Explosive Eighteen

  More silence. Probably, Berger wasn’t believing any of this.

  “Did you check for ID?” he finally asked.

  Damn! “No. Hold on, and I’ll go look.”

  I opened the door, and the hall was empty. No swarthy guy.

  “He’s gone,” I said to Berger.

  “Problem solved,” Berger said. And he hung up.

  I closed and locked the door, plugged my stun gun into a wall socket, returned the Smith & Wesson to the cookie jar, and opened the bottle of wine. Thank God it hadn’t broken, because I really needed a drink. A Cosmo or a Margarita or a water glass filled with whiskey would have been even better. I brought the bottle into the living room, settled in front of the television, tuned in to the Food Network, and tried to get my heart rate under control.

  Some woman was making cupcakes. Cupcakes are good, I told myself. There’s an innocence to a cupcake. A joy. I poured a second glass of wine, and I watched the woman frost the cupcakes.

  Halfway through the bottle of wine, I flipped to the Travel Channel, and I don’t remember much after that.

  • • •

  I woke up to the sun streaming into my bedroom. I was naked, tucked under the covers, and alone. I vaguely remembered half-waking to Morelli telling me the chicken was all he hoped it would be.

  I rolled out of bed, wrapped myself in my robe, and padded into the kitchen. No Morelli. No chicken. No dinner rolls. No apple pie. A note was stuck to the counter by Rex’s cage.

  You were asleep on the couch, so I put you to bed and ate the chicken.

  I dialed Morelli. “How’d I get naked?” I asked him.

  “That was the way I found you. You were mumbling something about being hot, and God was just going to have to deal with it.”

  Good grief. “How’d it go at the junkyard?”

  “We didn’t find Joyce’s body, but we found Frank Korda, the jeweler she supposedly stole the necklace from, and we found Joyce’s other shoe.”

  “Was Korda dead?”

  “Yeah, and then some.”

  “Do you think Joyce killed him?”

  “Personally, I don’t, but as a cop I’d have to consider it.”

  “Any leads?”

  “The usual relatives and friends,” Morelli said. “It looks like someone tried to break into Joyce’s condo. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that?”

  “Who, me?”

  “If anyone does break in, they should be careful about withholding evidence.”

  “I have a feeling the condo would be clean. And let me take a wild guess that Frank Korda was found in Joyce’s Mercedes.”

  “Your guess would be right. I have to run. We’re taking the dog back to the junkyard.”

  “You should bring Bob. He could hang with the cadaver dog and get some exercise. Maybe Bob could help find another body.”

  “If Bob found a body, he’d eat it,” Morelli said.

  I disconnected, took a shower, and got dressed in my usual girly T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. I fed Rex and gave him fresh water. He rushed out of his soup-can home, stuffed a bunch of hamster crunchies into his cheeks, and hustled back to his can. Maybe he was still creeped out by the guy with the knife last night. Understandable, because that would make two of us.

  I tossed my fully charged stun gun into my bag and took off. First stop was the coffee shop. Connie, Lula, and Vinnie were sitting at a table in the window. I got a coffee and a cinnamon roll and joined them.

  “They found Frank Korda at the junkyard,” Connie said. “It came over the police channel.”

  I nodded. “Morelli told me. How’s the office space search going?”

  “I have it narrowed down,” Connie said. “There’s a vacant storefront a couple blocks from the police station. Or I can rent a Winnebago RV, which would be smaller than the bus, but we could park it in our usual location.”

  “We’d get more business by the police station,” Vinnie said. “Let’s go with the storefront.”

  “I’ll pick the lease up this morning, and we can move in tomorrow,” Connie said. “It’s not pretty, but it’s usable space.”

  “As long as it got good facilities,” Lula said. “I might still have some potato salad left inside me.”

  “How about the fire investigation?” Vinnie asked. “Do they know what started it yet?”

  Connie closed her laptop and stood. “They said it was suspicious, but they’re still looking at all the little pieces they collected.”

  DeAngelo and his foreman walked into the coffee shop.

