“We’re losing time,” Howie said. “Everybody on their marks.”
Lula and Briggs went to the stoop.
“You gotta scooch down a little,” Howie said to Lula. “I can’t get both of you in the frame.”
“How about if I just pick the little dwarf up?” Lula said.
“You touch me and I’ll be on you like a badger ripping apart a rodent,” Briggs said.
“That’s good!” Howie yelled. “Already we got drama. Grandma, get the flashlight on them.”
“We can’t start yet,” Grandma said. “Nobody did the clacky thing.”
Everyone looked at me.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I said. “Scene one, take one.” And I clacked the clacker.
Grandma rushed in with the flashlight, Howie shouted “Action!” and Lula and Briggs mugged for the camera.
“Cut!” Howie yelled. “Grandma, you’re supposed to be shining the light on their faces. You’re shining it on Randy’s dick.”
“It’s one of them uncontrollable things,” Grandma said. “I can’t stop staring at it. I never get to see men’s parts anymore.”
Lula looked down at Briggs. “There’s not much to see.”
“Yeah,” Grandma said. “I remember them as being bigger, but it’s still hypnotic the way it’s moving around.”
“I’m excited, okay?” Briggs said. “This is what happens when I get excited.”
“Now that everyone called attention to it, I find it distracting,” Lula said. “I can’t do my best emoting under these circumstances.”
“Cripes,” Howie said. “Now you have me staring at it.”
“Maybe it would help if you put some powder on it so it’s not so noticeable in the moonlight,” Grandma said.
“It’s not the moonlight,” Briggs said. “It’s the stupid flashlight.”
The makeup woman rushed in and powdered Briggs’s dick.
“Hold it still,” she said. “I can’t do nothing with it bobbing around.”
“Listen up,” Howie said. “We’re all going to ignore the dick.”
“I’m good with that,” Grandma said. “I’ve seen enough.”
“Here’s the plan,” Howie said. “After I get a close-up of Lula and Randy they’re going to start on their way around the block. I’m going to follow them as they creep forward. When they move to the next block with the burned-out warehouse they get more wary. This is where they’re on alert for urban dangers. I got a couple dangers planned out, but they’re going to be a surprise.”
“I don’t like snakes and dead people,” Lula said to Howie. “You better not have any of them in your plan.”
I rubbed out “Take 1” on my chalkboard and wrote in “Take 2.”
“Yada yada,” I said. And I clacked the clacker.
“Action!” Howie yelled.
Lula and Briggs walked down the street. They were bare-assed and barefoot, and it was dark. Mostly the only thing visible was the little red light from the infrared camera following after them.
“I don’t like this,” Briggs said. “I can’t see where I’m going, and I don’t know what I’m stepping in. I just stepped in something squishy.”
“Waa, waa, waa,” Lula said. “You gotta get tough. We got a rocky road ahead of us. We gotta find our way out of this urban jungle.”
“Get ready,” Howie whispered to Grandma. “The first life-threatening danger is coming up. You have to get some light on their faces.”
Lula and Briggs were creeping along. I saw movement in a doorway to Lula’s left, and a woman threw a cat out at them. It bounced off Lula and landed on its feet.
Gurrhr, phffft, RAAAWR!
“What the freaking Sam Hill!” Lula said. “That sounds like a wild cat. It’s one of them vicious killer wild cats.”
Lula was jumping around, waving her arms in the air, not sure which direction to run. She stepped back, crashed into Briggs, and knocked him on his ass.
Grandma flashed the light on Lula and then on the cat. It was a fluffy white cat with a pink collar.
“It don’t look like a killer cat,” Grandma said. “It’s a pussycat.”
“Well, I hate cats. I’m allergic to cats,” Lula said. “And anyways you never know which one of them is a killer.”
She bent down to pick Briggs up, and she farted.
“Cut!” Howie yelled.
“What do you mean ‘Cut’?” Lula asked. “You keep yelling ‘Cut’ and we’re never gonna get done with this thing.”
