Hard Eight

HARD EIGHT

By Janet Evanovich

Fugitive Apprehension Agent Stephanie Plum has a big problem an her hands: Seven-year-old Annie Soder and her mother, Evelyn, have disappeared. Evelyn’s estranged husband, Steven, a shady owner of a seedy bar, is not at all happy. During the divorce proceedings, he and Evelyn signed a child custody bond, and Steven is demanding the money guaranteed by the bond to find Annie. The money was secured by a mortgage on Evelyn’s grandmother’s house, and the True Blue Bonds Bail Agency wants to take possession of the house. Finding a kidnapped child is not an assignment for a bounty hunter. But Evelyn’s grandmother lives next door to Stephanie’s parents, and Stephanie’s mother and grandmother are not about to see their neighbor lose her house because of the abduction. Even though Stephanie’s plate is full with miscreants who missed their court dates, including old nemesis and violent drunk Andy Bender and an elusive little old lady accused of grand theft auto, she can’t disappoint Grandma Mazur! So she follows the trail left by Annie and Evelyn—and finds a lot more than she bargained for. Steven is somehow linked with a very scary Eddie Abruzzi. Trenton cop and on-again, off-again fiancé Joe Morelli and Stephanie’s mentor and tormentor, Ranger, warn Stephanie about Abruzzi, but it’s Abruzzi’s eyes and mannerisms that frighten Stephanie most. Stephanie needs Ranger’s savvy and expertise, and she’s willing to accept his help to find Annie even though it might mean getting too involved with Ranger.

Stephanie, Ranger, Lula (who’s not going to miss riding with Ranger), and Evelyn’s lawyer/Laundromat manager set out to find Annie. The search turns out to be a race among Stephanie’s posse, the True Blue Bonds’ agent, a Rangerette known as Jeanne Ellen Burrows, and the Abruzzi crew. Not to mention the fact that there’s a killer rabbit on the loose!

Strap on your helmet and get ready for the ride of your life. Hard Eight. The world of Stephanie Plum has never been wilder.

1

LATELY, I’VE BEEN spending a lot of time rolling on the ground with men who think a stiffy represents personal growth. The rolling around has nothing to do with my sex life. The rolling around is what happens when a bust goes crapola and there’s a last ditch effort to hog-tie a big, dumb bad guy possessing a congenitally defective frontal lobe. My name is Stephanie Plum, and I’m in the fugitive apprehension business… bond enforcement, to be exact, working for my cousin Vincent Plum. It wouldn’t be such a bad job except the direct result of bond enforcement is usually incarceration—and fugitives tend to not like this. Go figure. To encourage fugitive cooperation on the way back to the pokey I usually persuade the guys I capture to wear handcuffs and leg shackles. This works pretty good most of the time. And, if done right, cuts back on the rolling around on the ground stuff.

Unfortunately, today wasn’t most of the time. Martin Paulson, weighing in at 297

pounds and standing five feet, eight inches tall, was arrested for credit card fraud and for being a genuinely obnoxious person. He failed to show for his court appearance last week, and this put Martin on my Most Wanted List. Since Martin is not too bright, he hadn’t been too hard to find. Martin had, in fact, been at home engaged in what he does best… stealing merchandise off the Internet. I’d managed to get Martin into cuffs and leg shackles and into my car. I’d even managed to drive Martin to the police station on North Clinton Avenue. Unfortunately, when I attempted to get Martin out of my car he tipped over and was now rolling around on his belly, trussed up like a Christmas goose, unable to right himself.

We were in the parking lot adjacent to the municipal building. The back door leading to the docket lieutenant was less than fifty feet away. I could call for help, but I’d be the brunt of cop humor for days. I could unlock the cuffs or ankle shackles, but I didn’t trust Paulson. He was royally pissed off, red-faced and swearing, making obscene threats and horrifying animal sounds.

I was standing there, watching Paulson struggle, wondering what the hell I was going to do, because anything short of a forklift wasn’t going to get Paulson up off the pavement. And just then, Joe Juniak pulled into the lot. Juniak is a former police chief and is now mayor of Trenton. He’s a bunch of years older than me and about a foot taller. Juniak’s second cousin, Ziggy, is married to my cousin-in-law Gloria Jean. So we’re sort of family… in a remote way.

The driver’s side window slid down, and Juniak grinned at me, cutting his eyes to Paulson. “Is he yours?”

“Yep.”

“He’s illegally parked. His ass is over the white line.”

I toed Paulson, causing him to start rocking again. “He’s stuck.”

Juniak got out of his car and hauled Paulson up by his armpits. “You don’t mind if I embellish this story when I spread it all over town, do you?”

“I do mind! Remember, I voted for you,” I said. “And we’re almost related.”

“Not gonna help you, cutie. Cops live for stuff like this.”

“You’re not a cop anymore.”

“Once a cop, always a cop.”

Paulson and I watched Juniak get back into his car and drive away.

“I can’t walk in these things,” Paulson said, looking down at the shackles. “I’m gonna fall over again. I haven’t got a good sense of balance.”

“Have you ever heard the bounty hunter slogan, Bring ‘em back—dead or alive?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Actually, bringing someone back dead is a big no-no, but this seemed like a good time to make an empty threat. It was late afternoon. It was spring. And I wanted to get on with my life. Spending another hour coaxing Paulson to walk across the parking lot wasn’t high on my list of favored things to do.

I wanted to be on a beach somewhere with the sun blistering my skin until I looked like a fried pork rind. Okay, truth is at this time of year that might have to be Cancun, and Cancun didn’t figure into my budget. Still, the point was, I didn’t want to be here in this stupid parking lot with Paulson.

“You probably don’t even have a gun,” Paulson said.

“Hey, give me a break. I haven’t got all day for this. I have other things to do.”

“Like what?”

“None of your business.”

“Hah! You haven’t got anything better to do.”

I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and black Caterpillar boots, and I had a real urge to kick him in the back of his leg with my size-seven CAT.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I promised my parents I’d be home for dinner at six.”

Paulson burst out laughing. “That’s pathetic. That’s fucking pathetic.” The laughter turned into a coughing fit. Paulson leaned forward, wobbled side to side, and fell over. I reached for him, but it was too late. He was back on his belly, doing his beached whale imitation.

**********************

MY PARENTS LIVE in a narrow duplex in a chunk of Trenton called the Burg. If the Burg was a food, it would be pasta-penne rigate, ziti, fettuccine, spaghetti, and elbow macaroni, swimming in marinara, cheese sauce, or mayo. Good, dependable, all-occasion food that puts a smile on your face and fat on your butt. The Burg is a solid neighborhood where people buy houses and live in them until death kicks them out. Backyards are used to run a clothesline, store the garbage can, and give the dog a place to poop. No fancy backyard decks and gazebos for Burgers. Burgers sit on their small front porches and cement stoops. The better to see the world go by.

I rolled in just as my mother was pulling the roast chicken out of the oven. My father was already in his seat at the head of the table. He stared straight ahead, eyes glazed, thoughts in limbo, knife and fork in hand. My sister, Valerie, who had recently moved back home after leaving her husband, was at work whipping potatoes in the kitchen. When we were kids Valerie was the perfect daughter. And I was the daughter who stepped in dog poo, sat on gum, and constantly fell off the garage roof in an attempt to fly. As a last ditch effort to preserve her marriage, Valerie had traded in her Italian-Hungarian genes and turned herself into Meg Ryan. The marriage failed, but the blonde Meg-shag persists. Valerie’s kids were at the table with my dad. The nine-year-old, Angie, was sitting primly with her hands folded, resigned to enduring the meal, an almost perfect clone of Valerie at that age. The seven-year-old, Mary Alice, the kid from hell, had two sticks poked into her brown hair.

“What’s with the sticks?” I asked.

“They not sticks. They’re antlers. I’m a reindeer.”

This was a surprise because usually she’s a horse.

“How was your day?” Grandma asked me, setting a bowl of green beans on the table.

“Did you shoot anybody? Did you capture any bad guys?”

Grandma Mazur moved in with my parents shortly after Grandpa Mazur took his fat clogged arteries to the all-you-can-eat buffet in the sky. Grandma’s in her midseventies and doesn’t look a day over ninety. Her body is aging, but her mind seems to be going in the opposite direction. She was wearing white tennis shoes and a lavender polyester warm-up suit. Her steel gray hair was cut short and permed to within an inch of its life. Her nails were painted lavender to match the suit.

“I didn’t shoot anybody today,” I said, “but I brought in a guy wanted for credit card fraud.”

There was a knock at the front door, and Mabel Markowitz stuck her head in and called,

“Yoohoo.”

My parents live in a two-family duplex. They own the south half, and Mabel Markowitz owns the north half, the house divided by a common wall and years of disagreement over house paint. Out of necessity, Mabel’s made thrift a religious experience, getting by on Social Security and government-surplus peanut butter. Her husband, Izzy, was a good man but drank himself into an early grave. Mabel’s only daughter died of uterine cancer a year ago. The son-in-law died a month later in a car crash.

All forward progress stopped at the table, and everyone looked to the front door, because in all the years Mabel had lived next door, she’d never once yoohoo ed while we were eating.

“I hate to disturb your meal,” Mabel said. “I just wanted to ask Stephanie if she’d have a minute to stop over, later. I have a question about this bond business. It’s for a friend.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be over after dinner.” I imagined it would be a short conversation since everything I knew about bond could be said in two sentences. Mabel left and Grandma leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I bet that’s a lot of hooey about wanting advice for a friend. I bet Mabel’s been busted.”

Everyone simultaneously rolled their eyes at Grandma.

“Okay then,” she said. “Maybe she wants a job. Maybe she wants to be a bounty hunter. You know how she’s always squeaking by.”

My father shoveled food into his mouth, keeping his head down. He reached for the potatoes and spooned seconds onto his plate. “Christ,” he mumbled.

“If there’s anyone in that family who would need a bail bond, it would be Mabel’s exgrandson-in-law,” my mother said. “He’s mixed up with some bad people these days. Evelyn was smart to divorce him.”

“Yeah, and that divorce was real nasty,” Grandma said to me. “Almost as nasty as yours.”

“I set a high standard.”

“You were a pip,” Grandma said.

My mother did another eye roll. “It was a disgrace.”

**********************

MABEL MARKOWITZ LIVES in a museum. She married in 1943 and still has her first table lamp, her first pot, her first chrome-and-Formica kitchen table. Her living room was newly wallpapered in 1957. The flowers have faded but the paste has held. The carpet is dark Oriental. The upholstered pieces sag slightly in the middle, imprinted with asses that have since moved on… either to God or Hamilton Township. Certainly the furniture doesn’t bear the imprint of Mabel’s ass as Mabel is a walking skeleton who never sits. Mabel bakes and cleans and paces while she talks on the phone. Her eyes are bright, and she laughs easily, slapping her thigh, wiping her hands on her apron. Her hair is thin and gray, cut short and curled. Her face is powdered first thing in the morning to a chalky white. Her lipstick is pink and applied hourly, feathering out into the deep crevices that line her mouth.

“Stephanie,” she said, “how nice to see you. Come in. I have a coffee cake.”

Mrs. Markowitz always has a coffee cake. That’s the way it is in the Burg. Windows are clean, cars are big, and there’s always a coffee cake.

I took a seat at the kitchen table. “The truth is, I don’t know very much about bond. My cousin Vinnie is the bond expert.”

“It’s not so much about bond,” Mabel said. “It’s more about finding someone. And I fibbed about it being for a friend. I was embarrassed. I just don’t know how to even begin telling you this.”

Mabel’s eyes filled with tears. She cut a piece of coffee cake and shoved it into her mouth. Angry. Mabel wasn’t the sort of woman to comfortably fall victim to emotion. She washed the coffee cake down with coffee that was strong enough to dissolve a spoon if you let it sit in the cup too long. Never accept coffee from Mrs. Markowitz.

“I guess you know Evelyn’s marriage didn’t work out. She and Steven got a divorce a while back, and it was pretty bitter,” Mabel finally said.

Evelyn is Mabel’s granddaughter. I’ve known Evelyn all my life, but we were never close friends. She lived several blocks away, and she went to Catholic school. Our paths only intersected on Sundays when she’d come to dinner at Mabel’s house. Valerie and I called her the Giggler because she giggled at everything. She’d come over to play board games in her Sunday clothes, and she’d giggle when she rolled the dice, giggle when she moved her piece, giggle when she lost. She giggled so much she got dimples. And when she got older, she was one of those girls that boys love. Evelyn was all round softness and dimples and vivacious energy.

