Sizzling Sixteen

EIGHT

I STOPPED HOME to change my shirt, and at the last moment, I decided to take my bottle. I mean, it couldn’t hurt to carry it around, right? I left my apartment, and I drove past the bonds office toward the arena. I cruised the area around the arena, looking for Chopper’s Lexus, checking out the fast-food places Morelli’s source had listed. I hung there until two o’clock without seeing a single black Lexus SUV. I took Broad to Cotter and drove the alley behind Chopper’s loft. The black SUV was parked in Chopper’s small backyard. Chopper was at home with Mr. Jingles.

I returned to Broad, and I was almost at Hamilton when Chet called.

“Gritch left the 7-Eleven and drove across the river. I have him at an isolated house a half mile off Lower Buck’s Road. He’s been there for ten minutes now. I’m programming it into your nav system.”

“Thanks. I’ll check it out.”

“Do you need back up?”

“Do I have a choice?”

There was a long pause. “No,” Chet finally said.

It used to bother me that Ranger monitored my every move, but I’ve gotten used to it, and for the most part, I’m able to ignore it. Truth is, I’m not all that good at being a bounty hunter, and Ranger’s over protectiveness has saved my life more than once.

I stopped at the bonds office to get Lula, and I ran into Walter Moon Man Dunphy coming out of the used-book store next to the bonds office. Mooner is my age, but he lives on an entirely different planet. He’s slim, with light brown shoulder-length hair, parted in the middle. He was wearing a vintage Metallica T-shirt, jeans with holes in the knees, and black-and-white Chucks.

“Dudette,” Mooner said to me. “Long time no see. How’s life?”

“It’s good,” I told him. “What’s new with you?”

“I got a new casa. It’s el loco mobile casa.”

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the rusted-out motor home at curbside.

“You’re living in this RV?”

“Affirmative. Totally cool, right? And the feng shui is excellent. Like, if I’m getting bad vibes, I just park this sweetheart in a different direction. And I have a dish, so I didn’t have to give up my position on the Cosmic Alliance.”

I had no clue what he meant by the Cosmic Alliance, and I didn’t want to take the time to ask.

“That’s great,” I said. “I have to go to work now.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“You’re working?”

“Gotta feed the Love Bus. Doesn’t run on air, dude.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m walking dogs. I pick ’em up, and take ’em to the park, they crap their brains out, and I take ’em home.”

He gave me his card. GOLDEN AURA DOG SERVICE. Happy Is As Happy Does.

“Nice,” I said.

“I’m hella entrepreneurial,” Mooner said. “It’s a gift.”

I pocketed the card and went into the bonds office. “Gritch is at a house in Bucks County,” I said to Lula. “I’m going to take a look. Want to come with me?”

“Sure,” Lula said. “Haven’t got anything better to do.”

“How about filing,” Connie said.

“Filing isn’t better,” Lula said. “Filing gives me a cramp in my head. Personally, I think you should just throw all those files away. We never look at them. What good are they? When was the last time you looked at one of them files?”

“I’d look at them if I could find them,” Connie said. She turned to me. “Speaking of files, I got a new one for you. Lenny Pickeral. It should be an easy capture.”

“Wait until you hear this,” Lula said. “This is a beauty. This guy stole toilet paper outta all the rest stops on the Turnpike. He said he was protesting the inferior quality of rest stop toilet paper.”

It didn’t seem like such a horrible crime. “They arrested him for that?”

“Actually, they arrested him for making an illegal U-turn across the grass median,” Connie said. “When they checked out his trunk, they found it was full of toilet paper. And then they went to his house, and it was full of toilet paper. The guy has been stealing toilet paper from the Turnpike for almost a year.”

“And now he’s FTA?” I asked.

“Probably stealing more toilet paper even as we speak,” Lula said. “Sounds to me like a addiction.”

I rammed the file into my bag. “Addios. I’m off to find Vinnie.”

“Me, too,” Lula said. “I’m gonna find the heck out of him.”

I crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania and went north on Lower Buck’s Road, watching my nav screen. Lower Buck’s Road is a two-lane, fairly well-traveled road that runs along the river. It’s a mix of expensive homes, moderate homes, and woods. Not a lot of commercial property.

