Janet Evanovich - Explosive Eighteen

“Who’s that?” Grandma asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I snatched it up with a magazine.”

“He’s kind of hot. Is there a name on the back?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Too bad,” Grandma said. “He’s a looker, and I’m thinking about becoming a cougar.”

My mother cut her eyes to the cupboard where she kept her whiskey. She glanced at the clock on the wall and gave up a small sigh of regret. Too early.

I dropped the envelope and the photo into the trash, chugged my coffee, grabbed a bagel from the bag on the counter, and ran upstairs to change.

Twenty minutes later, I was at the bonds office. I use the term office lightly since we were operating out of a converted motor coach parked on Hamilton Avenue directly in front of the construction site for a new brick-and-mortar office. The new construction had been made necessary by a fire of suspicious origin that totally destroyed the original building.

My cousin Vinnie bought the bus from a friend of mine, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was better than setting up shop in the food court at the mall. Connie’s car was parked behind the coach, and Vinnie’s car was parked behind Connie’s.

Vinnie is a good bail bondsman but a boil on my family’s backside. In the past, he’s been a gambler, a womanizer, a philanderer, a card cheat, and I’m pretty sure he once had a romantic encounter with a duck. He looks like a weasel in pointy-toed shoes and too-tight pants. His father-in-law, Harry the Hammer, for all purposes owns the agency, and due to recent scandalous events involving misappropriated money, gambling, and whoring, Vinnie’s wife, Lucille, now owns Vinnie.

I parked my junker Toyota RAV4 behind Vinnie’s Caddy, and checked out the scene in front of me. The cinder-block shell of the new bonds office was complete. The roof was on. Workers were inside banging in nails and using power tools. I looked from the construction site to the bonds bus, where I could see light creeping out from drawn shades. It all looked like business as usual.

I wrenched the coach door open and climbed the three steps up to the cockpit and beyond. Connie was at the dinette table, her purse on the bench seat next to her. Her laptop computer was closed.

Connie is a couple years older than me and a much better shot with a gun. She was wearing a magenta sweater with a deep V-neck, showing more cleavage than I could ever hope to grow. Her black hair had recently been straightened and was pulled up into a messy knot on the top of her head. She was wearing big chunky gold earrings and a matching necklace.

She stood when she saw me. “I’m going downtown to the courthouse,” she said. “I need to bond out Vinnie. He’s been arrested, and they won’t let him write his own bond.”

Oh boy. “Now what?”

“He had a dispute with DeAngelo and took a tire iron to his Mercedes. DeAngelo fired off a couple rounds at Vinnie’s Caddy, Vinnie Tasered DeAngelo, and that’s when the police showed up and dragged them both off to jail.”

Salvatore DeAngelo was the contractor Harry had hired to rebuild the bonds office after it burned to the ground. DeAngelo was better known as the contractor from hell since he did everything his way, did nothing without a bribe, and worked on DeAngelo Time, which had no relationship to an actual workweek.

“Well, at least it’s nothing serious,” I said.

“Yeah, but it could be if DeAngelo gets bonded out before Vinnie and comes back and sets fire to Vinnie’s bus.”

“Do you think DeAngelo would do that?” I asked Connie.

“Hard to tell what DeAngelo would do. That’s why I didn’t want to leave until you got here to stand guard.” Connie handed me the key to the gun cabinet. “You might want to pick something out and keep it handy.”

“You want me to shoot him?”

“Only if you have to,” Connie said, clomping down the stairs to the coach door in her four-inch cork wedges. “I won’t be long. And the files on the table are for you. They’re the no-shows for court that came in while you were on vacation.”

Oh great, I was supposed to babysit a bus that might at any moment go up in flames. On the other hand, Vinnie was my cousin and employer. And without the bus, we’d be renting space from the adult bookstore or working out of Connie’s Hyundai. All that still didn’t mean I was willing to get toasted protecting Vinnie’s makeshift office.

I took the Failure to Appear files outside, hauled a lawn chair out of the storage compartment under the bus, and set the chair in the shade. This way, I could divert a Molotov cocktail and not get trapped inside a flaming inferno.

I sat in the chair and paged through the files. Purse snatcher, armed robbery, domestic violence, a burglary suspect, credit card fraud, assault, a second armed robbery. I wanted to be back in Hawaii. I closed my eyes and sucked in some air, searching for the smell of the sea and instead catching exhaust fumes and a funky stench coming off the construction Dumpster.

A car eased to a stop behind my RAV4 and two men got out. One of them was Salvatore DeAngelo, a short, barrel-chested guy with a lot of wavy black hair going gray. He was wearing pleated dress slacks, a silky black short-sleeved shirt, and a thick gold chain that was stuck in a mat of chest hair that looked slightly singed… no doubt from Vinnie shooting a bunch of volts into him with his Taser.

DeAngelo sauntered over to me and stood hands in pants pockets, jiggling change. “Hey, cutie,” he said. “What’s up? Any special reason why you’re sitting outside? Like, are you looking for street business? ’Cause I might have some business for you, if you know what I mean.”

I was thinking Vinnie did the right thing when he Tasered DeAngelo.

“I’m just doing my job,” I said. “I’m supposed to shoot you if you firebomb the bus.”

“I don’t see no gun.”

“It’s hidden.”

“I bet,” he said. “Let me know if you change your mind about takin’ care of my business. And give me some credit here. I don’t firebomb buses in broad daylight. I do that shit at night when no one’s around.”

DeAngelo turned away and walked into the half-finished bonds office building, and I returned to my files.

The subject of the last file in the stack was a surprise. Joyce Barnhardt. She’d allegedly stolen a necklace from a downtown jewelry store and had assaulted the owner when he’d tried to retrieve it. Vinnie had bonded her out of jail, and she’d failed to show for court three days later.

I’d gone all through school with Joyce, and she’d made my life a misery. She was an obnoxious, sneaky, mean kid, and now she was an unscrupulous, self-serving, man-eating adult. From time to time, she’d tried her hand at working for Vinnie in various capacities, but none of the jobs stuck. Truth is, Joyce made her money through serial marriage, and last I looked, she was doing just fine. Hard to believe she’d stolen a necklace. Easy to believe she’d assaulted the store owner.

LULA’S RED FIREBIRD rolled to a stop in front of the bus, and Lula swung herself out from behind the wheel and walked over to me. Her hair was dyed pink and teased into a big puffball that looked surprisingly good against her brown skin, and her body was minimally contained by her orange spandex skirt and white scoop neck tank top. She’s a former ’ho who gave up her street corner to work for Vinnie as a file clerk.

“You looking to get some sun sitting out here?” she asked. “Didn’t you get enough of that in Hawaii?”

I told her about Vinnie and DeAngelo, and how I was guarding the bus.

“It’s a hunk of junk anyways,” Lula said.

“What’s up for today?” I asked her. “Are you filing?”