He peered in the window at me. “Stephanie Plum,” he said, smiling. “Haven’t seen you since high school.”
“I’m surprised you recognized me.”
“The orange hair threw me for a minute, but then I remembered you from the picture in the paper from when you burned down the funeral home.”
“I didn’t burn down the funeral home. It was a misprint.”
“Too bad,” Bucky said. “I thought it was cool. Sounds like you got a car problem.”
“It keeps stalling. Joe Morelli suggested I come here. He said you’re a good mechanic.”
“He gave you a pretty good recommendation, too. Read it on the bathroom wall of Mario’s Sub Shop over ten years ago, and I can still remember every word of it.”
“I have Mace in my shoulder bag.”
“Mostly what I care about is MasterCard.”
I sighed. “I’ve got that too.”
“Well,” Bucky said, “then let’s do business.”
I gave him the Nissan’s medical history.
Bucky had me run the engine while he looked under the hood.
“Okay,” he said. “Been here, done this.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Sure.”
“How long? How much?”
“Depends on parts.”
I’d heard this before.
He jerked his thumb at a bunch of junks lined up against a chain-link fence. “You could pick out one of those to use as a loaner if you want. I got a classic Buick that’s a beauty. A fifty-three.”
“NO!”
Rex was running on his wheel when I walked through the door. I’d stopped at the supermarket and gotten healthy food for Rex and me. Fruit, low-fat cottage cheese, potatoes and some of those already washed and peeled thumb-sized carrots in a bag. I said howdy to Rex and gave him a grape. My message light was blinking, so I hit the button and listened while I unpacked the groceries.
Ranger called to say he’d heard about Mo and the lawyer, and that it didn’t change my job. It’s simple, Ranger said. You get hired to find a man and that’s what you do.
Message number two was from Bucky Seidler. “I was able to get the part I needed,” Bucky said into the machine. “I’ll put it in first thing in the morning. You can pick your car up anytime after ten.”
I bit into my lower lip. Lord, I hoped it wasn’t another carburetor.
The last call started out with a lot of noise. People talking, and the sort of clatter you hear at an arcade. Then a man came on the line. “I’m watching you, Stephanie,” the man said. “I’m watching you have lunch with your cop boyfriend. I was watching you last night, too. Watching you diddle on the kitchen floor. Good to see you decided to do something else besides harassing upstanding citizens. You keep concentrating on banging Morelli and maybe you’ll live to be an old lady.”
I stared at the machine, unable to breathe. My chest was impossibly tight, and my ears were ringing. I leaned against the refrigerator and closed my eyes. Imagine you’re at the ocean, I thought. Hear the surf. Breathe with the surf, Stephanie.
When I got my heart rate under control, I rewound the tape and popped it out of the recorder. I took a blank from the junk drawer next to the refrigerator and slid it into the machine. It was a few minutes after five. I called Morelli to make sure he was home.
“’Lo,” Morelli said.
“You going to be there for a while?”
“Yeah. I just got in.”
“Don’t go away. I have something you need to hear. I’ll be right over.”
I dropped the tape into my shoulder bag, grabbed my jacket and locked up behind myself. I got down to the first floor and froze at the door. What if they were out there? Waiting for me. Spying on me. I took a few steps back and exhaled. This wasn’t good. It was okay to be afraid, but not okay to let it restrict my life. I moved away from the glass panes and checked my shoulder bag. I had the .38, and it was loaded. My cell phone was charged. My stun gun was charged. I transferred the pepper spray to my jacket pocket. Not good enough. I took the spray out of my pocket and held it in my left hand. Car keys in my right.
I paced in the lobby for a few beats to get the fear under control. When I felt strong, I turned and walked out the door and across the lot to my car. I never broke stride. Never turned my head right or left. But I was listening. I was on the balls of my feet, and I was ready to act if I had to.
I’d chosen a green Mazda as a loaner. It was rusted and dented and reeked of cigarettes, but its performance couldn’t be faulted. I checked the interior, stuck the key in the lock, opened the door and slid behind the wheel. I locked the door, immediately cranked the engine over and rolled out of the lot.
No one followed that I could tell, and once I got onto St. James there were too many headlights to distinguish a tail. I had my shoulder bag on the seat alongside me and my pepper spray in my lap. To keep my spirits up I sang “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” all the way to Morelli’s house. I parked at the curb and checked the street. No cars. No one on foot. I locked the Mazda, marched to Morelli’s front door and knocked. I guess I was still nervous because the knock came out like BAM BAM BAM instead of knock, knock, knock.
“Must have had your Wheaties today,” Morelli said when he answered the door.
I pushed past him. “You keep your doors locked?”
“Sometimes.”
“They locked now?”
Morelli reached behind him and flipped the Yale lock. “Yep.”
I went to the living room window and drew the drapes. “Pull the curtains in the dining room and kitchen.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just humor me.”
I followed him into the kitchen and waited while he adjusted Venetian blinds. When he was done I took the tape out of my shoulder bag. “You have a recorder?”