“You farted,” Howie said.
“It’s a human dilemma,” Lula said. “You telling me you don’t fart?”
“Not on camera,” Howie said.
“Well, excuse me,” Lula said. “It was my body releasing all my pent-up frustration. It’s not like this here’s a perfect filming experience for me. Every time I turn around, Short Stuff got his nose in my business. But I’m not acting like some prima donna and complaining about it.”
“Maybe I don’t like that your business is always in my face,” Briggs said. “You ever think of that?”
A woman came out from the doorway and scooped up the cat.
“Good kitty,” the woman said. “Good job.” She looked over at Howie. “Will you need Snowball any more?”
“No,” Howie said. “We’re done with Snowball.”
“I think I skinned my ass when Sasquatch knocked me over,” Briggs said. “Someone look and see if I’m bleeding.”
“Excuse me for knocking you over,” Lula said, “but it was a frightening experience. Just like it was supposed to be. It was supposed to point out the dangers of moving around in a city where you got cats and shit. I bet we got some good film on that. Like I had fear going. That’s genuine emotion.”
Howie ran the footage back. “What I got is Grandma on camera saying it’s a pussycat.”
“Maybe we could put a sex spin on it,” Lula said.
“It’s Grandma,” Howie said. “We’re not supposed to see her or hear her. You ever hear or see any of the crew on the real show? No! It’s gotta look like people are out there alone…naked and afraid.”
“You told me to light their faces,” Grandma said. “How am I supposed to do that if I don’t move in?”
“You put the light on the cat,” Howie said.
Grandma narrowed her eyes and stood her ground. “I thought people would want to see it.”
“Could we get on with this?” Briggs said. “I’m getting cold. Between the cat fiasco and the night air I’m getting shrinkage.”
“Gee, look at the time,” I said. “I have to be running along with Grandma now. I promised my mom. And Morelli is waiting for me. We wouldn’t want Morelli to come out here to get me. He might have to arrest the naked people.”
“Who’s going to work the flashlight if I leave?” Grandma asked.
“It’s gonna be a problem. We got a skeleton crew,” Howie said. “Give your flashlight to the makeup ’ho. I guess she can do it.”
Grandma handed the flashlight over and followed me to my car.
“Sorry I had to ruin your night,” I said to Grandma, “but Mom was worried about you.”
“It’s okay,” Grandma said. “The flashlight was running out of batteries anyway. It was getting real dim. And if you ask me I don’t think anybody back there knows what they’re doing.”
• • •
I dropped Grandma off and returned to Morelli.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Mission accomplished. Grandma’s home safe and sound. Anything interesting happen here?”
“No, but if you didn’t show up soon I was going to start without you.”
“After seeing Lula and Briggs in the altogether I’m not feeling especially romantic.”
“Cupcake, when you see what I’ve got to show you it’ll all be forgotten.”
“That sounds promising.”
“The first thing we have to do is get your clothes off.”
“Wait a minute,�
� I said. “I thought you were going to show me what you’ve got.”
“Even better,” Morelli said.
He got rid of his shoes and socks, stripped off his shirt, and shucked his jeans. He was wearing blue plaid Calvin boxers. He cuddled me up close against him and let me look inside the Calvins. He was right. Poof! No more Briggs.
FOURTEEN
MORELLI WAS GONE by the time I made my way to the kitchen Friday morning. I was supposed to meet Ranger at eight o’clock. That meant I had to leave my apartment at seven-thirty at the latest. I wasn’t sure how to dress so I’d chosen dressy black jeans, a blue V-neck sweater, a black blazer, and black Skechers. It was one of my go-to outfits when I worked for Rangeman. I gave Rex fresh water and a couple hamster crunchies. I looked at my watch. It was seven-thirty. I grabbed my messenger bag and a frozen waffle and took off.