Ten minutes down Lower Buck’s Road, I was told to turn left, onto a dirt road. It was a wooded area, and the dirt road was single-lane. I knew the house was a half mile in. I crept along, not wanting to raise dust, and after a half mile, I came to the house. It was a brown-shingle, two-story, cottage-type house. Big. Maybe seven thousand square feet. A Bucks County manor house. Professional landscaping. Circular drive court. Not shabby. Probably, Vinnie didn’t want to be rescued. He probably had a Jacuzzi and a four-poster bed. On the other hand, they were going to kill him on Friday.

I continued on down the road, past two more houses, before the road abruptly ended. I turned and slowly cruised past the brown-shingle house for a second time. Gritch’s Mercedes was parked in the drive court, plus two other cars. One was an SUV and the other a Ferrari.

“Hard to believe you’d want to stash a perv like Vinnie in a nice house like this,” Lula said. “Maybe this here’s Bobby Sunflower’s house. In which case, we be sitting in Bobby’s driveway, and that might not be healthy.”

“Good point.”

I drove back to the road, pulled to the side, and parked. A half hour later, Mickey Gritch turned out of the dirt road and headed south, toward Trenton. The Ferrari followed.

I called Chet, gave him the Ferrari’s plate number, and asked him to find owners for the car and the house. He called me back in five minutes.

“The car belongs to Bobby Sunflower,” Chet said. “The house is owned by a holding company. And Sunflower owns the holding company.”

“Can you find out if the holding company owns other properties?”

“Sure. I’ll get back to you.”

“This is like having your own private detective agency,” Lula said. “Does Ranger keep a tally of services? Do you gotta pay up one way or another at the end of the month? I tell you, I wouldn’t mind doing that. He is heartstoppin’ hot. I had my way, I’d spread sauce on him and work him like a rib.”

The thought of working Ranger like a rib gave me a hot flash that prickled from my scalp clear down to my doodah.

“You just turned red,” Lula said. “I never seen you turn red like that before.”

“It was the rib thing.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “I get like that about ribs, too. I think we need to go to Tony’s when we get back to town. He makes kick-ass ribs.”

We sat there for ten minutes more, waiting for the SUV, but the SUV didn’t drive by.

“I’m going to leave the car here and walk back to the house,” I told Lula.

“I’ll come with you. Good thing I dressed down to sneakers today.”

I checked Lula out. She was wearing pink wedge sneakers loaded up with rhinestones, a super-short stretch denim skirt, and a way-too-small pink T-shirt decorated with silver glitter that was flaking off on everything. It was casual Tuesday. I was in my usual outfit of jeans, sneakers, and a slightly stretchy V-neck T-shirt. No glitter. No red sauce stains.

“Here’s the plan,” I said, starting out on the dirt road. “If we hear a car coming, we jump off the road and hide in the woods.”

“Sure, I can do that,” Lula said. “Only I hope we don’t have to, ’cause I have vegetation issues. I don’t do the nature thing. Remember when we were down in the Pine Barrens? I hated that shit. I’m a city girl. I like cement. As far as I’m concerned, you could cement this whole country over.”

“Maybe you want to stay in the Jeep,” I said.

“That might be a good idea. I could stay and make sure it don’t get stolen.”

The road was hard-packed dirt and either side was forested. The sun filtered through the leaf canopy and the air smelled like the beginning of summer. I would have enjoyed the walk if only I hadn’t been terrified Bobby Sunflower would return and run me down.

I moved from the road to the woods just before I got within sight of the house. I’m not as bad as Lula when it comes to nature, but I’m not a tree nymph, either. I’ve seen Ranger move through brush and never make a sound. As hard as I try to be quiet, I’m more of a thrasher. I crept along the edge of the property, looking for movement inside the house. The SUV was still parked just past the door. Shades hadn’t been drawn. There was no way of knowing who belonged to the SUV. No way of knowing if Vinnie was here. I returned to the Jeep and pulled myself up behind the wheel.

“Well?” Lula wanted to know.

“I have no clue. I couldn’t see anything in the house. And no one came out.”

“Are you carrying the bottle?”

“Yes.”

“Hunh, you’d think the bottle would do something for you.”

