Janet Evanovich - Explosive Eighteen

“Do you think she’s really shot?” I asked Lula.

Lula shrugged. “I didn’t think the bullet would go through the door, but looks like that’s one of them cheapskate hollow jobs. There should be a law against those doors.”

Lahonka ripped the door open. “Of course I’m shot, you moron. What the hell’s wrong with you, shooting a unarmed woman? I’m feelin’ faint. Everything’s goin’ black.”

And Lahonka crashed to the floor.

Lula looked down at Lahonka’s foot. “Yep, she’s shot all right.”

“This is going to mean a lot of paperwork,” I said to Lula.

“You told me to shoot her. Wasn’t my idea,” Lula said. “I was just following orders. Hell, I’m not even a real bounty hunter. You’re the bounty hunter in charge, and I’m just a bounty hunter helper.”

I had a twitch in my left eye. I put my finger to it and took a couple deep breaths. “We need to take her to the emergency room. Help me drag her out to the truck.”

“Good thinking that you got a truck,” Lula said. “We can lay her out in the back, and you don’t even have to worry about her bleeding all over the place.”

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the hospital emergency drive-thru. I stopped in front of the entrance, and Lula and I ran around to get Lahonka.

“Uh-oh,” Lula said. “There’s no Lahonka here. She must have jumped out at a light or something.”

We retraced our steps to make sure Lahonka wasn’t road-kill, toes cocked in the gutter.

“I didn’t even see no blood trails,” Lula said when I parked in front of the office. “I thought I shot her good enough to at least draw blood.”

“You’ve got to stop shooting people,” I said. “It’s against the law.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Lula said, pushing through the front door to the office. “That was your fault. It’s your juju. It sucks. It’s getting frightening just being next to you.”

“Oh God, now what?” Connie said.

“No big deal,” Lula said. “We just can’t catch anyone.”

“As long as you didn’t shoot anyone,” Connie said. “You didn’t shoot anyone, did you?”

Lula’s eyes got big. “Why do you ask? Did you hear something?”

Connie put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”

“Fine by me,” Lula said. “I don’t want to talk about it, either. Wasn’t exactly a gratifying experience. Not that it was my fault.”

“Anything new come in?” I asked Connie.

“No. It’s been slow,” Connie said. “Moving the office around isn’t helping business.”

I stepped outside and tried Joyce again, but she still wasn’t picking up. While I was standing on the sidewalk a gray Camry parked behind my truck and Berger and Gooley got out.

“I liked the last office location,” Gooley said. “One-stop shopping. You could get bonded out and buy a black-and-white cookie all at the same time.”

“We have the finished sketch,” Berger said to me. “We wanted you to take a last look at it before we send it up the line.” He pulled the sketch out of a folder and handed it to me. “Is this the guy in the photograph?”

“I can barely remember the photograph,” I told him, “but this guy looks familiar.”

Lula swung out of the office and looked over my shoulder. “I know this guy,” she said. “It’s Tom Cruise.”

I looked back at the photograph. Lula was right. It was Tom Cruise. No wonder he looked familiar.

Connie wandered out. “What’s going on?”

Lula showed the sketch to Connie. “Who is this?”

“Tom Cruise,” Connie said.

Gooley gave a snort of laughter, and Berger closed his eyes and pinched his nose between thumb and index finger, indicating an approaching migraine. They turned on their heels, retreated to the Camry, and drove off.

“What were they doing with a picture of Tom Cruise?” Lula was excited. “Is he in the area? Is he making a movie here? I wouldn’t mind seeing Tom Cruise. I hear he’s short, but I wouldn’t hold that against him.”

“It was supposed to be a sketch of the guy in the photograph,” I said, “but I guess I was thinking of Tom Cruise when I gave the description to the FBI artist.”

“Or maybe the guy in the photograph was Tom Cruise,” Lula said.

I shook my head. “He wasn’t Tom Cruise, but I think there were similarities. His hair and the shape of his face.”

“I say we go proactive,” Lula said. “What we gotta do is root out the bad guys. We gotta get to the bottom of this. This is like one of them intrigue things. If we just knew what this story was, I bet it could be a television show. They’re always looking for good shit like this.”

“I don’t want to be a television show,” I said.

“Okay, but you don’t want to be dead, either. I don’t see those FBI idiots doing anything for you. I say we take charge and figure out what’s going on. WHAM! And then if you don’t want to sell it to television, we could sell it to one of them book publishers. We could even write the book ourself. How hard could it be?”

I had mixed feelings about going proactive. On the one hand, I was in my take-charge mode, and Lula was right about the FBI not doing a lot for me. On the other hand, I hated to get more involved. I was really hoping that if I just stuck to my story, eventually everyone would leave me alone. And from a purely practical point of view, I wasn’t making money when I chased down the people looking for the photograph.

“We could start by checking out Brenda,” Lula said. “She works at one of them strip malls before you get to Princeton. And we could look for Magpie on the way.”

Good compromise, I thought. There were two cemeteries off Route 1. He’d been known to hunker down in both of them. And on the way back to Trenton, I could take an early exit and head for the farmer’s market and flea market. There were acres of woods around the markets, and the woods were laced with single-lane dirt roads used for romance, and drugs, and, in Magpie’s case, camping. Magpie drove and lived in an ancient Crown Vic. In its glory years, the Crown Vic had been a black-and-white police car, but it had been sold at auction, and eventually found its way to Magpie. Magpie had hand-painted black over the white, but the car was still a bashed-in, rusted-out, retired cop car.

I drove one exit on Route 1 and turned off into the newer and smaller of the two cemeteries. For the most part, it was all flat ground, broken by an occasional tree. All grave markers were the same. Small granite slabs sunk into the grass. Easy maintenance. You could probably get the tractor up to about 40 mph and be done with the whole deal in an hour.

I took the loop around the cemetery, circled the little chapel and crematorium, and headed out, finding no indicators that Magpie had recently squatted here. No blackened splotch from a campfire. No stains from leaking transmission oil. No bag of discarded garbage. No ribbons of toilet tissue floating across the landscape.

The second cemetery was ten miles down the highway. It was a real monster, with rolling hills, lush landscaping, and elaborate tombstones. I methodically worked my way through the maze of feeder roads curling over and around hill and dale. Again, no sign of Magpie, so I returned to Route 1.

Lula had The Hair Barn plugged into the GPS app on her cell phone. “It’s on the left,” she said. “Take the next light.”

The Hair Barn was located in a complex that included some light industrial businesses, a budget hotel, two fairly large office buildings, and an outdoor shopping mall. The shopping mall was anchored at one end by a Kohl’s and a Target at the other. The Hair Barn was in the middle of the mall. The Scion was parked at the outer perimeter of the lot with what I assumed were a few other employee cars.