“Yes.”
He beeped his car locked, and when we got to the second floor, he took my key and he opened my apartment door. He flipped the lights on and looked around. Rex was running on his wheel.
“Maybe you should teach him to bark,” Ranger said.
He prowled through my living room, into my bedroom. He flipped the light on and looked around. He raised the dust ruffle and looked under the bed. “You need to get a mop under there, babe,” he said. He moved to the dresser and opened each drawer. Nothing jumped out. He stuck his head into the bathroom. All clear.
“No snakes, no spiders, no bad guys,” Ranger said. He reached out, grasped the collar on my denim jacket with both hands, and pulled me to him, his fingers lightly brushing my neck. “You're running up a bill. I assume you'll tell me when you're ready to settle your account.”
“Sure. Absolutely. You'll be the first to know.” God, I was being such a dork!
Ranger grinned down at me. “You have cuffs, right?”
Ulk. “Actually, no. I'm currently cuffless.”
“How are you going to catch the bad guys if you haven't got cuffs?”
“It's a problem.”
“I have cuffs,” Ranger said, touching his knee to mine.
My heart was up to about two hundred beats per minute. I wasn't exactly a handcuff-me-to-the-bed kind of person. I was more a turn-out-all-the-lights-and-hope-for-the-best kind of person. “I think I'm hyperventilating,” I said. “If I pass out just hold a paper bag over my nose and mouth.”
“Babe,” Ranger said, “it's not the end of the world to sleep with me.”
“There are issues.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Issues?”
“Well, actually, relationships.”
“Are you in a relationship?” Ranger asked.
“No. Are you?”
“My lifestyle doesn't lend itself to relationships.”
“Do you know what we need? Wine.”
He released my jacket collar and followed me into the kitchen. He lounged against the counter while I took two wineglasses from the cupboard and grabbed the bottle of merlot that I'd just bought. I poured out two glasses, gave one to Ranger, and kept one for myself.
“Cheers,” I said. And I chugged the wine.
Ranger took a sip. “Feel better?”
“I'm getting there. I hardly feel like fainting anymore. And most of the nausea is gone.” I refilled my glass and carted the bottle into the living room. “So,” I said, “would you like to watch television?”
He picked the remote off the coffee table and relaxed into the couch. “Let me know when you're nausea-free.”
“I think it was the handcuff thing that pushed me over the edge.”
“I'm disappointed. I thought it was the idea of me naked.” He searched through the sports and settled on basketball. “Are you okay with basketball? Or would you rather I search for a violent movie?”
“Basketball is good.”
Okay, I know I was the one who suggested television, but now that I had Ranger on my couch it felt too weird. He had his dark hair slicked back into a ponytail. He was dressed in SWAT blacks, fully loaded gun belt removed but a nine-millimeter at the small of his back, Navy SEAL watch on his wrist. And he was slouched on my couch, watching basketball.
I noticed my wineglass was empty, and I poured myself a third glass.
“This feels odd,” I said. “Do you watch basketball in the Bat Cave?”
“I don't have a lot of free time for television.”
“But the Bat Cave has a television?”
“Yeah, the Bat Cave has a television.”
“Just curious,” I said.
He drank some wine, and he watched me. He was different from Morelli. Morelli was a tightly coiled spring. I was always aware of contained energy with Morelli. Ranger was a cat. Quiet. Every muscle relaxed on command. Probably did yoga. Might not be human.
“Now what are you thinking?” he asked.
“I was wondering if you were human.”
“What are the other choices?”
I knocked back my glass of wine. “I didn't have anything else specifically in mind.”
I WOKE UP with a headache and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I was on my couch, tucked under the quilt from my bed. The television was silent, and Ranger was gone. From what I could remember, I'd seen about five minutes of basketball before falling asleep. I'm a cheap drunk. Two and a half glasses of wine and I'm comatose.
I stood under a hot shower until I was pruney and the throbbing behind my eyes had partially subsided. I got dressed and made tracks to McDonald's. I got a large fries and a Coke at the drive-thru and ate in the parking lot. This is the Stephanie Plum cure for a hangover. My cell phone rang when I was halfway through with the fries.
“Did you hear about the fire?” Grandma asked. “Do you know anything about it?”
“What fire?”
“Steven Soder's bar burned to the ground last night. Technically, I guess it burned this morning, since it was after closing when it caught fire. Lorraine Zupek just called. Her grandson is a firefighter, you know. He told her they had every truck in the city there but there wasn't anything they could do. I guess they're thinking it might have been arson.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Lorraine didn't say.”