I turned the key and put the Jeep into gear. “I didn’t get caught.”

“That’s true,” Lula said. “So it could be working.”

IT WAS AFTER four o’clock when we got back to the bonds office. Connie was painting her nails and looking not happy.

“So?” I said.

“I got a call from Bobby Sunflower at two o’clock. He said he was getting impatient. And then he put Vinnie on, and Vinnie begged me to get the money, and then someone started shrieking. I guess that was Vinnie. And the line went dead.”

“Bobby Sunflower was at the Pennsylvania house at two o’clock,” Lula said to me. “Now we know where they got Vinnie.”

“His car was at the house,” I said. “We never actually saw Bobby Sunflower.”

“That man isn’t gonna let nobody drive his Ferrari,” Lula said. “That’s a personal Ferrari.”

Probably true.

“They got Vinnie at this house in Pennsylvania,” Lula said to Connie. “We know exactly where it is. We just gotta rescue him now. My Visa bill is due any day. I can’t take no chances.”

Here was the deal. While I was looking for Vinnie, this sounded like a noble idea. Now that we might have found him and had to go in guns blazing, I was thinking… not so good. Morelli could pull this off, but I couldn’t ask him without agreeing to police involvement. Ranger would have Vinnie out in a heartbeat, but Ranger was in Atlanta. And even if Ranger were here, it wouldn’t feel right to make him do my dirty work.

“Maybe instead of rescuing Vinnie, we should try to raise the money,” I said.

“Okay,” Connie said. “How?”

We all thought about it.

“We could have a bake sale,” Lula said.

“You can’t bake, Stephanie can’t bake, and I don’t want to bake,” Connie said. “And we need $786,000. That’s a lot of cake. Plus, the interest grows on that every day.”

“Now that I think about it,” Lula said, “if I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t need this job.”

“The bonds office is now owned by a venture capital group called The Wellington Company. Last I looked, they weren’t happy with the office performance. I don’t think we want to rock that boat by asking them for a loan.”

“Let’s just rescue him and get it over with,” Lula said. “How hard could it be? There was one SUV sitting in the driveway. So I’m thinking there’s Vinnie tied to a chair in the kitchen and some goon in the living room watching TV.”

“And?” I asked.

“And we go in, shoot the goon, rescue Vinnie, and we go home.”

“I’m not comfortable with shooting the goon,” I told her. “And we aren’t a hundred percent sure Vinnie is in the house.”

“I know,” Connie said. “Stink bomb. We lob a stink bomb in there, everyone runs out, and in the confusion we rescue Vinnie.”

“I like it,” Lula said to Connie. “Boy, you’re good. I could see you’ve done this before.”

“High school,” Connie said. “I was the stink bomb queen. One time, I stink-bombed the principal’s house and he blamed it on Jimmy Rubinowski.”

“What happened to Jimmy Rubinowski?” Lula wanted to know.

“Nothing. He was a football player. He was golden.”

“Is this stink bomb going to damage the house?” I asked.

“No,” Connie said. “It takes a couple days for the smell to go away, but then everything’s good. Except for the window you broke getting the bomb into the house.”

“I hate to be a wet blanket, but I don’t like doing this without making sure Vinnie’s in the house,” I said.

Lula and I broke a few minor laws from time to time in the pursuit of felons, but for the most part, we had paperwork giving us wide authority for search and capture. We all knew Bobby Sunflower was pond scum, but that didn’t give me the right to lob a stink bomb through his window.

“This isn’t a whim,” Lula said. “There’s circumstantial evidence. And anyway, this here’s Bobby Sunflower we’re talking about. He probably gets stink-bombed all the time.”

“How about this,” Connie said. “I go home and whip up a stink bomb. And then we go back to the house at night so we can creep around better and look in windows. And then if it looks like Vinnie’s in the house, we bazooka the bomb in.”

“I guess that’s okay,” I said. “Unless Sunflower has family in the house.”

“Sunflower hasn’t got family,” Lula said. “Only thing he’d have in the house is armed entourage and maybe a ’ho or two.”

“The sun goes down around eight-thirty,” Connie said. “So let’s meet here at the office at eight-fifteen. And everyone wear black.”

“Black’s not my best color,” Lula said.