Finger Lickin' Fifteen

  “I’ve been checking. He isn’t there.”

  “He’s there. You just aren’t seeing him.”

  I stared down at my dinner plate and wineglass. Empty. Damn. “Someone drank my wine,” I said to Ranger.

  “That would be you.”

  I looked around. “Do we have dessert?”

  “No.”

  Big surprise. Ranger never had dessert.

  “Why can’t I see my drug dealer?” I asked him.

  Ranger leaned back in his chair and watched me. The lion assessing his prey. “He’s using a runner,” Ranger said. “If you want to find Hatcher, you have to follow the runner.”

  “How do I recognize the runner?”

  “You pay attention.”

  “Okay, I’ll give it another shot,” I said, pushing away from the table, taking the files from Ranger. “I’m going to Stark Street.”

  I started to leave, and Ranger snagged me by the back of my shirt and dragged me up against him.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re going to Stark Street now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  Ranger smiled down at me. I was amusing him.

  “I can think of at least a half-dozen reasons,” he said. “Not the least of which is you’ll be the only one on Stark Street not carrying a gun. It’ll be like open season on Plum pudding.”

  “I can take care of myself,” I told him.

  “Maybe, but I can take care of you better.”

  No argument there.

  THREE

  A HALF HOUR LATER, Ranger and I were parked on the six hundred block of Stark Street. Stark Street starts down by the river, cuts through the center of the city, and runs straight to hell. Storefronts are grimy, decorated with gang graffiti and the accumulated grit of day-today life in the breakdown lane. Hookers stake out corners, knots of kids going nowhere strut the street, men chainsmoke in doorways, and pushers work the sidewalks.

  Ranger was behind the wheel of a shiny black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows and fancy chrome wheel covers. No one could see us sitting in the SUV, and we were left unmolested as a sign of respect by the general population of Stark Street, who assumed the car belonged to contract killers, badass hip-hop gangsters, or high-level drug dealers.

  The sun had set, but there was ambient light from streetlights and headlights and doors opening into bars. Enough light to determine that Marbles wasn’t on the street.

  “I don’t see anyone who looks like a runner,” I said to Ranger.

  “The kid in the oversize sweatshirt, white T-shirt, and homeboy jeans.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s making deals.”

  “And?”

  “And this block belongs to Marbles. The kid would be dead if he wasn’t working for Marbles. Marbles isn’t a charitable kind of guy.”

  “Maybe Marbles sold his real estate and left town.”

  “Not his style. He’s in one of these buildings, conducting business. Besides owning drugs on the six hundred block, he also manages a couple hookers. Marbles read the memo on diversification. I ran into him two years ago, and he was operating an all-night dog-grooming and cockfighting operation. The cockfighting didn’t involve poultry.”

  It took me a couple beats to figure that out. And even then, how the heck did a guy go about it? Was it like thumb wrestling? I was debating asking about the rules and regulations of cockfighting, but just then the kid in the sweatshirt ambled into a building halfway down the block.

  “He’s going back to the mother ship,” Ranger said.

  Mostly, Stark Street is filled with narrow redbrick town houses, two to four stories tall. Small businesses in varying degrees of failure occupy ground floors, and the upper floors are given over to cramped apartments and rented rooms. At odd intervals on the street, you might find a garage or a ware house or a funeral home. The kid went into a four-story brick town house. All the windows had been painted black.

  Ranger and I left the Escalade, crossed the street, and followed the kid into the building. The foyer was dimly lit by a bare bulb in an overhead fixture, the walls were entirely covered with graffiti. A door labeled HEAD MOTHERFUCKER opened off the foyer.

  Ranger and I exchanged glances and went directly to the Head Motherfucker door. Ranger pushed the door open, and we looked inside at what at one time had probably been an efficiency apartment but was now a rat’s nest office. The desk was piled high with papers, empty fast-food boxes, a laptop computer, a multiline phone, and two half-filled cups of coffee. There was a chair behind the desk and a two-seater leather couch against a wall. Nobody home.

  We left the office, closing the door behind us. We returned to the foyer and took the stairs to the second floor, where a dull-eyed wannabe junior gangsta sat on a plastic lawn chair. He was hooked up to an MP3 player, and he had a small wooden table beside him. There was a cigar box and a roll of tickets on the table.

  “Yuh?” he said. “You want a ticket for the night or just for a run-through?”

  “Run-through,” Ranger said.

  “Twenty bucks each. Forty each, if you want a jumpsuit.”

  “Just the run-through ticket,” Ranger said.

  “You know the rules? You collect a ticket from the dude without no mess, and you get a kewpie doll. You’re gonna be on the third floor.”