I hardly ever saw Evelyn anymore, but when I did there wasn’t much vivacious energy left in her.

Mabel pressed her thin lips together. “There was so much arguing and hard feelings over the divorce that the judge made Evelyn take out one of these new child custody bonds. I guess he was afraid Evelyn wouldn’t let Steven see Annie. Anyway, Evelyn didn’t have any money to put up for the bond. Steven took the money that Evelyn got when my daughter died, and he never gave Evelyn anything. Evelyn was like a prisoner in that house on Key Street. I’m almost the only relative left for Evelyn and Annie now, so I put my house here up for collateral. Evelyn wouldn’t have gotten custody if I didn’t do that.”

This was all new to me. I’d never heard of a custody bond. The people I tracked down were in violation of a bail bond.

Mabel wiped the table clean of crumbs and dumped the crumbs in the sink. Mabel wasn’t good at sitting. “It was all just fine until last week when I got a note from Evelyn, saying she and Annie were going away for a while. I didn’t think much of it, but all of a sudden everyone is looking for Annie. Steven came to my house a couple days ago, raising his voice and saying terrible things about Evelyn. He said she had no business taking Annie off like she did, taking her away from him and taking her out of first grade. And he said he was invoking the custody bond. And then this morning I got a phone call from the bond company telling me they were going to take my house if I didn’t help them get Annie back.”

Mabel looked around her kitchen. “I don’t know what I’d do without the house. Can they really take it from me?”

“I don’t know,” I told Mabel. “I’ve never been involved in anything like this.”

“And now they all got me worried. How do I know if Evelyn and Annie are okay? I don’t have any way of getting in touch. And it was just a note. It wasn’t even like I talked to Evelyn.”

Mabel’s eyes filled up again, and I was really hoping she wasn’t going to flat-out cry because I wasn’t great with big displays of emotion. My mother and I expressed affection through veiled compliments about gravy.

“I feel just terrible,” Mabel said. “I don’t know what to do. I thought maybe you could find Evelyn and talk to her… make sure her and Annie are all right. I could put up with losing the house, but I don’t want to lose Evelyn and Annie. I’ve got some money set aside. I don’t know how much you charge for this sort of thing.”

“I don’t charge anything. I’m not a private investigator. I don’t take on private cases like this.” Hell, I’m not even a very good bounty hunter!

Mabel picked at her apron, tears rolling down her cheeks now. “I don’t know who else to ask.”

Oh man, I don’t believe this. Mabel Markowitz, crying! This was at about the same comfort level as getting a gyno exam in the middle of Main Street at high noon.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do… as a neighbor.”

Mabel nodded and wiped her eyes. “I’d appreciate it.” She took an envelope from the sideboard. “I have a picture for you. It’s Annie and Evelyn. It was taken last year when Annie turned seven. And I wrote Evelyn’s address on a piece of paper for you, too. And her car and license plate.”

“Do you have a key to her house?”

“No,” Mabel said. “She never gave me one.”

“Do you have any ideas about where Evelyn might have gone? Anything at all?”

Mabel shook her head. “I can’t imagine where she’s taken off to. She grew up here in the Burg. Never lived anyplace else. Didn’t go away to college. Most all our relatives are right here.”

“Did Vinnie write the bond?”

“No. It’s some other company. I wrote it down.” She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “It’s True Blue Bonds, and the man’s name is Les Sebring.”

My cousin Vinnie owns Vincent Plum Bail Bonds and runs his business out of a small storefront office on Hamilton Avenue. A while back when I’d been desperate for a job, I’d sort of blackmailed Vinnie into taking me on. The Trenton economy has since improved, and I’m not sure why I’m still working for Vinnie, except that the office is across from a bakery.

Sebring has offices downtown, and his operation makes Vinnie’s look like chump change. I’ve never met Sebring but I’ve heard stories. He’s supposed to be extremely professional. And he’s rumored to have legs second only to Tina Turner’s. I gave Mabel an awkward hug, told her I’d look into things for her, and I left. My mother and my grandmother were waiting for me. They were at my parents’ front door with the door cracked an inch, their noses pressed to the glass.

“Pssst,” my grandmother said. “Hurry up over here. We’re dying.”

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

Both women sucked in air. This went against the code of the Burg. In the Burg, blood was always thicker than water. Professional ethics didn’t count for much when held up to a juicy piece of gossip among family members.

“Okay,” I said, ducking inside. “I might as well tell you. You’ll find out anyway.” We rationalize a lot in the Burg, too. “When Evelyn got divorced she had to take out something called a child custody bond. Mabel put her house up as collateral. Now Evelyn and Annie are off somewhere, and Mabel is getting pressured by the bond company.”

“Oh my goodness,” my mother said. “I had no idea.”

“Mabel is worried about Evelyn and Annie. Evelyn sent her a note and said she and Annie were going away for a while, but Mabel hasn’t heard from them since.”

“If I was Mabel I’d be worried about her house,” Grandma said. “Sounds to me like she could be living in a cardboard box under the railroad bridge.”

“I told her I’d help her, but this isn’t really my thing. I’m not a private investigator.”

“Maybe you could get your friend Ranger to help her,” Grandma said. “That might be better anyway, on account of he’s hot. I wouldn’t mind having him hang around the neighborhood.”

Ranger is more associate than friend, although I guess friendship is mixed in there somehow, too. Plus a scary sexual attraction. A few months ago we made a deal that has haunted me. Another one of those jumping-off-the-garage-roof things, except this deal involved my bedroom. Ranger is Cuban-American with skin the color of a mocha latte, heavy on the mocha, and a body that can best be described as yum. He’s got a big-time stock portfolio, an endless, inexplicable supply of expensive black cars, and skills that make Rambo look like an amateur. I’m pretty sure he only kills bad guys, and I think he might be able to fly like Superman, although the flying part has never been confirmed. Ranger works in bond enforcement, among other things. And Ranger always gets his man.

My black Honda CR-V was parked curbside. Grandma walked me to the car. “Just let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” she said. “I always thought I’d make a good detective, on account of I’m so nosy.”

“Maybe you could ask around the neighborhood.”

“You bet. And I could go to Stiva’s tomorrow. Charlie Shleckner is laid out. I hear Stiva did a real good job on him.”

New York has Lincoln Center. Florida has Disney World. The Burg has Stiva’s Funeral Home. Not only is Stiva’s the premier entertainment facility for the Burg, it’s also the nerve center of the news network. If you can’t get the dirt on someone at Stiva’s, then there isn’t any dirt to get.

IT WAS STILL early when I left Mabel’s, so I drove past Evelyn’s house on Key Street. It was a two-family house very much like my parents‘. Small front yard, small front porch, small two-story house. No sign of life in Evelyn’s half. No car parked in front. No lights shining behind drawn drapes. According to Grandma Mazur, Evelyn had lived in the house when she’d been married to Steven Soder and had stayed there with Annie when Soder moved out. Eddie Abruzzi owns the property and rents out both units. Abruzzi owns several houses in the Burg and a couple large office buildings in downtown Trenton. I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard he’s not the world’s nicest guy. I parked and walked to Evelyn’s front porch. I rapped lightly on her door. No answer. I tried to peek in the front window, but the drapes were drawn tight. I walked around the side of the house and stood on tippy toes, looking in. No luck with the side windows in the front room and dining room, but my snoopiness paid off with the kitchen. No curtains drawn in the kitchen. There were two cereal bowls and two glasses on the counter next to the sink. Everything else seemed tidy. No sign of Evelyn or Annie. I returned to the front and knocked on the neighbor’s door.

The door opened, and Carol Nadich looked out at me.

“Stephanie!” she said. “How the hell are you?”

I went to school with Carol. She got a job at the button factory when we graduated and two months later married Lenny Nadich. Once in a while I run into her at Giovichinni’s Meat Market, but beyond that we’ve lost touch.

“I didn’t realize you were living here,” I said. “I was looking for Evelyn.”

Carol did an eye roll. “Everyone’s looking for Evelyn. And to tell you the truth, I hope no one finds her. Except for you, of course. Those other jerks I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

“What other jerks?”

“Her ex-husband and his friends. And the landlord, Abruzzi, and his goons.”

“You and Evelyn were close?”

“As close as anyone could get to Evelyn. We moved here two years ago, before the divorce. She’d spend all day popping pills and then drink herself into a stupor at night.”

“What kind of pills?”

“Prescription. For depression, I think. Understandable, since she was married to Soder. Do you know him?”

“Not well.” I met Steven Soder for the first time at Evelyn’s wedding nine years ago, and I took an instant dislike to him. In my brief dealings with him over the following years I found nothing to change my original bad impression.

“He’s a real manipulative bastard. And abusive,” Carol said.

“He’d hit her?”

“Not that I know. Just mental abuse. I could hear him yelling at her all the time. Telling her she was stupid. She was kind of heavy, and he used to call her ‘the cow.’ Then one day he moved out and moved in with some other woman. Joanne Something. Evelyn’s lucky day.”

“Do you think Evelyn and Annie are safe?”

“God, I hope so. Those two deserve a break.”

I looked over at Evelyn’s front door. “I don’t suppose you have a key?”

Carol shook her head. “Evelyn didn’t trust anyone. She was real paranoid. I don’t think her grandma even has a key. And she didn’t tell me where she was going, if that’s your next question. One day she just loaded a bunch of bags into her car and took off.”

I gave Carol my card and headed for home. I live in a three-story brick apartment building about ten minutes from the Burg… five, if I’m late for dinner and I hit the lights right. The building was constructed at a time when energy was cheap and architecture was inspired by economy. My bathroom is orange and brown, my refrigerator is avocado green, and my windows were born before Thermopane. Fine by me. The rent is reasonable, and the other tenants are okay. Mostly the building is inhabited by seniors on fixed incomes. The seniors are, for the most part, nice people…

as long as you don’t let them get behind the wheel of a car.

I parked in the lot and pushed through the double glass door that led to the small lobby. I was filled with chicken and potatoes and gravy and chocolate layer cake and Mabel’s coffee cake, so I bypassed the elevator and took the stairs as penance. All right, so I’m only one flight up, but it’s a start, right?

My hamster, Rex, was waiting for me when I opened the door to my apartment. Rex lives in a soup can in a glass aquarium in my kitchen. He stopped running on his wheel when I switched the light on and blinked out at me, whiskers whirring. I like to think it was welcome home but probably it was who put the damn light on? I gave him a raisin and a small piece of cheese. He stuffed the food into his cheeks and disappeared into his soup can. So much for roommate interaction.

In the past, Rex has sometimes shared his roommate status with a Trenton cop named Joe Morelli. Morelli’s two years older than I am, half a foot taller, and his gun is bigger than mine. Morelli started looking up my skirt when I was six, and he’s just never gotten out of the habit. We’ve had some differences of opinion lately, and Morelli’s toothbrush is not currently in my bathroom. Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder to get Morelli out of my heart and my mind than out of my bathroom. Nevertheless, I’m making an effort. I got a beer from the fridge and settled in front of the television. I flipped through the stations, hitting the high points, not finding much. I had the photo of Evelyn and Annie in front of me. They were standing together, looking happy. Annie had curly red hair and the pale skin of a natural redhead. Evelyn had her brown hair pulled back. Conservative makeup. She was smiling, but not enough to bring out the dimples. A mom and her kid… and I was supposed to find them.

**********************

CONNIE ROSOLLI HAD a doughnut in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other when I walked into the bail bonds office the next morning. She pushed the doughnut box across the top of her desk with her elbow and white powdered sugar sifted off her doughnut, down onto her boobs. “Have a doughnut,” she said. “You look like you need one.”

Connie is the office manager. She’s in charge of petty cash and she uses it wisely, buying doughnuts and file folders, and financing the occasional gaming trip to Atlantic City. It was a little after eight, and Connie was ready for the day, eyes lined, lashes mascara-ed, lips painted bright red, hair curled into a big bush around her face. I, on the other hand, was letting the day creep up on me. I had my hair pulled into a half-assed ponytail and was wearing my usual stretchy little T-shirt, jeans, and boots. Waving a mascara wand in the vicinity of my eye seemed like a dangerous maneuver this morning, so I was au naturel.

