Finger Lickin' Fifteen

  “Hey!” I yelled in her ear.

  “What?”

  “You’re snoring.”

  “No way. I was watching television. Look at me. Do I look like I’m asleep?”

  “I’m going to bed,” I said.

  “You sure you don’t want to see the end of this? This is a real good show.”

  “I’ll catch it on reruns.”

  I closed the door to my bedroom, crawled into bed, and shut my light off. I took a couple deep breaths and willed myself to go to sleep. Relax, I told myself. Calm down. Life is good. Think of a gentle breeze. Think of the moon in a dark sky. Hear the ocean. My eyes snapped open. I wasn’t hearing the ocean. I was hearing Lula snoring. I put my pillow over my head and went back to talking myself into sleep. Hear the ocean. Hear the wind in the trees. Shit! It wasn’t working. All I could hear was Lula.

  Okay, I had a choice. I could kick her out of my apartment. I could hit her in the head with a hammer until she was dead. Or I could leave.

  I PARKED IN the Rangeman garage and fobbed myself into the elevator and up to the seventh floor. I knew all eyes were on me in the control room. I waved at the Minicam hidden in the far corner of the elevator and tried to look nonchalant. I was wearing sneakers, flannel pajamas, and a sweatshirt. I’d called Ranger on the way across town and told him I needed a room. He said he was out on surveillance, and the only room available was his bedroom . . . so that was where I was headed.

  I walked through his apartment in the dark and debated sleeping on the couch, but in the end Ranger’s bed was too alluring. He was working a double shift, doing drive-bys on accounts he felt were at highest risk for break-in. That meant he wouldn’t be back until six A.M. All I had to do was set the alarm so I’d be out of his bed before he rolled in.

  The next morning, I was still in my pajamas and was standing in Ranger’s kitchen when he got home. I wasn’t entirely with the program, needing at least another two hours of sleep and a lot of hot coffee. Ranger had been up for more than twenty-four hours and looked annoyingly alert.

  He wrapped an arm around me and kissed me just above my ear. “There’s something wrong with this picture,” Ranger said. “You’re in my bed a lot, but never with me.”

  “It was nice of you to let me stay here. Lula has taken over my apartment.”

  “Nice has nothing to do with it,” Ranger said.

  “How was your night?”

  “Long. And uneventful. I need to get some sleep. Are you coming back to bed with me?”

  “No. I’m up for the day. Gotta get to work and solve all your problems.”

  “If you call Ella, she’ll bring breakfast. Or you can get dressed and have breakfast on the fifth floor.”

  “I haven’t got any clothes.”

  “Ella has clothes for you.”

  He took a bottle of water from the refrigerator, kissed me on the forehead, and left the kitchen. I called Ella, told her I was in Ranger’s apartment, and ten minutes later, Ella was at the door with a breakfast tray and a shopping bag filled with Rangeman gear.

  Ella wore Rangeman black just like everyone else in the building. Today she was in a girl-style V-neck T-shirt and black jeans.

  I took the bag and tray from her at the door and thanked her.

  “Let me know if the clothes don’t fit,” she said. “I saw you in the building yesterday, and I took a guess at the size. I didn’t think you’d changed from the last time you worked here.”

  “I didn’t see you,” I said. “I never see you! Food just mysteriously appears and disappears in the fifth floor kitchen.”

  “I try to stay invisible and not disrupt the men’s routine.”

  Ella left, and I ate a bagel with cream cheese, drank a couple cups of coffee, and picked at some fresh fruit. My eyes were pretty much open, but I wasn’t sure my heart was beating fast enough to propel me through the day. I collapsed on Ranger’s couch and woke up a little before eight A.M. I picked some clothes out of the shopping bag, tiptoed past Ranger, and quietly closed the bathroom door.

  I took a shower, brushed my teeth, dressed in my new clothes, and emerged from the bathroom feeling like a functioning human being. I was awake. I was clean. The caffeine had kicked in and my heart was racing. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the caffeine. Maybe it was the sight of Ranger with a day-old beard, sleeping in the bed I’d recently vacated.

  I left the apartment and took the elevator to the fifth floor. Roger King was monitoring the station that included the code computer. I paused in front of him to watch him work. He was on the phone with an account that had accidentally tripped their alarm. He was polite and professional. The conversation was short. The account gave King their password, King verified the password and ended the call.

  “That’s the first time I’ve seen someone verify a password,” I said to King.

  King was a nice-looking guy with a voice like velvet. I knew from his human resources file that he was twenty-seven years old and had a degree in criminal justice from a community college. He’d worked as a cop in a small town in Pennsylvania but quit to take the job with Rangeman.

  “If you work this shift, you get a lot of bogus alarms,” King said. “People get up in the morning and forget the alarm is on. By the time Chet takes over, this desk is like a graveyard.”

  When Chet showed up for his shift, I ventured out of my cubicle again and attempted small talk. Chet was polite but not stimulating, and I was feeling like I was contributing to the graveyard syndrome, so I moseyed on back to work, starting a computer search on a deadbeat client.

