Hot Six

  “I gotta go sit down, anyway,” Landowsky said. “I had to walk all the way down here.”

  Morelli closed the door, pinned me against the wall, and kissed me. When he was done I looked myself over to make sure I was still dressed.

  “Wow,” I said.

  His lips brushed against my ear. “If you don't get those old people out of your apartment I'm going to self-combust.”

  I knew just how he felt. I'd self-combusted in the shower that morning, but it didn't help much.

  Grandma opened the door and stuck her head out. “For a minute there I thought you left without us.”

  WE TOOK THE Buick because we couldn't all fit in Morelli's truck. Morelli drove, Bob sat next to him, and I sat by the window. Grandma and Myron sat in the back, discussing antacids.

  “Any news on the Ramos murder?” I asked Morelli.

  “Nothing new. Barnes is still convinced it's Ranger.”

  “No other suspects?”

  “Enough suspects to fill Shea Stadium. No evidence against any of them.”

  “What about the family?”

  Morelli cut his eyes at me. “What about them?”

  “Are they suspects?”

  “Along with everyone else in three countries.”

  My mother was standing at the door when we parked. It seemed strange to see her standing alone. For the past couple years Grandma had always stood beside her. The mother and daughter whose roles had reversed-Grandma gladly relinquishing parental responsibility, my mother grimly accepting the task, struggling to find a place for an old woman who'd suddenly become a strange hybrid of tolerant mother and rebellious daughter. My father, in the living room, not wanting any part of it.

  “Isn't that something,” Grandma said. “It looks different from this side of the door.”

  Bob bolted out of the car and charged my mother, driven by the scent of pork roast wafting from the kitchen.

  Myron moved slower. “That's some car you've got,” he said. “It's a real beaut. They don't make cars like that anymore. Everything's a piece of junk today. Plastic crap. Made by a bunch of foreigners.”

  My father drifted into the foyer. This was his kind of talk. My father was a second-generation American, and he loved bashing foreigners, relatives excluded. He dropped back a step when he saw Turtle Man was doing the talking.

  “This here's Myron,” Grandma said by way of introduction. “He's my date tonight.”

  “Nice house you got here,” Myron said. “You can't beat aluminum siding. That's aluminum siding on it, right?”

  Bob was running through the house like a crazy dog, high on food smells. He stopped in the foyer and gave my father's butt a good sniffing.

  “Get this dog outta here,” my father said. “Where'd this dog come from?”

  “This here's Bob,” my grandmother said. “He's just saying hello. I saw a show on the television about dogs and they said sniffing butts was like shaking hands. I know all about dogs now. And we're real lucky that they whacked off Bob's doodles before he got too old and got into the habit of humping your leg. They said it's real hard to break a dog of that habit.”

  “I had a rabbit once when I was a kid that was a leg humper,” Myron said. “Boy, once he got a hold of you it was the devil to get him off. And that rabbit didn't care who he went to town on. Got the cat in a stranglehold one time and almost killed it.”

  I could feel Morelli shaking with silent laughter behind me.

  “I'm starved,” Grandma said. “Let's eat.”

  We all took our places at the table, except for Bob, who was eating in the kitchen. My father helped himself to a couple slabs of pork and passed the rest to Morelli. We started the mashed potatoes going around. And the green beans, applesauce, pickle jar, basket of dinner rolls, and pickled beets.

  “No pickled beets for me,” Myron said. “They give me the runs. I don't know what it is, you get old and everything gives you the runs.”

  Something to look forward to.

  “You're lucky you can go,” Grandma said. “You're lucky you don't need Metamucil. Now that the Dealer's out of business, drug prices are gonna go sky high. Other stuff's gonna be outta reach too. I bought my car just in time.”

  My mother and father both looked up from their plates.

  “You bought a car?” my mother asked. “Nobody told me.”

  “It's a pip, too,” Grandma said. “It's a red Corvette.”

  My mother made the sign of the cross. “Dear God,” she said.

  Stephanie Plum 6 - Hot Six

  10

  “HOW COULD YOU afford a Corvette?” my father asked. “All you get is Social Security.”

  “I have money from when I sold the house,” Grandma said. “And anyway, I made a good deal. Even the Mooner said I got a good deal.”

  My mother made another cross. “The Mooner,” she said with just a touch of hysteria. “You bought a car from the Mooner?”

  “Not from the Mooner,” Grandma said. “The Mooner don't sell cars. I bought my car from the Dealer.”

  “Thank goodness,” my mother said, hand to her heart. “For a minute there . . . Well, I'm just glad you went to a car dealer.”

  “Not a car dealer,” Grandma told her. “I bought my car from the Metamucil dealer. I paid four hundred and fifty bucks for it. That's good, right?”

  “Depends,” my father said. “Does it have a motor?”

  “I didn't look,” Grandma said. “Don't all cars have motors?”

  Joe looked pained. He didn't want to be the one to rat on my grandmother for possession of stolen property.

