Janet Evanovich - Sizzling Sixteen

“Hunh,” Lula said, and she slammed her door shut.

“Guess we’re done here,” I said.

And I drove off.

“That was sort of a letdown,” Lula said. “I expected to get Vinnie back. Not that I even want him back, but we gave those guys a lot of money, and seems like we should get something. I need a doughnut. If you turn onto Broad, there’s a doughnut place.”

“You can’t solve all your problems with doughnuts,” I said. “If you keep doing that, I’m going to get fat.”

“There’s four ways to manage stress,” Lula said to me. “There’s drugs, there’s alcohol, there’s sex, and there’s doughnuts. I go with sex and doughnuts. I tried the other two and it wasn’t any good. You being in a dry spell, you might have to rely on doughnuts.”

I turned onto Broad, and a block later, I pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through. Lula got a bag of doughnuts, and Connie got a bag of doughnuts.

I took a doughnut from Connie’s bag. “So what do we think about Vinnie?”

“I think he’s dead,” Lula said.

“He hasn’t turned up,” Connie said.

Lula finished off her first doughnut. “He could be in the morgue.”

Connie shook her head. “All the cops know Vinnie. He’d get ID’d if he showed up dead.”

“Then they must have shot Vinnie full of holes like Swiss cheese and weighted him down with cement boots and thrown him off the bridge into the Delaware. Or they could have taken him to a butcher shop and chopped him up into little pieces and put him into the meat grinder,” Lula said. “I’m gonna eat this jelly doughnut next. I love jelly doughnuts.”

“So dead is one possibility,” I said. “What else?”

“Somebody else could have snatched him,” Lula said. “Somebody other than Bobby Sunflower.”

“Why?” Connie asked.

“I guess to get money, like Sunflower. It could be a copy-cat snatching,” Lula said.

“No one’s gotten in touch with us,” Connie said.

“Hunh,” Lula said. “That’s problematic.”

“There’s something else that I always thought was problematic,” I said. “If we’re assuming someone took Vinnie, how did they know he was in Mooner’s RV? Mooner picked Vinnie up at my parents’ house. And Mooner said Vinnie never left the RV.”

“I see what you’re saying,” Lula said. “This had to be one of them opportunistic crimes. Like someone decided to rob Mooner’s RV when Mooner went into the bakery, and they come across Vinnie and decided on the spur of the moment to take him, and then they killed him and put him in the meat grinder.”

“What’s with the meat grinder thing?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m feeling like a burger for dinner, and I just keep thinking of meat grinders,” Lula said.

I drove down Hamilton and was happy to see the Love Bus was still in front of the bookstore. I maneuvered the Mercedes into a space at the curb and cut the engine.

“I want to talk to Mooner,” I said to Connie and Lula. “The pieces aren’t fitting into the puzzle.”

Mooner was at the door to the RV before I knocked. “I was hoping you’d come back,” he said. “I was wondering if I could plug into your electric. I’m, like, down on my battery, and the Cosmic Alliance doesn’t understand no juice.”

“Sure,” Connie said. “We’re all going down the drain anyway. You have to unplug when I leave for the night.”

“Understood. And no worries, I got my own extension cord.”

“Talk to me about Vinnie disappearing,” I said to Mooner. “Walk me through it again.”

“Well, like I said, we were groovin’. We were listening to some Dead and gettin’ mellow. I was, like, just drivin’ around spreading the word. And next thing, I spotted the bakery, so I wheeled the old bus into the lot.”

“Stop,” I said. “Picture the lot. Was it empty?”

“No. There were, like, two cars. The big car and the little car.”

“An SUV and a sportscar.”

“Correcto mundo.”

“Were the cars occupied?”

“Don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. I wasn’t paying attention. And suppose someone was, like, lying down on the seat taking a nap? I mean, I wouldn’t see them, right? So would that count?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, like, dude.”

“What was Vinnie doing when you left for the bakery?”

“He was riding shotgun. And I guess he was looking out the window. Except there wasn’t anything to see but the parking lot.”

“So Vinnie is in the RV in the shotgun seat and you’re walking into the bakery. Was anyone in the lot? Maybe going to their car?”

“No. The lot was empty except for me.”

“How about the bakery? Were there any customers in the bakery besides you?”

“No. But you know how the bakery has those two glass doors? So, like, suppose there were two people going in and out of those doors at exactly the same time? Would they be in or would they be out? And, like, would that count?”

“Yes, it would count,” I told him.

“Then there was someone else, and she was either in or out. Now that I’m thinking about it, she might have been a teensy bit more out. It was her gazongas that were over the line. She had, like, massive gazongas. They’d definitely crossed the midway line before the rest of her.”

“She was coming out when you were going in?”

“Yeah,” Mooner said.

“Did you watch her cross the lot?”

“No, man. I was caught in the cinnamon roll tractor beam.”

“Okay, so what did she look like?” I asked him.

Mooner grinned. “She had real big gazongas.”

“We’ve already established that,” I said.

“He got a gazonga fixation,” Lula said. “What is it with men and gazongas? It’s not like women got a nut fixation. It’s not like we go around looking for some guy with basketballs hangin’ down to his knees.”

“Back to the woman,” I said. “How old was she?”

“She was about our age.”

“Pretty?”

“Yeah. She was, like, porn-star pretty.”

“What the heck is porn-star pretty?” Lula wanted to know.

“Like, out there with the gazongas, you know?”

“You say gazongas one more time, and I’m gonna hit you,” Lula said.

“Moving on,” I said. “What else?”

“She was wearing a lot of eye makeup, and she had big fat shiny lips, and she was in one of those black leather tops with the shoestrings. And it was, like, hardly holding the… you-know-whats in.”

“She was wearing a bustier,” Lula said.

“And she was in a black leather skirt that was, wow, really short. And stilleto heels.”

“Yep, that’s a porn star all right,” Lula said.

I was pretty sure I knew the porn star, and she was only a porn star in her home movies. “What about hair?” I asked.

“Red. Like Lula’s, but there was, like, a lot of it, and it was all in waves and curls. Like a red-haired Farrah Fawcett.”

“Joyce Barnhardt,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mooner said.

“You knew it was Joyce?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask me if I knew her name,” Mooner said.

“Can I hit him now?” Lula wanted to know.

I cut my eyes to her. “You’d hit the brownie maker?”

“Yeah, good point,” Lula said.

“At least we know where Vinnie’s hiding out,” Connie said.

“Yeah, he took off sniffing after Barnhardt,” Lula said. “I’m just surprised he’s still there. Barnhardt uses ’em up and kicks ’em out.”

Joyce Barnhardt is my arch nemesis. I went all through school with Joyce, and she did her best to make my life a misery. In all fairness to Joyce, I wasn’t singled out. Joyce made everyone’s life a misery. She was a fat kid who spit on other people’s food, looked under the stall door in the bathroom, lied, cheated, and bullied. Somewhere in high school, she morphed into a sexual vampire, and eventually she lost weight, bought breasts, inflated her lips, died her hair, and honed her skills as a home wrecker and user to an all-time high. She’s had multiple marriages, each more profitable than the previous, and she’s currently single and hunting. She drives a flashy Corvette and lives in a large house not far from Vinnie.