I took a doughnut and looked around. “Where’s Lula?”

“She’s late. She’s been late all week. Not that it matters.”

Lula was hired to do filing, but mostly she does what she wants.

“Hey, I heard that,” Lula said, swinging through the door. “You better not be talking about me. I’m late on account of I’m going to night school now.”

“You go one day a week,” Connie said.

“Yeah, but I gotta study. It’s not like this shit comes easy. It’s not like my former occupation as a ho helps me out, you know. I don’t think my final exam’s gonna be about hand jobs.”

Lula is a couple inches shorter and a lot of pounds heavier than me. She buys her clothes in the petite department and then shoehorns herself into them. This wouldn’t work for most people, but it seems right for Lula. Lula shoehorns herself into life.

“So what’s up?” Lula said. “I miss anything?”

I gave Connie the body receipt for Paulson. “Do you guys know anything about child custody bonds?”

“They’re relatively new,” Connie said. “Vinnie isn’t doing them yet. They’re high-risk bonds. Sebring is the only one in the area taking them on.”

“Sebring,” Lula said. “Isn’t he the guy with the good legs? I hear he’s got legs like Tina Turner.” She looked down at her own legs. “My legs are the right color but I just got more of them.”

“Sebring’s legs are white,” Connie said. “And I hear they’re good at running down blondes.”

I swallowed the last of my doughnut and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I need to talk to him.”

“You’ll be safe today,” Lula said. “Not only aren’t you blonde, but you aren’t exactly decked out. You have a hard night?”

“I’m not a morning person.”

“It’s your love life,” Lula said. “You aren’t getting any, and you got nothing to put a smile on your face. You’re letting yourself go, is what you’re doing.”

“I could get plenty if I wanted.”

“Well, then?”

“It’s complicated.”

Connie gave me a check for the Paulson capture. “You aren’t thinking about going to work for Sebring, are you?”

I told them about Evelyn and Annie.

“Maybe I should talk to Sebring with you,” Lula said. “Maybe we can get him to show us his legs.”

“Not necessary,” I said. “I can manage this myself.” And I didn’t especially want to see Les Sebring’s legs.

“Look here. I didn’t even put my bag down,” Lula said. “I’m ready to go.”

Lula and I stared at each other for a beat. I was going to lose. I could see it coming. Lula had it in her mind to go with me. Probably didn’t want to file. “Okay,” I said, “but no shooting, no shoving, no asking him to roll up his pants leg.”

“You got a lot of rules,” Lula said.

We took the CR-V across town and parked in a lot next to Sebring’s building. The bonds office was on the ground floor, and Sebring had a suite of offices above it.

“Just like Vinnie,” Lula said, eyeballing the carpeted floor and freshly painted walls.

“Only it looks like humans work here. And check out these chairs for people to sit in…

they don’t even have stains on them. And his receptionist don’t have a mustache, either.”

Sebring escorted us into his private office. “Stephanie Plum. I’ve heard of you,” he said.

“It wasn’t my fault that the funeral parlor burned down,” I told him. “And I almost never shoot people.”

“We heard of you, too,” Lula said to Sebring. “We heard you got great legs.”

Sebring was wearing a silver gray suit, white shirt, and red, white, and blue tie. He reeked of respectability, from the tips of his shined black shoes to the top of his perfectly trimmed white hair. And behind the polite politician smile he looked like he didn’t take a lot of shit. There was a moment of silence while he considered Lula. Then he hiked his pants leg up. “Get a load of these wheels,” he said.

“You must work out,” Lula said. “You got excellent legs.”

“I wanted to speak to you about Mabel Markowitz,” I said to Sebring. “You called her on a child custody bond.”

He nodded. “I remember. I have someone scheduled to visit her again today. So far, she hasn’t been helpful.”

“She lives next door to my parents, and I don’t think she knows where her granddaughter or her great-granddaughter have gone.”

“That’s too bad,” Sebring said. “Do you know about child custody bonds?”

“Not a lot.”

“PBUS, which as you know is a professional bail agents association, worked with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to get legislation going that would discourage parents from kidnapping their own kids.

“It’s a pretty simple idea. If it looks like there’s a good chance either or both parents will take off with the child for parts unknown, the court can impose a cash bond.”

“So this is like a criminal bail bond, but it’s a child who’s at risk,” I said.

“With one big difference,” Sebring said. “When a criminal bond is posted by a bail bondsman and the accused fails to appear in court, the bondsman forfeits the bond amount to the court. Then the bondsman can hunt down the accused, return him to the system, and hopefully be reimbursed by the court. In the case of a child custody bond, the bondsman forfeits the bond to the wronged parent. The money is then supposed to be used to find the missing child.”

“So if the bond isn’t enough of a deterrent to kidnapping, at least there’s money to hire a professional to search for the missing child,” I said.

“Exactly. Problem is, unlike a criminal bond, the child custody bondsman doesn’t have the legal right to hunt down the child. The only recourse the child custody bondsman has to recoup his loss is to foreclose on property or cash collateral posted at the time the bond is written.

“In this case, Evelyn Soder didn’t have the cash on hand for the bond. So she came to us and used her grandmother’s house as collateral for a surety bond. The hope is that when you call up the grandmother and tell her to start packing, she’ll divulge the location of the missing child.”

“Have you already released the money to Steven Soder?”

“The money gets released in three weeks.”

So I had three weeks to find Annie.

2

“THAT LES SEBRING seemed like a nice guy,” Lula said when we were back in my CR-V. “I bet he don’t even do it with barnyard animals.”

Lula was referring to the rumor that my cousin Vinnie had once been involved in a romantic relationship with a duck. The rumor’s never been officially confirmed or denied.

“Now what?” Lula asked. “What’s next on the list?”

It was a little after ten. Soder’s bar and grill, The Foxhole, should be opening for the lunch trade. “Next we visit Steven Soder,” I said. “Probably it’ll be a waste of time, but it seems like something we should do anyway.”

“No stone unturned,” Lula said.

Steven Soder’s bar wasn’t far from Sebring’s office. It was tucked between Carmine’s Cutrate Appliances and a tattoo parlor. The door to The Foxhole was open. The interior was dark and uninviting at this hour. Still, two souls had found their way in and were sitting at the polished wood bar.

“I’ve been here before,” Lula said. “It’s an okay place. The burgers aren’t bad. And if you get here early, before the grease goes rancid, the onion rings are good, too.”

We stepped inside and paused while our eyes adjusted. Soder was behind the bar. He looked up when we entered and nodded an acknowledgment. He was just under six foot. Chunky build. Reddish blond hair. Blue eyes. Ruddy complexion. Looked like he drank a lot of his own beer.

We bellied up to the bar, and he found his way over to us. “Stephanie Plum,” he said.

“Haven’t seen you in a while. What’ll it be?”

“Mabel is worried about Annie. I told her I’d ask around.”

“Worried about losing that wreck of a house is more like it.”

“She won’t lose the house. She has money to cover the bond.” Sometimes I fib just for practice. It’s my one really good bounty hunter skill.

“Too bad,” Soder said. “I’d like to see her sitting on the curb. That whole family is a car crash.”

“So you think Evelyn and Annie just took off?”

“I know they did. She left me a fucking letter. I went over there to pick the kid up and there was a letter for me on the kitchen counter.”

“What did the letter say?”

“It said she was taking off and next time I saw the kid would be never.”

“Guess she don’t like you, hunh?” Lula said.

“She’s nuts,” Soder said. “A drunk and a nut. She gets up in the morning and can’t figure out how to button her sweater. I hope you find the kid fast because Evelyn isn’t capable of taking care of her.”

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

He made a derisive grunt. “Not a clue. She didn’t have any friends, and she was dumb as a box of nails. So far as I can figure she didn’t have much money. They’re probably living out of the car somewhere in the Pine Barrens, eating from Dumpsters.”

Not a pretty thought.

I left my card on the bar. “In case you think of something helpful.”

He took the card and winked at me.

“Hey,” Lula said. “I don’t like that wink. You wink at her again, and I’ll rip your eye outta your head.”

“What’s with the fat chick?” Soder asked me. “The two of you going steady?”

“She’s my bodyguard,” I told him.

“I’m not no fat chick,” Lula said. “I’m a big woman. Big enough to kick your nasty white ass around this room.”

Soder locked eyes with her. “Something to look forward to.”

I dragged Lula out of the bar, and we stood blinking on the sidewalk in the sunlight.

“I didn’t like him,” Lula said.

“No kidding.”

“I didn’t like the way he kept calling his little girl the kid. And it wasn’t nice that he wanted an old lady kicked out of her house.”

I called Connie on my cell phone and asked her to get me Soder’s home address and car information.

“You think he got Annie in his cellar?” Lula asked.

“No, but it wouldn’t hurt to look.”

“What’s next?”

“Next we visit Soder’s divorce lawyer. There had to be some justification for setting the bond. I’d like to know the details.”

“You know Soder’s divorce lawyer?”

I got in the car and looked over at Lula. “Dickie Orr.”

Lula grinned. “Your ex? Every time we visit him he throws you out of the office. You think he’s going to talk to you about a client?”

I had had the shortest marriage in the history of the Burg. I’d barely finished unpacking my wedding presents when I caught the jerk on the dining room table with my archenemy, Joyce Barnhardt. Looking at it in retrospect I can’t imagine why I married Orr in the first place. I suppose I was in love with the idea of being in love. There are certain expectations of girls from the Burg. You grow up, you get married, you have children, you spread out some in the beam, and you learn how to set a buffet for forty. My dream was that I would get irradiated like Spiderman and be able to fly like Superman. My expectation had been that I’d marry. I did the best I could to live up to the expectation, but it didn’t work out. Guess I was stupid. Swayed by Dickie’s good looks and education. My head turned by the fact that he was a lawyer.

I didn’t see the flaws. The low opinion Dickie has of women. The way he can lie without remorse. I guess I shouldn’t fault him so much for that since I’m pretty good at lying myself. Still, I don’t lie about personal things… like love and fidelity.

“Maybe Dickie’s having a good day,” I said to Lula. “Maybe he’ll be feeling chatty.”

“Yeah, and it might help if you don’t leap across the desk and try to choke him like you did last time.”

Dickie’s office was on the other side of town. He’d left a large firm and gone off on his own. From what I could tell he was having some success. He was now located in a tworoom suite in the Carter Building. I’d been there, briefly, once before and had sort of lost control.

“I’ll be better this time,” I said to Lula.

Lula rolled her eyes and got into the CR-V.

I took State Street to Warren and turned onto Sommerset. I found a parking space directly across from Dickie’s building and took it as a sign.

“Unh-uh,” Lula said. “You just got good parking karma. It don’t count for interpersonal relationships. You read your horoscope today?”

I looked over at her. “No. Was it bad?”

“It said your moons weren’t in a good spot, and you need to be careful about making money decisions. And not only that, you’re going to have man trouble.”

“I always have man trouble.” I had two men in my life, and I didn’t know what to do with either of them. Ranger scared the bejeezus out of me, and Morelli had pretty much decided that unless I changed my ways I was more trouble than I was worth. I hadn’t heard from Morelli in weeks.

“Yeah, but this is going to be big trouble,” Lula said.

“You’re making that up.”

“Am not.”

“You are.”

“Well, okay, maybe I made some of it up, but not the part about the man trouble.”

I fed the meter a quarter and crossed the street. Lula and I entered the building and took the elevator to the third floor. Dickie’s office was at the end of the hall. The sign beside the door read Richard Orr, Attorney. I resisted the urge to write asshole below the sign. I was, after all, a woman scorned, and that carried certain responsibilities. Still, best to write asshole on the way out.

The reception area of Dickie’s office was tastefully done up in industrial chic. Blacks and grays and the occasional purple upholstered chair. If the Jetsons had hired Tim Burton to decorate, it would have turned out like this. Dickie’s secretary was seated behind a large mahogany desk. Caroline Sawyer. I recognized her from my last visit. She looked up when Lula and I entered. Her eyes widened in alarm, and she reached for the phone.

“If you come any closer I’m calling the police,” she said.

“I want to talk to Dickie.”

“He isn’t here.”

“I bet she’s fibbing,” Lula said. “I got a knack for knowing when people are fibbing.”

Lula shook her finger at Sawyer. “The Lord don’t like when people fib.”

“Honest to God, he isn’t here.”