  “Hey, what’s doin’ here?” DeAngelo said to Vinnie. “How come you’re not at work in your office? Oh yeah, now I remember … it blew up.”

  Vinnie narrowed his eyes, said something in Italian, and flipped DeAngelo the bird.

  “Better be careful,” DeAngelo said. “Your house could blow up next.”

  Vinnie’s lip curled back. “Are you threatening me?”

  “I don’t threaten,” DeAngelo said. “I’m more a doer.”

  “Don’t look to me like you do much of anything but flap your lips,” Lula said. “If you were a doer, we’d be in our new office by now.”

  DeAngelo looked at Vinnie. “Who’s the fat chick?”

  Everyone sucked in air.

  “Excuse me?” Lula said, leaning forward, hands on hips, eyes set in her wild boar on the attack squint. “Did you just say what I think you said? Because if you said that, you better say it was a mistake. I’m a reasonable person, but I don’t stand for disrespecting and slandering. I’m a big, beautiful woman. I am not a fat chick. You don’t apologize, and I’ll squash you like a bug. I’ll step on you until you’re just a grease spot on the floor.”

  “I like it,” DeAngelo said to Lula. “You want to spank me?”

  “No, I don’t want to spank you,” Lula said. “That’s disgusting. I don’t know you good enough to want to spank you.”

  DeAngelo winked at her and went to pick up his coffee.

  “He’s giving me the runs,” Lula said.

  I pushed back from the table. “I have to talk to the FBI this morning.”

  “Then what?” Lula asked. “Who’s up for today?”

  “Big Buggy and my RAV4 for starters. I’ll call when I’m done downtown.”

  TEN

  BERGER, THE FBI ARTIST, and Chuck Gooley were waiting for me in a conference room on the sixth floor. We started with face shapes, and from there we went to specifics like eyes and mouth and nose. By the time we were done, I was thoroughly confused and had no idea if the drawing even remotely resembled the guy in the photo.

  “So is this the guy?” Berger asked me, pointing to the composite sketch.

  “Sure,” I said. “Maybe. So about the maniac in my kitchen who wanted to kill me …”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Middle Eastern complexion. Lots of unruly curly black hair. Crazy eyes. Six foot. Slim. Early forties. An accent I couldn’t place. Tattoo of a rose on his knife hand.”

  “I’ll feed it into the system and let you know if we get a match.”

  I left the sixth floor, exited the building, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk because Lancer and Slasher were standing by the Buick, half a block away. Okay, here were my options. I could call Berger, but I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish. Berger’d made it clear my safety wasn’t his priority. I didn’t want to drag Morelli away from his murders. If I asked Ranger for help, he’d have me under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Ranger tended to be overprotective.

  I decided none of those options were going to work for me, so I transferred my stun gun from my bag to the pocket on my sweatshirt and approached Lancer and Slasher.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s new?”

  Lancer was leaning against the Buick’s passenger-side door. “Looks like you’re cozy with the FBI.”

  “They’re interested in the photograph.”

  “No shit,” Lancer said. “Did you give it to them?”
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  “I told them the same thing I told you. I don’t have it.”

  “Yeah, but you saw it, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “You’re lying,” Lancer said. “I can tell.”

  “There’s another guy after the photograph,” I said. “Tall, curly black hair, looks Middle Eastern, rose tattoo on his hand.”

  Lancer and Slasher looked at each other and grimaced.

  “Raz,” Lancer said.

  “Who’s Raz?” I asked.

  “No one knows his real name,” Lancer said. “Raz is short for Razzle Dazzle. That’s what he goes by. You don’t want to deal with him. He has no scruples.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Lancer. “Why is everyone so interested in this photograph?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care,” Lancer said. “We were hired to get it.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “That’s none of your business. If you don’t have the photograph, I bet you know where it is. And I bet we could get you to tell us. We got ways of making girls talk.”

  Slasher smiled. “Yeah, we got good ways.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, “but there’s still nothing I can tell you about the photograph. And as much as I’d love to stay and chat, I’m afraid I have to go now.”

