Eleven on Top

by Janet Evanovich

  “I'm not giving up nothing,” Grandma said.

  I took my bag of meatballs and went out to the car. I slid behind the wheel, turned the key in the ignition, and Morelli leaned over the seat at me.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked.

  “Food fight.”

  “Wedding cake?”

  “Yep.”

  Morelli licked icing off my neck, and I accidentally jumped the driveway and backed out over my parents' front lawn.

  “Okay, let me get this correct,” Morelli said. “You're giving up sweets.”

  We were sitting at Morelli's kitchen table, having a late breakfast.

  “If it's got sugar on it, I'm not eating it,” I told Morelli.

  “What about that cereal you've got in front of you?”

  “Frosted Flakes. My favorite.”

  “Coated with sugar.”

  Shit. “Maybe I got carried away last night. Maybe I was overreacting to Valerie gaining all that weight, and then Kloughn dreaming about her smothering him. And my mother said I ate seven pieces of wedding cake, but I don't actually remember eating anything. I think she must have been exaggerating.”

  Morelli's phone rang. He answered and passed it to me. “Your grandmother.”

  “Boy, that was some mess we made last night,” Grandma said. "We're gonna have to put up new paper in the dining room. It was worth it, though. Your mother got up this morning and cleaned the bottles out of the cupboard.

  'Course, I still got one in my closet, but that's okay on account of I can handle my liquor. I'm not one of them anxiety-ridden drunks. I just drink because I like it. Anyway, your mother's not drinking so long as you're off the sugar. You're

  off the sugar, right?"

  “Right. Absolutely. No sugar for me.”

  I gave the phone back to Morelli, and I went to look in the cupboard. “Do we have cereal that's not coated with sugar?”

  “We have bagels and English muffins.”

  I popped a bagel into the toaster and drank coffee while I waited. “Ranger thinks some of the bombings feel off.”

  “I agree,” Morelli said. “Laski's double-checking the crime-lab reports to make sure we don't have an opportunist at work. And I left a message for him to talk to Chester Rhinehart. So far Chester 's the only other person besides you to see Spiro.”

  “So, what's up for today? How's your leg?”

  “The leg is a lot better. No pain. My foot isn't swollen.”

  There was a lot of loud knocking on the front door. I grabbed my bagel and went to investigate.

  It was Lula, dressed in a poison green tank and spandex jeans with rhinestones running down the side seam. “I heard about the wedding,” Lula said. “I bet your mama had a cow. Imagine having to call all those people and tell them they're on their own for burgers tonight. But there's some good news in all this, right? You didn't have to go parading around like a freakin' eggplant.”

  “It all worked out for the best,” I said.

  “Damn skippy. Glad you feel that way. Wouldn't want you to be in a bad mood since I need a little help.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “It's just a little help. Moral support. But you can jump in on the physical stuff if you want. Not that I expect anyone's gonna shoot at us or anything.”

  “No. Whatever it is ... I'm not doing it.”

  “You don't mean that. I can see you don't mean that. Where's Officer Hottie? He in the kitchen?” Lula swept past me and went in search of Morelli. “Hey,” she said to him. “How's it shakin'? You don't mind if I borrow Stephanie today, do you?”

  “He does,” I said. “We were going to do something . . .”

  “Actually, it's Guy Day,” Morelli said to me. “I promised the guys we could hang out today.”

  “You hung out with the guys yesterday. And the day before.”

  "Those were cop guys. These are just guy guys. My brother Tony and my cousin

  Mooch. They're coming over to watch the game."

  “Lucky for you I came along,” Lula said to me. “You would have had to hide upstairs in your room so you didn't ruin Guy Day.”

  “You can stay and watch the game with us,” Morelli said to me. “It's not like it's a stag party. It's just Tony and Mooch.”

  “Yeah,” Lula said. “They probably be happy to have someone do the pizza run and open their beer bottles for them.”

  “Think I'll pass on Guy Day,” I said to Morelli. “But thanks for inviting me.” I grabbed my jacket and followed Lula out to the Firebird. “Who are we looking for?”

  “I'm gonna take another shot at Willie Martin. I'm gonna keep my clothes on this time. I'm gonna nail his ass.”

  “He didn't leave town?”

  “He's such an arrogant so-and-so. He thinks he's safe. He thinks no one can touch him. He's still in his cheap-ass apartment over the garage. My friend Lauralene made a business call on him last night. Do you believe it?”

  In a former life, Lula was a 'ho, and she still has a lot of friends in the industry. “Is Lauralene still there?”

  “No. Willie's too cheap to pay for a night. Willie's strictly pay by the job.”

  We crossed town, turned onto Stark, and Lula parked in front of the garage.

  We both looked up at Willie's apartment windows on the third floor.

  “You got a gun?” Lula asked.

  “No.”

  “Stun gun?”

  “No.”

