Fearless Fourteen: A Stephanie Plum Novel

by Janet Evanovich

  “We gotta have a plan for the takedown,” Lula said. “Do you have your cuffs ready?” she asked Brenda.

  “Cuffs?”

  “You gotta have handcuffs,” Lula said. “How’re you gonna do a takedown without handcuffs?”

  Brenda glared at Nancy. “Dammit, why don’t I have handcuffs?”

  Nancy was head down, thumbing through the pages on her clipboard. “Wardrobe didn’t list handcuffs.”

  “Isn’t it bad enough I haven’t got a gun?” Brenda said. “Just because little Miss Goody Two Shoes Stephanie Plum doesn’t have the stomach for it. Doesn’t want to stress out the disturbed woman who ran over her boyfriend.”

  “You ran over a cameraman,” Nancy said to Brenda.

  “He deserved it,” Brenda said. “The sonovabitch.”

  “I always got a gun,” Lula said. “I got a big one.”

  “This just isn’t going to work,” Brenda said. “How are we supposed to look like bounty hunters if we don’t go in with guns drawn? This is very disappointing. My fans will be expecting action. They’re going to want to hear me say, Freeze! We’re bounty hunters.”

  “She got a point,” Lula said.

  “Yes, but here’s the problem,” I said. “Television bounty hunters do that sort of thing, but I’m not a television bounty hunter. I’m a real-life bond-enforcement agent. So here’s how it’s going to happen. I’m going to knock on Susan’s door and hand her my card and explain who we are. Then I’m going to ask her to come downtown with us so she can get rebonded.”

  “Hunh,” Lula said. “I guess you could do it that way, but it’s not gonna get ratings.”

  “Humor me,” I said. “Brenda can go to a studio and do voice-overs, and no one will know the difference.”

  “That might work,” Lula said to Brenda.

  “Freeze, suckah,” Brenda said in a crouch position, pretending she had a gun.

  “That’s pretty good,” Lula told her. “You should have your own show. You could do CSI: Brenda.”

  I took the paperwork from Connie and shrugged into my jacket. It was almost eighty degrees outside, and I was going to sweat like a pig in this thing.

  “Here’s the way it works,” the sound guy said. “I’m going to wire you all, and I’ve also wired the Firebird. We’ll be able to hear everything, so switch yourself off if you need to use the bathroom. We’ve also got a lipstick cam in the Firebird, and we’ll be filming from the van. When you enter the lady’s house, Jeff will follow you with the minicam.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to be filmed?” I asked.

  “Everyone wants to be filmed,” the sound guy said. “Just start singing the ‘Bad Boys’ theme song.”

  We trudged outside, Lula got behind the wheel, Brenda got in next to her, and I climbed into the back. Brenda and Lula were in full view of the lipstick cam mounted above the driver’s side door. The camera didn’t cover the backseat. Fine by me. My hair didn’t look all that great, and my cleavage couldn’t nearly measure up.

  Lula drove across town to North Trenton and turned down Bing Street. The film crew van was right behind us. We parked in the apartment building lot, and we all got out. I thought we looked like one of those Publishers Clearing House commercials. The only thing missing was the big check and a bunch of balloons.

  I led the parade into the building and up one flight of stairs. The building wasn’t fancy, but it was clean and the paint looked new. There were six apartments on the second floor.

  “Now, remember,” I said to Brenda and Lula. “Let me do the talking.”

  “I should be the one to do the talking,” Brenda said. “I’m the star.”

  “And I’m almost a star,” Lula said. “What about me? I need to get a chance to talk.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’m the one who signed her name to the contract to apprehend. I’m the one who gets sued if there’s a screwup.”

  “Okay,” Lula said. “That sounds fair.”

  “I can live with it,” Brenda said.

  According to my paperwork, Susan Stitch was twenty-six years old, unmarried, and worked nights as a bartender at the Holiday Inn. She had no priors. And she lived alone.

  I rang the bell and a young woman answered the door. Shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, slim. Susan Stitch. She looked just like her booking photo. I introduced myself and gave her my card.