  “And I’m afraid we can’t let you,” Slasher said.

  He reached out to grab me, I gave him a shot with my stun gun, and he crumpled to his knees.

  “Hey,” Lancer said to me. “Those things are illegal. You’re not allowed to do that.”

  Zzzzt. I zapped Lancer, and he went down, too.

  I looked around to see if anyone had noticed. No cars screeched to a stop. No concerned pedestrian rushed at me. Good deal. I relieved Lancer and Slasher of their wallets, scrambled into the Buick, and took off.

  • • •

  By the time I got to the coffee shop, my breathing had returned to normal and my heart had stopped skipping around in my chest. Lula was alone at the table in the window with four untouched cups of coffee in front of her, working at a crossword puzzle.

  “What’s with the coffee?” I asked her.

  “I feel like I gotta buy something once in a while since I’m sitting here, but the only thing I’m drinking is Pepto-Bismol. Connie and Vinnie went to sign the rental agreement for the temporary office. And then after that, they were going across the street to bond out a guy who set all the birds loose in the pet store at the mall. He was singing that Born Free song and waving a double-barrel shotgun around, scaring the living daylights out of everyone.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No, but a couple canaries lost some feathers in the overhead fan.”

  I put the two wallets on the table and went through the first. The guy’s name was actually Mortimer Lancelot. Go figure that. It was almost as bad as Lance Lancer. I moved on to the second wallet. Sylvester Larder. Both guys had Long Branch, New Jersey, addresses. I took down the information on the two driver’s licenses and called Berger.

  “I have names for you,” I said. “The two fake FBI guys are Mortimer Lancelot and Sylvester Larder. They have Long Branch addresses. The guy in my kitchen apparently is known as Razzle Dazzle. Any of these names mean anything to you?”

  “Razzle Dazzle is a complete whack job. If you find him in your kitchen again, you might want to shoot him. Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

  And Berger hung up.

  I slouched in my chair, and sipped one of Lula’s coffees.

  “Looks to me like you caught some bad juju in Hawaii,” Lula said. “I mean, you gotta look at the facts. You got naked skin where a ring used to be, and you don’t want to talk about it, so I’m reaching the conclusion that your love life is in the crapper. And if that isn’t bad enough, you’re in the middle of some crazy whodunit shit that you didn’t even go looking for. Not to mention we haven’t caught any bad guys since you been back. You might want to do something about your juju.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I didn’t have anything in mind. I’m just sayin’.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what constituted juju, but I had the general picture, and Lula had a point. Lately, my luck sucked. It had been excellent when I arrived in Hawaii, and somewhere mid-vacation it turned bad.

  A flash of black caught my eye, and I looked out the big plate-glass window in time to see the Lincoln stop and double-park in front of the coffee shop. Lancer and Slasher lunged out of the car, stormed into the coffee shop, and stood over me, glaring.

  “You stole our wallets,” Lancer said.

  I took the wallets off the table and handed them to Lancer. “Identity check.”

  “You better not have put anything on my credit card,” Slasher said.

  “That’s insulting,” Lula said. “What does she look like, anyway? She’s a successful businesswoman. She don’t need your dumb-ass credit card. She got her own credit card. You need to learn some manners. Who the heck are you?”

  “Sylvester Larder, also known as Sly Slasher,” I said.

  He took his wallet from Lancer. “Everyone calls me Slasher.”

  “Is that a work-related nickname?” Lula asked. “On account of you don’t look like a slasher. You look more like a insurance salesman. Or one of those guys who sets out the grapefruits in the supermarket.”

  Lancer gave a bark of laughter.

  “Real funny,” Slasher said. “Why don’t you ask her if you look like a Lancelot?”

  I stood up from my seat. “Gotta go,” I said. “Sorry about your wallets and rearranging your neurons.”

  “You better play ball with us before we have to get rough,” Lancer said. “We need results. Our boss doesn’t like being disappointed.”

  • • •

  Lula and I left the coffee shop, piled into the Buick, and headed for Buggy’s house.