  “While Louise and I were looking at the cars, there were a couple men in the Dealer's backyard, and they were going on about Homer Ramos,” Grandma said. “They said he was a big car distributor. I didn't know the Ramos family sold cars. I thought they just sold guns.”

  “Homer Ramos sold stolen cars,” my father said, head bent over his plate. “Everybody knows that.”

  I turned to Joe. “Is that true?”

  Joe shrugged. Noncommittal. Cop face in place. If you knew how to read the signs, this one said “Ongoing Investigation.”

  “And that's not all,” Grandma said. “He cheated on his wife. He was a real skunk. They said his brother is just as bad. He lives out in California, but he keeps a house here so he can see women on the sly. The whole family is rotten, if you ask me.”

  “He must be pretty rich if he has two houses,” Myron said. “I should be so rich. I'd keep a girlfriend, too.”

  There was a collective pause while we all wondered what Landowsky would do with a girlfriend.

  He reached for the potato bowl, but it was empty.

  “Here, let me fill that for you,” Grandma said. “Ellen always has more keeping warm on the stove.”

  Grandma took the bowl and trotted off. “Uh-oh,” she said, when she stepped into the kitchen.

  My mother and I got up simultaneously and went to investigate. Grandma was standing in the middle of the floor, looking at the cake on the table. “The good news is Bob didn't eat the whole cake,” Grandma said. “The bad news is he licked the icing off one side.”

  Without missing a beat, my mother took a butter knife out of the silverware drawer, scooped some icing off the top of the cake, smeared the icing on the side Bob had licked clean, and sprinkled coconut all around the cake.

  “Been a long time since we had a coconut cake,” Grandma said. “It looks real pretty.”

  My mother put the cake on top of the refrigerator, out of Bob's reach. “When you were little you used to lick the icing off all the time,” she said to me. “We had a lot of coconut cakes.”

  Morelli gave me raised eyebrows when I got back.

  “Don't ask,” I said. “And don't eat the outside part of the cake.”

  THE PARKING LOT was almost full when we got back to my apartment building. The seniors were home, settled down in front of their televisions.

  Myron dangled his house keys at Grandma.
“How about coming over for a nightcap, sweetie.”

  “You men are all alike,” my grandmother said. “Only thinking about one thing.”

  “What's that?” Myron asked.

  Grandma scrinched her mouth up. “If I have to tell you, then there's no sense going in for a nightcap.”

  Morelli walked Grandma and me to my apartment. He let Grandma in, then pulled me aside. “You could come home with me,” he said.

  It was very tempting. And not for any of the reasons Morelli would hope for. I was dead on my feet. And Morelli didn't snore. I might actually be able to sleep at his house. I hadn't slept through the night in so long, I couldn't remember what it was like.

  He brushed a kiss across my lips. “Grandma wouldn't mind. She's got Bob.”

  Eight hours, I thought. All I wanted was eight hours of sleep, and I'd be good as new.

  His hands slid under my sweater. “It would be a night to remember.”

  It would be a night without a drooling, knife-wielding pyromaniac. “It would be heaven,” I said, not even realizing I was talking out loud.

  He was so close I could feel every part of him, pressed against me. And one of those parts was growing. Ordinarily this would have triggered a corresponding reaction in my body. But tonight my thoughts were that this was something I could do without. Still, if it was the price I had to pay for a decent night's sleep, then let's get to it.

  “Let me just scoot inside and grab a few things,” I told Morelli, imagining myself all cozy in his bed, in a toasty flannel nightshirt. “And I have to tell Grandma.”

  “You aren't going to go inside and close and lock the door and leave me out here, are you?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don't know. I just have this feeling . . .”

  “You should come in here,” Grandma called out. “There's a show on the television, and it's all about alligators.” She cocked her head. “What's that strange sound? It sounds like a cricket.”

  “Shit,” Morelli said.

  Morelli and I knew what the sound was. It was his pager. Morelli was trying hard to ignore it.

  I was the one to cave first. “You have to look at it sooner or later,” I said.

  “I don't have to look at it,” he said. “I know what it is, and it isn't going to be good.” He checked the readout, grimaced, and headed for the phone in the kitchen. When he came back, holding a paper towel with an address scribbled, I gave him an expectant look.

  “I have to go,” he said. “But I'll be back.”

  “When? When will you be back?”

  “Wednesday at the latest.”

  I rolled my eyes. Cop humor.

  He gave me a fast kiss, and he was gone.

  I pressed the redial button on my phone. A woman answered, and I recognized the voice. Terry Gilman.

  “Look at this,” Grandma said. “The alligator ate a cow. You don't see that every day.”

  I took a seat beside her. Fortunately, there wasn't any more cow eating. Although now that I knew Joe was on his way to meet Terry Gilman, death and destruction held some appeal. The fact that this was undoubtedly a business meeting took some of the fun out of getting nuts over it. Still, I could probably have worked myself up into a pretty good frenzy if I just hadn't been so darn tired.

  When the alligator show was done, we watched the Shopping Network for a while.

