Plum Boxed Set 1, Books 1-3 Stephanie Plum Novels) (66 page)

I scanned the room but found only familiar shapes. The digital readout on my clock said five-thirty. My eyes cut to my dresser at the sound of a drawer slamming shut, and finally I picked out the intruder.

A pair of sweats sailed through the air and hit me in the head.

“If we’re going to work together, you’ve got to get into shape,” the intruder said.

“Ranger?”

“I made you some tea. It’s on your nightstand.”

I switched the light on. Sure enough, there was a cup of tea steaming on my nightstand. So much for the illusion of Stephanie Plum, keen-sensed bounty hunter.

“I hate tea,” I said, sniffing at the noxious brew. I took a sip. YUK! “What
is
this?”

“Ginseng.”

“It’s weird. It tastes awful.”

“Good for your circulation,” Ranger said. “Helps oxygenate.”

“What are you doing in my bedroom?” Ordinarily I’d be curious as to the mode of entry. With Ranger it was a pointless question. Ranger had ways.

“I’m trying to get you out of bed,” Ranger said. “It’s late.”

“It’s five-thirty!”

“I’ll be in the living room warming up.”

I watched his back disappear through the bedroom door. Was he serious? Warm up for what? I pulled the sweats on and padded
out to him. He was doing one-armed push-ups.

“We’ll start out with fifty,” he said.

I got down on the floor and made an attempt at a push-up. After about five minutes Ranger was finished, and I’d almost done one.

“Okay,” Ranger said, jogging in place. “Let’s hit the streets.”

“I want breakfast.”

“We’ll do a fast five-mile run, and then we’ll come back for breakfast.”

A five-mile run? Was he nuts? It was five-thirty in the morning. It was dark out. It was cold. I peeked out the window. It was fucking snowing!

“Great,” I said. “Piece of cake.”

I zipped myself into a down ski jacket, filled the pockets with tissues and lip balm, pulled on a knit cap, wrapped a scarf around my neck, stuffed my hands into big wool mittens and followed Ranger down the stairs.

Ranger ran effortlessly for several blocks. His stride was steady and measured. His attention directed inward. I struggled beside him…nose running, breathing labored, attention directed to surviving the next moment.

We slipped through the gate to the playing field behind the high school and swung onto the track. I dropped back to a walk and applied some lip balm. Ranger lapped me, and I picked it up to a jog. Ranger lapped me a few more times, and then he nudged me off the track, back through the gate to the street.

The sun wasn’t yet on the horizon, but the sky had begun to lighten under the snow and the cloud cover. I could see the sheen on Ranger’s face, see the sweat soaking through his shirt. His face still bore the same meditative expression. His breathing was even once again, now that he had slowed his pace to mine.

We ran in silence back to my apartment, entering the front door, jogging through the lobby. He took the stairs, and I took the elevator.

He was waiting for me when the doors opened.

“I thought you were behind me,” he said.

“I was. Way behind.”

“It’s all in the attitude,” Ranger said. “You want to be tough, you have to live healthy.”

“To begin with, I don’t want to be tough. I want to be…adequate.”

Ranger stripped off his sweatshirt. “Adequate is being able to run five miles. How are
you going to catch the bad guys if you can’t outrun them?”

“Connie gives the bad guys who can run to you. I get the fat, out-of-shape bad guys.”

Ranger took a bag out of my refrigerator and dumped a load of stuff from the bag into my blender. He flipped the blender switch and the stuff in the jar turned pink.

“What are you making?” I wanted to know.

“A smoothie.” He poured half the smoothie into a big glass and handed it to me.

I took a sip. Not bad. If it was in a much smaller glass and sitting alongside a huge stack of hotcakes drenched in maple syrup, it would be just about tolerable.

“It needs something,” I said. “It needs…chocolate.”

Ranger drank the remaining smoothie. “I’m going home to take a shower and make some phone calls. I’ll be back in an hour.”

To celebrate our partnership I dressed up like Ranger. Black boots, black jeans, black turtleneck, small silver hoop earrings.

