Finger Lickin' Fifteen

  Neither of us said a word in the elevator. Ranger guided the Turbo out of the garage, and I gave him directions to Ernie’s house. He looked relaxed at the wheel. No angry little lines in his forehead. No tense muscles working in his jaw. He also wasn’t talking. He was in his zone.

  We drove down the alley behind Ernie’s house and parked in his driveway, Ranger still not saying anything, looking at the wreck of a haunted mansion in front of him. We got out of the Porsche and walked to the building’s back door. Ranger listened for a moment and knocked. No answer. Ranger knocked again.

  There was a sound overhead like a window being raised. I looked up to see and Splooosh. I was doused head to foot with red paint.

  Ranger was standing inches from me, and he didn’t have a drop on him. He was in black Rangeman tactical gear of T-shirt, cargo pants, and windbreaker, and he was pristine. He looked at me and did a small I can’t believe these things always happen to you gesture with his hands.

  “If you so much as crack a smile, that’s the end of our friendship,” I said to him.

  The corners of his mouth twitched a little, and I knew he was smiling inside.

  “Babe,” he said.

  “I’m a mess.”

  “Yes, but we’re going to have fun washing this paint off you when we get back to my apartment.” He unholstered his gun and handed it to me. “Stay here and don’t move from this spot. If you see Ernie Dell, shoot him.”

  “What if he isn’t armed?”

  “He’ll be armed by the time the police get here.”

  Ranger disappeared inside the house, leaving the kitchen door open. A minute later, I heard something crash overhead. The crash was accompanied by a loud grunt, as if the air had been knocked out of someone. I’d seen Ranger in action on other manhunts, and I suspected this was Ernie Dell getting thrown against a wall. There was a moment of silence and then more thumping and crashing. I looked inside, past the kitchen, and saw Ernie sprawled on the floor at the foot of the stairs. Ranger hauled him to his feet and wrangled him to the back door.

  “What was all that crashing?” I asked Ranger.

  “He slipped on the stairs.”

  Ernie’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and he wasn’t looking happy. I was relieved to have captured Ernie, but it was annoying that it was so easy for Ranger to execute a take down and next to impossible for me.

  “You have other talents,” Ranger said, reading my thoughts.

  “Such as?”

  He tucked my hair behind my ear so it wouldn’t drip paint on my face. “You’re smart. You’re intuitive. You’re resilient.” He thought about it for a beat. “You’re stubborn.”

  “Stubborn is a good thing?”

  “Not necessarily. I ran out of good things.”

  A Rangeman SUV glided into the driveway and parked. Tank and Ramon got out and went pale when they saw me.

  “It’s paint,” Ranger said to them. “Mr. Dell was feeling playful.”

  Tank clapped a hand to his heart.

  “Sweet Mother of God,” Ramon said.

  Ranger handed Ernie over to Tank. “I’ll get the paperwork for you, and you can turn him in for Stephanie. And I need a thermal blanket from the emergency kit for her.”

  Five minutes later, Ernie was shackled to the floor in the backseat of the Rangeman SUV and trundled off to the police station. This left me with two open files, and as far as I was concerned, Joyce was welcome to both of them. I kicked my shoes off at car-side, wrapped myself in the aluminum blanket from the emergency kit, and eased myself into the Turbo, next to Ranger.

  “I’m trying not to drip,” I said to him.

  “I saw the can in the upstairs bedroom. It’s water-based. It should wash off.”

  “Why don’t you have any paint on you? It’s always me. Why isn’t it ever you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ranger said. “But I like it this way.”

  Ranger backed out of the driveway and drove toward Olden. I was soaked through with paint and wrapped in an aluminum foil blanket like a baked potato. I’d left my shoes in the driveway, and my feet were getting cold.

  “Take me to my apartment,” I said to Ranger.

  “Isn’t Lula there?”

  “No. She’s cleared out.”

  THIRTEEN

  I LET MYSELF into my apartment and went to my kitchen first thing. It was sparkling clean, with only a few pale pink stains in the ceiling paint and a small chunk of the ceiling chipped away from the lid impact. The living room and dining room were nice and neat. No sign of Lula. Yay. Yippee.

  The bedroom wasn’t nearly so happy. Lula’s clothes were still there. Okay, don’t panic, I told myself. Maybe she was in a hurry to go to brunch and just hasn’t come back to collect her clothes. I was holding a big plastic garbage bag that I’d taken from the kitchen. I stripped down and put everything, including the disposable aluminum blanket, into the garbage bag. There was a limit to how much paint you could wash out of a shirt, and my clothes were way beyond the limit.

  I stepped into the shower and, after a lot of scrubbing and shampooing, finally emerged red-free. I fluffed my hair out with the dryer, swiped some mascara on my lashes, and dressed in a ratty T-shirt, washed-out jeans, and a denim jacket. Not a high-fashion day, since my laundry basket with all my clean clothes was still at my mother’s house.