I shoved a handful of fries into my mouth and cranked the engine over. I wanted to see the fire scene. I'm not sure why. Ghoulish curiosity, I guess. If Soder had partners, then this wasn't entirely unexpected. Partners were known to come into a business sometimes, drain it of all profits, and then destroy it.
It took me twenty minutes to get through town. The street in front of The Foxhole was closed to traffic, so I parked two blocks away and walked. A fire truck was still on the scene, and a couple cop cars were angled into the curb. A photographer from the Trenton Times was taking pictures. Crime-scene tape hadn't been stretched, but sightseers were kept at a distance by the police.
The brick face was blackened. Windows were gone. There were two levels of apartments above the bar. They looked totally destroyed. Sooty water pooled on the street and sidewalk. A hose snaked into the building from the one remaining truck but it wasn't in use.
“Was anyone hurt?” I asked one of the bystanders.
“Doesn't look like it,” he said. “It was after-hours for the bar. And the apartments were empty. There were some code violations, so they were being renovated.”
“Do they know how the fire got started?”
“Nobody's said.”
I didn't recognize any of the cops or firefighters. I didn't see Soder anywhere. I took one last look, and I left. A quick stop at the office was next on my list. Connie should have the more complete background check on Evelyn by now.
“Jeez,” Lula said when I walked in, “you don't look so good.”
“Hangover,” I said. “I ran into Ranger after I dropped Kloughn off, and we had a couple glasses of wine.”
Connie and Lula stopped what they were doing and stared at me.
“Well?” Lula said. “You're not going to stop there, are you? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I was sort of creeped out about the spiders and stuff, so Ranger came in with me to make sure everything was okay. We had a couple glasses of wine. And he left.”
“Yeah, but what about the part between the drinking and the leaving? What happened there?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Hold on here,” Lula said. “You're telling me you had Ranger in your apartment, the two of you are drinking wine, and nothing happened. No fooling around at all.”
“That makes no sense,” Connie said. “Anytime the two of you are in this office, he's looking at you like you're lunch. There has to be some explanation. Your grandma was there, right?”
“It was just the two of us. Just Ranger and me.”
“Did you put him off? You smack him, or something?” Lula asked.
> “It wasn't like that. It was friendly.” In an uncomfortably tense sort of way.
“Friendly,” Lula said. “Hunh.”
“So how do you feel about that?” Connie asked me.
“I don't know,” I said. “I guess friendly is good.”
“Yeah, except naked and sweaty would be better,” Lula said.
We all thought about that for a moment.
Connie fanned herself with a steno pad. “Whew,” she said. “Hot flash.”
I resisted looking down to see if my nipples were hard. “Did Evelyn's report come in?”
Connie leafed through a stack of folders on her desk and pulled one out. “Just got it this morning.”
I took the folder and read down the first page. I turned to the second page."
“Not a lot there,” Connie said. “Evelyn stuck pretty close to home. Even as a kid.”
I stuffed the folder into my bag and looked up at the video camera. “Is Vinnie here?”
“He hasn't come in yet. Probably got Candy inflating his ego,” Lula said.
Stephanie Plum 8 - Hard Eight
9
I READ THROUGH Evelyn's file one more time when I got to my car. Some of the information seemed invasive, but this is the age of data for anyone interested. I had a credit report and some medical history. Nothing struck me as incredibly helpful.
A rap on my passenger-side window pulled me away from the file. It was Morelli. I unlocked the door, and he slid in next to me.
“Hung over?” he asked, but it was more of a statement than a question.
“How'd you know?”
He poked at the fast-food carton. “McDonald's french fries and Coke for breakfast. Dark circles under your eyes. Hair from hell.”
I checked out my hair in the rearview mirror. Yow. “I overdid the wine last night.”
He took that in. Nothing was said for a long moment. I didn't volunteer more. He didn't ask.
He looked at the file in my hand. “Are you getting any closer to Evelyn?”
“I've made some progress.”
“You heard about Soder's bar.”
“I just came from there,” I said. “It looked bad. Lucky no one was in the building.”
“Yeah, except so far we haven't been able to locate Soder. His girlfriend said he never came home.”
“Do you think he could have been in the bar when the fire broke out?”
“The guys are in there checking. They had to wait for the building to cool. No sign of him so far. I thought you'd want to know.” Morelli had his hand on the door handle. “I'll let you know if we find him.”
“Wait a minute. I have a theoretical question. Suppose you were watching television with me. And we were alone in my apartment. And I had a couple glasses of wine, and I sort of passed out. Would you try to make love to me, anyway? Would you do a little exploring while I was asleep?”
“What are we watching? Is it the play-offs?”
“You can leave now,” I said.
Morelli grinned and got out of the car.
