“I might have made it on my own,” I said.
“You would have dropped like a rock to the bottom of the river without him,” Moe said.
“What are we going to do with Sunny?” Shorty asked.
“Sunny can wait,” Moe said. “We need to take care of these two first.”
“Are you gonna pop them here?”
“No. It’ll make a mess, and I don’t feel like cleaning up a mess. I told Liz I’d be home to watch a movie tonight. She downloaded something with that DiCaprio weenie in it.”
“He’s pretty good.”
“He wasn’t in any of the Godfather movies.”
“You got me on that one.”
“We’ll take them to the construction site,” Moe said. “We already got a thing going there.”
“A thing?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re having a party.”
“I like parties,” Grandma said.
I didn’t think this sounded like a good party. And I wasn’t excited about visiting a construction site. Lula was out there somewhere communing with Kevin. If I could get Lula’s attention I would have help. She could call in the Marines, or at the very least she could shoot someone, which hopefully wouldn’t be me or Grandma.
“Call Fitz,” Moe said to Shorty. “He’s working a late-night gig a couple blocks away. Tell him we need a short pour.”
Moe walked Grandma and me down the backstairs and into the alley while Shorty called Fitz. The alley was deserted and in deep shadow. No sign of Lula.
“We’re going to the building across from the social club,” Moe said. “Sunny’s been renovating it. Get walking.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t want to go there either,” Grandma said.
“You want me to shoot them?” Shorty asked.
“No. You don’t know who’s watching here. Remember the trouble Sunny got into because he was filmed running over some a-hole.”
“Damn cellphone cameras,” Shorty said. “There’s no privacy anymore.”
Moe poked Grandma with the barrel of his gun. “Move.”
“Make me,” Grandma said.
“All I want is to get home to watch a dopey movie with my wife,” Moe said. “Could you try to cooperate?”
Grandma squinched her eyes together and opened her mouth to scream, and Shorty rushed at her and tagged her with his stun gun. Grandma squeaked and crumpled to the ground. I took a step toward Grandma, and Shorty pointed his stun gun at me.
“Stay,” Shorty said.
“She’s old and fragile,” I said. “She could be hurt.”
“First off, she doesn’t look too fragile to me. And second, that’s the least of her problems,” Shorty said.
Moe waved his gun at me. “We’re going two houses down to where the construction Dumpster is sitting. I don’t want to make a scene out here, but I will if I have to. I can shoot you and drag you, or you can walk.”
Shorty looked down at Grandma. “What about her?”
“You zapped her, so you get to drag her.”
“I got a bad back. Why don’t we get Bobby over here?”
“It’ll take too long. Just suck it up and drag the old lady to the Dumpster.”
Shorty got Grandma by the ankles. “I’m gonna remember this. I’m making a list. I’m tired of always being the one to drag people. I dragged Paul Mooney. And he wasn’t no lightweight. I dragged him all the way to the river when we found out we didn’t bring shovels to bury him.”
Moe cracked a smile. “That was pretty funny.”
Shorty smiled too. “We should write a book.”
I watched Shorty drag Grandma down the alley, and I was so angry I could barely breathe. I didn’t find any of this funny. I wanted to rip these two guys apart with my bare hands.
We got to the building that was under renovation, Moe tapped a security code into a door lock, and the door clicked open. Grandma was twitching and mumbling and trying to stand.
“Get her up and get her inside,” Moe said to me.
I helped Grandma stand and maneuvered her inside. We were in a small back hall that was lit by a single overhead light. An open doorway led down to the basement.
“The party’s downstairs,” Moe said.
My rage was draining away, getting replaced by gut-clenching dread. The best-case scenario was that they’d lock us in the basement and Lula would have a chance to rescue us. I didn’t want to think about the worst-case scenario.