He gave me the once-over when I opened the door to him.

“Smart ass,” he said.

I sent him what I hoped was an enigmatic smile.

He was wearing a black leather jacket with
fringe running the length of each sleeve. Little blue and black beads were hooked three-quarters down the fringe.

I didn’t have any fringe on my black leather jacket. And I didn’t have any beads. I had more zippers than Ranger, so I guess it all evened out. I slipped the jacket on and clapped a black Metallica ball cap over my freshly washed hair.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we look for Mo.”

It was still snowing, but it was cozy in Ranger’s Bronco. We cruised the streets, looking for the Batmobile in parking lots and middle-class neighborhoods. At my suggestion we visited some photo stores. Two of the merchants said they recognized Mo but hadn’t seen him lately. The snow was still coming down, and traffic was crawling around cars that couldn’t make grades.

“Mo’s not going to be out in this,” Ranger said. “We might as well close up shop for the day.”

I wasn’t going to argue. It was lunchtime. I was starving, and I didn’t want to graze on sprouts and bean curd.

Ranger dropped me at the front door to my building and motored off in four-wheel drive. I took the stairs two at a time, practi
cally ran down the hall and unlocked my door. Everything was quiet and peaceful inside. Rex was sleeping. The refrigerator hummed softly. The snow clacked on the windows. I kicked my shoes off, shuffled out of the black jeans and carted an armload of food into my bedroom. I switched the television on and crawled into bed with the channel changer.

Do I know how to have a good time, or what?

At six-thirty I was coming off a two-hour MTV stint and was approaching a vegetative state. I was trying to choose between a Turner classic and the news when a thought straggled into the front of my brain.

Mo had a lawyer.

Since when? The paperwork I’d been given said he’d waived an attorney. The only one I could think to ask was Joe Morelli.

“Yeah?” Morelli said when he answered the phone.

Just yeah. No hello. “You have a bad day?”

“I didn’t have a good day.”

“Do you know who Mo is using for a lawyer?”

“Mo waived counsel.”

“I ran into him, and he said he had a lawyer.”

There was a pause at the other end. “You ran into Mo?”

“He was at the candy store.”

“And?”

“And he got away.”

“I hear they’re hiring at the button factory.”

“At least I know he has a lawyer. That’s more than you know.”

“You got me there,” Morelli said. “I’ll check with the court tomorrow, but to the best of my knowledge, we haven’t been informed of counsel.”

A new question to add to the list. Why would Mo get a lawyer? Mo would get a lawyer if he was thinking of turning himself in. Probably there were other reasons, too, but I couldn’t think of them.

I went to the window and peered outside. It had stopped snowing, and the streets looked cleared. I paced in my bedroom. I paced in my living room. I went to the dining room table and wrote, “Mo gets a lawyer,” on the steno pad. Then I wrote, “Three people think they might have seen Mo on Montgomery Street.”

I drew a big round head and filled it with question marks. It was my head.

I did some more pacing. Montgomery
Street nagged at me. Hell, I thought, I’ll take a ride over there. I haven’t got anything else to do.

I got dressed and plowed through the night in the Buick. I parked on Montgomery in almost precisely the same spot I’d parked on previous snooping sessions. I saw precisely the same things. Yellow apartment building, mission, church, appliance store. The only difference was that it was dark now, and it had been light then. Technically it had been dark for the first two hours I’d spent here with Ranger, but I’d been in a sleep-deprived stupor, so it hadn’t counted.

Just for kicks, I trained my binoculars on the apartment building, peeping into the lit, undraped windows. I didn’t see any nudity, or any murders or any Mo. Peeping isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Lights were out in the mission, but the church next to the mission was getting some traffic. The mission and the church occupied two buildings that were two stories each. They’d been shops at one time. An office supply store and a dry cleaner. The Reverend Bill, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, had bought the buildings five years ago and set up his storefront church. He was one of those hooray for people, let’s get back to
family values preachers. Every now and then his picture would be in the paper for picketing an abortion clinic or for throwing cow’s blood on some woman in a fur coat.

