To the Nines

  “We got a new skip this morning, but Vinnie doesn't want anyone working on anything other than Singh. Vinnie s in a state over this Singh thing.”

  “Maybe I should go look for Howie with you,” Lula said. “If I stay here I'll file all day and filing makes me hungry. I don't know if I got enough vegetables for a full day of filing.”

  “Bad idea. Howie works at a fast-​food place. You have no willpower when it comes to that stuff.”

  “No problemo. I'm a changed woman. And anyway, I got my fill of fast food for the day. I had a good fast-​food breakfast.”

  A half hour later, Lula and I parked in the McDonald's lot. Lula had gone through a bunch of celery and was halfway into a bag of carrots.

  “This isn't doing much for me,” she said, “but I guess you gotta sacrifice if you want to be a supermodel.”

  “Maybe you should wait in the car.”

  “Hell no, I'm not missing out on the questioning. This could be an important lead. This Howie guy and Singh are supposed to be friends, right?”

  “I don't know if they're friends. I just know Singh tried to find Howie the day before he disappeared.”

  “Let's do it.”

  As soon as I was through the door to the restaurant I spotted Howie. He was working a register and he looked to be in his early twenties. He was dark-​skinned and slim. Pakistani, maybe. I knew he was Howie because he was wearing a name tag. Howie P.

  “Yes?” he asked, smiling. “What will it be?”

  I slid a card across to him and introduced myself. “I'm looking for Samuel Singh,” I said. “I understand you're friends.”

  He went immobile for a moment while he held my card. He appeared to be studying it, but I had a suspicion his mind wasn't keeping up with his eyes.

  “You are mistaken. I do not know Samuel Singh,” he finally said, “but what would you like to order?”

  “Actually, I'd just like to talk to you. Perhaps on your next break?”

  “That would be my lunchtime at one o'clock. But you must order now. It is a rule.”

  There was a big guy standing behind me. He was wearing a sleeveless T-​shirt, scruffy cutoffs, and mud-​clogged grungy boots.

  “Gripes, lady,” he said. “You think we got all day? Give him your order. I gotta get back to work.”

  Lula turned and looked at him and he moved to another register. “Hunh,” Lula said.

  “I must take your order,” Howie said.

  “Fine. Great. I'll have a cheeseburger, a large fries, a Coke, and an apple pie.”

  “Maybe some chicken nuggets,” Lula said.

  “No nuggets,” I told Howie. “What about Samuel Singh?”

  “First, you must pay me for your food.”

  I shoved a twenty at him. “Do you know where Singh is?”

  “I do not. I am telling you I do not know him. Would you like extra ketchup packets with this cheeseburger? I have extra ketchup packets to give at my discretion.”

  “Yeah, extra ketchup would be great.”

  “If it was me, I would have gotten some chicken nuggets,” Lula said. “Always good to have nuggets.”

  “You're not eating this, remember?”

  “Well, maybe I could have had a nugget.”

  I took my bag of food. “You have my card. Call me if you think of anything,” I said to Howie. “I'll try to stop back at one.”

  Howie nodded and smiled. “Yes. Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you for eating at McDonalds.”

  “He was nice and polite,” Lula said when we got back to the car, “but he didn't give us a lot.” She looked at the bag of food. “Boy, that smells good. I can smell the fries. Wonder how many points it would cost me to eat a French fry?”

  “No one can eat just one French fry.”

  “I bet supermodels eat just one French fry.”

  I didn't like the way Lula was looking at the bag. Her eyes were too wide and sort of bugged out of her head. “I'm going to throw this food away,” I said. “I got it so I could talk to Howie. We don't really need this food.”

  “It's a sin to throw food away,” Lula said. “There's children starving in Africa. They'd be happy to get this food. God's gonna come get you if you throw that food away.”

  “First off, we're not in Africa, so I can't give this food to any of those starving kids. Second, neither of us needs this food. So God's just going to have to understand.”

  “I think you might be blaspheming God.”

  “I'm not blaspheming God.” But just in case, I did a mental genuflect and asked for forgiveness. Guilt and fear remain long after blind belief.

  “Give me that food bag,” Lula said. “I'm going to save your immortal soul.”

  “No! Remember the supermodel. Have some carrots.”

  “I hate those fucking carrots. Give me that bag!”

  “Stop it,” I said. “You're getting scary.”

  “I need that burger. I'm outta control.”