The basement was dark and damp, lit by overhead bare bulbs dangling from sockets attached to wires. I carefully helped Grandma negotiate the construction-grade wood stairs. She was still wobbly, and I could feel her hand shaking in mine. A furnace and two water heaters were on a far wall. Rolls of fiberglass insulation were stacked by the water heaters. The floor was packed dirt, and the dirt smell was cloying. There was a door by the furnace. It was heavy wood with a large padlock attached.
“Over there,” Moe said, motioning to the door.
I wanted this to be a closet or a storeroom, someplace where they would stash us until the time was more convenient for them to kill us. If I had enough time, someone would find me. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be Ranger. The messenger bag, with my cellphone and Ranger’s tracking gizmo, was back in Sunny’s bachelor pad.
Moe opened the padlock and pushed Grandma and me into a room that was about ten by fourteen. The floor was poured concrete. The ceiling was unfinished, with exposed pipes and electrical wires running between wood beams. There was one small window high on the wall. It had been painted black.
“Fitz is here,” Shorty said. “He just texted me.”
“Okay, ladies,” Moe said. “Make yourselves comfy. We have to help Fitz.”
The door closed and locked, and we were in total darkness. Not a shred of light.
“I’m sort of scared,” Grandma said. “And I think I wet myself when they electrocuted me.”
I was scared too. I wanted to believe Lula was looking for us and had called in help, but I wasn’t convinced. I could hear a truck rumbling in the alley. Men were talking. I thought I recognized Moe’s voice. There were scraping sounds at the window, and the window opened. A shaft of light filtered in from the open window and drew my attention to something embedded in the cement floor. It was a tuft of platinum hair. Four feet away from the tuft of hair, like a small island in a sea of rock-hard cement, I found what I feared was the pointy toe to Rita Raguzzi’s red patent-leather stilettos. I felt the chill originate at my heart and rush through me to all other parts.
A metal trough was shoved through the window, and wet cement began pouring into the room. I pulled Grandma against the far wall and tried to unscramble my thoughts and calm myself. The door was locked. I couldn’t reach the window. I watched the cement creep toward us, and I wondered how long it would take for the cement to fill the room. We had some time, right? They’d need a lot of cement. They might even need to get a second truck.
The cement reached our feet and then the entire floor was covered. There was no longer any trace of Rita. The tuft of hair and the red shoes were covered in wet cement.
“This is a bitch,” Grandma said. “I have one of them top-of-the-line caskets put on layaway at the funeral parlor. This is not the way I wanted to go out. Even if they find us and chip me out, it’ll be closed casket, and you know how I hate that.”
The cement was pouring in, and my heart was pounding in my chest. It was above my ankles, and then it was almost to my knees. And suddenly it stopped. The trough got pulled away, and Moe stuck his head into the open window and looked around.
“This is good,” he said. “Tell Fitz he can get back to his job.”
I heard engine sounds, heard the barrel of the cement mixer churning cement, and then I heard the truck leave.
Moe stuck his head through the window again. “This is what we call shooting fish in a barrel,” he said.
He leaned in a little farther, with his gun in his han
d, and before he could aim there was a scream from somewhere in the alley. The scream was followed by a gunshot that sounded like it came out of a cannon.
Moe yelped and pitched forward. I slogged across the room, grabbed his arm, and used my weight to pull him through the window. He fell on top of me into the wet cement, and we rolled around until Grandma got hold of the gun and fired off a shot.
I was head-to-toe cement, but I managed to get to my feet. Moe was still down, holding his leg, with Grandma training the gun on him. Her hand was shaking, but her eyes were narrowed and steady.
“I’m feeling mean as a snake,” she said to Moe. “And I’d love to have an excuse to shoot you, so go ahead and make a move.”
Lula looked in through the window. “Holy horse pucky,” she said. “What the heck?”
Red lights were flashing in the alley. Men’s voices. The rumble of a big truck. Blue strobes flashing with the red lights.
“What’s going on out there?” Grandma asked.