The people entering the church looked normal enough. Nobody carried a picket sign or a bucket of blood. Mostly families. A few single men. I counted twenty-six men, women and children in a half-hour period and then the meeting or the service must have started, because the front door remained closed, and no one else showed up. It wasn’t an ethnically diverse group, but that wasn’t shocking. The surrounding neighborhood was predominantly white, blue-collar. People usually choose a church that’s within their community.

The appliance store and Sal’s Café closed at nine. A half hour later, the twenty-six people filed out of the church. I scanned the apartment building windows one more time with the binoculars. I had my eyes glued to the third floor when someone rapped on my passenger-side window.

It was Carl Costanza in cop uniform. He looked in at me and shook his head. I unlocked the door, and Carl took a seat.

“You really need to get a social life,” Carl said.

“You sound like my mother.”

“We got a complaint about some pervert sitting in a Buick, looking in people’s windows with binoculars.”

“I’m checking out a Mo sighting.”

Costanza reached for the binoculars and looked the building over. “Are you going to be checking it out much longer?”

“No. I’m done. I don’t know why I even came back here tonight. I just have this feeling, you know?”

“Nobody ever takes their clothes off in this neighborhood,” Costanza said, still going window to window. “Have you talked to Reverend Bill?”

“Not yet.”

“You should go do that while I keep an eye on things. I’ve got a second-floor apartment that looks promising.”

“You think Mo might be there?”

“No. I think a naked woman might be there. Come on, sweetheart,” Carl crooned, watching the woman in the window, “unbutton your shirt for Uncle Carl.”

“You’re sick.”

“I live to serve,” Costanza said.

I crossed the street and tried to peek past the curtains covering the two plate-glass windows in the front of the Freedom
Church. I didn’t get much mileage from that, so I opened the door and looked inside.

The entire downstairs portion was essentially one large room, set up auditorium style with a bunch of folding chairs arranged in rows and a raised platform set against the back wall. The platform had some blue material tacked to it to make a skirt. A lectern stood in the middle of the platform. I assumed this was the pulpit.

A man was stacking books at one end of the platform. He was medium height, medium weight and had a head like a bowling ball. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses, and had pink scrubbed-clean skin, and looked like he should be saying things like, “Okley dokley, neighbor.” I recognized him from his press photos. It was Reverend Bill.

He straightened and smiled when he saw me. His voice was soft and pleasantly melodic. Easy to imagine him in a choir robe. Hard to imagine him throwing cow’s blood, but I guess when the moment seizes you…

“Of course I know Moses Bedemier,” he said affably. “Everyone knows Uncle Mo. He packs one heck of an ice cream cone.”

“A couple people have reported seeing him here on Montgomery recently.”

“You mean since his disappearance?”

“You know about that?”

“Several of our parishioners are from the burg. Everyone has been concerned. This is pretty strange behavior for a man as stable as Mo Bedemier.”

I gave Reverend Bill my card. “If you should see him, I’d appreciate a call.”

“Of course.” He silently stared at the card, lost in thought, serious. “I hope he’s okay.”

I didn’t want Ranger showing up in my bedroom at the crack of dawn again, so I made sure my windows were locked and the bolt thrown on my front door. Then, to be extra sure, I jury-rigged a tower of pots and pans in front of the door, so that if the door was opened the pots would come crashing down and wake me up. I’d done this once before with a tower of glasses. It had worked like a charm except for the broken glass all over the floor and the necessity of drinking from paper cups until my next paycheck arrived.

I reread my scribblings on the steno pad, but no wondrous revelation jumped off the page at me.

At 5
A.M
. the pots clattered to the floor, and I rushed out in my flannel nightshirt to find Ranger smiling in my foyer.

“Hey babe,” Ranger said.

I picked my way around the pots and examined my door. The two Yale locks were intact, the bolt was thrown, the chain was attached. My conclusion was that Ranger had knocked the pots over when he slid under the doorjamb.