Ranger was waiting in his Cayenne, toward the back of the Mo Morris Ice Cream lot. I parked beside him, and we both got out to talk.
“How’s this going to happen?” I asked him. “I hear it’s impossible to get a job here. No one ever quits.”
“Morris is also interested in increasing security in his plant. He’s approached me to take a look. And he’s very vocal about playing no part in the problems across town. He’s agreed to let you come in undercover. All he asks is that he’s kept in the loop. He wants to know if we find hard proof that someone in his organization has gone to the dark side.”
“Does this mean I’m a double agent?”
“Think of yourself as an investigative operative.”
I thought the title was kind of fancy for someone who was probably going to be wearing a shower cap.
“How do I get started?” I asked Ranger.
“Park your car up front in visitor parking. Use the front entrance and ask at the reception desk for Vicky. She’ll be your inside contact. You’ll work the line today. Morris runs his plant six days a week, so Vicky will find a job for you tomorrow as well.”
“Did you ever find out who told Bogart about me and got me kicked out of the plant?”
“It was one of the women on the line. You went to school with her daughter and she knew you worked as a bounty hunter. She thought you were in there looking for a skip. Bogart was never comfortable with an undercover operative and used it as an excuse to get rid of you. Things should be different here. Morris was in favor of putting someone in place to look around.”
His watch buzzed, and he glanced at the message.
“I have to go,” Ranger said. “I’ll be in touch.”
He gave me a quick kiss and took off.
I licked my lips. I really was going to have to stop the Ranger kissing. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. I got back into my car, drove to the front of the building, and parked in visitor parking.
The front of Morris’s plant was nicely landscaped with flower beds and shrubs. The grass was green and perfect. I looked more closely and saw that it was artificial. Fake grass, fake flowers, fake shrubs. I liked it. It gave the building a theme park quality.
I pushed through the large glass door into the lobby and went to the desk. Everything was bright and colorful in the lobby. Orange couches, white tile floor, lamps that looked like six-foot ice cream cones. And an old-fashioned ice cream pushcart filled with ice cream cups that were free for the taking. The Mo Morris theme was written in large red letters across one of the walls. “Our Ice Cream Is Mo Better!”
There was a young man behind the desk. He was dressed in a white ice cream vendor uniform. I told him I was there to see Vicky, and moments later Vicky appeared. Vicky was also wearing the white ice cream vendor uniform. I followed her down a hall to the women’s locker room. She assigned a locker to me and gave me the key.
“I understand you have experience with the cup dropper and filler,” she said, “so I thought we’d start you there. That way you can look around without the pressure of learning a new job.”
I felt my eyes glaze over at the thought of the cup dropper and filler. I nodded and attempted a smile.
“Oh boy,” I said. “The cup dropper and filler.”
“Of course, everyone on the floor wears a sanitary uniform,” Vicky said. “You’ll find one in your locker. Once you’re suited up just go through the door labeled ‘Yummytown.’ It opens to the manufacturing area. I’ll be waiting on the other side.”
The Mo Morris uniform was almost identical to the Bogart uniform, but it was orange. The slogan printed in black over the door to Yummytown said “Orange you happy to be working in an ice cream factory!”
If I opened the door and saw Oompa-Loompas working the line I was going to run like hell and never come back.
I peeked out and saw that it looked a lot like the Bogart factory. One large warehouse-type room with a lot going on. No Oompa-Loompas in sight. Vicky led me to the cup dropper and filler machine and said she’d be back at ten so I could take a break.
After an hour of looking at the cups going by I found myself dozing off on my feet. I jumped around a little and I sang the Pharrell Williams “Happy” song. Vicky came over and asked if I was okay because she’d noticed I was clapping my hands and dancing. I told her I was being happy, and she went away.
Three cups came down crooked. I fixed them and realized that they were all coming down crooked. I couldn’t set them right fast enough, and down the line the ice cream was plopping onto the side of the cup and oozing over onto the conveyor belt and onto the floor. I looked for the red button that stopped the line and called the foreman, but there was no red button. There were a bunch of switches and a green button.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Yoo-hoo! Somebody?”