“I saw Moe and Shorty standing there with the cement truck and I got worried, so I called everyone. We got police and a fire truck and EMTs and Ranger and half of Rangeman here.”
There was scraping at the door and the door opened, oozing cement onto the dirt floor. Morelli was the first one I saw. He grabbed me and pulled me out of the room. Cement was dropping off me in globs, but the cement on my legs was beginning to harden. He half dragged, half carried me up the stairs and out into the alley. A uniform followed with Grandma.
Morelli yelled for water, and an instant later Grandma and I were getting hosed down. Grandma went to the hospital to get checked out, but I refused. I shucked my clothes behind the fire truck and wrapped myself in a blanket. When I came out from behind the truck I saw that Moe had been hosed down and cuffed, and his leg was bandaged. Shorty was strapped to a backboard.
“What happened to Shorty?” I asked Lula.
“He got trampled,” Lula said. “I guess the lights from the police cars scared Kevin out of his hidey-hole, and he came barreling down the alley and ran right over Shorty.”
“Sunny is dead,” I told Morelli. “Heart attack.” I gave him the short version of the night and asked him to retrieve my messenger bag. I would have gotten it for myself, but I didn’t think my legs could get me up the stairs. I felt like I was still encased in cement.
Morelli gave me a kiss on the forehead and handed me over to Ranger to take home.
“I need to stay and do my cop thing,” Morelli said, “but I’ll stop around when I’m done.”
It was past midnight when Morelli let himself into my apartment.
“You did it, Sherlock,” he said. “You solved the Dumpster murders.”
I was on the couch, watching television, waiting for him. “It was an accident. Dumb luck.”
“Better to be lucky than smart,” Morelli said, slouching onto the couch next to me, handing me the messenger bag I’d left in Sunny’s bachelor pad. “Shiller already questioned Moe and Shorty, and they blabbed everything. Turns out there were old ladies getting left in Dumpsters for the last ten years, over a three-state area. It was how Sunny got his kicks.”
“Sick.”
“Yeah. Big-time. There’s a name for it. ‘Granny grabbers.’ They’re like chubby chasers, but they like to do old ladies. Sunny added his own twist to it by killing them after.”
“What was the connection? Was it Bingo? Was it the Senior Center?”
“There was no connection. They were all random encounters. Sunny was out and about, going to wakes, shopping in bakeries and grocery stores, meeting women in the casinos in Atlantic City. He was Mr. Charm, and after a couple phone calls there was a date.”
“And a death.”
“Yeah, and a death,” Morelli said. “And a sunflower. We should have picked up on it. We should have made the Sunny and sunflower connection. Are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
He went to the kitchen and came back with a bag of food and a six-pack. He gave me a beer, and he pulled Philly cheesesteaks out of the bag.
“Somehow Moe mysteriously got shot just before we arrived. I don’t suppose you have any ideas on this?”
“Nope.”
That was a fib. I only knew of one gun that made that much noise, and I suspect it was in Lula’s purse. She was lucky she didn’t have a broken nose.
“I’ve got more news for you,” Morelli said. “Sunny was renovating the brownstone, hoping to turn it into an exclusive restaurant that served big game and endangered species. For an extra charge you could even kill the animal yourself. I don’t exactly know how he was going to pull that one off. Take everyone out in the alley and give them an assault rifle, I guess. Anyway, the giraffe got delivered early and managed to escape. Eventually they gave up trying to catch it, since the restaurant wasn’t done anyway.”
“Why didn’t anyone report the giraffe to the police or the Humane Society?”
“Sunny controlled those blocks. The giraffe cost him lots of money. He didn’t want someone snatching it out from under him. Some of the people on those blocks hoped they’d get a job at the restaurant. They didn’t want to jeopardize it.”
“So what’s going to happen to the giraffe now?”
“There’s going to be a giraffe roundup tomorrow at noon. Some people are coming in from one of the wildlife agencies. If they can get the giraffe unharmed, there’s a zoo in Naples, Florida, that’ll take it.” Morelli tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “I’m beat. This was a long day. I’m so tired I don’t even care about the bag from the drugstore.”