  I’d promised to test-drive more barbecue sauce tonight at my parents’ house. I called Lula for a ride and went down to the parking lot to wait for her.

  Mostly seniors on fixed incomes lived in my building. There were a couple Hispanics and a young single mom with two kids, but everyone else had a subscription to AARP The Magazine. It was almost five, and half of my building was out taking advantage of the early bird specials at the diner, and the other half was in front of the television, eating a defrosted entrée.

  Lula barreled into the lot and came to a sharp stop in front of me. “Hop in,” she said. “I gotta get back to help your granny. We’re in the middle of saucin’ up some chicken.”

  “Is this Mister Clucky’s recipe?”

  “Yeah, and I think it’s a good one. His secret ingredient is blackberry jelly. Leave it to a cross-dresser to come up with something real creative like that.”

  Lula was wearing a stretchy orange sweater with a low V-neck and short sleeves, and a matching orange-and-black tiger-striped skirt. No flak vest.

  “What happened to the flak vest?” I asked her.

  “I was always sweating under it and it gave me a rash. I just gotta be on a more vigilant outlook for those idiot killers. If I get rid of the rash in time, I might wear the vest to the cook-off. Although I hate for it to interfere with my chef outfit.”

  “Do you still think Chipotle’s killers will be at the cook-off?”

  “They’ll be there,” Lula said. “And we’ll catch them and be rich. I got a bracelet all picked out at the jewelry store. And I’m going on a cruise down to the Panama Canal. I always wanted to see the Panama Canal.”

  I agreed with Lula. I thought there was a good chance the killers would be at the cook-off. They were sticking around, and the cook-off seemed to be the logical reason. Although for me, it wouldn’t have been reason enough. If I whacked someone’s head off and was worried about being recognized, I’d get out of town. These guys didn’t seem to be all that smart. They were focused on getting rid of the witness, and in the bargain they were getting more witnesses.

  Lula parked at the curb in front of my parents’ house and looked around before getting out of the car.

  “I guess the coast is clear,” she said. “I don’t see no killers anywhere.”

  Everything was business as usual in my parents’ house. My dad was in his chair in front of the television. My mom and Grandma Mazur were in the kitchen.

  “I got all the chicken soaking in the sauce,” Grandma said. “I got batter for biscuits, and we made some coleslaw.”

  “I got Larry comin’ over as soon as he’s off his shift,”
Lula said. “He’s gonna show us how to do the grillin’. He should be here any minute.”

  The doorbell chimed, and Grandma went to open the door.

  “Well, lookit you,” I heard Grandma say. “You must be Larry. Come on in. We’re all in the kitchen waiting for you. And this here’s my son-in-law, Frank.”

  “For the love of everything holy,” my father said. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

  “This is from my Julia Child collection,” Larry said. “I know she didn’t barbecue, but I just love the simplicity of her clothes and the complexity of her dishes.”

  I stuck my head out the kitchen door and looked beyond the dining room into the living room. Larry was wearing a curly brown wig, a lavender-and-pink flower-print blouse, navy skirt, and navy pumps with very low heels. There actually was a frightening resemblance to Julia Child.

  My father muttered something that might have sounded like flaming fruitcake and went back to reading his paper.

  Larry followed Grandma into the kitchen, and Grandma introduced him to my mother.

  “Very nice to meet you,” my mother said. And then she made the sign of the cross and reached for the liquor bottle in the cupboard next to the stove.

  “We had a mishap with the grill a couple days ago,” Lula said to Larry. “But we got it put together again and we’re pretty sure it’ll work. It’s out back.”

  “And here’s the chicken,” Grandma said. “We got it sitting in the sauce just like you told us.”

  “Lookin’ good, ladies,” Larry said. “Let’s barbecue.”

  Lula grabbed the tray with the chicken. My mother had her hand wrapped around a highball glass. And my grandmother had a broom.

  “What’s the broom for?” Larry wanted to know.

  “Dogs,” Grandma said.

  We went outside, Larry approached the grill, and the rest of us hung back. Not that we didn’t trust Larry’s manly ability to ignite a grill; more that we suspected this was the grill from hell.

  After a couple minutes of fiddling around, Larry got the grill up and running. He adjusted the flame just so, and he arranged the chicken.

  “Good thing you got the night off from being Mister Clucky,” Grandma said.

  “I never get the Sunday night shift,” Larry said. “Sunday night is dead. All the action takes place for the brunch and the early-dinner crowd. They always give those times to me because I’m the best Mister Clucky.”

  “You’re a pretty good Julia Child, too,” Grandma said. “I bet you’re fun on Halloween.”

  At six o’clock, my father took his seat at the table and we all hustled into the dining room with the food. We took our seats and I realized there was an extra plate set.

  “You didn’t do what I think you did,” I said to my mother.