  “They could be in big trouble if their boss doesn’t like being disappointed,” Lula said. “And I don’t think they believe you about not having that photograph. You really don’t have it, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How come everyone thinks you have it, if you don’t have it?”

  “Because I used to have it.”

  “Like you used to have a ring on your finger,” Lula said.

  I felt my blood pressure edge up a notch. “Give it a rest, okay?”

  “Hunh,” Lula said.

  I turned onto Pulling Street and saw my RAV4 at the curb in front of Buggy’s house.

  “I guess he borrowed your car,” Lula said.

  “Something like that.”

  “We gonna do our bounty hunter thing on him?”

  “Yeah. I’ll use my stun gun, we’ll cuff him when he goes down, and we’ll drag him into the Buick. It has a bigger backseat.”

  “Let’s do it. I’m there,” Lula said. “If you notice, I’m wearing black again today. I’m in the Ranger zone. WHAM!”

  I was glad Lula had such a positive attitude, because I was experiencing some self-doubt. And I appreciated that Lula was in the zone, although I suspected her outfit was from her S&M ’ho collection, since she was wearing over-the-knee black leather boots with four-inch heels, a black leather miniskirt, and a skintight black leather bustier.

  I parked, and Lula and I went to the door. I had the Flexi-Cuffs ready, and I was holding the stun gun.

  “You distract him,” I said to Lula. “When he looks over at you, I’ll stun him.”

  “Sure,” Lula said. “I’ll distract the hell out of him.”

  I rang the bell and Buggy answered.

  “Howdy,” he said, opening the door, looking out at me. “What’s up?”

  “I came to get my car.”

  “I’m thinking about keeping it. I like it a lot.”

  “You can’t just go around keeping cars,” Lula said to him.

  “Yu-huh, I can,” he said, glancing at her but turning back to me.

  “Tell him why he can’t do that,” I s
aid to Lula.

  “Because,” she said.

  “That’s it?” I said to her. “That’s all you got?”

  “Because it’s not right,” she said to Buggy. “You gotta buy a car. You can’t take other people’s.”

  Buggy wasn’t paying attention to Lula. Buggy was looking at me, his brow drawn together, his mouth tight. “I want it,” he said.

  “He’s not paying attention to you,” I said to Lula.

  “Don’t I know it,” she said. “What’s this boy’s problem?” She leaned forward and yelled at him. “Hey! You!”

  “Yuh,” Buggy said.

  Lula popped one of her giant boobs out of her black leather bustier. “What do you think of this?”

  “It’s big,” Buggy said.

  “You bet your ass,” Lula told him.

  I whipped the stun gun out, pressed it against Buggy’s arm, and hit the go button.

  “Ow,” Buggy said.

  His eyes didn’t roll back into his head. He didn’t crash to the ground. He didn’t go down to his knees.

  I blasted him again.

  “That stings,” Buggy said. “Stop it.”

  “Must be about body weight,” Lula said. “You need the shit they make for elephants.”

  Buggy grabbed the stun gun out of my hand and threw it into the bushes bordering the house. “Go away,” Buggy said. “And you better not take my car, or that would make me mad.”

  No point getting goofy over this, I told myself. Just very calmly take the RAV, go home, and make a reassessment. Surely there’s a way to capture this man. A big net, maybe. A rhinoceros tranquilizer dart. Get him to follow a trail of cheeseburgers leading to the police station.

  I scrounged through the bushes, found my stun gun, handed Lula the key to the Buick, and smiled pleasantly at Buggy. I turned, walked to the RAV, plugged my key in, and opened the driver’s side door. Buggy grabbed me from behind, and tossed me into the street.

  “Hey, idiot,” Lula said to Buggy. “You can’t do that to her. That’s friggin’ rude.”

  “I’ll do whatever I want,” Buggy said. “It’s my car now.”

  Lula hauled her Glock out of her purse and aimed it at Buggy. “At the risk of gettin’ too personal, I got a delicate intestinal condition today, and you’re not making it any better. And I already explained to you about how car ownership works. Now, you need to get your lard butt outta here, or I’ll put another hole in it.”