“That’s a first,” I said. “I’ve never known you to be that tired.”
Morelli grinned. “I could probably force myself to rise to the occasion if you were desperate for me.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
LULA AND I stood behind a barricade at Fifteenth and Freeman that had been set up to keep people from encroaching on the giraffe roundup area. A bunch of residents of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth blocks were standing there with us. They’d been feeding and cleaning up after Kevin while he’d clip-clopped down the back alleys, evading capture by Sunny’s henchmen.
“I’m happy Kevin’s gonna get a good home in Florida,” Lula said. “I might even visit him at the zoo. I talked to some of the giraffe wranglers, and they said they wouldn’t have any problems catching Kevin. It turns out he was born in Philadelphia, and he’s used to people, unless they chase him in a car and try to shoot him with a dart gun.”
“Did they know how Sunny got Kevin?”
“He stole him. Hijacked his truck. The zoo in Philadelphia had too many man giraffes, so they were already sending Kevin to that zoo in Florida. Kevin escaped when Sunny’s idiots tried to get him out of his truck.”
We could hear activity in the alley. It sounded like it was a block away. The wranglers had been working since early this morning, fencing off streets, shrinking the capture area. The goal was to get Kevin into his truck without sedation. One of the wranglers was tweeting and transmitting pictures, so we were all on our smartphones. A cheer went up from the alley, and a moment later the picture came through of Kevin in his truck.
“This here’s a happy ending,” Lula said. “It worked out for everyone. Kevin’s going to a good home. Old ladies don’t have to worry about getting choked and thrown into a Dumpster no more. It even worked out for Sunny on account of he died doing his favorite thing.”
I looked at Lula. She’d gotten dressed up for Kevin’s capture. She was wearing a tasteful beige suit and matching pumps. And she had a Brahmin handbag on her arm. It was a pretty bag with the classic Brahmin leather pattern and the little Brahmin gold tag.
“That’s a real Brahmin, isn’t it?” I asked her.
“You bet your ass,” Lula said. “I bought this suit to go with it. I didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about my character when I carry this bag. This here’s a elegant bag, and I don’t want to distract from it by someone trying to get a look up my
hoo-ha ’cause my skirt might have rode up.”
“You stole that Brahmin, didn’t you? You went back to Randy Berger’s garage and lifted a handbag.”
“I didn’t steal it,” Lula said. “I rescued it. It was being held hostage there.”
The giraffe truck slowly rolled down the street, and when it turned the corner we could see Kevin looking out at us. With its twenty-foot-high canvas roof, the truck looked like a horse trailer on steroids. Everyone waved at Kevin, and he disappeared from view, on his way to the Naples Zoo.
Lula and I returned to Ranger’s loaner SUV, and just for the heck of it I drove past the basketball court. It was almost two o’clock and the court was deserted except for a lone figure sitting on a bench, looking into the court through the chain link fence. It was Antwan. He still had the big white bandage on his ear, and now he had an additional bandage on his foot. Crutches rested against the bench.
“I bet Shaneeka shot him in the foot,” Lula said.
I idled on the side of the road, and we watched Antwan for a couple minutes.
“He looks depressed,” Lula said. “You think we should go cheer him up?”
“We’re supposed to be trying to arrest him.”
“Yeah, but that was back when you were a bounty hunter. Of course, if you wanted to be a bounty hunter again then we could slap some cuffs on him. We don’t have to worry about him running away from us. And we don’t have to worry about him hearing us creep up on him. And he probably don’t even have a gun, since I still have his gun.”
“Kind of takes all the fun out of it,” I said.
Lula nodded. “I see what you’re saying.”
We watched him for another minute.
“Oh hell,” I said. “Let’s take him down.”
“Freakin’ A!” Lula said. “My girl’s back in the saddle.”
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