  Ranger and I climbed the stairs to the third floor and stood in the hallway.

  “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?” I asked Ranger.

  “No. Knowing Marbles, it could be most anything.”

  There were two doors that opened off the hallway. The doors were labeled PUSSY and MOTHERFUCKERS.

  “I’m taking the Motherfucker door,” I said to Ranger.

  “No way. That’s my door.”

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not taking the Pussy door.”

  “It’s just a door, Babe.”

  “Great. Then you take it.”

  Ranger moved to the Pussy door and shoved it open. He walked through the front room and looked into two other rooms. “It’s an apartment. Looks like it was decorated by someone on ’shrooms. No one home.”

  I opened the Motherfucker door and stepped inside. The door closed behind me, neon red, green, blue, and white strobe lights activated and flickered across the front room, and hip-hop boomed from overhead speakers. I opened a door. Closet. I opened another door and a crazy-eyed, woolly-haired, scrawny guy in too-big pants and too-big shoes shouldered a gun at me from across the room.

  “Gonna put a cap up your pussy ass,” he said.

  And POW.

  I felt the bullet hit my shoulder, knock me back an inch or two, and something splattered out across my chest.

  “What the?” I said.

  “Run, Pussy!”

  “What?”

  “Run!”

  And POW. I got shot again. POW. POW.

  An arm wrapped around my waist, and I was lifted off my feet and whisked out of the room and back into the hall. Ranger kicked the door closed and set me down.

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  “Paintball. Are you okay?”

  “No! It hurt. It’s like getting hit with a rock. Why on earth do people do that? You’d have to be crazy.”

  “It’s a game,” Ranger said. “Usually. This version is more like shooting sitting ducks.”

  I checked myself out. I was completely splattered with blue, pink, and yellow paint. It was in my hair and on my shoes and everywhere in between. There was no paint on Ranger.

  “You don’t have a drop of paint on you,” I said. “Why is that?”

  Ranger smiled, liking that he hadn’t gotten hit. “I guess they were hunting pussy.”

  “But I walked into the Motherfucker room.”

  “Yeah, but babe, you’re clearly pussy.”

  “That is so sexist and annoying. T
hese are my favorite sneakers, and now they’re ruined. I’ll never get this paint out.”

  “I’m sure it’s water-based. Throw them in the washer.”

  “I don’t have a washer.”

  Ranger took my hand and tugged me toward the stairs. “Then throw them in your mother’s washer.”

  “You wouldn’t be this cheery if you were covered in paint.”

  He pushed my back to the wall and leaned in to me. “Would you like me to take your mind off your sneakers?”

  I bit into my lower lip.

  “Well?” he asked, kissing me just below my ear, making the little man in the boat pay attention.

  “I’m th-th-thinking.”

  Actually, I was thinking he’d have half my paint on him when he pried himself loose. And along with that I was thinking he felt great plastered against me. He was big and warm and strong.

  A door banged open on the first floor and conversation carried up to us. Ranger listened for a moment and eased away. I followed him down the stairs and into the first-floor hall, where the kid in the white T-shirt and homeboy jeans stood talking to a stocky older man with wiry gray hair. Both guys looked up when we stepped into the hall. The kid froze in his tracks. The older guy spun around, ran to the office, and locked himself inside.

  Ranger dismissed the kid and knocked on the locked office door. He waited a couple beats and knocked again. When there was no response to his second knock, he put his foot to the door and kicked it open.

  “Jeez Louise,” I said to Ranger, knowing he could have finessed the lock and opened the door.

  Ranger smiled. “Making a statement.”

  The guy inside the office was behind his desk, waving his arms, his eyes rolling around in their sockets, popped out like marbles.

  “This must be Marbles,” I said to Ranger.

  “Only one of them is real,” Ranger said.

  “You broke my door,” Marbles said. “You’re gonna pay. You think doors grow on trees?”

  “Bond enforcement,” Ranger said.

  “That’s bullshit. You owe me for a door. And she owes me for playing. Does she have a ticket? Where’s her fuckin’ ticket?”

  Ranger never shows much emotion. I saw him walk into a room once, knowing he was going to get shot and maybe die, and he was perfectly composed. Only because I’ve spent a decent amount of time with him did I know the limit to his patience. So I took a step back and gave him some room, because I knew he was done talking.

  “And another thing . . .” Marbles said, finger pointed at Ranger, eyes all googly-woogly.

  Marbles never finished the sentence, because in a matter of moments, he was on the ground and cuffed. Ranger dragged Marbles to his feet and set him in his chair. Marbles opened his mouth to speak, Ranger looked at him, and Marbles clamped his mouth shut.