No one could hear me over the machinery. I held my breath and flipped the first switch. The line sped up. Cups were coming down one after another and moving along the belt at warp-speed. Ice cream was flying all over the place. The floor was inches deep in ice cream.
A large woman rushed over, threw a switch on the side of the conveyor belt, and everything came to a grinding halt.
“What on earth?” she asked.
“There’s no big red button,” I said.
A man hurried over. He was dressed in one of the white vendor uniforms, and he had a medal pinned to his jacket. He slipped on the ice cream and went down to one knee. He got up and I saw that the medal said “Big Shot.” I guess that meant he was a boss of some sort.
“No red button,” I said to him.
He looked confused.
“She keeps saying that,” the woman said. “She keeps saying there’s no red button.”
Vicky ran in. “She’s new,” Vicky said. “My bad. I assumed she knew how to run the machine.”
“There’s no big red button,” I said to Vicky.
“No problem,” Vicky said. “I was coming to get you anyway. There’s a man here to see you.”
Ranger was waiting for me in the break room.
“Babe,” he said, his attention focusing on the orange shower cap.
“If you so much as crack a smile I’m going to hit you.”
“I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you can lose the orange after today. You’re going back to Bogart.”
“Gee, I just got here.”
“Yeah, I know you’re broken up about leaving, but we have a situation across town. The bad news is that the loading dock foreman was found dead in the freezer this morning.”
I felt myself go into suspended animation for a beat. Disbelief that another Bogart employee was frozen. A sense of dread that it was true and that I knew the man.
“Gus?” I asked.
“Yes. You worked with him yesterday.”
There was still disbelief. “How did it happen?”
“The ME didn’t see any sign of trauma. It looks like Gus got locked in and froze to death.”
“That’s impossible. The freezer door always opens from the inside.”
“Someone tampered with the lock. There’s no cell reception in the fre
ezer, but Gus left a message on his phone. He said he went in to do inventory and couldn’t get out. The time on the phone was five-ten.”
My heart was beating hard. It could have been me! “I was in and out of that freezer all morning. The door was working perfectly.”
“It was also working perfectly for most of the afternoon. A truck came in at one o’clock, and it took three hours to load it. No one had any problems with the door.”
“No one noticed that Gus was missing?”
“Butchy clocked out at four-thirty P.M. The Jolly clown clocked out at seven P.M. He said he tried to put his unsold ice cream back in the freezer but the number code wouldn’t work, so he used a small auxiliary freezer in the storeroom.”
“He didn’t think it was odd that he couldn’t get into the freezer?”
“He thought it was inconvenient but not odd. He said it wasn’t the first time he couldn’t get into the freezer. He said Gus was an idiot, and Bogart was a cheap bastard who never fixed anything. And he wondered who he should see to apply for the foreman job.”
“He’s been trying to get out of the clown suit for years.”
“Not going to happen. I asked Bogart about the denied requests to transfer. It’s company policy straight from Bogart not to move people around. No exceptions. He hires from the outside for new jobs or he promotes within departments. The clown is a department of one. He isn’t going anywhere.”
“What about Gus’s family?”
“He lived alone. Divorced. Two kids that live out of state.”
“I hate this,” I said. “It’s ugly and horrible and sad. And I’m in the middle of it. And I can’t even eat a Bogart Bar and feel happy.”
“Babe,” Ranger said.
I blew out a sigh. “Criminy.”
Ranger wrapped his arms around me and held me close. “It’s what we do. We wade in and try to make things a little more safe.”
“I know, but I’m having a shortage of happy.”
“I could fix that.”
“Your fix would create a whole other set of problems for me.” I stepped away. “So how do I fit in across town?”
“Bogart wants you back. He’s scared. This is the second employee death. And it looks like another murder.”
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