Sizzling Sixteen

TWENTY-SIX

I STOPPED AT three different drive-through windows, and by the time we got back to the office, we were all feeling sick, not just from the freakish turn our lives had taken, but also from the food we’d managed to snarf down en route.

“I don’t feel so good,” Lula said. “I think I must have got a bad egg. I need a Rolaid.”

“You know what I need?” Vinnie said. “Lucille. I know this is stupid, but I miss Lucille. I never thought I’d say that. She was such a pain in the ass. How can you miss someone that’s a pain in the ass?”

“My ex-husband was a pain in the ass,” Connie said, “and I don’t miss him at all.”

“Ditto for me,” I said.

My marriage lasted about fifteen minutes. I caught my ex-husband naked on my dining room table with Joyce Barnhardt riding him like she was in the Kentucky Derby going for the win.

“Your problem is you’re a jerk,” Lula said to Vinnie. “You got all normal feelings. Like, you love Lucille. But you can’t help from being a jerk. I mean, what kind of a man has a romantic relationship with a duck?”

“I don’t know,” Vinnie said. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“You see?” Lula said. “It’s always a good idea at the time. But you don’t connect the dots between the good idea and the bad ever after. You got no sense of consequences. I learned all about this in my deviant behavior class at the community college.”

“I didn’t know you were going to college,” Vinnie said.

“Of course you didn’t, on account of you don’t listen. You’re not a listener like me. You’d be a better person if you were a listener.”

“I’d listen more if you talked less,” Vinnie said.

“Hunh,” Lula said. “Your ass.”

The crime-scene tape had been stretched across wooden barricades placed close to what used to be the building housing the bonds office. The sidewalk was still passable, and there was still on-street parking. Lula’s Firebird was at the curb, along with Connie’s car and the Love Bus. Mooner and the Hobbits were on the sidewalk, looking at the rubble.

I parked in front of the Firebird, and walked back to Mooner.

“Dude,” Mooner said. “Someone was smoking in bed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Not much left of the bonds office.”

“Too bad,” Mooner said. “I was gonna plug in. The Hobbits need computer juice.”

“I have to do my blog,” one of the Hobbits said. “I have to Twitter.”

“Bungo Goodchild,” an old Hobbit said. “Where are your manners? Introduce us to this lovely creature.”

Mooner pointed to the old Hobbit. “This is Oldbuck of Buckland. He’s, like, the oldest dude, but he’s cool. The little guy standing next to him is Poppy Proudfoot. Then there’s Fredoc Broadbeam. That’s, like, self-explanatory. Twofoot of Nobottle. Fauxfrodo. And Chicaribbit.”

“That’s a lot of Hobbits,” Lula said.

“Tell me about it,” Mooner said. “It’s like I need rubber walls on the old bus. And I can’t bake brownies fast enough for these dudes. They sure love their brownies.”

The Hobbits were all dressed in a mix of shabby chic Hobbit clothes and assorted footgear. Brown hooded capes, green or brown vests over tunics. Peddle pusher-type pants cinched in with a variety of belts from rope to lizard. Chicaribbit was a girl Hobbit, and her purse matched her pink Converse sneakers. Fredoc Broadbeam was as wide as he was tall. Twofoot of Nobottle was a tall, gangly guy with sandy blond hair and a scraggly beard. Fauxfrodo was nineteen or twenty and covered with tattoos and piercings. And Poppy Proudfoot was the youngest. I was guessing he was seventeen or eighteen.

“How long are the Hobbits going to be with you?” I asked Mooner.

“A week. Hobbit Con starts today, but it doesn’t really start to swing until Tuesday when The High Holy One proclaims it officially in session.”

“I need to charge my phone,” Poppy said. “My mom’s going to freak if she can’t call me.”

“Me, too,” Oldbuck said. “My wife will think I’m fooling around if I don’t answer my phone.”

“You can plug in at my place,” I said.

What the heck, I didn’t have anything else to do.

“Did you hear that?” Mooner said to the Hobbits. “We have juice! Ysellyra Thorney is going to let all you dudes plug in.”

“Three cheers for Ysellyra,” Broadbeam said.

“Hobbit hooray!” they all yelled. “Hooray! Hooray!”

“Let’s do it again,” Poppy said.

“Not necessary,” I told them. “Get in the bus and follow me.”

“Boy, Hobbits know how to have a good time,” Lula said. “Don’t take much to make them happy.”

I drove across town with the Love Bus on my tail. I parked in the lot to my building, and we all trooped into the elevator. Twofoot, Poppy, Broadbeam, Oldbuck, Fauxfrodo, Chicaribbit, Mooner, Vinnie, and me.

“There are a lot of Hobbits in this elevator,” Vinnie said. “Anybody know the weight limit?”

Mooner pushed the button for the second floor and the elevator creaked and shuddered and slowly rose.

“We have lift-off,” Mooner said.

“Hobbit Hooray!” they all yelled. “Hooray! Hooray!”

“This could get old,” Vinnie said to me. “They’re just plugging in, right? Like, an hour and they’re gone?”

I unlocked my door and the Hobbits rushed in. They plugged their phones and their laptops into outlets all over the apartment. They used the bathroom, tested out the couch, turned the television on, cooed over Rex, looked in my refrigerator and cupboards.

I found a relatively quiet corner and called Ranger.