  “Cuffs?”

  “Negative.”

  “I swear, I don't know why I brought you.”

  “To make sure you keep your clothes on,” I said.

  “Yeah, that would be it.”

  We got out of the Firebird and took the stairs. The air was foul, reeking of urine and stale fast-food burgers and fries. We got to the third-floor landing, and Lula started arranging her equipment. Gun shoved into the waistband of her jeans. Cuffs half out of her pocket. Stun gun rammed into her jeans at the small of her back. Pepper spray in hand.

  “Where's the taser?” I asked.

  “It's in my purse.” She rooted around in her big shoulder bag and found the taser. “I haven't had a chance to test-drive this baby yet, but I think I could figure it out. How hard can it be, right?” She powered up and held on to the taser. She motioned me to the door. “Go ahead and knock.”

  “Me?”

  “He won't open the door if it's me. I'm gonna hide to the side, here. He see a skinny white girl like you standing at his door, he's gonna get all excited and open up.”

  “He'd better not get too excited.”

  “Hell, the more excited the better. Slow him down running. Make him do some pole vaulting.”

  I rapped on the door, and I stood where Martin could see me. The door opened, and he looked me over.

  “I don't know what you're selling, but I might be willing to buy it,” Willie said.

  “Boy, that's real original,” I said, walking into his apartment. “I bet you had a hard time coming up with that one.”

  “Wadda ya mean?”

  I turned to face him. Was he really that dumb? I looked into his eyes and decided the answer was yes. And the frightening part is that he outsmarted Lula last time she tried to snag him. Best not to dwell on that realization. The door was still open, and I could see Lula creeping forward behind Willie Martin.

  She had pepper spray in one hand and the taser in the other.

  “I was actually looking for Andy Bartok,” I said to Martin. “This is his apartment, right?”

  “This is my apartment. There's no Andy here. Do you know who I am? You follow football?”

  “No,” I said, putting the couch between me and Martin. “I don't like violent sports.”

  “I like violent sports,” Lula said. “I like the sport called kick Willie Martin in his big ugly blubber butt.”

  Martin turned to Lula. “You! Guess you didn't get enough of Will Martin, hunh? Guess you came back for more. And look at this here present you b
rought me ... a candy-ass white woman.”

  “The only thing I brought you is a ticket to the lockup,” Lula said. “I'm hauling your nasty blubber butt off to jail.”

  “I haven't got no blubber butt,” Martin said. He turned again so he could moon Lula, and he dropped his drawers to prove his point.

  I was standing in front of him so I got the pole-vaulting demonstration.

  Lula got the rear view, and whether it was intentional or just a jerk-action reflex was hard to say, but Lula shot Martin in the ass with the taser.

  Martin went down with his pants at half-mast and flopped around on the floor, twitching on the taser line like a fresh-caught fish.

  “Get your finger off the button,” I yelled to Lula. “You're going to kill him!”

  “Oops,” Lula said. “Guess I should have read the instruction book.”

  Martin was facedown, doing shallow breathing. He was about six foot five and close to three hundred pounds. I had no idea how we were going to get him to the Firebird.

  “I'll cuff him, and you pull his pants up,” Lula said.

  “Good try, but this is your party. I'm not doing pants wrangling.”

  “The bounty hunter assistant is supposed to take orders,” Lula said.

  I cut my eyes to her.

  “Of course, that don't count for you,” she said. “On account of you're not an official assistant. You're the...”

  “The friend of the bounty hunter,” I said.

  “Yeah, that's it. The friend of the bounty hunter. How about you cuff him, and I'll get his pants up.”

  I took the cuffs from Lula. “Works for me.”

  I cuffed Martins hands behind his back and stepped away, and Lula straddled him and yanked the taser leads off. By the time she got his pants up, she was sweating.

  “Usually I'm taking pants off a man,” Lula said. “It's a lot more work getting them up than down.”

  Especially when you're wrestling them up the equivalent of a 280-pound sandbag.

  Willie had one eye open, and he was making some low-level gurgling sounds.

  “He's gonna be pissed off when he comes around,” Lula said. “I'm thinking we want to get him into the car before that happens.”

  “I'd feel a lot better about this if you had ankle shackles,” I said.

  “I forgot ankle shackles.”

  I grabbed a foot and Lula grabbed a foot, and we threw our weight into dragging Martin to the door. We got him through the door and onto the cement landing and realized we were going to have to use the rickety freight elevator.

  “It's probably okay,” Lula said, pushing the button.

  I closed and locked Martin's door. I repeated Lula's words. It's probably okay. It's probably okay. The elevator made a lot of grinding, clanking noises, and we could see it shudder as it rose from the bottom floor.

  “It's just three floors,” Lula said, more to herself than to me. “Three floors isn't a whole lot, right? Probably you could jump from three floors if you had to. Remember when you fell off that fire escape? That was three floors, right?”

