Pei and ate it while I walked. Time to be realistic. Morelli was a lot better at this cops-and-robbers stuff than I was. It seemed to me that if he wanted to arrest me, he would have done it by now. For that matter, if he was serious about bringing me in for further questioning he would have done it. Probably there was no immediate need for the Kaopectate.

So why was Morelli harassing me? Because he wanted something. What did he want? Information that I might be withholding? Maybe he thought he could worm some missing details out of me better under more casual circumstances. Or maybe he wanted to threaten me without witnesses. Or maybe he wanted to ask me for a date.

I turned the corner at Hartland and decided I should talk to Morelli. This was no longer a simple recovery. Mo was still missing. A man had been killed. I’d been threatened. And there were some details I’d neglected to tell Morelli when I’d been questioned at the station. Not to mention the spice cake.

Everything looked status quo when I got to my parking lot. Lights were on in my apartment. Morelli’s car hadn’t been moved. A small gathering of people were clustered around the Chrysler Mr. Weinstein had used for target practice. Mr. Weinstein was there with a big piece of plastic bagging and a roll of duct tape in his hand.

“Another minute and he would have been driving off in this car, I’m telling you,” Mr. Weinstein was saying. “Better a broken windshield than a stolen car.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Arty Boyt said. “Good thing you had that gun handy.”

Everyone else nodded. Good thing, they all said.

I slipped into the building and went to the pay phone at the front of the small lobby. I dropped a quarter and called upstairs.

“It’s me again,” I said when Morelli answered.

“Where are you?”

“Far away.”

“Liar.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I saw you cross the parking lot.”

“Why are you stalking me?”

“Cops don’t stalk. Cops pursue.”

“Okay. Why are you pursuing me?”

“We need to talk,” Morelli said.

“That’s it? Just talk?”

“You had something else in mind?”

“Nope.”

We were both silent for a moment, contemplating the something else.

“Well,” I said, “what do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about Mo, and I don’t want to do it on the phone.”

“I heard some people might want to arrest me.”

“That’s true,” Morelli said. “But I’m not one of them.”

“I have your word?”

“I won’t arrest you tonight. I’d rather not make a blanket statement that covers eternity.”

He was waiting with the door open when I got off the elevator.

“You look cold and tired,” he said.

“Dodging bullets is exhausting. I don’t know how you cops do it day after day.”

“I assume you’re talking about Mr. Weinstein.”

I hung my jacket and my shoulder bag on a wall hook. “I’m talking about everyone. People keep shooting at me.” I sliced myself off a big chunk of spice cake and told Morelli about Snake.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“I think bounty hunters should be tested and licensed. And I think you’d flunk the test.”

“I’m learning.”

“Yeah,” Morelli said. “Let’s hope you don’t get dead in the process.”

Ordinarily I’d consider a remark like that to be an insult, but I’d actually been thinking along the same lines myself. “What’s the deal with Uncle Mo?”

“I don’t know,” Morelli said. “At first I was worried he was dead. Now I don’t know what to think.”

“What kind of prints did you get from his store?”

“Yours, Mo’s and Anders’s from the door-knobs in the rear. We didn’t bother with the public areas. Two-thirds of the burg would have showed up.”

“The neighbors see anything?”

“Only the lady across the street who reported the flashlight.” Morelli was slouched against my kitchen counter, arms crossed over his chest. “Any other questions?”

“Do you know who killed Anders?”

“No. Do you?”

I rinsed my plate and put it in the dishwasher. “No.” I looked at Morelli. “How did Anders get into the store? I heard him fumbling out there, trying the doorknob. At first I thought he had a key, but the door wouldn’t open. So then I decided he must be jimmying the lock.”

“There was no sign of forced entry.”

“Can we unofficially walk through this?”

“You must be reading my mind,” Morelli said.

“I’m not saying any of this to a cop, right?”

“Right.”

I poured myself a glass of milk. “This is what I know. The back door to Mo’s store was locked. I opened it with a key I got from his apartment. After I was in the store I pulled the door closed. When Ronald Anders tried to get in, the door was locked. At first it sounded like he had a key, but the door wouldn’t open. He fiddled with it for a couple minutes, and the door clicked open. Did you find anything on him that he could have used to pick a lock?”

“No.”

“Did you find a key to the store on him?”

“No.”

I raised my eyebrows.

Morelli raised his eyebrows.

“Either someone needed a set of picks, or else someone lifted a key that doesn’t work especially well,” I said. “Or maybe someone opened the door with a sticky key, let Ronald Anders into the store, disappeared for a few minutes, returned and killed Anders.”

Morelli and I sighed. The logical person to have a sticky key would be Uncle Mo. And it wasn’t so far-fetched that Mo would know Anders in light of the fact that Mo had been seen on Stark Street from time to time. Maybe this was drug related. Maybe Mo was buying. Hell, maybe Mo was selling. After perusing Mo’s bedtime books I was willing to believe almost anything about him.

“You have anybody talking to the kids who hang at the store?” I asked Morelli. “When you were working vice did you hear anything about drugs coming out of Mo’s?”

“Just the opposite,” Morelli said. “Mo’s was a safe zone. Mo was militant against dope. Everyone knew.”

I had another idea. “How militant?” I asked. “Militant enough to kill a dealer?”

Morelli looked at me with his unreadable cop face.

“That would be strange,” I said. “Lovable, out-of-shape ice cream guy turns killer. Revenge of the small businessman.”