  Louis had made good on the new chair, and my ass no longer cramped after a half hour. I was wearing black slacks that had some stretch, and a short-sleeved V-neck knit shirt with Rangeman stitched on it and my name stitched below the Rangeman. Ella had also given me cargo pants and matching button-down-collared shirts with roll-up sleeves, a couple stretchy little skirts, black running shoes, black socks, a black zippered sweatshirt, and a black windbreaker. I was on my own for underwear.

  A little before noon, I sensed a shift in the climate and looked up to find Ranger on deck. He spoke briefly to each of the men at the monitoring stations, grabbed a sandwich from the kitchen, and stopped at my cubicle on his way to his office. He was freshly showered and shaved and perfectly pressed in black dress slacks and shirt.

  “I have a client meeting in the boardroom in fifteen minutes,” he said. “After that, I need to catch up on paperwork, and then I’ll take another surveillance shift at six. How far did you get on the accounts list yesterday?”

  “Not that far. I was getting ready to pack up here and spend the afternoon riding around.”

  “Do you need a company car?”

  “No. I’m okay in the Escort.”

  I stuffed myself into my new Rangeman sweatshirt, hiked my purse onto my shoulder, and went to the kitchen to load up on free food. Ella had set out vegetable soup and crackers, assorted sandwiches, a salad bar, and a large display of fresh fruit. I looked it all over and blew out a sigh.

  Ramon was behind me, and he burst out laughing. “Let me guess what that sigh was about. You want a hot dog, fries, and a brownie with ice cream.”

  “I’d kill for a meatball sub and a hunk of birthday cake, but this is better for me,” I said, selecting a barbecue chicken sandwich.

  “Yeah, I keep telling myself that. If I get shot dead on the job, there won’t be an ounce of fat on me.”

  “Do you worry about that?”

  “Getting shot dead? No. I don’t do a lot of worrying, but the reality is most of this job is routine, with the occasional potential for really bad shit.”

  I dropped the sandwich into my purse, along with an apple and an organic granola bar. “Gotta go,” I said. “Things to do.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  I took the elevator to the garage, wrenched open the rusted door on my p.o.s. Escort, and motored out to the street. Probably it was stupid to refuse Ranger’s offer of a company car, but
it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I had lousy car karma, and I always felt crappy when I used Ranger’s Porsche and it got stolen or crushed by a garbage truck.

  I had my map on the seat beside me, and I drove from one account to the next according to neighborhood. By four o’clock, I’d gone through all the accounts and had checked off a handful that I thought had the potential for a future break-in. I’d gone full circle around the city and ended on lower Hamilton, a half mile from the bonds office.

  Lula hadn’t called about the door, but I felt confident the door had been replaced and everything was cool. I drove up Hamilton to talk to Connie and Lula and found Connie was manning the office all by herself.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked Connie.

  “Vinnie is writing bond for someone, and Lula is at your apartment. She said she lives there now.”

  “I let her stay last night because her door was broken.”

  “I guess her door is still broken,” Connie said.

  “That’s ridiculous. How long does it take to replace a door? You go to Home Depot, buy a door, and hang it on those doohickey hinge things.”

  “Something about it being a crime scene. The door can’t be replaced until the lab checks it out.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Morelli. He stopped by the office to talk to her after she reported the shooting.”

  Unh! Mental head slap.

  I dialed Morelli and did some anti-hyperventilation exercises while I waited for him to pick up.

  “What?” Morelli said.

  “Did you tell Lula she couldn’t replace her door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s stupid. She has to replace her door. How can she live in her apartment without a door?”

  “It’s a crime scene that’s part of an ongoing murder investigation, and we couldn’t schedule evidence collection today. I’ll have a guy out there tomorrow, and then she can replace her door.”

  “You don’t understand. She’s camped out in my apartment.”

  “And?”

  “I can’t live with her! She rumbles around. She takes up space. Lots of space! And she snores!!”

  “Listen,” Morelli said. “I have my own problems.”

  “Such as?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  A woman’s voice called out in the background. “Get off the phone. I need help with my zipper.”

  My heart felt like it had stopped dead in my chest. “Is that who I think it is?” I asked Morelli.

  “Yeah, and I can’t get rid of her. Thank God her zipper’s stuck. I’m moving in with my brother.”

  For a moment, my entire field of vision went red. Undoubtedly due to a sudden, violent rise in blood pressure once my heart started beating again. It was Joyce Barnhardt. I hated Joyce Barnhardt. She was a sneaky, mean little kid when we were in school together. She spread rumors, stole boyfriends, alienated girlfriends, cheated on tests, and looked under stall doors in the girls’ bathroom. And now that she was all grown up, she wasn’t much different. She stole husbands, boyfriends, and jobs, cheating in any way possible. Her very presence in Morelli’s house sent me into the irrationally enraged nutso zone.

  I sucked in some air and pretended I was calm. “You’re a big strong guy,” I said, my voice mostly steady, well below the screaming level. “You could get rid of her if you wanted.”

