Janet Evanovich: Smokin Seventeen

“Anything for me?” I asked Connie.

“No. None of the new bondees have come up to trial yet. They’ll start next week, and I imagine they won’t all show up for court. Vinnie bonded out some real losers. How did it go on Stark Street?”

“The two warehouses are possibilities.”

Lula snapped to attention. “Stark Street? Warehouses? Did I miss something?”

I filled Lula in on the cockfighting and my plan to get Nick Alpha sent back to jail so he couldn’t kill me.

“That’s a good plan,” Lula said. “He belongs in jail anyway what with doing cruelty to animals. I don’t have patience with people mistreating animals. And I like chickens.”

“Especially when they’re hacked up into pieces and fried,” Connie said.

“Yeah, but that’s a different kind of chicken,” Lula said. “Those are nasty bald, eating chickens. They’re not the Little Red Hen.”

“Eating chickens aren’t bald,” I said.

“I seen them in the supermarket,” Lula said. “And they’re bald.”

“Dude,” Mooner said from the back of the bus. “Something’s wrong with my television. I can’t get it to go on.”

“Imagine that,” Connie said. “Maybe the satellite is behind a cloud.”

“What happens next?” Lula asked. “Are the cops gonna bust up the cockfight tonight?”

“I have to pin down the location before I make the call. And I want to make sure Alpha is there. I don’t want to shut down the operation and not have Alpha involved.”

Lula nodded. “I see what you’re saying. So I’m thinking we’re going out to a cockfight tonight. I gotta put some thought to this. I don’t know if I got a cockfighting outfit at home. I might have to go shopping.”

“I’m not actually going to the cockfight. I’m going to hang around and follow Alpha when he goes out. Then when I’m sure he’s at the cockfight I’ll call Morelli.”

“I could live with that,” Lula said. “What time you want to meet up?”

“Are you sure you feel okay to do this?”

“Hell, yeah. I’m almost a hundred percent.”

This wasn’t something that filled me with confidence. When Lula and I operated at a full hundred percent we weren’t all that great. Almost a hundred percent was getting into Three Stooges territory.

“You need a different car,” Connie said. “You’ll be noticed in the Shelby. Lula’s Firebird isn’t any better.”

“I can get a car,” Lula said. “I’ll borrow my cousin Ernie’s car. He’s got a piece of crap SUV. It’ll blend right in on Stark Street.”

I got into the Shelby, drove to my apartment building, and stopped at the entrance to the lot. I was afraid to park. Regina Bugle could be there. Even worse, Dave could be there. And if they weren’t there now, they might be there when I wanted to leave, and I’d be trapped inside my apartment.

I turned around and idled on a side street, running through my options. I could drop in on Morelli, but there would be complications. I didn’t want to involve Morelli in this stage of the Nick Alpha saga. And he wouldn’t want me to go to Stark Street. There would also be complications if I dropped in on Ranger. Mostly related to vordo or the lack thereof. The bonds bus felt claustrophobic. The new décor was much better, but it was still Mooner’s bus. And I was afraid to go to the mall for fear of falling under the influence of another red dress. That left my parents’ house.

I got there early and sat in the kitchen, watching my mother assemble dinner. I always offered to help, and my mother almost always declined. She’d been doing this for a lot of years, and she had her own rhythm. My grandmother was tuned into the rhythm and pitched in as needed.

“I heard they found Sam Grip,” Grandma said.

There was no need for a newspaper or the Internet in the Burg. News traveled at the speed of light the old-fashioned way … over the back fence and in line at the deli.

I got a soda out of the refrigerator. “He was in his car in the Pine Barrens.”

“I hear Skooter Berkower is real worried. He played poker with those guys sometimes. That whole poker group is getting wiped out. Somebody don’t like poker players. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s someone’s wife doing this. Probably one of those guys lost a lot of money and some wife wigged out.”

That would be a decent theory except for the two bodies addressed to me.

“Or maybe it’s Joyce Barnhardt trying to get attention,” Grandma said. “I wouldn’t put it past her. You know how she loves to be in the spotlight.”

I drank some soda and recapped the bottle. “Killing five people seems extreme, even for Joyce.”

“I suppose,” Grandma said. “This sure is a mystery.”

“That’s a lot of potatoes you’re mashing,” I said to my mother.

My mother added a big glob of butter to the potatoes. “We have a lot of people for dinner. Valerie and Albert are coming with the children.”

My sister Valerie has two children by her disastrous first marriage, and two with her second husband Albert Klaughn. I love my sister and Albert, and I especially love the kids, but it’s half a bottle of Advil when you get them all into my parents’ small house.

“We’re gonna need rubber walls if you ever get married and have kids,” Grandma said to me. “I don’t know how we could fit any more people in here, and Dave looks like the kind who’d want a big family.”

“Dave isn’t in the picture.”

“I hear different,” Grandma said. “It’s all over town about you and Dave.”

I traded my soda in for a glass of wine. If I had to deal with Valerie and the kids and talk about Dave, I was going to need alcohol.

“JEEZ,” LULA SAIDwhen I met her by the bonds bus. “You look worse than me, and I just had root canal.”

“I had dinner with my parents and Valerie and Albert and the kids. The dinner was fine. And it was nice to spend time with Valerie and the girls, but the conversation kept coming back to Dave Brewer and me.”

“And?”

“And I’m not interested in him. I don’t want to date him. I don’t want him cooking in my kitchen.”

Lula did a raised eyebrow. “You don’t want him cooking in your kitchen?”

“Okay, maybe I want him cooking in my kitchen. The problem is he won’t stay in the kitchen. He wanders.”

“Hunh,” Lula said.

I put my hand up. “Let me revise that statement. I don’t even want him in my kitchen. Yes, he makes great food. Is it worth it? No. And I can’t discourage him. He doesn’t take hints. He doesn’t listen . I broke his nose, for crying out loud. And he came back to make breakfast.”

“How’d you break his nose?”

“I hit him in the face with a hair dryer.”

“Good one,” Lula said.

We were on the sidewalk, standing by an old junker SUV. It looked like it might be black under the grime, and there was some rust creeping up from the undercarriage.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met your cousin Ernie,” I said to Lula.

“Ernie works for the roads department, patching potholes. It’s not a bad job except he always smells like asphalt, and he got hit a couple times.”

We saddled up in the SUV, and Lula drove to Stark Street. We cruised past the dry cleaner, turned at the corner, and rolled down the alley. Lula stopped just short of Alpha’s building and killed the engine. Lights were on in the second-floor windows, and there was a dark-colored Mercedes sedan parked next to the dry-cleaning van.

A little before nine o’clock Alpha’s back door opened, lights were switched off in the apartment, and Alpha walked down the exterior stairs and got into the Mercedes.