“Now you’re blaspheming,” Lula said. “You’re in big trouble now.”

The door to Dickie’s inner office opened, and Dickie stuck his head out. “Oh shit,” he said, spotting Lula and me. He pulled his head back and slammed his door shut.

“I need to talk to you,” I yelled.

“No. Go away. Caroline, call the police.”

Lula leaned on Caroline’s desk. “You call the police and I’ll break one of your fingernails. You’ll need a new manicure.”

Caroline looked down at her nails. “I just got them done yesterday.”

“They did a good job,” Lula said. “Where’d you go?”

“Kim’s Nails on Second Street.”

“They’re the best. I go there, too,” Lula said. “I got mine detailed this time. See, I got little-bitty stars painted on them.”

Caroline looked over at Lula’s nails. “Awesome,” she said.

I scooted around Sawyer and knocked on Dickie’s door. “Open up. I promise I won’t try to choke you. I need to talk to you about Annie Soder. She’s missing.”

The door opened a crack. “What do you mean… missing?”

“Evelyn apparently took off with her, and Les Sebring is enforcing the child custody bond.”

The door opened all the way. “I was afraid this would happen.”

“I’m trying to help find Annie. I was hoping you could give me some background information.”

“I don’t know how helpful I can be. I was Soder’s attorney. Evelyn was represented by Albert Kloughn. There was so much acrimony during the divorce process, and so many threats were made on both sides, that the judge imposed the bonds.”

“Soder had to post a bond, too?”

“Yes, although Soder’s was relatively meaningless. Soder owns a local business and isn’t likely to flee. Evelyn, on the other hand, had nothing holding her here.”

“What do you think of Soder?”

“He was a decent client. Paid his bill on time. Got a little hot under the collar in court. There’s no love lost between him and Evelyn.”

“Do you think he’s a good father?”

Dickie did a palms-up. “Don’t know.”

“What about Evelyn?”

“She never looked like she was totally with the program. A real space cadet. Probably in the kid’s best interest to get found. Evelyn might misplace her and not realize it for days.”

“Anything else?” I asked him.

“No, but it doesn’t seem right that you haven’t gone for my throat,” Dickie said.

“Disappointed?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I bought pepper spray.”

It would have been funny if it had been casual banter, but I suspected Dickie was serious.

“Maybe next time.”

“You know where to find me.”

Lula and I sashayed out of the office, down the hall, and into the elevator.

“That wasn’t as much fun as last time,” Lula said. “You didn’t even threaten him. You didn’t chase him around the desk, or anything.”

“I don’t think I hate him as much as I used to.”

“Bummer.”

We crossed the street and stared at my car. It had a parking ticket on the window.

“See this,” Lula said. “It’s your moons. You made a bad money decision when you picked this busted meter.”

I stuffed the ticket into my bag and wrenched the door open.

“You better watch out,” Lula said. “The man trouble’s gonna come next.”

I called Connie and asked for an address for Albert Kloughn. In minutes I had Kloughn’s business address and Soder’s home address. Both were in Hamilton Township. We drove past Soder’s home first. He lived in a complex of garden apartments. The buildings were two-story brick, decked out to be colonial style with white window shutters and white columns at the front doors. Soder’s apartment was on the ground floor.

“Guess he hasn’t got the little girl in his cellar,” Lula said. “Since he hasn’t got a cellar.”

We sat and watched the apartment for a few minutes, but nothing happened, so we moved on to Kloughn.

Albert Kloughn had a two-room office, next to a Laundromat, in a strip mall. There was a desk for a secretary but no secretary was in residence. Instead, Kloughn was at the desk, typing at the computer. He was my height and looked like he was approaching puberty. He had sandy-colored hair, a face like a cherub, and the body of the Pillsbury Doughboy. He looked up and smiled tentatively when we entered. Probably thought we were scrounging quarters to do our laundry. I could feel my feet vibrating from the drums tumbling next door, and there was a distant rumble from the large commercial washers.

“Albert Kloughn?” I asked.

He was wearing a white shirt, red-and-green striped tie, and khakis. He stood and selfconsciously smoothed out his tie. “I’m Albert Kloughn,” he said.

“Well, this is a big disappointment,” Lula said. “Where’s the red nose that goes beep beep?

And where’re your big clown feet?”

“I’m not that kind of clown. Yeesh. Everybody says that. Ever since kindergarten I’ve been hearing that. It’s spelled ‘K-1-o-u-g-h-n.’ Kloughn!”

“Could be worse,” Lula said. “You could be Albert Fuch.”

I gave Kloughn my card. “I’m Stephanie Plum and this is my associate, Lula. I understand you represented Evelyn Soder in her divorce case.”

“Wow,” he said, “are you really a bounty hunter?”

“Bond enforcement,” I told him.

“Yeah, that’s a bounty hunter, right?”

“About Evelyn Soder…”

“Sure. What do you want to know? Is she in trouble?”

“Evelyn and Annie are missing. And it looks like Evelyn took Annie away so she wouldn’t have to visit her father. She left a couple notes.”

“She must have had a good reason to leave,” Kloughn said. “She really didn’t want to jeopardize her grandmother’s house. She just didn’t have any choice. She had no place to turn for the bond money.”

“Any ideas where Evelyn and Annie might have gone?”

Kloughn shook his head. “No. Evelyn didn’t talk much. From what I could tell, her entire family lived in the Burg. I don’t want to be mean or anything, but she didn’t impress me as being real bright. I’m not even sure she could drive. She always had someone bring her to the office.”

“Where’s your secretary?” Lula asked him.

“I don’t have a secretary right now. I used to have someone who came in part-time, but she said the lint blowing around from the dryers bothered her sinuses. Probably I should put an ad in the paper, but I’m not real organized. I only opened this office a couple months ago. Evelyn was one of my first clients. That’s why I remember her.”

Probably Evelyn was his only client. “Did she pay her bill?”

“She’s paying it off monthly.”

“If she mails in a check, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know where it was postmarked.”

“I was just gonna suggest that,” Lula said. “I thought of that, too.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Kloughn said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

A woman rapped on Kloughn’s open door and stuck her head in. “The dryer at the far end don’t work. It took all my quarters, and now it’s just doing nothing. And on top of that, I can’t get the door open.”

“Hey,” Lula said, “do we look like we care? This man’s an attorney-at-law. He don’t give a rat’s ass about your quarters.”

“This happens all the time,” Kloughn said. He pulled a form from his top desk drawer.

“Here,” he said to the woman. “Fill this out and the management will refund your money.”

“They gonna comp your rent for that?” Lula asked Kloughn.

“No. They’ll probably evict me.” He looked around the room. “This is my third office in six months. I had an accidental wastebasket fire in my first office that sort of spread throughout the building. And the office after that got condemned when there was a toilet incident above it and the roof caved in.”

“Public restroom?” Lula asked.

“Yes. But I swear it wasn’t me. I’m almost positive.”

Lula looked at her watch. “It’s my lunchtime.”

“Hey, how about if I go to lunch with you guys,” Kloughn said. “I have some ideas on this case. We could talk about it over lunch.”

Lula cut her eyes to him. “Haven’t got anybody to eat lunch with, hunh?”

“Sure, I’ve got lots of people to eat lunch with. Everybody wants to eat lunch with me. I didn’t make any plans for today, though.”

“You’re an accident waiting to happen,” Lula said. “We eat lunch with you we’ll probably get food poisoning.”

“If you were really sick I could get you some money,” he said. “And if you died it would be big money.”

“We’re only getting fast food,” I said.

His eyes lit up. “I love fast food. It’s always the same. You can count on it. No surprises.”

“And it’s cheap,” Lula said.

“Exactly!”

He put a small out to lunch sign in his office window and locked the door behind himself. He climbed into the backseat of the CR-V and leaned forward.

“What are you, part golden retriever?” Lula asked. “You’re breathing on me. Sit back in your seat. Put your seat belt on. And if you start drooling, you’re outta here.”

“Boy, this is fun,” he said. “What are we going to eat? Fried chicken? Fish sandwich?

Cheeseburger?”

Ten minutes later, we pulled out of the McDonald’s drive-thru, loaded with burgers and shakes and fries.

“Okay, here’s what I think,” Kloughn said. “I think Evelyn isn’t far away. She’s nice but she’s a mouse, right? I mean, where’s she gonna go? How do we know she’s not at her grandma’s?”

“Her grandmother is the one who hired me! She’s going to lose her house.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

Lula looked at him in the rearview mirror. “What’d you do, go to one of them offshore law schools?”

“Very funny.” He did another tie-smoothing thing. “It was a correspondence course.”

“Is that legal?”

“Sure, you take tests and everything.”

I pulled into the Laundromat parking lot and stopped. “Here we are, back from lunch,” I said.

“Already? But it’s too short. I didn’t even finish my fries,” he said. “And after that I have a pie to eat.”

“Sorry. We have work to do.”

“Yeah? What kind of work? Are you going out after someone dangerous? I bet I could help.”

“Don’t you have lawyer things to do?”

“It’s my lunch hour.”

“You wouldn’t want to tag along,” I said. “We’re not doing anything interesting. I was going back to Evelyn’s house and maybe talk to some of her neighbors.”

“I’m good at talking to people,” he said. “That was one of my best courses… talking to people.”

“Don’t seem right to kick him out before he eats his pie,” Lula said. She looked over the seatback at him. “You gonna eat that whole thing?”

“Alright, he can stay,” I said. “But no talking to people. He has to stay in the car.”

“Like I’m the wheel guy, right?” he said. “In case you have to make a fast getaway.”

“No. There will be no fast getaways. And you’re not the wheel guy. You don’t drive. I drive.”

“Sure. I know that,” he said.

I rolled out of the lot, found Hamilton Avenue, and took it to the Burg, left-turning at St. Francis Hospital. I wound my way through the maze of streets and came to an idle in front of Evelyn’s house. The neighborhood was quiet at midday. No kids on bikes. No porch sitters. No traffic to speak of.

I wanted to talk to Evelyn’s neighbors, but I didn’t want to do it with Lula and Kloughn tagging along. Lula scared the hell out of people. And Kloughn made us look like religious missionaries. I parked the car at the curb, Lula and I got out, and I pocketed the key. “Let’s just take a look around,” I said to Lula.

She cut her eyes to Kloughn, sitting in the backseat. “You think we should crack a window for him? Isn’t there a law about that sort of thing?”

“I think the law applies to dogs.”

“Seems like he fits in there, somehow,” Lula said. “Actually, he’s kind of cute, in a white bread kind of way.”

I didn’t want to go back to the car and open the door. I was afraid Kloughn would bound out. “He’ll be okay,” I said. “We won’t be that long.”

We walked to the porch, and I rang the bell. No answer. Still couldn’t see in the front window.

Lula put her ear to the door. “I don’t hear anything going on in there,” she said. We walked around the house and looked in the kitchen window. The same two cereal bowls and glasses were on the counter next to the sink.

“We need to look around inside,” Lula said. “I bet the house is lousy with clues.”

“No one has a key.”

Lula tried the window. “Locked.” She gave the door the once-over. “Of course, we’re bounty hunters and if we think there’s some bad guy in there we have the right to bust the door apart.”

I’ve been known to bend the law a little from time to time, but this was a multiple fracture. “I don’t want to ruin Evelyn’s door,” I said.

I saw Lula eye the window.

“And I don’t want to break her window. We’re not acting as bond enforcement here, and we have no ground for forced entry.”

“Yeah, but if the window broke by accident it would be neighborly of us to investigate it. Like, maybe we could fix it from the inside.” Lula swung her big black leather shoulder bag in an arc and smashed the window. “Oops,” she said.

I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the door. I took a deep breath and told myself to stay calm. Sure, I’d like to yell at Lula and maybe choke her, but what would that accomplish? “You’re going to pay to have that window fixed,” I told her.

“The hell I am. This here’s a rental. They got insurance on stuff like this.” She knocked out a few remaining pieces of glass, stuck her arm through the open window, and unlocked the door.

I pulled some disposable rubber gloves out of my bag and we snapped them on. No point leaving prints all over since this was sort of an illegal entry. With the kind of luck I had, someone would come in and burgle the place and the police would find my prints. Lula and I slipped into the kitchen and closed the door behind us. It was a small kitchen, and with Lula next to me we were wall-to-wall people.