  “You have a choice,” Ranger said to me. “We can take him to the station and get him booked in, or I can have one of my men do it, and I can take you home so we can get you out of your clothes.”

  “We can get me out of my clothes? Are you planning on making it a group activity?”

  “Figure of speech, Babe. I don’t need help getting you undressed.” He answered his cell phone, listened for a moment, and disconnected. “Change in plans,” he said, yanking Marbles out of his chair. “There’s been another break-in. We’ll take Marbles with us and pass him off on site.”

  FOUR

  THE HOUSE WAS a big white colonial with black shutters and a massive mahogany front door. The grounds were professionally landscaped. A dusty and battered police cruiser and two gleaming black Rangeman SUVs were parked in the circular drive. Ranger parked behind one of the Rangeman SUVs, we got out, and Tank and Hal came forward to meet us.

  I gave Hal my paperwork for Marbles, Hal got behind the wheel, backed the Escalade out of the drive and disappeared down the street.

  “Same MO,” Tank told Ranger. “The clients attended a political fund-raiser, came home, and found money and jewelry missing.” He handed Ranger a list. “We interrogated the system and found it had been briefly disarmed and then reset.”

  “Anything missing besides the money and jewelry?”

  “Some electronics. They’re going through the house now, trying to make sure the list is complete.”

  “I want Stephanie to walk through the house and look at it from a woman’s point of view. Make sure she has total access. Assure the owners her paint isn’t wet.”

  Tank looked at my paint-splattered hair and clothes. He paused for a beat, but he didn’t smile or frown or grimace. “Yessir,” he said to Ranger.

  I wandered around, checking out the kitchen with its professional-level appliances, marble countertops and splash plates, warming ovens and wine cooler. I thought it would be nice to have a kitchen like this, although most of it would go unused. All I actually needed was a butter knife, a loaf of white bread, and a jar of peanut butter. And can you fill a wine cooler with Bud Light?

  The upstairs master bath had a crystal chandelier and a bidet. I knew the purpose for the bidet, because I had seen Crocodile Dundee about a hundred times, but I wasn’t sure how one actually used a bidet. I mean, does it shoot water up your cooter or do you splash it around? And I thought I might have issues with the crystal chandelier. I wasn’t sure I could do number two in a room with a crystal chandelier.

  I’d looked at the list, so I knew what had been taken and what had been left. There was a safe in the master bedroom, but it hadn’t been touched. Madame’s jewelry had been easy access in a jewelry case on display in her walk-in closet. A couple thousand in twenties had been left on the dresser. All this stuff was gone. Plus two laptop computers from the home office, and a Patek Philippe man’s watch.

  I wandered around in the house for a half hour while the police did their thing, and Ranger did his thing, and the burgled house owners, a conservatively dressed middle-aged couple, quietly sat in the living room, looking shell-shocked.

  Ranger caught up with me in the front foyer. “Any ideas?” he asked me.

  “The thieves only hit two rooms. The master bedroom and the home office. There was a woman’s rose gold and diamond Cartier watch on the kitchen counter. And there were four icons that looked priceless in a display case in the living room. All untouched. Is this always the pattern?”

  “Yes. They disable the alarm for precisely fifteen minutes, and they move directly to the master bedroom and office.”

  “Why fifteen minutes?”

  Ranger did palms-up. “I don’t know.”

  “No prints left on doorknobs?”

  “None.”

  “And they only hit residential accounts?”

  “So far.”

  “This house has two security keypads. Can you tell which was used?”

  “They always enter and exit through the garage.”

  “The garage in this house opens into a short hall that leads to the kitchen. That means they walked through the kitchen twice and didn’t take the watch.”

  “Correct,” Ranger said.

  “Do you have anyone working for you who’s OCD or superstitious?”

  “Almost everyone. I’m going to have Tank take you back to Rangeman so you can get your car. I need to stay here for a while and then I have paperwork to complete.”

  “So I’m off the hook with the undressing thing?”

  “Rain check,” Ranger said.

  I drove home and did my own undressing, lathering, and shampooing. When I flopped into bed, my hair was still multicolored.

  I STOPPED AT the bonds office on my way to Rangeman. It was a little before nine in the morning, and the air was warm, and the sky was almost blue. It was Indian summer in Jersey.

  Connie and Lula looked over when I walked through the door.

  “What the heck happened to you?” Lula wanted to know. “You got tutti-frutti hair. Is this some new fashion statement?”

  “No, this is the result of a paintball encounter on Stark Street. The good ne
ws is I apprehended Kenny Hatcher.”

  “Your mother’s going to have a cow when she sees your hair,” Connie said. “You try water? You try paint thinner?”