“I don’t suppose it would do me any good to ask how you got in,” I said.

“Someday when things are slow we’ll have a class in advanced B and E.”

“You ever hear of a doorbell?”

Ranger just kept smiling.

Okay, so I wouldn’t answer the doorbell. I’d look out the peephole, see Ranger standing there and I’d go back to bed.

“I’m not running,” I said. “I went running yesterday. I hated it. I’m not doing it again, ever. Been there, done that.”

“Exercise improves your sex life,” Ranger said.

I wasn’t going to share any embarrassing secrets with Ranger, but my sex life was at an all-time low. You can’t improve something that doesn’t exist.

“Is it snowing?” I asked.

“No.”

“Is it raining?”

“No.”

“You aren’t going to expect me to drink another one of those smoothies, are you?”

Ranger gave me the once-over. “Wouldn’t hurt. You look like Smokey the Bear in that nightgown.”

“I do
not
look like Smokey the Bear! All right, so I haven’t shaved my legs in a couple days…that does not make me look like Smokey the Bear. And I certainly am
not
as fat as Smokey the Bear.”

Ranger did more of the smile thing.

I stomped off into the bedroom and slammed the door. I stuffed myself into long johns and sweats, laced up my running shoes and marched back to the foyer where Ranger stood, arms crossed.

“Don’t expect me to do this every day,” I said to Ranger, teeth clenched. “I’m just doing this to humor you.”

An hour later I dragged myself into my apartment and collapsed onto the couch. I thought about the gun on my night table and wondered if it was loaded. And then I thought about using it on Ranger. And then I thought
about using it on myself. One more early-morning run and I’d be dead anyway. May as well get it over with now.

“I’m ready for a job at the sanitary products factory,” I told Rex, who was hiding in his soup can. “You don’t have to be in shape to cram tampons into a box. I could probably blow up to three hundred pounds and still do a good job at the sanitary products plant.” I wrenched the shoes off my feet and peeled wet socks away. “Why am I knocking myself out over this? I’m teamed up with a madman, and we’re both fixated on finding an old guy who sells ice cream.”

Rex backed out of his can and looked at me, whiskers whirring.

“Exactly,” I said to Rex. “It’s dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.”

I gave a grunt and got to my feet. I padded into the kitchen and started coffee brewing. At least Ranger hadn’t come back with me to supervise breakfast.

“He had to go home on account of the accident,” I said to Rex. “Honest to God, I didn’t mean to trip him. And I certainly hadn’t wanted him to tear the knee out of his sweatsuit when he went down. And of course I’d felt very bad about the pulled groin.”

Rex gave me one of those looks that said, Yeah, right.

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a reindeer—the flying kind. I spent a couple years galloping around looking for lichen and fantasizing about boy reindeer. Then one day I saw
Peter Pan
and my reindeer phase was over. I didn’t understand the allure of not growing up, because every little girl in the burg couldn’t wait to grow up and get boobs and go steady. I did understand that a flying Peter Pan was better than a flying reindeer. Mary Lou had seen
Peter Pan
too, but Mary Lou’s ambition was to be Wendy, so Mary Lou and I made a good pair. On most any day we could be seen holding hands, running through the neighborhood singing, “I can fly! I can fly!” If we’d been older this probably would have started rumors.

The Peter Pan stage was actually pretty short-lived because a few months into Peter Pan I discovered Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman couldn’t fly, but she had big, fat bulging boobs crammed into a sexy Wondersuit. Barbie was firmly entrenched as role model in the burg, but Wonder Woman gave her a good run for her money. Not only did Wonder Woman spill over her Wonder
cups but she also kicked serious ass. If I had to name the single most influential person in my life it would have to be Wonder Woman.

All during my teens and early twenties I wanted to be a rock star. The fact that I can’t play a musical instrument or carry a tune did nothing to diminish the fantasy. During my more realistic moments I wanted to be a rock star’s girlfriend.