  “It’s not that easy. She walked right into my house. I’m going to have to start locking my doors. And she came in with a tray of lasagna. I’m afraid to touch it. She’s probably got it laced with roofies.”

  Okay, get a grip here. She walked into Morelli’s house. She wasn’t invited. It could be worse, right?

  “Why is she suddenly bringing you food?” I asked him.

  “She’s been up my ass ever since you broke up with me.”

  “Hey, stud,” Joyce yelled to Morelli. “Get over here.”

  “Shit,” Morelli said. “Maybe I should just shoot her and get it done with.”

  I had a bunch of bitchy comments rolling through my head, but I clamped my mouth shut to keep the comments from spewing out into the phone. I mean, honestly, how hard is it to shove a woman out your back door? What am I supposed to be thinking here?

  “I have to go,” Morelli said. “I don’t like the way she’s looking at my olive oil.”

  I made a sticking-my-finger-down-my-throat gagging motion and hung up.

  “What was that about?” Connie wanted to know.

  “Barnhardt is trying to feed her lasagna to Morelli.”

  “She’s fungus,” Connie said.

  “I’m not too happy with Morelli, either.”

  “He’s a man,” Connie said. As if that explained it all.

  “I suppose I should go home and see what Lula is doing.”

  “I know what she’s doing,” Connie said. “She’s brewing barbecue sauce with your grandmother.”

  “In my apartment?”

  “That was the plan.”

  Eek! Okay, so I know my apartment isn’t going to get a full-page spread in Home Beautiful, but it’s all I’ve got. Bad enough I have Lula in it. Lula and Grandma together are total facaca.

  “Gotta go,” I said to Connie. “See you tomorrow.”

  Vinnie stuck his head out of his office. “Where are you going? Why are you dressed up in Rangeman stuff? Christ, you’re not moonlighting, are you? You aren’t any good when you’re working for me full-time. Now I’m sharing you with Ranger?”

  “I brought two skips in this week.”

  “Big deal. What about all the others still in the wind? This isn’t a goddamn charity. I’m not buying these idiots out of jail for my health. And it’s not like you’re the only bounty hunter out there,” Vinnie said. “You could be replaced.”

  “Lucille’s been talking redecorating again,” Connie said to me. “Vinnie needs money.”

  Lucille was Vinnie’s wife. She tortured Vinnie by constantly redecorating their house and by spending his money faster than he could make it. We figured this was retribution for Vinnie boinking anything that moved. The good part of the deal was that all Vinnie could do was pedal twice as fast, since Lucille’s father, Harry the Hammer, financed the bonds office. If Vinnie left Lucille, not only would he be unemployed, there was a good chance he’d be dining with Stanley Chipotle.

  “She’s killing me,” Vinnie said. “I haven’t got money to buy a hot dog for lunch. My bookie took me off his iPhone.”

  Actually, it wasn’t a good thing when Vinnie got this broke, because instead of buying favors from professionals on Stark Street, we suspected Vinnie was forced to chase down ducks at the park.

  NINE

  I LEFT THE bonds office, drove a couple blocks on Hamilton, and took a right into Morelli’s neighborhood. Best not to examine my motives too closely. I was telling myself morbid curiosity was the driving force, but my heart was beating pretty hard for something that benign. I left-turned onto Morelli’s street, cruised half a block, and stopped in front of his house. His SUV was gone, and there was no sign of Joyce’s car. No lights on in the house. No sign of activity. I turned at the next corner and headed for the Burg. I drove past Morelli’s brother’s house. No SUV there, either.

  Okay, get a grip, I told myself. No reason to get crazy. Morelli is a free man. He can do whatever the heck he wants. If he wants to act like a jerk and get friendly with Barnhardt, it’s his problem. Anyway, I have to expect that he’ll be seeing other women. That’s what happens when people break up . . . they spend time with other people, right? Just because I don’t want to spend time with other people doesn’t mean Morelli has to feel that way. I’m one of those people who needs space between relationships. I don’t just jump into stuff. And I don’t do one-night stands. Usually. There was that time with Ranger, but you couldn’t really categorize it as a one-night stand. It was more like a onetime-only ticket to WOW.

  I turned out of the Burg onto Hamilton, and five minutes later, I p
ulled into my parking lot. I parked next to Lula’s Firebird and looked up at my windows. No smoke. No sign of fire. No one running screaming out of the building. That was good. Maybe I wasn’t too late. Maybe they hadn’t started cooking yet. Maybe they’d discovered I only had one pot and decided to watch television.

  I jogged across the lot, up the stairs, and down the hall to my apartment, reminding myself to stay calm. Lula and Grandma were in my kitchen and my counters were filled with bottles of barbecue sauce, dry rub, vinegar, cooking sherry, a half-empty bottle of rum, lemons, onions, oranges, a keg of ketchup, and a ten-pound can of tomato sauce. Grandma and Lula were in their chef’s clothes, except Lula was missing her hat. My sink was filled with dirty measuring cups, assorted utensils, bowls, and measuring spoons. There was a large pot hissing on the stove.