I dialed Dotty's number on my cell phone. I was anxious to tell her the news about the bar and about Soder going missing. The phone rang a bunch of times and the machine picked it up. I left a message for a callback and tried her work number. I got her voice mail at work. Dotty was on vacation, scheduled to return in two weeks.
The voice mail message sent a strange emotion curling through my stomach. I searched for a name for the emotion. Unease was the closest I could come.
In less than an hour, I was parked in front of Dotty's house. No sign of Jeanne Ellen. And no sign of life in Dotty's house. No car in the driveway. No doors or windows opened. Nothing wrong with that, I told myself. The kids would be in school and day care at this time of day. And Dotty was probably out shopping.
I walked to the door and rang the bell. No one answered. I looked in the front window. The house looked at rest. No lights on. No television blaring. No kids running around. The bad feeling crept into my stomach again. Something was wrong. I walked around and looked in the back window. The kitchen was tidy. No signs of breakfast. No bowls in the sink. No cereal boxes left out. I tried the doorknob. Locked. I knocked on the door. No response. That's when it hit me. No dog. The dog should be running around, barking at the door. It was a one-story ranch. I circled the house and looked in every window. No dog.
Okay, so she's walking the dog. Or maybe she took the dog to the vet. I tried Dotty's two closest neighbors. Neither knew what had happened to Dotty and the dog. Both had noticed they were missing this morning. The consensus was that Dotty and her family vacated the house sometime during the night.
No Dotty. No dog. No Jeanne Ellen. I had other names for the thing in my stomach now. Panic. Fear. With a touch of nausea from the hangover.
I went back to my car and sat in front of the house for a while, taking it all in. At some point I looked down at my watch and realized an hour had passed. I suppose I was hoping Dotty would return. And I suppose I knew it wasn't going to happen.
When I was nine years old I persuaded my mom to let me get a parakeet. On the way home from the pet store the door to the cage came open somehow, and the bird flew away. That's what this felt like. It felt like I left the door open.
I put the car in gear and drove back to the Burg. I went straight to Dotty's parents' house. Mrs. Palowski answered my knock, and Dotty's dog came running from the kitchen, yapping the whole way.
I dredged up my biggest and best phony smile for Mrs. Palowski. “Hi,” I said, “I'm looking for Dotty.”
“You just missed her,” Mrs. Palowski said. “She dropped Scotty off early this morning. We're baby-sitting him while Dotty and the children are on vacation.”
“I really need to talk to her,” I said. “Do you have a phone number where she can be reached?”
“I don't. She said she was going camping with a friend. A cabin in the woods somewhere. She said she'd be in touch, though. I could give her a message.”
I gave Mrs. Palowski my card. “Tell Dotty I have very important information for her. And ask her to call me.”
“Dotty isn't in any kind of trouble, is she?” Mrs. Palowski asked.
“No. This is information about one of Dotty's friends.”
“It's Evelyn, isn't it? I heard Evelyn and Annie were missing. That's such a shame. Evelyn and Dotty used to be such good friends.”
“Do they still get together?”
“Not for years, now. Evelyn kept to herself after she married. I think Steven made it difficult for her to have friends.”
I thanked Mrs. Palowski for her time and returned to my car. I reread the report on Evelyn. No mention of a secret cabin in the woods.
My phone chirped, and I wasn't sure what I hoped for . . . a date was high on the list. Next might be news about Soder or a friendly call from Evelyn.
Close to last on the list was a call from my mother. “Help,” she said.
Then my grandmother got on the phone. “You gotta come over and see this,” she said.
“See what?”
“You gotta see for yourself.”
My parents' house was less than five minutes away. My mother and grandmother were at the door, waiting for me. They stepped aside and motioned me into the living room. My sister was there, slouched in my father's favorite chair. She was dressed in a rumpled long flannel nightgown and furry bedroom slippers. Yesterday's mascara hadn't been removed but had been smudged by sleep. Her hair was snarled and untamed. Meg Ryan meets Beetlejuice. California girl goes to Transylvania. She had the television remote in her hand, her attention glued to a game show. The floor around her was littered with candy bar wrappers and empty soda cans. She didn't acknowledge our presence. She burped and scratched her boob and changed the channel.
This was my perfect sister. Saint Valerie.
“I see that smile,” my mother said to me. “It's not funny. She's been like that ever since she lost her job.”
“Yeah, we had to vac
uum around her this morning,” Grandma said. “I came too close and almost sucked up one of those bunny slippers.”
“She's depressed,” my mother said.
No shit.
“We thought maybe you could help get her a job,” Grandma said. “Something that would get her out of the house, on account of now we're getting depressed looking at her. Bad enough we got to look at your father.”
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