  No shit. I was afraid if I didn't get rid of the bag Lula would squash me like a bug. I eyed the distance between me and the trash receptacle and I was pretty sure I could out-​sprint Lula, so I took off at a run.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “You come back here.” And then she pounded after me.

  I reached the trash and shoved the bag in. Lula knocked me out of the way, took the top off the trash receptacle, and retrieved the bag of food.

  “This here's good as new,” she said, testing a couple French fries.“ She closed her eyes. ”Oh man, they just made these fresh. And they got a lot of salt. I love it when they got a lot of salt."

  I took a couple fries from the box. She was right. They were great fries. We finished the fries, Lula broke the cheese burger in half, and we ate the cheeseburger. Then we each ate half of the apple pie.

  “Would have been nice to have some nuggets,” Lula said.

  “You're a nut.”

  “It's not my fault. That was a bogus diet. I can't go around eating plain-​ass vegetables all day. I'll get weak and die.”

  “Wouldn't want that to happen.”

  “Hell no,” Lula said.

  We went back to the car and I called Ranger. “Having any luck?” I asked him.

  “I found someone who saw Singh with the dog the day after it disappeared. It looks like Singh ran as opposed to getting himself whacked. And you were right, he took the dog with him.”

  “Any idea why he might want to disappear?”

  “The future mother-​in-​law would do it for me.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Have you got something?”

  “I have a guy who says he doesn't know Singh, but I don't believe him.” And I have horrific photos of a dead woman. Best to wait until I'm alone with Ranger to tell him about the horrific photos. Lula isn't always great at keeping a secret and Morelli asked me not to share the details.

  “Later,” Ranger said.

  I called Connie next. “I need an address for a guy named Howie P. He works at the McDonald's on Lincoln Avenue. See if you can get his address out of the manager.”

  Five minutes later Connie got back to me with the address.

  “This is the deal,” I said to Lula. “We're going to check out Howie's apartment. We are not going to break in. You accidentally smash a window or bust down a door, and I swear I'll never take you on a case with me again.”

  “Hunh,” Lula said. “When did I ever bust down a door?” “Two days ago. And it was the wrong door.” “I didn't bust that door. I just tapped it open.”

  Howie lived in a hard times neighborhood a short distance from his job. He rented two rooms in a house that was originally designed to contain one family and now was home to seven. Paint peeled off the clapboard siding, and window ledges rotted in the sun. The small yard was hard-​packed dirt, the perimeter marked by chain-​link fencing. A fringe of weed clung to life at the base of the fence.

  Lula and I stood in the dark, musty foyer and ran through the names on the
mailboxes. Howie was 3B. Sonji Kluchari was 3A.

  “Hey, I know her,” Lula said. “Back when I was a ho. She worked the corner across from me. If she's living in three A you can bet there's eight other people in there with her. She's a scabby ol' crackhead, doing whatever she has to so she can get her next fix.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She's my age,” Lula said. “And I'm not saying how old I am, but it's twenty-​something.”

  We climbed the stairs to the second-​floor landing, which was illuminated by a bare twenty-​watt bulb hanging from a ceiling cord, and then we went to the third floor, which clearly had been the attic. The third-​floor landing was small and dark and smelled like rot. There were two doors. Someone had scrawled 3A and 3B on the doors with black magic marker.

  We knocked on 3B. No answer. I tried the door. Locked.

  “Hunh,” Lula said. “Looks flimsy. Too bad you got all these rules about breaking things. I bet I could lean on this door and it'd fall down.”

  That was a good possibility. Lula wasn't a small woman.

  I turned and knocked on 3A. I knocked louder the second time and the door opened and Sonji peered out at us. She was bloodless white with red-​rimmed eyes and yellow straw hair. She was rail thin and I would have put her age closer to fifty than twenty. Not easy being a crackhead ho.

  Sonji stared at Lula, recognition struggling through the dope haze.

  “Girl,” Lula said. “You look like shit.”

  “Oh yeah,” Sonji said, flat-​voiced, dull-​eyed. “Now I remember. Lula. How you doin', you big ugly ho.”

  “I'm not a ho anymore,” Lula said. “I'm working for a bail bondsman and we're looking for a scrawny little Indian guy. His name's Samuel Singh and he might know Howie.”

  “Howie?”

  “The guy across the hall from you.”

  I showed Sonji a photo of Singh.