  “I’m here to bring you to the courthouse so you can get rebonded,” I told her. And that was partially true. The part I neglected to mention was that she would have to go through the arrest process again and that it wasn’t a given she would be released.

  She looked over my shoulder at the cameraman and sound guy and Brenda and Lula. “Who are all these people?”

  “This is your lucky day,” Lula said. “You been selected to be arrested by Brenda. And these are the guys who follow her around and take pictures.”

  “Freeze, bitch,” Brenda said.

  Susan squinted at Brenda. “Omigod! Is it really you?”

  “Yep,” Brenda said. “In the flesh.”

  “Omigod. Omigod!” Susan said. “I’ve got goose bumps. The lady at the bonds office didn’t tell me. I would have worn something different. Omigod, you have to come in so I can get my camera. No one’s going to believe this.”

  Susan ran off to get her camera, and we all shuffled into her small apartment.

  Her furniture looked a lot like mine. Inexpensive and without personality. Neither of us was a nest-builder. I always had good intentions of buying throw pillows and arranging pictures in frames and maybe getting a houseplant, but somehow it never happened.

  “Hey,” Lula yelled into the bedroom at Susan. “Did you really give your boyfriend a ride on the roof rack?”

  Susan came in with her camera. “He’s not my boyfriend. He used to be my boyfriend, but he’s a total jerk. I’m just sorry all I got was his leg. If he hadn’t gotten up so fast, I would have run over him like he was a speed bump.” She focused the camera and took everyone’s picture. “Now one of me with Brenda,” she said, handing the camera to Lula. “This is so cool.”

  “Why’d your boyfriend jump on the car?” Lula wanted to know. “Guess he didn’t want you to go?”

  “Had nothing to do with me. It was that I took Carl. He just wanted his precious Carl.”

  “Isn’t that tragic,” Brenda said. “You have a little boy. A split is always so hard on the children.”

  “Actually, Carl’s a monkey,” Susan said.

  Lula snapped her head around. “He isn’t here, is he? Nothing personal, but I hate monkeys.”

  “I have him in the bathroom. He gets excited when strangers come into the apartment.”

  “I have to see this,” Brenda said, crossing to the closed bathroom door. “What kind of monkey is it?”

  “Don’t open the door!” Susan said.

  Too late. Brenda yanked the door open, and the monkey launched himself out at her and draped himself over her head.

  Everyone in the room went rigid and sucked air.

  Brenda rolled her eyes, trying to see through her skull. “What the heck?”

  “Hee, hee, hee,” Carl said. And he reached down and pinched Brenda’s nose . . . hard.

  Brenda slapped his hand away, and Carl shrieked and hunkered down, digging into Brenda’s scalp with his monkey fingers and toes. All you could see was monkey tail and brown monkey fur sticking out of Brenda’s rat’s nest hair.

  “Uh-oh,” Lula said. “I never seen a monkey hump before, but I could swear Carl’s in love.”

  “Somebody do something, for crissake,” Brenda yelled. “Get him off me! Kill him. Get him a damn banana!”

  It was the spider all over again, times fifty. The difference was that this time Brenda’s freak-out was justified. If I had a monkey humping my head, I’d be freaked, too.

  “Don’t slap at him,” Susan said. “You’ll make him mad.”

  Lula had her gun out. “Hold still, and I’ll nail the nast
y little bugger.”

  The sound guy reached for Carl, and Carl latched on to his arm and bit his hand.

  “Yow! Shit!” the sound guy said. “Shoot him. Shoot him.” He whipped his arm out, and Carl flew off into space, hit the wall, and bounced off like a tennis ball. And he kept bouncing. Onto the table, to the chandelier, to the couch, to an end table, to the television.

  Carl rocketed around the room, shrieking and chattering and baring his teeth. His eyes were black and glittery and bugged out of his head, and he was spraying monkey spit.

  “It’s a demon monkey!” Lula yelled. “Get a priest.”

  “I’m out of here,” the cameraman said. “Life’s too short.”

  The sound guy was already in the hall, and Brenda was at the stairs.

  “Wait for me,” Lula said, pounding after them.

  If I didn’t catch up, they’d leave without me. They’d drive away and never look back.

