Busted

by Diane Kelly

  I took a quick shower, braided my still-wet hair, and slid into my favorite pair of Levi’s, a flannel shirt, and my ankle-high black biker boots. As soon as Dad and I finished breakfast, I decided to make a quick run by the DQHQ, to see if the Ninja’s owner had called about his crushed motorcycle. Surely the poor guy would have found his bike by now.

  Dad and I headed outside with the two boxes I’d retrieved from the Parker House, the ones from Macy’s and Bergdorf’s addressed to Savannah’s son, Zane. In the dirt driveway, Dad helped me strap the boxes to the back of my bike. After giving Dad a quick peck on the cheek, I pulled the faceplate down on the daisy helmet and cranked the bike’s engine.

  Minutes later, I pulled under the rickety carport at the police station. At the front counter sat Linda, the weekend dispatcher, a tall fiftyish woman whose once-blond curls had faded to a pale ivory. She was reading the business section of the Dallas Sunday paper. The front page bore a color photo of Kent Tindall and a headline that read How the Mighty Have Fallen. Tindall’s arrest was still big news, the district attorney having uncovered further financial shenanigans over the past few weeks.

  She glanced up from the paper as I came in the door. “‘Mornin’ captain.”

  “‘Mornin’, Linda. Any calls come in for me?”

  She shook her head.

  Damn. Hadn’t the Ninja rider discovered his damaged bike yet? Maybe he’d partied all night at the Watering Hole and was still sleeping off his night of debauchery somewhere, maybe at the house of some woman he’d met at the bar.

  Linda put the business section down and fingered through the rest of the paper until she found the Piggly Wiggly ad, which she spread out on the counter in front of her. “What’re you doing here on a Sunday?”

  “Thought I’d come in and catch up on some paperwork.” Thought I’d come in and catch me a man was more like it. Since the Ninja guy hadn’t called in, I’d have to track him down through his newly issued license plate number. I tried to convince myself I wasn’t actually stalking the guy, that I was doing him a favor, locating him for official police purposes.

  Linda flipped the glossy page. “Toilet paper’s on sale. Two-for-one.”

  Didn’t take much to get people excited in this town.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I poured myself a mug of coffee, added vanilla creamer, then headed back to my booth and booted up my computer. The decrepit thing seemed to take forever. Maybe if I poured some coffee into the hard drive the machine would wake up and get moving.

  My hand was poised on the mouse, index finger hovering over the button, waiting. When the screen finally came to life, I clicked on the link to the state motor vehicle records and, at a speed that would make my high school typing teacher proud, input the Ninja’s license plate number. The computer made a whirring sound for a couple seconds, then emitted a beep.

  There it was. The identity of my mystery man.

  Bartholomew Edmund Jonasili.

  Really? I hadn’t expected such an old-fashioned name. I’d anticipated something tough, rugged, and sexy, like Mitch or Derek or Axel. Certainly not Bartholomew Edmund. I looked up to plead with the heavens. Please, Lord, don’t let him be some octogenarian hiding his wrinkly gonads under a cool leather jumpsuit. But no, he couldn’t be. I’d seen him at the pumps at the Grab-N-Go and he’d had dark hair. Of course anyone could dye their hair. Chet had taught me that. But my quick glimpse hadn’t left me with the impression that the Ninja’s rider was old.

  I looked back at the screen. Maybe the guy went by Bart or Eddie. Either of those names would do. But what about that surname, Jonasili? What was it, Italian? French? Greek? I didn’t have a clue. I’d never heard it before.

  I realized then that his driver’s license record could give me his age and a photo. I backed out of the vehicle registration file, clicked on the icon for driver’s license records, and typed in his name. The computer whirred for several seconds, then emitted an odd crackling noise as if it were about to short-circuit. I shot the screen a death glare and hissed, “Don’t fail me now, you sorry piece of crap!”

  “You say something, Marnie?” Linda called from across the room.

  “Just cursing the computer!” I called back. “Stupid thing’s acting up again.”

  I took a sip of my coffee and closed my eyes. The computer stopped whirring and beeped. The moment of truth. Time to come face-to-face with my mystery man. Well, at least face-to-photo.

  I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and checked the screen. No match.

  How could Bartholomew Edmund Jonasili have a motorcycle registered in his name but no driver’s license? It made no sense. I must have misspelled the name. That had to be the reason no match was found.

  I backed up to the input screen and checked my spelling. Nope. I’d spelled it exactly as it showed up on the registration records. I typed the name in again anyway. Still no match. I tried various misspellings of the name, just in case the data entry clerk at the DMV had flubbed up. Still no match.

  “What the hell?” I banged my fist on the red Formica.

  Fate, that nasty bitch, was taunting me, dangling two men in front of me like juicy, sexy carrots, then yanking them out of my grasp, keeping them just out of reach.

