Janet Evanovich - Explosive Eighteen

“You’re driving without a license and probably no money or credit cards,” Ranger said.

“It seemed like the lesser of two evils.”

There was the hint of a twitch at the corner of his mouth, as if he might be thinking about smiling. “Are you saying I’m evil?”

Ranger was playing with me. Hard to tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“I’m saying I don’t know where I’m going with you,” I told him.

“Would you like me to make some suggestions?”

“No! You made enough suggestions in Hawaii.”

“You made some of your own,” he said. His gaze dropped to my hand. “You’re still wearing my mark on your ring finger. Not as legal as a wedding band, but it would qualify you for a good time.”

“That ring mark got you seven stitches and a broken bone in your hand.”

“At least Morelli fights clean.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Babe, you stun-gunned me on the back of my neck.”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t easy with the two of you rolling around on the ground, whaling away at each other.”

Actually, I had stunned both of them, cuffed them while they were immobilized, and drove them to the emergency room. Then I changed out my plane ticket for an earlier flight, called Lula, and took off before they were finished getting stitched and patched. Not only did I want to put distance between us, but I thought it smart to leave the island before getting charged with illegal use of an illegal stun gun. Sometimes there’s a fine line between a cowardly act and a brilliant decision, and my brilliant decision had been to get out of Honolulu and leave the stun gun behind.

Ranger transferred the messenger bag from his shoulder to mine, pulled me into him, and kissed me like he meant it. “Let me know if the guys following you in the Lincoln get too bothersome,” he said, opening the door to my car.

No point asking how Ranger knew about the Lincoln. Ranger pretty much knows everything.

I slid behind the wheel of the RAV, cranked it over, and drove to the coffee shop. Lula and Connie were in the table area by the front window. Connie was working on her laptop, and Lula was drinking coffee, paging through a magazine.

“Is this the new office?” I asked Connie.

“Until I come up with something better. DeAngelo says the building will be done in three weeks. Hard to believe.”

“Did he say that before or after he firebombed the bus?” I asked her.

“After. I just spoke to him.”

Lula picked her head up. “You think DeAngelo did the bus?”

“It’s a theory,” I said.

I got a Frappuccino and a big cookie, and suggested to Lula that we head over to the junkyard to check out the rumor about Joyce.

“Hard to believe Joyce is dead,” Lula said. “She’s too mean to die. It’d be like killing the Devil. You see what I’m saying? I bet it’s damn hard to kill the Devil.”

We piled into the Firebird, and Lula cut through town and motored up Stark Street, past the mom-and-pop chop shops, groceries, bars, and pawnshops. The groceries and pawnshops gave way to crack houses, third-world sanitation, and hollow-eyed stoop sitters. The crack houses gave way to the burned-out, rat-riddled slums of no-man’s-land, where only the crazies and the most desperate existed. And the junkyard rose fortress-like and defiant, a mountain of heavy metal and fiberglass discard, beyond no-man’s-land.

Lula parked in the junkyard lot and tried to gauge her distance from the big electromagnet that swung the cars into the compactor.

“They better not get the wrong idea about my Firebird,” she said.

“You’re good,” I told her. “You’re in the visitor parking area.”

“Yeah, but if these people were smart, they wouldn’t be working in a junkyard at the end of the world.”

No argument there. It wasn’t so much the junkyard as it was the proximity to Hell. Connie’s cousin Manny Rosolli owned the junkyard. I knew him in a remote sort of way, and he seemed like a nice man. And since 80 percent of Connie’s family was mob, this gave Manny a certain amount of security in spite of the precarious location.

I found the trailer that served as an office and asked for Andy, the son of Grandma’s friend Mrs. Kulicki. I was told he was stacking cars, and I was directed to the part of the lot where cars were stored when they came out of the compactor. Fortunately, the compactor wasn’t currently in use, so I was spared the sound of cars getting crushed to death.

It was easy to find Andy since he was the only one there. Plus, he was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit with his name embroidered in black. He was a gangly tattooed guy with multiple piercings. I was guessing nineteen or twenty years old.

“You got a ankle bracelet on, too?” Lula asked him.

“This isn’t prison clothes,” Andy said. “It’s so the crusher guy can see me, so I don’t get a car dropped on me.”

“I’m looking for Joyce Barnhardt,” I told him.

“You might have a hard time finding her,” he said. “She could have got compacted. I was cleaning up, and I found her driver’s license on the ground, along with a smashed lady’s high heel shoe and a lipstick. You’d be surprised what gets shook loose after the crusher. There’s all kinds of stuff falling out of these cars when they get picked up and stacked.”

“Where’s the car now?”

“Dunno. No way to tell which car it came from.”

“Did you tell the police?” I asked him.

“Nope. I told the office. But they said when it comes to suspecting bodies in the crusher, we have a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”

“What happened to the license and the shoe?”

“Threw them away. The license was all torn and bent, and the shoe was a mess and it smelled real bad. Anyway, the office said no one ever comes to claim stuff that’s been shook from the crusher.”

“Probably, the junkyard’s doing big disposal business since they put the surveillance cameras up at the landfill,” Lula said. “I bet you could bring a cadaver dog here, and he wouldn’t know where to go first.”

“I’M HUNGRY,” LULA SAID, pulling out of the junkyard. “What would Ranger eat for lunch? I bet he’d be up for a bucket of fried chicken.”

“He usually grabs a sandwich at Rangeman. Roast beef on multigrain. Or a turkey club.”

“I could do that. What else does he eat?”

“An apple sometimes. And water.”

“Say what? Is that it? How could he live on that? What about chips? What about a root beer float? And how many of those roast beef sandwiches does he eat for lunch?”

“One sandwich. No chips.”

“That’s un-American. He’s not stimulating the economy like that. I’d feel it was my patriotic duty to at least have chips.”

Lula stopped at a deli on the first block of Stark.

“This looks sketchy,” I said. “The window is dirty, and I just saw a rat run out the front door.”

“I’ve been here before,” she said. “They give you a half-pound of meat on your sandwich, and they throw in pickles for free. If I’m only gonna have one sandwich, this is the place.”

It looked to me like they threw in food poisoning for free, too. “I’ll pass.”

“You have no spirit of culinary adventure. You need to be more like that snarky guy on the Travel Channel. He goes all over the world eating kangaroo assholes and snail throw-up. He’d eat anything. He don’t care how sick he gets. He’s another one of my role models, except he needs ironing.” She took her big silver Glock out of her purse and handed it over to me. “You wait here and don’t let anyone take my car.”

I hefted the Glock, aiming it out the window at an empty street corner. My own gun was smaller, a Smith & Wesson.45 revolver. I’d gotten it from Ranger when I first started doing bond enforcement and Connie had asked him to mentor me. He was scary tough and mysteriously complex back then. He isn’t so different now. He’s abandoned his Special Forces camo fatigues for Rangeman black, he’s dropped the ghetto accent and lost the ponytail as his business needs changed, but he’s still a tough guy with lots of secrets.