“What’s all that noise?” Ranger asked. “It sounds like you’re having a party.”

“It’s Hobbits,” I said. “They’re using my electric. I saw the Meagan Building this morning. There was a lot of damage. Will they have to raze the building?”

“I don’t know. They’re checking the structural integrity. The bonds office burned like it was made out of cardboard. Ten minutes after you left, the roof went down. Whoever set the fire must have used a decent amount of accelerant.”

“Do you think this is the end of it?”

“If Bluttovich destroyed both businesses to cover his tracks, it’ll end here. That would be the good business decision. If this has become a personal vendetta against Vinnie, it’s probably not over.”

“Hard to believe Vinnie is that important to Bluttovich. He doesn’t even know Vinnie.”

“From what I can tell, Bluttovich is a power-hungry maniac. If he thinks Vinnie is a threat, he’ll take him down.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“I have men working on it. I’ll get back to you in a couple hours.”

I disconnected and went to the kitchen for a soda. Mooner was watching Rex. Everyone else was in front of the televsion, except Vinnie.

“Where’s Vinnie?” I asked Mooner.

“Bathroom.”

The doorbell rang, and Mooner answered.

I looked out from the kitchen and saw two guys.

“Vincent Plum?” the one guy asked.

“No, dude,” Mooner said. “I’m, like, the Moon Man. I’m Bungo.”

“Cripes,” the guy said. “He’s stoned.”

“He’s the right height. Brown hair. Slim weasel body,” the other guy said. “Hit him.”

I saw the guy’s arm extend with the stun gun, and I ran for Mooner. I reached the door just as Mooner collapsed, and I got tagged, too.

BY THE TIME my brain unscrambled, I was tied hands and feet and had duct tape across my mouth. I was rolling around on the floor of a van, bumping into Mooner, who was also bound and taped. It was a panel van with solid sides and two doors in the rear with small windows. The driver and his partner were up front. I didn’t want to go there. I could mostly see sky through the windows. A streetlight flashed by. A tree. No way of knowing where we were going. The driver and his partner weren’t talking.

The van turned from a smooth road to a bumpy road, hooked a corner, and the road was smooth again. It came to a stop, and the rear doors opened. Mo and Eugene looked in at Mooner and me.

“What the hell’s this?” Mo asked.

The driver came around. “What do you mean? It’s Vincent Plum and some girl. She got in the way, so we took her, too. She looks like fun.”

“That’s not Vincent Plum, you moron.”

“How do you know? Have you ever seen Vincent Plum?”

“I saw him when he stuck his head out of his office. We followed him and the girl from the bonds office to the apartment. That’s how we knew where to find them. We would have snatched him then, but Larry was whining and bleeding all over the place.”

Eugene joined the group and looked in at Mooner and me. “What the fuck’s this?”

“Exactly,” Mo said.

“We took the wrong guy,” the driver said.

“No shit,” Eugene said.

“How was I to know? He’s the right height. He’s got brown hair. He’s sort of weasely.”

“Gregor is going to be pissed,” Eugene said. “We already called and told him we had Vinnie. He’s coming out to personally cut off his nuts.”

“Call him and tell him we made a mistake,” the driver said.

“What are you, crazy?” Eugene said. “Remember what happened to Ziggy when he brought Gregor the wrong Dairy Queen Blizzard?”

“Yeah,” the driver said. “Gregor hit him in the head with a hammer, and now Ziggy falls over when he takes a leak.”

“I got an idea,” Eugene said. “Why don’t we douse the van with gasoline, set it on fire, and shove it off a cliff? Then we tell Gregor there was a faulty gas pedal, and the van went out of control and crashed, and we all got out just in time, except we couldn’t rescue Vincent.”

“That might work,” Mo said.

“Wait a minute,” the driver said. “We don’t have to get all that elaborate. Has Gregor ever seen Vincent Plum?”

“Not that I know,” Eugene said.

“Then what’s the problem?” the driver said. “We tell him this is Vincent Plum. That way, Gregor gets to cut someone’s nuts off, and he won’t be disappointed that he made the trip out here.”

“Yeah, but this guy will tell Gregor he’s not Plum,” Mo said.

The driver shrugged. “We’ll leave the tape on his mouth.”

“Gregor won’t like that,” Eugene said. “He likes when people scream and beg.”

“So we wait until Gregor starts working on him,” the driver said, “and then we take the tape off when this guy’s in the screaming stage.”

Everyone thought about that for a beat.

“It could work,” Mo said.

Eugene agreed.

“Okay, so we have a plan,” Eugene said. “Let’s haul these two into the house. We’ll put them in the tower room. When Gregor gets here, we’ll take this guy to the kitchen, because it has a tile floor for easy cleanup. And then we’ll save the girl for ourselves for later.”

“Mmmrmph,” Mooner said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Eugene said to Mooner. “It only hurts in the beginning, and then you faint.”

I was dragged out of the van, and Mo put me over his shoulder like a bag of sand. This was the first chance I had to see the house and its surroundings. There was a large lawn surrounding the house. Beyond the lawn, there were dense trees. Long, paved driveway leading to the house. The house itself could hardly be called a house. It was a fortress. It was ominous gray stone and huge. It defied description. It had a tower with turrets, like a medieval castle. If I had to imagine a house for a Bulgarian maniacal mobster, this would be it.