“Maybe you should do lookout in the front room,” I said. “Make sure no one walks in on us.”

“Lookout is my middle name,” Lula said. “No one will get by me.”

I started with the countertop, going through the usual kitchen clutter. There were no messages written on the pad by the phone. I rifled through a pile of junk mail. Aside from some nice towels on sale in the Martha Stewart line, there wasn’t anything of interest. A drawing of a house done in red and green crayon was taped to the refrigerator. Annie’s, I thought. The dishes were neatly stacked in over-the-counter cupboards. Glasses were spotless and lined by threes on the shelves. The refrigerator was filled with condiments but empty of food that might spoil. No milk or orange juice. No fresh vegetables or fruit.

I drew some conclusions from the kitchen. Evelyn’s cupboard was better stocked than mine. She left quickly but still took the time to get rid of the milk. If she was a drunk or on drugs or loony tunes, she was a responsible drunk or druggie or loony. I didn’t find anything of help in the kitchen, so I moved on to the dining room and living room. I opened drawers and checked under cushions.

“You know where I’d go if I had to hide out?” Lula said. “I’d go to Disney World. Have you ever been to Disney World? I’d especially go there if I had a problem, because everybody’s happy at Disney World.”

“I’ve been to Disney World seven times,” Kloughn said.

Lula and I both jumped at his voice.

“Hey,” Lula said, “you’re supposed to be in the car.”

“I got tired of waiting.”

I gave Lula the evil eye.

“I was watching,” Lula said. “I don’t know how he got past me.” She turned to Kloughn.

“How’d you get in here?”

“The back door was open. And the window was broken. You didn’t break the window, did you? You could get into big trouble for something like that. That’s breaking and entering.”

“We found the window like that,” Lula said. “That’s how come we’re wearing gloves. We don’t want to screw up the evidence if anything’s been stolen.”

“Good thinking,” Kloughn said, his eyes getting bright, his voice up an octave. “Do you really think stuff has been stolen? You think anybody got roughed up?”

Lula looked at him like she’d never seen anybody that dumb before.

“I’m checking upstairs,” I said. “You two stay down here and don’t touch anything.”

“What are you looking for upstairs?” Kloughn wanted to know, following me up the stairs. “I bet you’re looking for clues that’ll lead you to Evelyn and Annie. You know where I’d look? I’d look—”

I whirled around, almost knocking him off his feet. “Down,” I said, pointing stiff-armed, shouting at him nose to nose. “Go sit on the couch and don’t get up until I tell you.”

“Yeesh,” he said. “You don’t have to yell at me. Just tell me, okay? Boy, it must be one of those days for you, hunh?”

I narrowed my eyes. “One of what days?”

“You know.”

“It is not one of those days,” I said.

“Yeah, she’s like this on a good day,” Lula said. “You don’t want to know what she’s like on one of those days.”

I left Lula and Kloughn downstairs, and I poked through the bedrooms on my own. There were still clothes hanging in the closets and folded in dresser drawers. Evelyn must have only taken essentials. Either her disappearance was temporary or else she was in a rush to leave. Maybe both.

As far as I could tell there was no sign of Steven. Evelyn had sanitized the house of him. There were no leftover men’s toiletries in the bathroom, no forgotten men’s belts lurking in the closet, no family photo in a silver frame. I’d done a similar house cleaning when I’d divorced Dickie. Still, for months after our breakup I’d get bushwhacked by an overlooked item… a man’s sock that had dropped behind the washing machine, a set of car keys that had gotten kicked under the couch and been given up for lost. The medicine chest contained the usual… a bottle of Tylenol, a bottle of kids’ cough syrup, dental floss, nail scissors, mouthwash, box of Band-Aids, talcum powder. No uppers or downers. No hallucinogens. No happy pills. Also, conspicuously missing was anything alcoholic. No wine or gin stashed in kitchen cupboards. No beer in the fridge. Could be Carol was mistaken about the booze and pills. Or could be Evelyn took it all with her.

Kloughn popped his head around the bathroom doorjamb. “You don’t mind if I look, too, do you?”

“Yes! I mind. I told you to stay on the couch. And what’s Lula doing? She was supposed to keep her eye on you.”

“Lula’s doing watch out. That doesn’t take two people, so I decided to help you search. Did you already look in Annie’s room? I just looked in there, and I didn’t find any clues, but her drawings were real scary. Did you look at her drawings? I’m telling you, that’s a messed-up kid. It’s television. All that violence.”

“The only picture I saw was of a red-and-green house.”

“Did the red look like blood?”

“No. It looked like windows.”

“Uh-oh,” Lula said from the front room.

Damn. I hate uh-oh. “What?” I yelled down at her.

“There’s a car pulled up behind your CR-V.”

I peeked out Evelyn’s bedroom window. It was a black Lincoln Towncar. Two guys got out and started walking toward Evelyn’s front door. I grabbed Kloughn’s hand and pulled him down the stairs after me. Don’t panic, I thought. The door’s locked. And they can’t see in. I made a sign for everyone to be quiet, and we all stood still as statues, barely breathing, while one of the men rapped on the door.

“Nobody home,” he said.

I carefully exhaled. They’d leave now, right? Wrong. There was the sound of a key being inserted in the lock. The lock clicked, and the door swung open.

Lula and Kloughn lined up behind me. The two men stood their ground on the front porch.

“Yes?” I asked, trying to look like I belonged to the house.

The men were late forties, early fifties. Medium height. Built solid. Dressed in business suits. Both Caucasian. Didn’t look especially happy to see the Three Stooges in Evelyn’s house.

“We’re looking for Evelyn,” one of the men said.

“Not here,” I told him. “And you would be?”

“Eddie Abruzzi. And this is my associate, Melvin Darrow.”

3

OH BOY. EDDIE Abruzzi. Talk about a day going into the toilet.

“It’s been brought to my attention that Evelyn moved out,” Abruzzi said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where she is, would you?”

“No,” I said. “But as you can see, she hasn’t moved out.”

Abruzzi looked around. “Her furniture’s here. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t moved out.”

“Well, technically…” Kloughn said.

Abruzzi squinted at Kloughn. “Who are you?”

“I’m Albert Kloughn. I’m Evelyn’s lawyer.”

This got a smile out of Abruzzi. “Evelyn hired a clown for a lawyer. Perfect.”

“K-1-o-u-g-h-n,” Albert Kloughn said.

“And I’m Stephanie Plum,” I said.

“I know who you are,” Abruzzi said. His voice was eerily quiet, and his pupils were shrunk to the size of pinpricks. “You killed Benito Ramirez.”

Benito Ramirez was a heavyweight boxer who tried to kill me on several occasions and finally was shot on my fire escape, poised to break through my window. He was criminally insane and flat-out evil, taking pleasure and finding strength through other people’s pain.

“I owned Ramirez,” Abruzzi said. “I had a lot of time and money invested in him. And I understood him. We enjoyed many of the same pursuits.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“You didn’t pull the trigger… but you killed him all the same.” He turned his attention to Lula. “I know who you are, too. You’re one of Benito’s whores. How did it feel to spend time with Benito? Did you enjoy it? Did you feel privileged? Did you learn anything?”

“I don’t feel so good,” Lula said. And she fainted dead away, crashing into Kloughn, taking him down with her.

Lula had been brutalized by Ramirez. He’d tortured her and left her for dead. But Lula hadn’t died. Turns out, it’s not so easy to kill Lula.

Unlike Kloughn, who looked like he might be ready to cash in his chips any minute. Kloughn was squashed under Lula with only his feet showing, doing a good imitation of the Wicked Witch of the East when Dorothy’s house fell on her. He made a sound that was half squeak, half death rattle. “Help,” he whispered. “I can’t breathe.”

Darrow grabbed one of Lula’s legs and I grabbed an arm, and we rolled Lula off Kloughn.

Kloughn lay there for a moment, eyes glazed, breath shallow. “Does anything look broken?” he asked. “Did I mess myself?”

“What are you doing here?” Abruzzi asked. “And how did you get in?”

“We came to visit Evelyn,” I said. “The back door was open.”

“You and your fat whore friend always wear rubber gloves?”

Lula opened an eye. “Who you calling fat?” She opened the other eye. “What happened?

What am I doing on the floor?”

“You fainted,” I told her.

“That’s a lie,” she said, getting to her feet. “I don’t faint. I never fainted once in my life.”

She looked over at Kloughn, who was still on his back. “What’s with him?”

“You landed on him.”

“Squashed me like a bug,” Kloughn said, struggling to stand. “I’m lucky I’m alive.”

Abruzzi considered us all for a moment. “This is my property,” he said. “Don’t break in again. I don’t care if you’re friends of the family or lawyers, or murdering bitches. Got that?”

I pressed my lips tight together and said nothing.

Lula shifted her weight foot to foot. “Hunh,” she said.

And Kloughn vigorously nodded his head. “Yessir,” he said, “we understand. No problemo. We only came in this time on account of—”

Lula gave him a kick in the back of his calf.

“Yow! ” Kloughn said, bending at the waist, grabbing his leg.

“Get out of this house,” Abruzzi said to me. “And don’t return.”

“I’ve been employed by Evelyn’s family to look after her interests. That includes stopping by here from time to time.”

“You’re not listening,” Abruzzi said. “I’m telling you to stay out. Stay out of this house and stay out of Evelyn’s affairs.”

Bells and whistles were going off in my head. Why did Abruzzi care about Evelyn and her house? He was her landlord. My understanding of his business was that this wasn’t even an important piece of real estate to him.

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll make your life very unpleasant. I know how to make women uncomfortable. Benito and I had that in common. We knew how to make women pay attention. Tell me,”

Abruzzi said, “what were Benito’s last moments like? Was he in pain? Was he afraid? Did he know he was going to die?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He was on the other side of the glass. I don’t know what he was feeling.” Aside from insane rage.

Abruzzi stared at me for a moment. “Fate is a funny thing, isn’t it? Here you are back in my life. And you’re, once again, on the wrong side. It will be interesting to see how this campaign unfolds.”

“Campaign?”

“I’m a student of military history. And, this is to some extent a war.” He made a small hand gesture. “Maybe not a war. More of a skirmish, I think. Whatever we call it, it’s a contest, of sorts. Because I’m feeling generous today, I’ll give you an option. You can walk away from Evelyn and this house, and I’ll let you go. You’ll have bought amnesty. If you continue to participate, I’ll consider you to be enemy troops. And the war game will begin.”

Oh boy. This guy is a total fruitcake. I held my hand up in a stop gesture. “I’m not playing war games. I’m just a friend of the family, checking on things for Evelyn. We’re going now. And I think you should do the same.” And I think you should take a pill. A big pill.

I ushered Lula and Kloughn past Abruzzi and Darrow and through the door. I hustled them into the car, and we took off.

“Holy crap,” Lula said. “What was that? I’m totally creeped out. Eddie Abruzzi has eyes like Ramirez. And Ramirez had no soul. I thought I put all that behind me, but I looked into those eyes just now and everything went black. It was like being with Ramirez all over again. I’m telling you, I’m freaked. I got the sweats. I’m hyperventilating is what I’m doing. I need a burger. No, wait a minute, I just had a burger. I need something else. I need… I need… I need to go shopping. I need shoes.”

Kloughn’s eyes brightened. “So Ramirez and Abruzzi are bad guys, right? And Ramirez is dead, right? What was he, a professional killer?”

“He was a professional boxer.”

“Holy cow. That Ramirez. I remember reading about him in the paper. Holy cow, you’re the one who killed Benito Ramirez.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “He was on my fire escape, trying to break in, and someone else shot him.”

“Yeah, she almost never shoots anyone,” Lula said. “And I don’t care anyway. I’m getting out of here. I need mall air. I could breathe better if I had mall air.”

I took Kloughn back to the Laundromat and dropped Lula at the office. Lula roared off in her red Trans Am, and I went in to visit with Connie.

“You know that guy you picked up yesterday,” Connie said to me, “Martin Paulson?

He’s back on the street. There was something wrong with his original arrest, and the case has been dismissed.”

“He should be locked up just for living.”

“Apparently, when he was released his first words as a freed man were some unflattering references to you.”

“Great.” I slouched onto the couch. “Did you know Eddie Abruzzi owned Benito Ramirez? We ran into him at Evelyn’s house. And speaking of Evelyn’s house, she has a broken window that we need to repair. It’s in the back.”