  “I don't know,” she said. “These guys all look the same to me.”

  “Anybody living over there besides Howie?” I asked her.

  “Not that I know. From what I can tell, Howie's not exactly Mr. Social. Maybe Singh came over once ... or somebody who looked like him. Don't think anybody but Howie s living there. But hell, what do I know?”

  I gave Sonji my card and a twenty. “Give me a call if you see Singh.”

  Sonji disappeared behind her closed door and Lula and I trudged down the stairs. We went outside, walked around the building to the backyard, and looked up at Howie s single window.

  “Could be me living here,” Lula said. “I still got some pain from what that maniac Ramirez did to me, but turned out it was a favor. He stopped me from being a ho. When I got out of the hospital I knew I had to change my life. God works in strange ways.”

  Benito Ramirez was an insane boxer who loved inflicting pain. He'd beaten Lula to within an inch of her life and tied her to my fire escape. I found her body, bloody and battered. Ramirez wanted the beating to serve as a lesson for Lula and for me.

  I thought getting brutalized like that was a pretty harsh wake-​up call.

  “So what do you think?” Lula asked. “You think Singh could be hiding out up there?”

  It was possible. But it was a long shot. There were a million reasons why Singh could have been looking for Howie. And for that matter, I wasn't even sure I had the right guy. There were a lot of McDonald's around. Singh could have been calling McDonald's in Hong Kong for all I knew.

  I'd been keeping watch for the gray Sentra, but it hadn't surfaced. It could be in a nearby garage. Or it could be in Mexico. A rusted fire escape precariously clung to the back of the building. The ladder had been dropped and hung just a few inches from the ground. “I could go up the fire escape,” I said. “Then I could look in the window.”

  “Now you're the nut. That things falling apart. No way I'm going up that rusted-​out piece of junk.”

  I grabbed a rail and pulled. The rail held tight. “It's in better shape than it looks,” I said. “It'll hold me.”

  “Maybe. But it sure as hell won't hold me.”

  Only one of us needed to go anyway. I'd be up and down in a couple minutes. And I'd be able to see if there was any indication of Singh or the dog. “You need to stay on the ground and do lookout anyway,” I told Lula.

  Stephanie Plum 9 - To The Nines

  Chapter Five

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I went hand over hand up the ladder and pulled myself onto the first level. I climbed the second ladder, steadied myself on the third-​floor platform, and looked into Howie's window. Howie lived directly under the roof. There were rafters where the ceiling should be and the floor was chipped linoleum. Howie had a sofa that was lumpy and faded, but looked comfy in a dilapidated sort of way. He had a small television and a card table and two metal folding chairs. That was the extent of his furniture. A sink hung on a far wall. A half refrigerator had been placed beside the sink. There were two wood shelves over the refrigerator. Howie had stacked two plates, two bowls, and two mugs on one of the shelves. The other shelf held condiments, a couple boxes of cereal, a jar of peanut butter, and a bag of chips.

  When you come right down to it, this is really all anyone needs, isn't it? A television and a bag of chips.

  I could see the front door and a doorway leading to another room, but the second room wasn't visible. The bedroom, obviously. I tried the window, but it was either locked or painted shut.

  “Coming down,” I said to Lula. “No dog biscuits on the kitchen shelf.” I put my foot on the ladder and it disintegrated in a shower of rust flakes and chunks of broken metal. The chunks of metal crashed onto the second-​floor platform and the whole thing pulled away from the building, and with more of a sigh than a screech the entire bottom half of the fire escape landed on the ground in front of Lula.

  “Hunh,” Lula said.

  I looked down at Lula. Too far to jump. The only way off the platform was through Howie's apartment.

  “Are you coming down soon?” Lula asked. “I'm getting hungry.”

  “I don't want to break his window.”

  “You got any other choices?”

  I dialed Ranger on my cell phone.

  “I'm sort of stuck,” I told Ranger.

  Ten minutes later, Ranger opened Howie's apartment door, crossed the room, unlocked and raised the window, and looked out at the mangled mess of metal on the ground. He raised his eyes to mine and the almost smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Good job, Destructo.”

  “It wasn't my fault.”

  He dragged me through the window, into the apartment. “It never is.”

  “I wanted to see if there were any signs that Singh or the dog had been here. I don't have much to tie Howie to Singh, but once I get past Howie I have nothing.”