  I flopped back into the booth. I sat there for a minute, fighting the urge to take my .38 and blast the useless piece of silicon and plastic sitting in front of me to smithereens. Instead, I paged back to the vehicle registration records to get the address in Hockerville for Bart. Big Bad Bart. Bad Boy Bart. I could always drive by his house and hope to catch a glimpse of him, or knock on the door and pretend to be selling tickets to the policeman’s ball. Of course we didn’t hold a ball, but that was beside the point.

  As the machine attempted to access the registration records again, the screen flickered. “No! Not now!”

  The screen flared bluish-white, then fell pitch black. The machine sat in silence. The system had crashed.

  “Gah!” I bitch-slapped the monitor and it rotated a few inches on the base. I banged my forehead once on the edge of the tabletop, then left it there, staring down at the scratched tile floor. I could call the sheriff’s department, ask them to run the search for me on their state-of-the-art computers, but I wasn’t in the mood to be razzed about our crappy equipment. I had a full to-do list for the day and didn’t have time to hang around until the irritable machine decided to cooperate again.

  I marched to the dispatch desk and grabbed the dog-eared Ruger County phone book from under the counter. I opened it on the countertop and flipped pages aside until I got to the J’s. I ran my finger down the listings. “Jonasili, Jonasili,” I mumbled. There was one Jonah, two Jonases, and then the listings moved on to Jones, one of which was BJ and Frances, Trey’s parents. Just my luck. The Ninja’s owner either didn’t have a landline, or he had an unlisted number. Gah, gah, gah!

  Maybe this was Fate’s way of telling me to focus on one guy at a time. But maybe Fate should give me a break and go screw with someone else for a change.

  I turned to Linda. “You ever heard of anyone in Hockerville with the last name of Jonasili?”

  She looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook her head. “No. Why?”

  “His motorcycle was damaged at the park last night. I’m trying to track him down. I left my card at the scene. If he calls, you can give him my personal cell number.”

  “Sure thing, Marnie.”

  I slammed the phone book closed and shoved it back under the counter. “Computer’s crashed again. Call the sheriff’s department if you need to run anything.”

  “Okey dokey.”

  I grabbed my purse from my desk-booth and headed back out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A DAY OF REST? NOT QUITE

  I ducked into the Piggly Wiggly, emerging from the store twenty minutes later with two plastic bags full of cleaning supplies. After packing them in the black leather saddle bags on my bike, I snapped my helmet back on, slid my
hands back into my gloves and aimed for the trailer park.

  As I passed Jacksburg City Park, I did a double take. A bright red flatbed truck from a local towing service sat in the lot. A stocky bald man in gray coveralls bent over next to it, wrestling with the shattered remains of the Ninja.

  I made an illegal U-turn, my braid whipping around and whacking me in the left boob. I drove slowly into the lot, glancing around for the owner of the bike. Besides the tow truck operator, there was no one in sight.

  I pulled up behind the man and cut my engine. The guy looked up at me. We recognized each other from previous accident scenes. He nodded to me.

  I looked down at the mangled motorcycle. “That bike’s in sad shape.”

  “You ain’t kidding.” He picked up a chunk of ragged yellow fiberglass, what was once the wheel cover.

  “Where’s the owner of the bike?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “He called this morning and asked us to haul it to a motorcycle repair outfit in Dallas. Said there’s an extra hundred in it for me if I’d make it my first priority. Must be in a hurry to get it fixed.”

  If I had a bike like that, I’d be in a hurry to get it back up and running, too. Luckily, since only the front end was damaged, the repairs shouldn’t take more than a day or two.

  No point in sticking around if Bad Bart isn’t here. “See ya.” I raised a gloved hand, started my engine and drove off.

  ***

  Lucas’s key slid easily into the lock on his front door, but with the frame sitting cockeyed it took three hard shoves to the darn thing open. I made a mental note to look into what it would cost to get the trailer leveled. All these mental notes were seriously crowding my mental bulletin board.

  When I stepped inside, the same stench from the night before met my nose. I dropped my grocery store bags on the floor and set about opening all the windows to air the place out. After unbuttoning my cuffs and rolling up the sleeves on my flannel shirt, I got down to business. So much for Sunday being a day of rest.

  For the next two hours, I ignored the complaints from my sore, scraped palms and scrubbed, swept, sprayed, scoured, and squeegeed. I chiseled months-old cereal debris off the scratched stainless steel kitchen sink. I polished Lucas’s particle-board bookcase, wiping off a layer of accumulated dust so thick I wouldn’t have been surprised to find dinosaur fossils at the bottom. After a ten-minute battle with bleach and a long-handled scrub brush, the circle of black mildew in the toilet gave up the fight. I hauled the trash out to the curb, taking the two beers from the fridge with it, replacing them with a fresh box of baking soda.

  In the bedroom, I found a sketchpad and a box of charcoal pencils on the plastic milk crate that served as his night table. A half dozen crumpled balls of sketch paper lay on the floor next to the mattress. I opened the sketchpad to find a series of drawings, three of Tosh in various poses, two of farm landscapes, and a final one of a woman in jeans and a floral-print peasant blouse, her thick dark hair hanging down to her waist, a smattering of freckles scattered across her face. The woman looked like me except for the slight gap between her front teeth. Dad had scrimped to afford my braces.