“It was a kid with a baseball, right?” Connie said. “And after you saw him break the window, he ran away, and you don’t know who he is. Wait, even better, you never saw him. You got there and the window was broken.”

“On the nose. So, what do you know about Abruzzi?”

Connie punched the name into her computer. In less than a minute, information started coming in. Home address, previous address, work history, wives, children, arrest history. She printed it out and handed it over to me. “We can find out his toothpaste brand and the size of his right nut, but it’ll take a little longer.”

“Tempting, but I don’t think I need to know his nut size just yet.”

“I bet they’re big.”

I clapped my hands over my ears. “I’m not listening!” I looked sideways at Connie.

“What else do you know about him?”

“I don’t know much. Just that he owns a bunch of real estate in the Burg and downtown. I’ve heard he’s not a nice guy, but I don’t know any details. A while back he was arrested on a minor racketeering charge. The charge was dropped due to lack of live witnesses. Why do you want to know about Abruzzi?” Connie asked.

“Morbid curiosity.”

“I got two skips in today. Laura Minello got picked up for shoplifting a couple weeks ago and was a no-show for her court appearance yesterday.”

“What did she shoplift?”

“A brand-new BMW. Red. Took it right off the lot in broad daylight.”

“Test drive?”

“Yeah, only she didn’t tell anyone she was taking it, and she tested it for four days before they caught her.”

“You’ve got to respect a woman with that kind of initiative.”

Connie passed me two files. “The second failure to appear is Andy Bender. ”He’s a repeat for domestic violence. I think you might have picked him up on a previous charge. He’s probably home, drunk as a skunk, without a clue if it’s Monday or Friday.“

I flipped through Bender’s file. Connie was right. I’d tangled with him before. He was a scrawny wasteoid of a man. And he was a nasty drunk.

“This is the guy who came after me with a chain saw,” I said.

“Yes, but look on the bright side,” Connie said. “He didn’t have a gun.”

I tucked the two files into my bag. “Maybe you could run Evelyn Soder through the computer and see if you could pull out her innermost secrets.”

“Innermost secrets is a forty-eight-hour search.”

“Put it on my tab. I have to take off. I need to talk to the Wizard.”

“The Wizard hasn’t been answering his page,” Connie said. “Tell him to call me.”

The Wizard is Ranger. He’s the Wizard because he’s magic. He mysteriously passes through locked doors. He seems to read minds. He’s able to refuse dessert. And he can give me a hot flash with the touch of a fingertip. I had mixed feelings about calling him. We were currently in a strange place, filled with double entendre and unresolved sexual tension. But we were also partners, of sorts, and he had contacts I’d never have. The Annie search would go much faster if I brought Ranger in.

I got into my car and dialed Ranger on my cell phone. I left a message on his machine and read through Bender’s file. Didn’t sound like much new had happened since I last saw Andy Bender. He was still unemployed. He was still beating on his wife. And he still lived in the projects on the other side of town. It wasn’t going to be hard to find Bender. The hard part was going to be wrestling him into the CR-V.

Hey, I thought, no sense being negative right from the start. Look on the bright side, right? Be a cup-is-half-full person. Maybe Mr. Bender will be sorry he missed his court date. Maybe he’ll be happy to see me. Maybe he won’t have any gas in his chain saw. I put the car in gear and headed across town. It was a pleasant afternoon, and the projects looked habitable. There was a hopefulness to the dirt front yards that suggested perhaps this year some grass might grow. Perhaps the junkers at the curb would stop leaking oil. Perhaps a Lotto ticket would pay out big. But then again, perhaps not. I parked in front of Bender’s unit and watched for a while. For lack of a better word, this part of the complex would be described as garden apartments. Bender lived on the ground floor. He had a battered wife and, thankfully, no kids.

An open-air bazaar, of sorts, was operating a short distance away. The bazaar consisted of two cars, an old Caddy and a new Oldsmobile. The owners had parked the cars at the curb and were selling handbags, T-shirts, DVDs, and God knows what else from their trunks. A few people milled around the cars.

I rooted around in my bag and found a purse-size cylinder of pepper spray. I shook it to make sure it was active and stuffed it into my pants pocket for easy access. I took a pair of cuffs out of the glove compartment and slipped them into the back of my jeans, under the waistband. Okay, now I was all dressed up like a bounty hunter. I walked to Bender’s door, took a deep breath, and knocked.

The door opened and Bender looked out at me. “What?”

“Andy Bender?”

He leaned forward and squinted. “Do I know you?”

Get right to it, I thought, reaching behind my back for the cuffs. Move fast and catch him by surprise. “Stephanie Plum,” I said, whipping the cuffs out, clapping one on his left wrist. “Bond enforcement. We need to go to the station and reschedule your court date.” I put my hand to his shoulder and spun him around, so I could cuff his right wrist.

“Hey, hold on here,” he said, jerking away. “What the hell is this? I’m not going nowhere.”

He took a swing at me, lost his balance, and listed sideways, knocking into an end table. A lamp and an ashtray crashed to the floor. Bender looked at them, dumbfounded. “You broke my lamp,” he said. His face got red and his eyes narrowed. “I don’t like that you broke my lamp.”

“I didn’t break your lamp!”

“I said you broke it. You hard of hearing?” He picked the lamp up from the floor and threw it at me. I sidestepped, and the lamp sailed past me and hit the wall. I rammed my hand into my pocket, but Bender tackled me before I could grab hold of the spray. He was a couple inches taller than me, thin and wiry. He wasn’t especially strong, but he was mean as a snake. And he was motivated by hate and beer. We scrabbled around on the floor for a while, kicking and scratching. He was trying to do damage, and I was trying to get clear, and neither of us was having much luck. The room was a mess of clutter with stacks of newspapers, dirty dishes, and empty beer cans. We were bumping into tables and chairs, dumping the dishes and cans on the floor, then rolling over it all. A floor lamp went down, followed by a pizza box. I managed to slither from his grasp and get to my feet. He lunged after me and came up with a ten-inch chef’s knife. I suppose it had been buried in the garbage heap in his living room. I yelped and bolted. No time for the pepper spray.

He was surprisingly fast, considering he was shit-faced drunk. I ran flat-out, up the street. And he ran close at my heels. I skidded to a stop when I got to the boosted goods market, putting the Cadillac between me and Bender while I caught my breath. One of the vendors approached me. “I got some nice T-shirts,” he said. “Exactly like what you’d see at the Gap. Got them in all sizes.”

“Not interested,” I said.

“Selling them for a good price.”

Bender and I were doing a dance around the car. He’d move, then I’d move, then he’d move, then I’d move. Meanwhile, I was trying to get the pepper spray out of my pocket. Trouble was, my pants were tight, the spray was shoved to the bottom of my pocket, and my hands were sweating and shaking.

There was a guy sitting on the Oldsmobile’s hood. “Andy,” he called, “why’re you going after this girl with a knife?”

“She ruined my lunch. I was just sitting down to eat my pizza, and she came and ruined it all.”

“I can see that,” the guy on the Oldsmobile said. “She got pizza all over her. Looks like she rolled in it.”

There was a second guy sitting on the Olds. “Kinky,” he said.

“How about one of you guys giving me a hand here,” I said. “Get him to drop the knife. Call the police. Do something!”

“Hey, Andy,” one of the men said, “she wants you to drop the knife.”

“I’m gonna gut her like a fish,” Bender said. “I’m gonna filet her like a trout. No bitch just walks in and ruins my lunch.”

The two guys on the Olds were smiling. “Andy needs some anger management courses,”

one of them said.

The T-shirt salesman was next to me. “Yeah, and he don’t know much about fishing, either. That ain’t no filet knife.”

I finally pried the pepper spray loose from my pocket. I shook it and aimed it at Bender. The three men mobilized into action, slamming the trunks shut, putting some distance between us.

“Hey, you want to watch which way the wind is blowing,” one of them said. “I don’t need my sinuses cleaned. And I don’t want my merchandise ruined, either. I’m a businessman, you see what I’m saying? We got inventory here.”

“That stuff doesn’t scare me,” Bender said, inching his way around the Caddy, waving the knife at me. “I love it. Bring it on. I’ve had so much pepper spray I got an addiction.”

“What you got on your wrist?” one of the men asked Bender. “Looks like you got a bracelet on. You and the old lady doing S and M shit now?”

“Those are my cuffs,” I said. “He’s in violation of his bail bond agreement.”

“Hey, I know you,” one of the men said. “I remember seeing your picture in the paper. You burned down a funeral home and set your eyebrows on fire.”

“It wasn’t my fault!”

They were all smiling again. “Didn’t Andy go after you with a chain saw last year? And all you got now is this puny girlie-size pepper spray? Where’s your gun? You’re probably the only one in the whole project not got a gun.”

“Gimme the keys,” Bender said to the T-shirt guy. “I’m getting out of here. This is turning into a real downer.”

“I’m not done selling.”

“Sell some other time.”

“Shit,” the guy said, and flipped him the keys.

Bender got into the Cadillac and roared away.

“What was that?” I asked. “Why did you give him the keys?”

The T-shirt guy shrugged. “It’s his car.”

“He doesn’t have a car listed on his bond agreement,” I said.

“Guess of Andy don’t tell everything. Anyways, it’s a recent acquisition.”

Recent acquisition. Probably stole it last night along with the T-shirts.

“You sure you don’t want a T-shirt? We got more in the Oldsmobile,” the guy said. He opened the trunk and took a couple shirts out. “Look at this. This here’s the V-neck model. Even got some spandex in it. You’d look fine in this shirt. Show off your boobies.”

“How much?” I asked.

“How much you got?”

I shoved my hand back into my pocket and pulled out two dollars.

“This here’s your lucky day,” the guy said, “on account of this shirt is on sale for two bucks.”

I gave him the two dollars, took the shirt, and trudged back to my CR-V. There was a sleek black car parked just in front of mine. A man leaned against the car, watching me, smiling. Ranger. His black hair was pulled back from his face, tied into a ponytail. He was dressed in black cargo pants, black Bates boots, and a black T-shirt that stretched taut over muscles he’d acquired when he was in Special Forces.

“Looks like you’ve been shopping,” he said.

I tossed the shirt into the CR-V. “I need some help.”

“Again?”

A while ago I’d asked Ranger to help me capture a guy named Eddie DeChooch. DeChooch had been accused of trafficking contraband cigarettes and had been causing all kinds of problems for me. Ranger, being of mercenary mentality, had quoted his price for assistance as a night of his choosing, spent together. The whole night. And he got to pick the night’s activities. Not exactly a hardship, since I’m attracted to Ranger in a moth-to-the-flame sort of way. Still, the idea was scary. I mean, he’s the Wizard, right? I practically have an orgasm standing next to him. What would happen with actual penetration? My God, my entire vagina might go up in flames. Not to mention, I can’t figure out if I’m still attached to Morelli.

As it turns out, I’d needed Ranger for the takedown. And it had been an okay takedown except for a couple small hitches… like DeChooch getting his ear shot off. Ranger had hauled DeChooch off to the lockdown prison ward of St. Francis Hospital, and I had retreated to my apartment and crawled into bed, not wanting to think too hard about the day’s events.

What happened after that is still vivid in my mind. At one o’clock the lock tumbled on my front door, and I heard the security chain swing free. I knew a lot of people who could pick a lock. I only knew one man who could release a security chain from the outside.

Ranger stepped into the doorway to my bedroom and knocked softly on the jamb. “Are you awake?”

“I am now. You scared the hell out of me. You ever think about ringing a doorbell?”

“Didn’t want to get you out of bed.”

“So what’s going on?” I asked. “Is DeChooch okay?”

Ranger removed his gun belt and dropped it on the floor. “DeChooch is fine, but we have unfinished business.”

Unfinished business? Omigod, was he talking about his price for the takedown? The room whirled in front of my eyes, and I involuntarily clutched the sheet to my breast.

“This is sort of sudden,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t think it would be tonight. I didn’t even know if it would be any night. I wasn’t sure you were serious. Not that I’d go back on a deal, but, um, what I’m trying to say is…”

Ranger raised an eyebrow. “I make you nervous?”

“Yes.” Damn.

He sat in the rocker in the corner. He slouched slightly, elbows on the arms of the chair, fingers steepled against each other.

“Well?” I asked.

“You can relax. I’m not here to collect on the deal.”