  “I'm going to turn in,” Grandma finally said. “Gotta get my beauty rest.”

  The second she left the room I hauled out my pillow and quilt, killed the lights, and flopped onto the couch. I was asleep in an instant, my sleep deep and dreamless. And short-lived. I was dragged awake by Grandma's snoring. I got up to close her door, but it was already closed. I sighed, half in self-pity and half in amazement that she could sleep with all that noise. You'd think she'd wake herself up. Bob didn't seem to notice. He was asleep on the floor at one end of the couch, sprawled on his side.

  I crawled under the quilt and willed myself to go back to sleep. I thrashed around some. I put my hands over my ears. I thrashed around some more. The couch was uncomfortable. The quilt was tangled. And Grandma kept snoring. “Arrrrgh,” I said. Bob didn't stir.

  Grandma was going to have to go, one way or another. I got up and padded out to the kitchen. I looked through the cupboards and refrigerator. Nothing interesting. It was a little after twelve. Not all that late, really. Maybe I should go out and get a candy bar to settle my nerves. Chocolate was calming, right?

  I pulled on my jeans and shoes and covered my pajama top with a coat. I snagged my bag from its hook in the foyer and let myself out. It would only take ten minutes to make a candy bar run, and then I'd be home and no doubt I'd clonk right off to sleep.

  I stepped into the elevator half-expecting to see Ranger, but Ranger didn't appear. No Ranger in the parking lot, either. I fired up the Buick, drove to the store, and bought a Milky Way and a Snickers. I ate the Snickers immediately, intending to save the Milky Way for bed. But then somehow the Milky Way got eaten right away, too.

  I thought about Grandma and the snoring and couldn't get excited about going home, so I drove over to Joe's house. Joe lives just outside the Burg in a row house he'd inherited from his aunt. In the beginning it had felt weird to think of him as a homeowner. But somehow the house had conformed to Joe, and the union had proved comfortable. It was a nice little place on a quiet street. A shotgun-style row house with the kitchen in the rear and bedrooms and bath on the second floor.

  The house was dark. No lights shining behind the curtained windows. No truck parked at the curb. No sign of Terry Gilman. Okay, so maybe I was a teensy bit nuts. And maybe the candy bars were just an excuse to come over here. I dialed Joe's number on my cell phone. No answer.

  Too bad I didn't have lock-picking skills. I could have let myself in and gone to sleep in Joe's bed. Just like Goldilocks.

  I put the Buick in gear and slowly drove the length of the block, not feeling all that tired anymore. What the hell, I thought, as long as I'm out here with nothing to do, why not check up on Hannibal?

  I wound my way out of Joe's neighborhood, hit Hamilton, and drove toward the river. I got on Route 29 and in minutes I was cruising past Hannibal's town house. Dark, dark, dark. No lights on here, either. I parked one block up, just around the corner, and walked back to the house. I stood directly in front and looked up at the windows. Did I see the tiniest hint of light in the front room? I crept closer, over the lawn right into the bushes that hugged the house, and pressed my nose to his window. There was definitely light coming from somewhere in the house. Could have been a night light. Hard to tell where it originated.

  I scuttled back to the sidewalk and speed-walked around to the bike path, where I took a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dark. Then I carefully picked my way to Hannibal's yard. I climbed the tree and stared into Hannibal's windows. All the drapes were drawn. But again, there was the hint of alight coming from somewhere downstairs. I was thinking the light wasn't significant when it suddenly blinked out.

  This got my heart thumping just a little, since I wasn't keen on getting shot at again. In fact, probably it wasn't a good idea to stay in the tree. Probably it would be better to watch from a safer distance . . . like Georgia. I quietly inched down to the ground and was about to tippy-toe away when I heard a lock tumble. Either someone was closing up for the night, or someone was coming out to shoot me. This got me moving.

  I was about to turn for the street when I heard a gate creak open. I scrunched myself flat against the fence, deep in shadow. I held my breath and watched the bike path. A lone figure came into view. He closed the gate. He paused for a moment and looked directly at me. I was pretty sure he had come out of Hannibal's yard. And I was pretty sure he couldn't see me. There was a good chunk of distance between us, and he was almost lost in the dark; the ambient light revealed only an outline. He turned on his heel and walked away from me. He passed under a shaft of window light and was briefly illuminated. My b
reath caught in my throat. It was Ranger. I opened my mouth to call out his name, but he was gone, dissolved into the night. Like an apparition.

  I ran to the street and listened for footsteps. I didn't hear them, but there was the sound of an engine catching not far off. A black SUV crossed the intersection, and quiet returned to the neighborhood. I was half afraid that I was losing my mind, that it had all been a hallucination from lack of sleep. I walked back to the car feeling pretty well creeped out and took off for home.

  Grandma was still snoring like a lumberjack when I dropped my shoulder bag on the kitchen counter. I said hello to Rex and shuffled to the couch. I didn't bother taking my shoes off. I just crashed onto the couch and pulled the quilt over myself.