There was a briefcase sitting on the kitchen table. Morelli opened the briefcase and took out a recorder. He slipped the tape into the recorder and pressed the play button.
Ranger came up first.
“Bad advice,” Morelli said.
“That’s not what I want you to hear.”
The noise blasted out and then the man’s voice. Morelli’s face showed no expression while he listened to the message. Cop face, I thought. He ran the tape through a second time before shutting the machine off.
“Not Mickey Maglio,” he said.
“No.” A cop would know better than to have his voice recorded.
“You have any clue you were being followed?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Did you pick up a tail tonight?”
“No.”
“There’s a record store, grunge shop across from the Shuman Building. It’s got some video machines in it. It’s a kid hangout. The call probably originated from there. I’ll send someone over to ask a few questions.”
“Guess the crashing and scuffling we heard didn’t come from your neighbor’s dog.”
“Whoever was out there must have knocked the garbage can over trying to get a better look.”
“You don’t seem very upset by this.”
There were dishes drying in a drainer on the sink. A dinner plate, a cereal bowl, a couple glasses. Morelli grabbed the dinner plate and threw it hard against the opposite wall, where it smashed into a million pieces.
“Okay,” I said. “So I was wrong.”
“You want to stay for dinner?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Morelli made chicken sounds.
“Very adult,” I said. “Very attractive.”
Morelli grinned.
I paused with my hand on the door handle. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me more about your conversation with Dickie.”
“No more to tell,” Morelli said.
Yeah, right.
“And don’t follow me home,” I said. “I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“Who said I was going to follow you home?”
>
“You have your car keys in your hand, and I know the body language. You look like my mother.”
The grin widened. “You sure you don’t want an escort?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” The only thing worse than being scared out of my wits was having Morelli know it.
Morelli opened the door and glanced at the Mazda. “Looks like you’ve got one of Bucky’s loaners.”
“Bucky remembered me from high school. Said you gave me quite a recommendation on the men’s room wall at Mario’s.”
“That was during my reckless youth,” Morelli said. “These days I’m the soul of discretion.”
It was still early, and I couldn’t get excited about going home and fixing dinner for one. The alternatives were Cluck in a Bucket or mooching a meal from my parents. I was afraid I might be recognized and remembered at Cluck in a Bucket, so I opted for family.
My mother looked flustered when she came to the door. “Whose car is that?” she asked.
“It’s a loaner from a garage. My car is broken again.”
“Hah!” my father said from the dining room.
“We were just sitting down,” my mother said. “Roast leg of lamb with mashed potatoes and asparagus.”
“Is that Stephanie?” Grandma Mazur hollered from the table. “Have you got your gun? I want to show it around.”
“I’ve got my gun, but you can’t see it,” I said.
There was a man sitting next to Grandma Mazur.
“This here’s Fred,” Grandma said. “He’s my boyfriend.”
Fred nodded to me. “Howdy-do.”
Fred looked to be about three hundred years old. Gravity had pulled the skin from the top of his head down to his neck, and Fred had tucked it into his shirt collar.
I took my seat across from Grandma and noticed a set of false teeth neatly placed beside Fred’s salad fork.
“Those are my choppers,” Fred said. “Got them for free from the VA, but they don’t fit right. Can’t eat with them in.”
“Had to put his lamb through the meat grinder,” Grandma said. “That’s what the lump of gray stuff is on his plate.”
“So,” my father said to Fred. “You pretty well fixed?”
“I do okay. I get disability from the army.” He tapped a finger against his right eye. “Glass,” he said. “World War Two.”
“Were you overseas?” my father asked.
“Nope. Lost my eye at Camp Kilmer. I was inspecting my bayonet, and then next thing you know I’d poked my eye out with it.”
“The fact he’s only got one eye don’t slow him down none,” Grandma said. “I’ve seen him handle ten bingo cards and never miss a single call. And he’s an artist, too. He hooks rugs. You should see the beautiful rugs he makes. He made one with a picture of a tiger on it.”
“I imagine you got a house of your own?” my father asked him.
Fred gummed some of the gray glop. “Nope. I just got a room at Senior Citizens. I sure would like to have a house though. I’d like to marry someone like Sweetie here, and I’d be happy to move right in. I’d be quiet too. You wouldn’t hardly know I was here.”
“Over my dead body,” my father said. “You can take your teeth and get the hell out of here. You’re nothing but a goddamn gold digger.”
Fred opened his eyes wide in alarm. “I can’t get out of here. I haven’t had dessert yet. Sweetie promised me dessert. And besides, I don’t have a ride back to the Seniors.”
“Call him a cab,” my father ordered. “Stephanie, go call him a cab. Ellen, wrap up his dessert.”
Ten minutes later Fred was on his way.
Grandma Mazur helped herself to a cookie and a second cup of coffee. “There’s plenty more where he came from,” she said. “Tell you the truth he was kind of old for me anyway. And he was creeping me out with that glass eye…the way he’d tap on it all the time. It was okay that he took his teeth out, but I didn’t want to see that eye rolling around next to his soup spoon.”