I blinked. “You’re not? Then why did you drop your gun belt?”

“I’m tired. I wanted to sit and the belt is uncomfortable.”

“Oh.”

He smiled. “Disappointed?”

“No.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.

The smile widened.

“So what’s the unfinished business?”

“The hospital is holding DeChooch overnight. He’ll be transferred out first thing tomorrow morning. Someone should be present during the transfer to make sure the paperwork is handled correctly.”

“And that would be me?”

Ranger looked at me over his steepled fingers. “That would be you.”

“You could have called with this information.”

He picked the gun belt off the floor and stood. “I could have, but it wouldn’t have been as interesting.” He kissed me lightly on the lips and walked to the doorway.

“Hey,” I said, “… about the deal. You were kidding, right?”

It was the second time I’d asked, and I got the same answer. A smile. And now, here we were weeks later. Ranger still hadn’t collected his fee, and I was in the undesirable position of negotiating more assistance. “Do you know about child custody bonds?” I asked him.

He inclined his head a fraction of an inch. This was the equivalent to intense nodding for Ranger. “Yes.”

“I’m looking for a mother and a little girl.”

“How old is the little girl?”

“Seven.”

“From the Burg?”

“Yes.”

“It’s difficult to hide a seven-year-old,” Ranger said. “They peek out windows and stand in open doorways. If the child is in the Burg, word will get around. The Burg isn’t good at keeping a secret.”

“I haven’t heard anything. I have no leads. I have Connie running a computer check, but I won’t get that back for a day or two.”

“Give me whatever information you have, and I’ll ask around.”

I looked past Ranger and saw the Cadillac in the distance, cruising toward us. Bender was still behind the wheel. He slowed when he reached us, gave me the finger, and rolled away around the corner, out of sight.

“A friend of yours?” Ranger asked.

I opened the driver’s side door to the CR-V. “I’m supposed to be capturing him.”

“And?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I could help you with that, too. We could run a tab for you.”

I sent him a grimace. “Do you know Eddie Abruzzi?”

Ranger removed a slice of pepperoni from my hair and picked some crushed potato chip crumbs off my T-shirt. “Abruzzi’s not a nice guy. You want to stay away from Abruzzi.”

I was trying to ignore Ranger’s hands on my chest. On the surface it seemed like innocent grooming. In the pit of my stomach it felt like sex. “Stop fondling me,” I said.

“Maybe you should get used to it, considering what you owe me.”

“I’m trying to have a conversation here! The missing mother is renting a house owned by Abruzzi. I sort of ran into him this morning.”

“Let me guess—you rolled on his lunch?”

I looked down at my shirt. “No. Lunch belongs to the guy who gave me the finger.”

“Where did you meet up with Abruzzi?”

“At the rental house. This is the weird thing… Abruzzi didn’t want me in the house, and he didn’t want me involved with Evelyn. I mean, what’s it to him? This isn’t even a significant property for him. And then he got really freaky about this being a military campaign and a war game.”

“Abruzzi makes his money primarily through loan sharking,” Ranger said. “Then he invests it in legitimate ventures like real estate. His hobby is war gaming. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“A war gamer studies military strategy. When it first started it was a bunch of guys in a room, pushing toy soldiers around on a map on the table. Like the board game Risk, or Axis and Allies. Imaginary battles are constructed and fought. A lot of war gamers play by computer now. It’s Dungeons and Dragons for adults. I’m told Abruzzi takes it seriously.”

“He’s crazy.”

“That’s the general consensus. Anything else?” Ranger asked.

“Nope. That’s about it.”

Ranger angled into his car and drove away.

So much for the part of my day where I actually tried to earn some money. I still had Laura Minello, grand theft auto, but I was feeling discouraged and I didn’t have any handcuffs. Probably I needed to get back to the kid search, anyway. If I went back to the house now chances were good that Abruzzi wouldn’t be there. He probably left in a huff after threatening me and went home to shove some toy soldiers around. I drove back to Key Street and parked in front of Carol Nadich’s half of the house. I rang her bell and scraped some pizza cheese off my breast while I waited.

“Hey,” Carol said, opening the door. “Now what?”

“Did Annie play with any kids in the neighborhood? Did she seem to have a best friend?”

“Most of the kids on this street are older, and Annie stayed inside a lot. Is that pizza in your hair?”

I put my hand to my head and felt around. “Any pepperoni?”

“No. Just cheese and tomato sauce.”

“Well,” I said, “as long as there aren’t any pepperonis.”

“Hold on,” Carol said. “I remember Evelyn telling me that Annie had a new friend at school. Evelyn was worried about it because the little girl thought she was a horse.”

Mental head slap. My niece, Mary Alice.

“Sorry, I don’t know the horse kid’s name,” Carol said.

I left Carol and drove two blocks to my parents’ house. It was midafternoon. School would be out, and Mary Alice and Angie would be in the kitchen, eating cookies, getting grilled by my mother. One of my early lessons was that everything has a price. If you want an after-school cookie, you have to tell my mother about your day. When we were kids, Valerie always had lots to report. She made glee club. She won the spelling contest. She was chosen for the Christmas pageant. Susan Marrone told her Jimmy Wizneski thought she was pretty.

I had lots to report, too. I didn’t make glee club. I didn’t win the spelling contest. I wasn’t chosen for the Christmas pageant. And I accidentally knocked Billy Bartolucci down the stairs, and he ripped the knee out of his pants.

Grandma met me at the door. “Just in time to have a cookie and tell us about your day,”

she said. “I bet it was a pip. You’ve got food all over you. Were you after a killer?”

“I was after a guy wanted for domestic violence.”

“I hope you kicked him where it hurt.”

“I didn’t actually get to kick him, but I ruined his pizza.” I sat down at the table with Angie and Mary Alice. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“I made the glee club,” Angie said.

I stifled the urge to scream and took a cookie. “How about you?” I asked Mary Alice. Mary Alice took a drink of milk and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m not a reindeer anymore on account of I lost my antlers.”

“They fell off on the way home from school, and a dog went to the bathroom on them,”

Angie said.

“I didn’t want to be a reindeer anyway,” Mary Alice said. “Reindeers don’t got nice tails like horses.”

“Do you know Annie Soder?”

“Sure,” Mary Alice said, “she’s in my class. She’s my best friend, except she’s never in school lately.”

“I went to see her today, but she wasn’t home. Do you know where she is?”

“Nope,” Mary Alice said. “I guess she’s gone. That happens when you get divorced.”

“If Annie could go anywhere she wanted… where would she go?”

“Disney World.”

“Where else?”

“Her grandma’s.”

“Where else?”

Mary Alice shrugged.

“How about her mom? Where would her mom want to go?”

Another shrug.

“Help me out here,” I said. “I’m trying to find Annie.”

“Annie is a horse, too,” Mary Alice said. “Annie is a brown horse, only thing, she can’t gallop as fast as me.”

Grandma moved to the front door, driven there by Burg radar. A good Burg housewife never missed anything happening on the street. A good Burg housewife could pick up street sounds not ordinarily heard by the human ear.

“Look at this,” Grandma said, “Mabel’s got company. Somebody I never saw before.”

My mother and I joined Grandma at the door.

“Fancy car,” my mother said.

It was a black Jaguar. Brand new. Not a splatter of mud or a speck of dust on it. A woman emerged from behind the wheel. She was dressed in black leather pants, highheeled black leather boots, and a short form-fitting black leather jacket. I knew who she was. I’d run into her once before. She was the female equivalent of Ranger. My understanding was that, like Ranger, she did a variety of things including but not limited to bodyguarding, bounty hunting, and private investigating. Her name was Jeanne Ellen Burrows.

4

“MABEL’S VISITOR LOOKS like Catwoman,” Grandma said. “Except she hasn’t got pointy cat ears and whiskers.”

And the cat suit was by Donna Karan.

“I know her,” I said. “Her name is Jeanne Ellen Burrows, and she’s probably connected to the child custody bond, somehow. I need to talk to her.”

“Me, too,” Grandma said.

“No. Not a good idea. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Jeanne Ellen saw me approach and paused on the sidewalk. I extended my hand to her.

“Stephanie Plum,” I said.

She had a firm handshake. “I remember.”

“I assume you’ve been hired by someone connected to the bond.”

“Steven Soder.”

“I’ve been hired by Mabel.”

“I hope we won’t have an adversarial relationship.”

“That would be my hope, too,” I said.

“Would you like to share any information with me?”

I took a beat to think about it and decided I didn’t have any information to share. “No.”

Her mouth curved into a small, polite smile. “Well, then.”

Mabel opened her door and peered out at us.

“This is Jeanne Ellen Burrows,” I told Mabel. “She’s working for Steven Soder. She’d like to ask you some questions. I’d prefer you didn’t answer them.” I was getting strange vibes on Evelyn and Annie’s disappearance, and I didn’t want Annie given up to Steven until I heard Evelyn’s reason for leaving.

“It would be in your best interest to talk to me,” Jeanne Ellen said to Mabel. “Your greatgranddaughter could be in danger. I could help find her. I’m very good at finding people.”

“Stephanie’s good at finding people, too,” Mabel said.

Again, the small smile returned to Jeanne Ellen’s mouth. “I’m better,” she said. It was true. Jeanne Ellen was better at finding people. I relied more on dumb luck and blind persistence.

“I don’t know,” Mabel said. “I don’t feel comfortable going against Stephanie. You look like a perfectly nice young woman, but I’d rather not talk to you about this.”

Jeanne Ellen gave Mabel her card. “If you change you mind, you can reach me at one of these numbers.”

Mabel and I watched Jeanne Ellen get into her car and drive off.

“She reminds me of someone,” Mabel said. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Catwoman,” I said.

“Yes! That’s it, except for the ears.”

I left Mabel, filled my mother and grandmother in on Jeanne Ellen, took a cookie for the road, and headed for home, making a fast stop at the office first. Lula pulled in behind me. “Wait until you see the boots I got. I got myself a pair of biker boots.” She tossed her bag and her jacket on the couch and opened the shoe box. “Look at this. Are these hot, or what?”

They were black with a high stacked heel with an eagle stitched onto the side. Connie and I agreed. The boots were hot.

“So what have you been up to?” Lula asked me. “I miss anything interesting?”

“I ran into Jeanne Ellen Burrows,” I said.

Connie and Lula did a double mouth drop. Jeanne Ellen wasn’t seen a lot. She mostly worked at night and was as elusive as smoke.

“Tell me,” Lula said. “I gotta know everything.”

“Steven Soder hired her to find Evelyn and Annie.”

Connie and Lula exchanged glances. “Does Ranger know about this?” Connie asked. There were a lot of rumors about Ranger and Jeanne Ellen. One rumor had them secretly living together. One rumor had them as mentor and mentee. Clearly there’d been some sort of relationship at some point. And I was pretty sure it no longer existed, although it was hard to know anything for sure with Ranger.

“This is going to be good,” Lula said. “You and Ranger and Jeanne Ellen Burrows. If I was you, I’d go home and do my hair and put some mascara on. And I’d stop at the Harley store and get a pair of these cool boots. You need a pair of these boots just in case you need to walk over Jeanne Ellen.”

My cousin Vinnie stuck his head out of his office. “Are you talking about Jeanne Ellen Burrows?”

“Stephanie ran into her today,” Connie said. “They’re working a case together, from opposite sides.”

Vinnie grinned at me. “You’re going up against Jeanne Ellen? Are you nuts? This isn’t one of my FTAs, is it?”

“Child custody bond,” I said. “Mabel’s great-granddaughter.”

“The Mabel next door to your parents? The old-as-dirt Mabel?”

“That’s the one. Evelyn and Steven got a divorce and Evelyn took off with Annie.”

“So Jeanne Ellen is working for Soder. That makes sense. Sebring probably wrote the bond, right? Jeanne Ellen works for Sebring. Sebring can’t go after Evelyn, but he can recommend that Soder hires Jeanne Ellen. Just the sort of case Jeanne Ellen would take, too. A missing kid. Jeanne Ellen loves to have a cause.”

“How do you know so much about Jeanne Ellen?”

“Everybody knows about Jeanne Ellen,” Vinnie said. “She’s a legend. Cripes, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.”

This Jeanne Ellen thing was starting to annoy me.

“Gotta go,” I said. “Things to do. I just stopped in to borrow a pair of cuffs.”