Anders was shot in the back. He’d been carrying a gun, but the gun hadn’t been touched. The gun had been found when the police rolled the body. The gun had been stuffed into the waistband of Anders’s double-pleated rapper slacks. Whoever got nailed for the murder would have a hard time pleading self-defense.

“Is that it?” I asked Morelli.

“For now.”

Morelli was wearing jeans, boots and a long-sleeved driver’s shirt with the sleeves pushed up. He had his service pistol clipped to his belt. He grabbed his khaki jacket from one of the wall hooks in the entrance hall and shrugged into it.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take any vacations in foreign countries for a couple days,” he said.

“Gee, and I have tickets to Monaco.”

He gave me a chuck under my chin, smiled and left.

I stared at the closed front door for a moment. A chuck under the chin. What was that? In the past, Morelli had tried to stick his tongue down my throat. Or at the very least he’d make a lewd suggestion. I was suspicious of a chuck under the chin. Now that I thought about it, he’d been a perfect gentleman when he’d brought the pizza. And what about last night? He’d left without so much as a handshake.

I checked myself out in the hall mirror. My hair was still squashed under the knit cap. Not real sexy, but that had never slowed Morelli down before. I pulled the cap off and my hair sprang out. Eek. Good thing I’d left the cap on.

I went back to the kitchen and dialed Ranger.

“Yo,” Ranger said.

“Anyone bragging about killing Ronald Anders?”

“No one’s bragging about anything these days. The streets are quiet.”

“Turf war?”

“Don’t know. A couple players are missing. A couple dopers are dead. Got some hot shit going around killing people.”

“ODs?”

“That’s the way the death certificates read.”

“You think something different?”

“Feels dark, babe.”

I disconnected and a minute later the phone rang.

“We got a situation on our hands,” Lula said.

“A situation?”

“Just got a call from Jackie, and I can’t make any sense of what she’s saying. Something about how her old man jacked her over again.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s at the FancyAss Apartments. She’s been there day and night, and she sounds flipped out. I told her to wait right where she was, and we’d come fast as we could.”

Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the RiverEdge lot. The sky was black and dense above evenly spaced pools of artificial light thrown by the overhead halogen lamps. Jackie had parked her Chrysler on the fringe of one of those pools. The river was a block away, and the ice fog swirled around the lamps and settled on the cars.

Jackie stood beside her car, waving her arms while she yelled at Lula, and Lula was yelling back at Jackie.

“Calm down,” Lula was saying. “Calm down!”

“He’s dead,” Jackie shouted. “Dead, dead, dead. Fucking dead. Dead as a goddamn doorknob. What a bitch!”

I looked at Lula, and Lula gave me an I-don’t-know shrug.

“I just got here,” Lula said. “I can’t get her to say anything besides the motherfucker’s dead. Maybe she’s too coked up. Maybe we need to get something to slow her down.”

“I’m not coked up, you dumb ho,” Jackie said. “I’m trying to tell you he’s dead, and you’re not fucking listening.”

I looked around the lot. “Is he dead anywhere nearby?”

I really wanted a no on this one. I’d already had my millennium quota of dead.

“You see that big bush by the Dumpster?” Jackie said.

“Yeah.”

“You see that ugly-ass foot sticking out of that big bush?”

Oh boy. She was right. There was a foot sticking out of the bush.

“Shit, Jackie,” I said. “You didn’t kill that foot, did you?”

“No, I didn’t kill that foot. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Someone jacked me over. I’ve been sitting out here, freezing my ass off, waiting to kill that sonovabitch Cameron Brown, and someone beat me to it. It isn’t fair!”

Jackie wheeled off for the Dumpster with Lula and me scrambling to keep up.

“I decided to neaten up the car,” Jackie said. “So I come over here with a bag of trash, and I’m throwing it in the Dumpster, and I see something sort of reflecting light. And I look a little harder, and I see it’s a watch. And then I see it’s attached to a wrist. And I say, Goddamn, I know that watch and that wrist. So I dig around some and look what I come up with. Look what I hauled out of the goddamn garbage.”

She stopped at the bush, reached down, grabbed hold of the foot and dragged a man’s body out into the open. “Just look at this. He’s dead. And if that isn’t bad enough, he’s frozen solid. This motherfucker is one big frosty Popsicle. It’s not even like I get to see him rot. Damn.”

Jackie dropped the foot and gave Cameron a good solid kick in the ribs.

Lula and I jumped back and sucked in some air.

“Dang,” Lula said.

“That ain’t the half of it,” Jackie said. “I’ve been sitting here waiting to shoot him, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Jackie opened her coat, pulled a 9mm Beretta out of her sweatpants and drilled half a clip into Cameron Brown. Cameron jumped around some from the impact, but mostly the bullets didn’t have much effect—except for putting a bunch of extra holes in various body parts.

“Are you nuts?” Lula yelled. “This guy’s dead! You’re shooting a dead man!”

“Isn’t my fault,” Jackie said. “I wanted to shoot him while he was alive, but somebody beat me to it. I’m just making the best of a bad situation.”

“You’ve been drinking,” Lula said.

“Damn skippy. Would have froze to death if I didn’t have a nip once in a while.”

Jackie raised the gun, looking to unload a few more rounds into Cameron.

“Hold on,” Lula said. “I hear sirens.”

We stood still and listened to the whoop, whoop, whoop.

“Coming this way!” Lula said. “Every man for himself!”

We all ran for our cars and took off at the same time, almost crashing into each other trying to get out of the lot.