The Rangers were playing Montreal, so I stayed to see the game. Watching the game also involved eating a lot of junk food since my father is an even worse junk food addict than I am. By the time the third period rolled around we’d gone through a jar of cocktail wieners, a bag of Chee•tos and a can of cashews and were working on a two-pound bag of M&M’s.
When I finally waved good-bye I was considering bulimia.
The upside to lacking self-control was that the threat of masked men paled in comparison to worry over the Chee-tos working their way to my thighs. By the time I remembered to be afraid I was inserting the key in my front door.
My apartment felt relatively safe. Only one phone message, and no cocktail wieners tempting me from cupboard shelves. I punched up the message.
It was from Ranger. “Call me.”
I dialed his home number and received a single-word answer. “Go.”
“Is this a message?” I asked. “Am I talking to a machine?”
“This is very weird, babe, but I could swear your friend Lula is trying to tail me.”
“She thinks you’re a superhero.”
“Lot of people think that.”
“You know how you give everybody that vacant lot as your home address? She thinks that’s a little odd. She wants to find out where you live. And by the way, where do you live?”
I waited for an answer, but all I heard was a disconnect.
I woke up feeling guilty about the junk food binge, so for penance I cleaned the hamster cage, rearranged the jars in the refrigerator and scrubbed the toilet. I looked for ironing, but there was none. When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don’t need ironing.
Bucky had said my car would be ready at ten. Not that I doubted Morelli or Bucky, but I’d come to regard car repairs with the same sort of cynicism I’d previously reserved for Elvis sightings.
I parked the green Mazda against the garage fence and saw that my pickup was waiting for me in front of one of the open bays. It had been freshly washed and was sparkly clean. It would have been slick if only it didn’t have a big crumple in its hood and a big dent in its back bumper.
Bucky sauntered out from the other bay.
I looked at the pickup skeptically. “Is it fixed?”
“Emission control valve needed a doohickey,” Bucky said. “Two hundred and thirty dollars.”
“Doohickey?”
“That’s the technical term,” Bucky said.
“Two hundred and thirty dollars sounds high for a doohickey.”
“Mr. Fix It don’t come cheap.”
I drove back to my apartment building without a hitch. No stalls. No backfires. And no confidence that this would last. The honeymoon period, I thought skeptically.
I returned to my building and parked in my usual Dumpster spot. I cautiously got out of the truck and looked for possible assailants. Finding none, I crossed the lot and swung through the door into the lobby.
Mr. Wexler was in the lobby, waiting for the senior citizens’ minibus to pick him up. “You hear about Mo Bedemier?” Mr. Wexler asked. “Isn’t he a pip? I tell you, the man’s got a lot of jewels. It’s about time somebody did something about the drug problem.”
“He’s suspected of killing a whole bunch of men!”
“Yep. He’s on a roll, all right.”
The elevator doors opened, and I got in, but I didn’t feel like going to my apartment. I felt like striking out at someone.
I got out of the elevator and confronted Mr. Wexler. “Killing is wrong.”
“We kill chickens,” Mr. Wexler said. “We kill cows. We kill trees. So big deal, we kill some drug dealers.”
It was hard to argue with that kind of logic because I like cows and chickens and trees much better than drug dealers.
I got back into the elevator and rode to the second floor. I stood there for a fe
w minutes, trying to talk myself into a relaxing afternoon of doing nothing, but I couldn’t sell the idea. I returned to the lobby, stomped over to my truck and wedged myself behind the steering wheel. As long as I was already in a fairly vicious mood I thought I might as well visit Dickie, the little crumb. I wanted to know what he told Morelli.
I parked in a lot a block from Dickie’s office, barreled through the lobby and gave his receptionist my power smile.
“I need to have a few words with Dickie,” I said. And before she could answer I turned on my heel and stalked off to Dickie’s office.
CHAPTER 15
Dickie didn’t look happy to see me. In fact, Dickie didn’t look happy at all. He was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands and his hair rumpled. This was serious stuff, because Dickie’s hair was always perfect. Dickie woke up in the morning with every hair neatly in place. That he was having a bad day did nothing to dampen my spirits.
He jumped in his seat when he saw me. “You! Are you nuts? Are you wacko?” He shook his head. “This is too much. This time you’ve gone too far.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about restraining orders. Harassment charges. Attempts at intimidating an attorney.”
“Are you putting that funny white powder in your coffee again?”
“Okay, so I fooled around a little while we were married. Okay, our divorce didn’t go smooth as silk. Okay, I know you have some hostile feelings for me.” He unconsciously ran his hand through his hair, causing it to stand on end. “That’s no reason to turn into the Terminator. Christ, you need help. Have you ever thought of getting some counseling?”
“I get the feeling you’re trying to tell me something.”
“I’m talking about sending your goon to attack me in my parking lot this morning!”
“Lula attacked you?”
“Not Lula. The other one.”
“I don’t have another one.”
“The big guy,” Dickie said. “In the ski mask and coveralls.”
“Hold the phone. I’ve got the picture. That wasn’t my goon. And there’s more than one. There’s a whole pack of them, and they’ve been threatening me, too. Just exactly what did he say to you?”
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