For a very short time, while I was working as a lingerie buyer for E. E. Martin, my aspirations ran toward corporate America. My fantasies were of an elegantly dressed woman, barking orders at toadying men while her limo waited at curbside. The reality of E. E. Martin was that I worked in Newark and considered it a good day if no one peed on my shoe in the train station.

I was currently having problems coming up with a good fantasy. I had reverted back to wanting to be Wonder Woman, but it was a cruel fact of life that I was going to have a hard time filling Wonder Woman’s Wonder-bra.

I popped a frozen waffle into the toaster and ate it cookie style when it was done. I drank two cups of coffee and walked my sore muscles into the bathroom to take a shower.

I stood under the steaming water for a
long time, reviewing my mental list of things to do. I needed to call about my pickup. I needed to do laundry and pay some bills. I had to return Mary Lou’s sweatshirt. And last but not least, I had to find Uncle Mo.

First thing I called about the pickup.

“It’s your carburetor,” the service manager of the blue team told me. “We could put a new one in or we could try to rebuild the one you’ve got. It’d be a lot cheaper to rebuild. Of course there’s no guarantee with a rebuild.”

“What do you mean it’s my carburetor? I just got points and plugs.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It needed them too.”

“And now you’re sure it needs a carburetor.”

“Yeah. Ninety-five percent sure. Sometimes you get problems like this, and you’ve got faulty EGR valve operation. Sometimes you’ve got faulty PCV valve airflow or faulty choke vacuum diaphragm. Could be a defective fuel pump…but I don’t think that’s it. I think you need a new carburetor.”

“Fine. Good. Wonderful. Give me a carburetor. How long will it take?”

“Not long. We’ll call you.”

Next on my list was to stop off at the office and see if anything new had turned up. And while I was there, maybe just for the heck of
it I’d run a credit history on Stanley Larkin, the Montgomery Street tenant Ranger and I had questioned.

I threw on a bunch of warm clothes, hustled downstairs, chipped the latest layer of ice off the Buick and rumbled on down to the office.

Lula and Connie were already busy at work. Vinnie’s door was closed.

“Is he in?” I asked.

“Haven’t seen him,” Connie said.

“Yeah,” Lula added. “Maybe somebody drove a stake in his heart last night, and he won’t be in at all.”

The phone rang, and Connie handed it over to Lula. “Someone named Shirlene,” Connie said.

I raised my eyebrows to Lula. Shirlene, who was Leroy Watkins’s woman?

“Yes!” Lula said when she got off the phone. “We’re on a roll! We got ourselves another live one. Shirlene says Leroy came home last night. And then they got into a big fight, and Leroy beat up some on Shirlene and kicked her out to the street. So Shirlene says we could have his ugly ass.”

I had my keys in my hand and my coat zipped. “Let’s go.”

“This is gonna be easy,” Lula said when
we hit Stark Street. “We’re just gonna sneak up on ol’ Leroy. Probably he think it gonna be Shirlene at the door. I just hope he don’t come to the door too happy, you know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what she meant, and I didn’t want to think about it. I parked in front of Leroy’s building, and we both sat there in silence.

“Well,” Lula finally said. “He probably wouldn’t want to ruin his door a second time. Probably he caught it from the landlord. Doors don’t grow on trees, you know.”

I considered that. “Maybe he isn’t even in there,” I added. “When was the last Shirlene saw him?”

“Last night.”

We did some more sitting.

“We could wait out here for him,” Lula said. “Do a stakeout.”

“Or we could call.”

Lula looked up into the third-story windows. “Calling might be a good idea.”

A few more minutes passed.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s do it.”

“Damn skippy,” Lula said.

We paused in the foyer and took stock of the building. A television blaring somewhere. A baby crying. We walked the first
flight of stairs slowly, listening as we crept step by step. We stopped on the second-floor landing and took a few deep breaths.

“You aren’t gonna hyperventilate, are you?” Lula asked. “I’d hate to have you keel over on me from hyperventilating.”

“I’m okay,” I told her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

When we got to the third-floor landing neither of us was breathing at all.