Everyone’s eyebrows rose a couple inches.

“You need another pair of cuffs?” Vinnie asked.

I gave him my PMS look. “You got a problem with that?”

“Hell no,” Vinnie said. “I’m gonna go with S and M. I’m gonna pretend you got a man chained up naked somewhere. It’s more comforting than thinking one of my FTAs is running around with your bracelet attached.”

**********************

I PARKED IN the back of the lot, next to the Dumpster, and walked the short distance to my apartment building’s rear entrance. Mr. Spiga had just docked his twenty-year-old Oldsmobile in one of the coveted handicapped slots, close to the door, his handicapped sign proudly affixed to his windshield. He was in his seventies, retired from his job at the button factory and, with the exception of his addiction to Metamucil, was in perfect health. Lucky for him, his wife is legally blind and lame from a hip replacement gone bad. Not that it cuts a lot of slack in this lot. Half the people in the building have poked out an eye and run over their foot to get handicapped status. In Jersey, parking is often more important than sight.

“Nice day,” I said to Mr. Spiga.

He grabbed a grocery bag from the backseat. “Have you bought ground chuck lately?

Who decides these prices? How can people afford to eat? And why is the meat so red?

You ever notice it’s only red on the outside? They spray it with something, so you think it’s fresh. The food industry’s going to hell.”

I opened the door for him.

“Another thing,” he said, “half the men in this country have breasts. I’m telling you, it’s from those hormones they feed the cows. You drink the milk from the cows and you grow breasts.”

Ah, I thought, if only it was that easy.

The elevator doors opened and Mrs. Bestler peeked out. “Going up,” she said. Mrs. Bestler was about two hundred years old and liked to play elevator operator.

“Second floor,” I told her.

“Second floor, ladies handbags and better dresses,” she sang out, punching the button.

“Cripes,” Mr. Spiga said. “This place is filled with loonies.”

First thing I did when I entered my apartment was check my messages. I work with a mysterious bounty hunter guy who turns me to jelly and makes sexual innuendoes and never follows through. And I’m in the off-again phase of an off-again-on-again relationship with a cop guy I think I might want to marry… someday, but not now. That’s my love life. In other words, my love life is a big zero. I can’t remember the last time I had a date. An orgasm is nothing more than a distant memory. And there were no messages on my machine.

I flopped onto my couch and closed my eyes. My life was in the toilet. I did about a half hour of self-pity and was about to get up and take a shower when my doorbell rang. I went to the door and looked out my security peephole. Nobody there. I turned to walk away and heard rustling on the other side of the door. I looked out again. Still no one there.

I called my neighbor across the hall and asked him to look out his door and tell me if anyone was there. Okay, so this is a little despicable on my part, but no one ever wants to kill Mr. Wolesky and from time to time people want to kill me. Doesn’t hurt to be careful, right?

“What are you crazy?” Mr. Wolesky said. “I’m watching The Brady Bunch. You called right in the middle of The Brady Bunch.”

And he hung up.

I was still hearing the rustling sounds, so I got my gun out of the cookie jar, found a bullet in the bottom of my purse, put the bullet in the gun, and opened the door. There was a dark green canvas bag hanging from my doorknob. The bag had a drawstring pulled tight at the top and something was moving in the bag. My first thought was an abandoned kitten. I removed the bag from the doorknob, opened the drawstring, and looked inside.

Snakes. The bag was filled with big black snakes.

I shrieked and dropped the bag on the floor, and the snakes slid out. I jumped back into my apartment and slammed my door shut. I looked out my peephole. The snakes were scattering. Shit. I opened the door and shot a snake. Now I was out of bullets. Shit again. Mr. Wolesky opened his door and looked out. “What the… ?” he said, and slammed his door shut.

I ran into my kitchen to look for more bullets, and a snake followed me in. Another shriek and I climbed onto my kitchen counter.

I was still on the counter when the police arrived. Carl Costanza and his partner, Big Dog. I’d gone to school with Carl, and we were friends, in a strange, distant sort of way.

“We got a weird call from your neighbor about snakes,” Carl said. “Since there’s one shot to shit on your doorstep, and you’re up there on the counter, I suppose the call isn’t a hoax.”

“I ran out of bullets,” I said.

“So by a rough estimate, how many snakes do you think we got here?”

“I’m pretty sure there were four in the bag. I shot one. I saw one go down the hall. I saw one head for my bedroom. And one is God knows where.”

Carl and Big Dog grinned up at me. “Is the big, bad bounty hunter afraid of snakes?”

“Just find them, okay?” Yeesh.

Carl adjusted his gun belt and swaggered off with Big Dog a step behind him.

“Here, snakey, snakey, snakey,” Carl crooned.

“I think we should look in her panties drawer,” Big Dog said. “That’s where I’d go if I was a snake.”

“Pervert!” I yelled.

“I don’t see any snakes here,” Carl said.

“They go under things, and they hide in corners,” I told him. “Did you check under the couch? Did you look in my closet? Under my bed?”

“I’m not looking under your bed,” Carl said. “I’m afraid I’ll find some knuckle dragger hiding there.”

This got a laugh out of Big Dog. I didn’t think it was funny since it was one of my constant fears.

“Listen, Steph,” Carl called from the bedroom, “we really have searched everywhere, but we’re not seeing any snakes. Are you sure there’s one in here?”

“Yes!”

“How about her closet?” Big Dog said. “Did you look in the closet?”

“The door’s closed. A snake couldn’t get in there.”

I heard one of them pull the closet door open, and then they both started shouting.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Holy shit!”

“Shoot it. Shoot it! ” Carl yelled. “Kill the motherfucker!”

There was a lot of gunshot and more shouting.

“We didn’t get it. It’s coming out,” Carl said. “Goddamn, there are two of them.”

I heard the door to my bedroom slam shut.

“Stay here and watch the door,” Carl told Big Dog. “Make sure they don’t come out.”

Carl stormed into my kitchen and started going through my cupboards. He found a halfempty bottle of gin and drank two fingers from the bottle.

“Jesus,” he said, capping the bottle, returning it to the cupboard shelf.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to drink on duty.”

“Yeah, except when you find snakes in closets. I’m calling Animal Control.”

I was still on the counter when two Animal Control guys arrived. Carl and Big Dog were in my living room, guns drawn, eyes trained on my bedroom door.

“They’re in the bedroom,” Carl told the Animal Control officers. “Two of them.”

Joe Morelli showed up a couple minutes later. Morelli wears his hair short but always needs a cut. Today was no exception. His dark hair curled over his ears and his collar and fell onto his forehead. His eyes were melted-chocolate brown. He wore jeans and running shoes and a gray-green thermal Henley. Under the shirt his body was hard and perfect. Fortunately, at this particular moment, under the jeans he was just perfect. Although I’d seen that part of him hard, and it was pretty damn fantastic. His gun and his badge were also under the Henley.

Morelli grinned when he saw me on the counter. “What’s going on?”

“Someone left a bag of snakes on my doorknob.”

“And you let them loose?”

“They took me by surprise.”

He looked back at the one I’d shot, still untouched on the hall floor. “Is that the one you shot?”

“I ran out of bullets.”

“How many bullets did you start with?”

“One.”

The grin widened.

The Animal Control officers came out of the bedroom with the two snakes in a bag.

“Racers,” they said. “Harmless.” One of them toed the dead snake in the hall. “You want us to take this one, too?”

“Yes!” I said. “And there’s another snake somewhere.” Someone screamed at the far end of the hall.

“Guess we know where to look for snake number four,” Joe said.

The Animal Control guys took off with the snakes, and Carl and Big Dog shuffled out of my living room, into my foyer.

“Guess we’re done here,” Carl said. “You might want to check out your closet. I think Big Dog killed a pair of shoes.”

Joe closed the door behind them. “You can get off the counter now.”

“It was scary.”

“Cupcake, your life is scary.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your job sucks.”

“It’s no suckier than yours.”

“I don’t have people leaving snakes on my doorknob.”

“Animal Control said they were harmless.”

He threw his hands into the air. “You’re impossible.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? I haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

“I heard the call go out on the radio and had a misguided urge to make sure you were okay. You haven’t heard from me because we broke up, remember?”

“Yes, but there’s all kinds of broken up.”

“Oh yeah? What kind is this? First you decide you don’t want to marry me…”

“That was a mutual agreement.”

“Then you go off with Ranger…”

“That was work-related.”

He had his hands planted on his hips. “Let’s get back to the snakes, okay? You have any idea who left them?”

“I guess I could make a list.”

“Jesus,” he said, “you’ve got a list. Not one or two people. A whole list. You have a whole list of people who might want to leave snakes on your doorknob.”

“The last couple days have been sort of busy.”

“Is that pizza in your hair?”

“I accidentally rolled on Andy Bender’s lunch. He would be on the list. A guy named Martin Paulson isn’t too happy with me. There’s my ex-husband. Then I had an unfortunate encounter with Eddie Abruzzi.”

That caught Morelli’s attention. “Eddie Abruzzi?”

I told him about Evelyn and Annie and the Abruzzi connection.

“I don’t suppose you’d listen to me if I told you to stay away from Abruzzi,” Morelli said.

“I’m trying to stay away from Abruzzi.”

Morelli grabbed me by the front of my shirt, pulled me to him, and kissed me. His tongue touched mine, and I felt liquid fire slide through my stomach and head south. He released me and turned to go.

“Hey!” I said. “What was that?”

“Temporary insanity. You drive me nuts.”

And he stalked off down the hall and disappeared into the elevator.

**********************

I TOOK A shower and dressed in clean jeans and T-shirt. I did the makeup thing this time and put some gel in my hair. Sort of like locking the barn after the horses have escaped.

I went into the kitchen and stared into the refrigerator for a while, but nothing materialized. No cake. No hot sausage sandwich. No macaroni and cheese magically appeared. I took a bag of chocolate chip cookies out of the freezer and ate one. You were supposed to bake them first, but that seemed like unnecessary effort. I’d talked to Annie’s best friend and that hadn’t given me a lot. Okay, so what would I do if I needed to protect my daughter from her father? Where would I go?

I wouldn’t have a lot of money, so I’d need to rely on a friend or relative. I’d need to go far enough that my car wouldn’t be recognized, and I wouldn’t run the risk of bumping into Soder or one of his friends. This narrowed the search down to the entire world, except for the Burg.

I was contemplating the world when my doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I’d just received a bag of snakes, so I wasn’t all that crazy about answering the door. I looked out my peephole and grimaced. It was Albert Kloughn. But wait a minute, he was holding a pizza box. Hello.

I opened the door and gave a quick look up and down the hall. I was pretty sure there’d been four snakes in the bag… still, doesn’t hurt to keep your eyes open for renegade reptiles.

“Hope I’m not disturbing anything,” Kloughn said, stretching his neck out to look around me into my apartment. “You aren’t entertaining or anything, are you? I didn’t know if you were living with anyone.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking about the Soder case, and I have some ideas. I thought we could, like, brainstorm.”

I looked down at the box he was holding.

“I brought a pizza,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d eaten yet. Do you like pizza? If you don’t like pizza I could get something else. I could get Mexican or Chinese or Thai…”

Please, Lord, tell me this isn’t a date. “I’m sort of engaged.”

He vigorously nodded his head. Up and down, up and down, like one of those dogs people put in their back car windows. “Absolutely. I knew you would be. Understood. I’m almost engaged, too. I have a girlfriend.”

“Really?”

He took a deep breath. “No. I just made that up.”

I took the pizza box from him and dragged him into my apartment. I got some napkins and a couple beers, and we sat at my small dining room table and ate pizza.

“What are these ideas you have about Evelyn Soder?”

“I figure she’s with a friend, right? So she had to get in touch with the friend somehow. She had to tell her she was coming to stay. I figure she did this on the phone. So what we need is a phone bill.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“Good thing you brought a pizza.”

“Actually, it’s a tomato pie. In the Burg they call it a tomato pie.”

“Sometimes. You know anyone at the phone company? Anyone in the billing department?”

“I figured you’d have the contacts. See, that’s why we’re such a good team. I have the ideas. And you have the contacts. Bounty hunters have contacts, right?”

“Right.” Unfortunately, not in the phone company.

We finished the pizza, and I brought out the bag of frozen cookies for dessert.

“I heard you get cancer from eating raw cookie dough,” Kloughn said. “Don’t you think you should bake this?”