  “Two floors by the time I actually started free falling.” And it knocked me out and hurt like hell.

  The open-air car came to a lurching stop three inches below floor level.

  Lula struggled with the grate and finally got it half open.

  “You got the least weight,” Lula said. “You go in first and see if it holds you.”

  I gingerly got into the cage. It swayed slightly but held. “Feels okay,” I said.

  Lula crept in. “See, this is gonna be fine,” Lula said, standing very still.

  “This is one sturdy-ass elevator. You give this elevator a coat of paint and it'll be like new.”

  The elevator groaned and dropped two inches.

  “Just settling in,” Lula said. “I'm sure it's fine. I could see this is a real safe elevator. Still, maybe we should get off and reconsider our options.”

  Lula took a step forward and the elevator went into a downslide, banging against the side of the building, groaning and screeching. It reached the second floor and the bottom dropped out from under us. Lula and I hit the ground level and lay there stunned, knocked breathless, with rust sifting down on us like fairy dust.

  “Fuck,” Lula said. “Take a look at me and tell me if anything's broken.”

  I got to my hands and knees and crawled out of the elevator. It was Sunday and the garage was closed, thank God. At least we didn't have an audience.

  And probably the guys who worked in the garage wouldn't be real helpful when it came to capturing Martin. Lula crawled out after me, and we slowly got to our feet.

  “I feel like a truck rolled over me,” Lula said. “That was a dumb idea to take the elevator. You're supposed to stop me from acting on those dumb ideas.”

  I tried to dust some of the rust and elevator grit off my jeans, but it was sticking like it was glued on. “I don't know how to break this to you,” I said.

  “But your FTA is still on the third floor.”

  “We're just gonna have to carry Willie down the stairs,” Lula said. “I got him cuffed. I'm not giving up now.”

  “We can't carry him. He's too heavy.”

  “Then we'll drag him. Okay, so he might get a little bruised, but we'll say we were walking him down and he slipped. That happens, right? People fall down the stairs all the time. Look at us, we just fell down an elevator, and are we complaining?”

  We were standing next to a stack of tires that were loaded onto a hand truck. “Maybe we could use this hand truck,” I said. “We could strap Martin on like a refrigerator. It'll be hard to get him down the two flights of stairs, but at least we won't crack his head open.”

  “That's a good idea,” Lula said. “I was just going to think of that idea.”

  We off-loaded the tires and carted the truck up the stairs. Martin was still out. He was drooling and his expression was dazed, but his breathing had normalized, and he now had both eyes open. We laid the hand truck flat and rolled Martin onto it. I'd brought about thirty feet of strapping up with the hand truck, and we wrapped Martin onto the truck until he looked like a mummy. Then we pushed and pulled until we had Martin and the truck upright.

  “Now we're going to ease him down, one step at a time,” I said to Lula.

  “We're both going to get a grip on the truck, and between the two of us we should be able to do this.”

  By the time we got Martin to the second-floor landing we were soaked through. The air in the stairwell was hot and stagnant, and lowering Martin down the stairs one at a time was hard work. My hands were raw from gripping the strapping and my back ached. We stopped to catch our breath, and I saw Martins fingers twitch. Not a good sign. I didn't want him struggling to get free on the next set of stairs.

  “We have to get moving,” I said to Lula. “He's coming around.”

  “I'm coming around, too,” Lula said. “I'm having a heart attack. I think I gave myself a hernia. And look... I broke a nail. It was my best nail, too. It was the one with the stars and stripes decal.”

  We shifted the hand truck into position to take the first step, and Martin turned his head and looked me in the eye.

  “What the...” he said. And then he went nuts, yelling and struggling against the strapping. He was crazy-eyed and a vein was popped out in his forehead.

  I was having a hard time hanging on to the hand truck, and I was watching the strapping around his chest go loose and show signs of unraveling.

  “The stun gun,” I yelled to Lula. “Give him a jolt with the stun gun. I can't hang on with him struggling like this.”

  Lula reached around back for the stun gun and came up empty. “Must have fallen out when the elevator crashed,” she said.

  “Do something! The strap is unraveling. Shoot him. Zap him. Kick him in the nuts. Do something! Anything!”

  “I got my spray!” Lula said. “Stand back, and I'll spray the snot out of him.”

  “No!” I shri
eked. “Don't spray in the stairwell!”

  “It's okay, I got plenty,” Lula said.

  She hit the button, and I got a faceful of pepper spray. Martin gave an enraged bellow and wrenched the hand truck away from Lula and me. I was blinded and gagging, and I could hear the hand truck banging down the stairs like a toboggan. There was some scuffling at ground level, the door opened, and then it was quiet at the bottom of the stairs. At the top of the stairs, Lula and I were gasping for breath, feeling our way down, trying to get away from the droplets that were still hanging in the torpid air on the second-floor landing.