  It’s Mom.

  Lucas had an incredible knack for detail and a fantastic memory. He’d captured her perfectly. The almost imperceptible dimple on her left cheek, the shaggy bangs brushed to the side, her unique expression, simultaneously daring and warm. I tore the sheet from the sketchbook, rolled it up, and slid it into one of the plastic grocery sacks to take with me later.

  The trailer didn’t exactly gleam when I was done. The fixtures and furniture were too old and scarred to give off any sparkle. But it smelled much better and at least appeared tidy. My last task was to gather up the dirty clothes strewn about the trailer, along with the bedding, and stuff it all into a garbage bag to take with me for washing.

  ***

  When I pulled into Savannah’s driveway, the sheer white curtain at the front window was pulled back by a tiny hand and Zane’s smiling face appeared in the window. His mouth formed the words, “Aunt Marnie’s here!” He waved frantically before dropping the curtain back in place.

  Before I could even get my helmet off, he was in the driveway, dressed in hand-me-down footed pajamas covered in fabric pills, holes in the knees, a smear of peanut butter on his pink cheek. He ran in crazy circles around my bike.

  When he got dizzy he grabbed me around the thigh, hugging my leg, partly in affection, partly to keep from falling.

  I pulled off my helmet with one hand and put the other on his back. “Hey there, Zaniac.”

  After clipping my helmet to the bike, I lifted the little guy up by the armpits and plastered kisses on his cheeks. He giggled and squirmed in my arms. I put him down and he ran full tilt back into the house, straight through the door he’d left wide open. I unstrapped the boxes and garbage bag of laundry from my motorcycle and lugged them into the house, dropping the bag in the foyer and tucking the boxes under my arm.

  Savannah and Craig’s oldest son, Braden, lay on his back on the couch, legs draped over the arm as he watched SpongeBob SquarePants. Dylan was on the floor, assembling pieces of a plastic racetrack into an elaborate curlicue formation, no plain old figure eight for him.

  “Hey, dudes,” I called.

  Braden jutted out his chin by way of greeting and Dylan said “Hey,” without looking up from the track. They treated me like nothing special, like family. I like that.

  Savannah’s voice came from the bedroom down the hall. “Back here, Marn.”

  Zane hopped two-footed down the hall ahead of me into his parents’ bedroom, leaping onto the rumpled comforter on the unmade bed. I set the boxes on the floor and flopped onto the bed next to him, tickling him until he grabbed the covers and rolled, concealing himself in a cocoon of sheets.

  Savannah stood in front of the dresser in a calf-length green linen dress. She tilted her head to each side as she put on a pair of gold hoop earrings, then righted her head and fluffed out her hair with her fingers.

  I eyed her in the mirror. “You look gorgeous.”

  She looked down and grabbed the roll of excess flesh on her belly with both hands. “Ugh. Look at this. I’m going to have to suck in my gut all day.” She inhaled sharply and turned to the side to check out her abs in the mirror. “That’s better,” she gasped, struggling to hold in her stomach and breath.

  “At least you can blame your fat on your babies. I’ve only got cookies to blame for mine.” I climbed off the bed, picked up the boxes from Bergdorf’s and Macy’s, and set them on the wide pine dresser. “These are the boxes I told you about, the ones that were delivered to the Parker place on Renfro.”

  Savannah stepped over to look at the labels and frowned. “They’re addressed to Zane, all right.”

  “Want to see what’s in them?”

  “Why not?” She pulled a pair of nail scissors out of a drawer and handed them to me.

  I cut through the strapping tape with the tiny scissors and pulled the boxes open. Zane hopped down from the bed, reached his little hands into one of the boxes and tossed handfuls of Styrofoam peanuts into the air, the white foam drifting to the floor around us as if we were in a snow globe. Savannah turned the smaller box over and dumped out the contents while I pulled items out of the bigger box.

  We spread the merchandise out on the dresser to take a look. A pair of midnight blue Dior sling-backs, women’s size seven. A soft pink cashmere sweater, size small. A pair of Prada sunglasses with a fancy case. Five pairs of teeny silk panties in assorted pastel colors. Two black lace push-up bras, size 32A. A pair of men’s burgundy silk boxers.

  “That’s some fancy stuff,” Savannah said. “Not exactly the kind of thing people wear around here.”

  Women in Jacksburg primarily opted for utility rather than style, dressing in jeans, T-shirts, and tennis shoes. I couldn’t think of a single guy in town who’d wear silk boxers, either. I also couldn’t decide for certain whether the contents of the boxes indic
ated that the thief was male or female. Although most of the items in the boxes were intended for a woman’s use, the fact that there was so much lingerie could mean the thief was buying things for a wife or girlfriend. Besides, the thief had chosen to steal the identities of a Logan, a Taylor, and a Zane. Zane was clearly a male name, while the names Logan and Taylor could go either way.