We stood there staring at the door that had been patched with cardboard and two slats of stained plywood. I motioned to Lula to stand aside of the door. She jumped to attention and plastered herself against the wall. I did the same on the opposite side.

I rapped on the door. “Pizza delivery,” I yelled.

There was no response.

I rapped harder and the door swung open. Lula and I still weren’t breathing, and I could feel my blood pounding behind my eyeballs. Neither Lula nor I made a move for a full minute. We just pressed into the wall, not making a sound.

I called out again. “Leroy? It’s Lula and Stephanie Plum. Are you there, Leroy?”

After a while Lula said, “I don’t think he’s here.”

“Don’t move,” I said. “I’m going in.”

“Help yourself,” Lula said. “I’d go in first, but I don’t want to be a hog about this searching shit.”

I inched my way into the apartment and looked around. Everything was as I’d remembered. There was no sign of occupancy. I peeked into the bedroom. No one there.

“Well?” Lula asked from the hall.

“Looks empty.”

Lula poked her head around the doorjamb. “Too bad. I was looking to do another takedown. I was ready to kick some butt.”

I approached the closed bathroom door with my pepper spray in hand. I flipped the door open and jumped back. The door crashed against the wall and Lula dove behind the couch.

I looked into the empty bathroom, and then I looked over at Lula.

Lula picked herself up. “Just testing my reflexes,” Lula said. “Trying out new techniques.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wasn’t that I was scared,” she said. “Hell, takes more than a man like Leroy to scare a woman like me.”

“You were scared,” I said.

“Was not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Unh-uh, was not. I’ll show you who’s scared. And it won’t be me. Guess I can open doors too.”

Lula stomped over to the closet door and wrenched it open. The door swung wide with Lula glaring straight into the jammed-together coats and other clothes.

The clothes parted and Leroy Watkins, buck naked, sporting a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, fell out onto Lula.

Lula lost her footing, and the two of them went down to the floor—Leroy, arms outstretched, stiff as a board, looking like Frankenstein from the ’hood, on top of Lula.

“Holy cow,” I yelled. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

“Eeeeeeeeee,” Lula screamed, flat on her back, arms and legs flailing, with Leroy deadweight on her chest.

I was jumping around, hollering, “Get up. Get up.”

And Lula was rolling around, hollering, “Get him off. Get him off.”

I grabbed an arm and yanked, and Lula sprang to her feet, shaking herself like a dog in a rainstorm. “Ugh. Gross. Yuk.”

We squinted down at Leroy.

“Dead,” I said. “Definitely dead.”

“You better believe it. Wasn’t shot with no BB gun, either. Got a hole in his head about the size of Rhode Island.”

“Smells bad.”

“Think he pooped in the closet,” Lula said.

We both gagged and ran to the window and stuck our heads out for air. When the ringing stopped in my ears I went to the phone and dialed Morelli. “Got a customer for you,” I told him.

“Another one?”

He sounded incredulous, and I couldn’t blame him. This was my third dead body in the space of a week.

“Leroy Watkins fell out of a closet on top of Lula,” I said. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to put Leroy Watkins together again.”

I gave him the address, hung up and went out to the hall to wait.

Two uniforms were the first to arrive. Morelli followed them by thirty seconds. I gave Morelli the details and fidgeted while he checked out the crime scene.

Leroy had been naked and not especially bloody. I thought one possibility was that someone had surprised him in the shower.
The bathroom hadn’t been covered with gore, but then I hadn’t felt inclined to peek behind the drawn shower curtain.

Morelli returned after walking through the apartment and securing the scene. He ushered us down to the second-floor landing, away from the activity, and we went through our story one more time.

Two more uniforms trundled up the stairs. I didn’t know either of them. They looked to Joe, and he asked them to wait at the door. A television continued to drone on. The muffled sound of young children arguing carried into the hallway. None of the residents opened a door to snoop on the police activity. I suppose curiosity isn’t a healthy character trait in this neighborhood.