  “Turn yourself in,” I said to Susan. “Sorry about the monkey.”

  I sprinted across the lot and got to the Firebird just as Lula put the key into the ignition. I hurled myself into the backseat, and we took off with the camera crew truck right on our ass.

  “What the hell was that?” Brenda wanted to know.

  Lula gave the Firebird gas. “She said don’t open the door, but would you listen? Heck, no. You had to go open the door. What were you thinking?”

  “I wanted to see the monkey. Did she say the monkey was rabid? No. Did she say the monkey was on crack? No. I assumed it was a pet. Its name was Carl.”

  “Right there, it tells you something,” Lula said. “Carls are always crazy. You never trust anyone named Carl or Steve.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Brenda said. “Do you have any other theories on names?”

  “Yeah. It’s been my experience that guys named Ralph only got one good nut.”

  I was sitting behind Brenda, and her hair was Wild Woman of Borneo, with a couple chunks obviously chewed off by the monkey.

  “Is my hair all right?” Brenda asked. “Do I need to comb it or something?” She patted the top of her head. “What’s this sticky stuff?”

  At the very best, I thought it was monkey spit.

  “Jeez,” I said. “I don’t know. I think it might be your gel or something. Probably you want to wait until you get to a ladies’ room to comb it.”

  TEN

  MARK BIRD AND his producer were waiting for us at the office. The producer gasped when Brenda walked through the door. “H-h-how’d it go?” she asked, her attention caught on Brenda’s hair.

  “This bounty hunter thing is harder than I thought,” Brenda said. “I need a ladies’ room.”

  “There’s a powder room straight back,” Connie said. “It’ll be on your right.”

  Brenda sashayed off to the powder room, and we all stayed mute until the door closed.

  “What the heck happened to her?” Connie asked.

  “Monkey,” Lula said. “Bugger humped her head.”

  The sound guy was grinning wide. “We looked at the footage in the truck on the way here. It’s great!”

  “You couldn’t possibly use it,” I said to him.

  “It would be a crime not to,” he said. “It’s gold.”

  Connie looked to me. “I assume there was no capture.”

  I took my cell phone out and punched Morelli’s number in. “Your assumption is correct.”

  Morelli answered with a grunt.

  “What’s new?” I asked him.

  “Nothing worth talking about. I caught a double homicide this morning and haven’t been able to do anything about Dom or Loretta. Larry Skid is working Loretta. So far, no one’s spotted Dom.”

  “Larry Skid is an idiot.”

  “Yeah. My description for him would be sack of shit. I’ve got to go. You’re picking the kid up today, right?”

  “Right.”

  I disconnected and fished around in my bag, looking for my keys. “I have to talk to some people,” I said to Connie. “I’ll get back to Susan Stitch later. Her monkey needs alone time.”

  “Where you going?” Lula wanted to know. “I might have to go with you. I don’t want to be here when Ms. Monkey Hair comes out of the bathroom.”

  Ten minutes later, we were in front of Dom’s mother’s house. I knew Morelli had done a search, but I didn’t think it would hurt for me to take a look, too. I knocked on the front door. No answer. I turned the knob and the door swung open. We stepped inside and listened.

  “All I hear is the refrigerator,” Lula said.

  The interior of the house was dark and fussy. Lots of candy dishes and figurines and vases filled with plastic flowers. The dining room table was covered with a lace tablecloth.

  “What are we looking for?” Lula wanted to know.

  “Clues.”

  “Good thing I asked. I thought it might have been elephants.”

  I prowled through the kitchen, and it looked to me like Dom had cleared out in a hurry. There were dirty dishes in the sink and a fry pan on the stove. The refrigerator held the usual staples. Yesterday’s paper was open on the small kitchen table. A cup of cold coffee was beside the paper. A cardboard box containing cereal, jars of soup, and canned food was on the floor next to the sink. I was guessing this came from Loretta’s stash. There were more cardboard boxes upstairs in a spare bedroom. They were labeled “clothes” and “bathroom.” The master bedroom was untouched, the bed neatly made. A second bedroom was a disaster. Linens rumpled into a mess in the middle of the bed. Drawers open with clothes everywhere. Either Dom was a slob or else the room had been tossed.

