Джанет Иванович - Twisted Twenty-Six

“Yeah, so?” he said.

“I represent your bail bondsman. You missed your trial date, and I need to help you reschedule.”

“Sure,” he said. “Reschedule me.”

“We’ll have to go to the courthouse,” I said. “It will only take a couple minutes.”

“I haven’t got a couple minutes. Do it without me. I got a job.”

I moved between him and the open door on the van. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.”

“Look, lady, I’m not going with you. Get out of my way. The whole thing is bogus anyway.”

“We heard you did the deed with the dog,” Lula said.

“The dog and the old lady came on to me. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to be rude.”

“It says in the police report that it was nonconsensual,” Lula said.

Brown gave a derisive snort of laughter. “That’s what they all say.”

“Hunh,” Lula said. “I don’t like that answer. You got a nasty attitude.”

Brown gave Lula the finger. “Nasty this, bitch.”

“Okay,” Lula said to me. “Do you want to give him a couple thousand volts with your stun gun or do you want me to shoot him?”

I clapped a cuff on his right wrist and reached to secure the second wrist.

“Whoa,” he said, jumping away. “What’s this about? I don’t go for the kinky handcuff S&M stuff.”

“This isn’t kinky,” Lula said. “This is police protocol.”

“Are you police?” he asked.

“Sort of,” Lula said. “We’re like faux police.”

I got the other cuff on him, wrestled him into the back seat of my car, and drove him to the police station. We turned him in, and I got my body receipt.

“That’s a job well done,” Lula said when we were back in my car. “I bet there’s a lot of dogs resting easier knowing that guy is off the streets.”

I squelched a grimace and pulled out of the lot into traffic. “There has to be more to life than this.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I want something else. Something different. Something better.”

“You need a cat,” Lula said.

“A cat?”

“Yeah. I read an article online about how people are getting therapy cats on account of cats are good companions. We could go to the shelter and pick one out for you.”

“That’s a big responsibility. I don’t think I’m ready for a cat.”

“Well, your life can’t be all that bad if you don’t want a cat.”

“A cat isn’t going to fix my job.”

“What’s wrong with your job? You got a lot of personal freedom on this job. And some weeks we even make a living wage.”

“We work in a cesspool. We hunt down creepy people. I’m tired of creepy people. I want a job with normal people. I want to work with people who use deodorant and don’t eat out of dumpsters.”

“I hope you’re not referring to me,” Lula said. “I’d be real insulted if I thought you were referring to me.”

“I’m talking about the people we drag back to jail.”

“Okay, I get that. They aren’t always attractive.”

“And I’m stuck in a rut. I’m fifty-six years old and I’m still doing the same stupid stuff.”

“Say what? You’re how old? How can you be fifty-six?”

I looked over at Lula. “Did I say I was fifty-six?”

“Yeah, and we know that’s wrong because that would mean I’m a middle-age lady, and I’m not ready for that shit. Your mama is fifty-six. Not that fifty-six is so bad since fifty-six is now the new thirty-six.”

“Well I feel like I’m seventy.”

“That’s the new fifty,” Lula said.

“My life isn’t going anywhere. It’s same old, same old. It’s stagnant.”

“I see where you might feel like that sometimes. There’s not much upward mobility in bounty-huntering, unless you’re Ranger. But that’s just your day job. You got any other stagnation problems?”

“My relationships are stagnant.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Lula said. “We’re back to the cat issue. You got a problem with commitment. You’ve always had that problem. Only thing you can commit to is a three-ounce hamster. You got two hot men in your life that have been on hold forever.”

Lula was right, but I was only half of the problem. Both the men in my life were committed to me at some level, but they’d made it clear that marriage wasn’t on the table. Okay with me. I’d tried marriage, and it was a disaster. Still, it felt like my life was standing still when it should be moving forward. I mean, where do you go in a relationship after you’ve got the fantastic sex mastered and you’re comfortable sharing a bathroom?

“You gotta shake it up,” Lula said. “Get a new hairdo and some funner clothes. And we got Travis Wisneski in our future. He could turn out to be scary instead of just creepy, being that he’s up for armed robbery.”

“Tell me about him.”

Lula pulled his file out of my messenger bag. “It says here he lives in one of those little row houses on the edge of the Burg. He’s thirty-four years old. Unemployed. And I hate to tell you this, but I’m guessing from his picture he doesn’t use deodorant. I’m not sure where he dines. Guess it could be a dumpster.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

“My feeling is that you have a job and you do it as best you can,” Lula said. “Doesn’t matter if you like your job. You do it as best you can.”

I agreed, but the unfortunate reality was that sometimes our best was lacking.

I cut across town and found the row houses. Travis lived in the middle of the row in a house indistinguishable from the rest. Paint peeling off the clapboard. Shades drawn on the two front windows. Bleak.

“Are we following standard procedure for an armed suspect?” Lula asked.

“We don’t have a standard procedure,” I said. “And we don’t know that he’s armed.”

“Yeah, but we know he’s got a gun.”

“Lots of people have a gun. You have a gun. I have a gun.”

“In theory, you got a gun,” Lula said, “but I’m guessing you don’t have it with you. I’m guessing your gun is home in your cookie jar, and it don’t even have bullets in it. There’s your problem again. You can’t commit to having a gun.”

“I don’t like guns.”

“I like my gun. Her name is Suzy.”

“You named your gun?”

“Doesn’t your gun have a name?”

“Smith and Wesson.”

“That don’t count,” Lula said. “You got a poor nameless gun. I bet you don’t even take proper care of your gun. When was the last time you cleaned it?”

“I put it in the dishwasher after Elliot Flug threw up on it.”

“I never saw anything like it,” Lula said. “Projectile vomiting. All over you and your gun. It was like something from a horror movie where after someone’s head rotates they spew. Next time we go after a felon having a stomach virus we don’t get so close.”

Something to remember. I parked and cut the engine. “Let’s see if Travis is home.”

Lula and I walked up to the door and knocked. No answer.

“Hey!” Lula yelled. “Open this here door. I got Girl Scout Cookies.”

There was the sound of locks being released, the door opened, and a woman looked out at us. She was somewhere in her thirties. Brown hair that was parted in the middle and needed conditioning. Thin, with tattoos covering her arms. Nose ring. Cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

“Where’s the cookies?” she asked.

“It was sort of a fib,” Lula said. “We just wanted you to open the door.”

A guy who looked like the Travis file photo came up behind the woman and draped an arm around her. “What’s up?” he asked.

“They haven’t got any cookies,” the woman said.