  “He seemed like a nice young man,” my mother said. “I met him in the supermarket. He helped me pick out a grapefruit. And it turned out he’s related to Biddy Gurkin.”

  The doorbell rang and Grandma jumped out of her chair. “I’ll get it. I like when we have a new man at the dinner table.”

  “You have to stop doing this,” I said to my mother. “I don’t want a new man.”

  “I’ll be dead someday,” my mother said. “And then what? You’ll wish you had someone.”

  “I have a hamster.”

  “This here is Peter Pecker,” Grandma said, leading a tall, bald, red-faced guy into the room.

  Lula spewed water out of her nose, and my father choked on a piece of bread.

  “Sorry,” Lula said. “I never met anyone named Peter Pecker before.”

  “And he looks just like one, too,” Grandma said. “Did anyone else notice that? Isn’t that something?”

  My mother drained her highball glass and looked to the kitchen.

  “Sit here and have a piece of chicken,” Grandma said to Peter Pecker. “We made it special.”

  Pecker sat down and looked across the table at Julia Child. “I thought you died.”

  “It’s not really Julia Child,” Grandma said. “It’s Larry all dressed up. Earlier today, he was Mister Clucky.”

  “That’s weird,” Peter said.

  “Not as weird as being named Peter Pecker,” Larry said.

  “I can’t help it if that’s what I’m named, asshole.”

  “Who are you calling an asshole?”

  “You, Mister Fruity Tutti.”

  “You must have heard wrong,” Grandma said. “He’s not Mister Fruity Tutti. He’s Mister Clucky.”

  “Biscuits,” my father said. “Where the hell are the biscuits?”

  My mother and grandmother and I snapped to attention and passed the biscuits to my father.

  “What do you do at the supermarket?” Grandma asked Pecker.

  “I’m assistant manager for produce. I’m the vegetable specialist.”

  “That sounds like a real good job,” Grandma said.

  “I know all the vegetables,” Pecker said. “And I know all about fruits, too.” He looked across the table to Larry. “Nothing personal.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Larry asked. “Are you calling me a fruit?”

  “If the high heel fits.”

  “You’re a jerk.”

  “Hey, pal, I’m not the one wearing ladies’ panties.”

  “This is the United States of America,” Larry said. “I can wear whatever kind of pants I want.”

  “You should stop pickin’ on him,” Lula said to Peter Pecker. “You don’t watch your step, and I’ll put my foot up your runty butt.”

  “Oh, I’m so scared,” Pecker said. “Now the fat chick’s going to protect the pussy-boy.”

  Lula was on her feet. “Did someone call me a fat chick? I better not have heard that.”

  “Fat, fat, fat,” Pecker said.

  “Pecker head, pecker head, pecker head,” Larry said.

  “Nobody calls me pecker head and lives,” Pecker said. And he launched himself across the table and tackled Julia Child.

  The two men went to the floor, punching and grunting, rolling around locked together.

  “Look at that,” Grandma said, leaning across the table. “He is wearing ladies’ panties.”

  My father kept his head down, shoveling in buttered biscuits and barbecued chicken, and my mother went to the kitchen to refill her glass.

  Lula hauled her Glock out of her purse and fired off a round at the ceiling. A small chunk of plaster fell down onto the table, and Larry and Pecker stopped gouging each other’s eyes out long enough to look around.

  “We got chicken on the table,” Lula said, pointing the gun at the two men. “And I want some respect for it. What the hell are you thinking, rolling around on the floor like that at dinner hour? You need to get your asses into your chairs and show some manners. It’s like you two were born in a barn. Not to mention I got a contest coming up, and I need to know if this is gonna give you all diarrhea on account of everything I’ve cooked so far has gone through people like goose grease.”

  Larry righted his chair and sat down, and Pecker went to his side of the table. Pecker’s nose was bleeding a little, and Larry had a bruise developing on his cheekbone.

  “I hope this chicken’s okay,” Grandma said, spooning coleslaw onto her plate. “I’m hungry.”

  Everyone looked to my father. He’d been shoveling food into his face nonstop, including the chicken.

  “What do you think of the chicken?” my mother asked him.

  “Passable,” my father said. “It would be better if it was roasted.”

  Pecker tested out a leg. “This is pretty good,” he said, reaching for another piece.

  “It’s Larry’s recipe,” Grandma said.

  Pecker looked over at Larry. “No kidding? How do you get that sweet but spicy taste?”

  “Blackberry jelly,” Larry said. “You add a dab to the hot sauce.”

  “I would never have thought of that,” Pecker said.

  I ate a biscuit and ni
bbled at the chicken. Pecker was right. The chicken was good. Really good. I didn’t have any delusions about winning the contest, but at least we might not poison anyone.

  My father reached for the butter and noticed the chunk of plaster in the middle of the table. “Where’d that come from?” he asked.