  I checked the garage. No cars. Loretta’s possessions neatly stacked in a corner.

  “What’d we learn here?” Lula wanted to know.

  “Not much. Loretta moved in and then disappeared. Dom made an unplanned departure. Hard to tell how many people have searched the house. I’m guessing at least three . . . Morelli and me and someone else.”

  THE LIMO AND the film crew van were gone when I returned to the office.

  “Guess it’s safe to park,” Lula said. “Looks like everyone went away.”

  Not everyone. Gary-the-Stalker was sitting on the curb in front of the bonds office. He stood when I got out of the Sentra and walked over to me.

  “Brenda went back to the hotel,” I told him.

  “I know. I saw her leave. I thought I’d have better luck talking to you.”

  “I’m not working security for her anymore.”

  “Yeah, but you talk to her.”

  “Actually, no.”

  “I had a dream that she was sitting on a toilet in the southbound lane of Route 1.”

  “Un-hunh?”

  “I thought someone needed to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Just in case,” he said.

  “Anything else?”

  “No. That’s it.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Thanks.”

  My phone rang and a strange number popped onto the screen.

  “Is this Stephanie Plum?” a man asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, recognizing the voice. “Is this the Mooner?”

  “Affirmative. It’s the Moonster, the Moondog, the MoonMan. I’m here at the house, looking for Zookarama, but he isn’t here.”

  “He’s in school.”

  “School! Far out.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Here’s the thing, it was real late when we were done playing last night, and I think I might have left my computer in the house, because I don’t seem to have it with me. So I was wondering if you could, like, let me into the house.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m at the bonds office. I’ll be right there.”

  Morelli’s house is minutes from the bonds office. It was close to noon, and there was no traffic. No kids playing. No dogs barking. Only Mooner sitting on the small porch, patiently waiting for me.

  I unlocked the door, and Bob galloped over to us. Bob st
uck his snoot into Mooner’s crotch and took a sniff.

  “Whoa,” Mooner said. “He remembers me. Cool.”

  We pushed past Bob and found the computer exactly where Mooner had left it, on the coffee table.

  “When’s the little dude get out of school?” Mooner asked.

  “Two-thirty.”

  Mooner flopped onto the couch.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Waiting.”

  I decided some time ago that Mooner fell into the pet category. He was like a stray cat that showed up on your doorstep and stayed for a few days and then wandered off. He was amusing in small doses, fairly harmless, and for the most part, housebroken.

  I left Mooner on the couch and went to the kitchen to check out the contents of Morelli’s refrigerator. It was noon, and as long as I was there, I figured I might as well eat. If I’d been in my house, I would have made a peanut butter sandwich, but this was Morelli’s house and he was a meat guy, so I found deli-sliced ham and roast beef and Swiss cheese. I made a sandwich for me and a sandwich for Mooner, and I dragged a big bag of potato chips out of the cupboard. I put it all on the small kitchen table and called Mooner in.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Mooner said, sitting down, dumping some chips onto his plate. “This is, like, excellent.”

  I ate half a sandwich, and I realized Bob was at the table, and he was holding a man’s shoe in his mouth. It was a scuffed brown lace-up shoe, and I didn’t recognize it as Morelli’s. I looked under the table at Mooner’s feet. Both of them were stuffed into beat-up sneakers.

  “Where’d Bob get the shoe?” I asked.

  “He brought it up from the basement,” Mooner said. “The door’s open.”

  I turned and looked behind me and, sure enough, the basement door was open. I got up and cautiously peeked down the stairs. “Hello?” I called. No one answered. I took the carving knife out of the butcher-block knife caddy, switched the light on in the basement, and carefully crept down the stairs and looked around.

  “What’s down there?” Mooner wanted to know.

  “Furnace, water heater, and a dead guy.”

  “Bad juju,” Mooner said.

  The dead guy was spread-eagle on his back, eyes wide open, hole in the middle of his forehead, lots of blood pooling under him, wearing only one shoe. I didn’t recognize him. He looked like he came out of central casting for a Sopranos episode.