Janet Evanovich - Finger Lickin’ Fifteen

Ranger came in behind me. “Is he up there?”

“I don’t know. I lost him when he turned the corner. I wasn’t that far away. I don’t think he had time to go farther than this building. Where were you? I thought you’d be on top of him.”

“The fire escape rusted out underneath me at the second floor. It took me a minute to regroup.” He looked up the stairs. “Do you want to come with me, or do you want to keep watch here?”

“I’ll stay here.”

Ranger was immediately swallowed up by the dark. He had a flashlight, but he didn’t use it. He moved almost without sound, creeping up the stairs, pausing at the second-floor landing to listen before moving on.

I hid in the shadows, not wanting to be seen from the street. God knows who was walking the street. Probably, I should carry a gun, but guns scared the heck out of me. I had pepper spray in my purse. And a large can of hair spray, which in my experience is almost as effective as the pepper spray.

I was concentrating on listening for Ranger and keeping watch on the street, and was completely taken by surprise when a door to the rear of the ground-floor hallway opened and Manfred stepped out. He froze when he saw me, obviously just as shocked to find me standing there as I was to see him. He whirled around and retreated through the door. I yelled for Ranger and ran after Manfred.

The door opened to a flight of stairs that led to the cellar. I got to the bottom of the stairs and realized this was a storeroom for the pizza place. Stainless-steel rolling shelves marched in rows across the room. Bags of flour, cans of tomato sauce, and gallon cans of olive oil were stacked on the shelves. A dim bulb burned overhead. I didn’t see Manfred. Fine by me. Probably the only reason I wasn’t already dead was that he’d left his girl’s house in such a rush, he’d gone out unarmed.

I cautiously approached one of the shelves, and Manfred stepped out and grabbed me.

“Give me your gun,” he said.

My heart skipped a beat and went into terror tempo. Bang, bang, bang, bang, knocking against my rib cage.

“I don’t have a gun,” I said.

And then, without any help from my brain, my knee suddenly connected with Manfred’s gonads.

Manfred doubled over, and I hit him on the head with a bag of flour. He staggered forward a little, but he didn’t go down, so I hit him again. The bag broke, and flour went everywhere. I was momentarily blinded, but I reached back to the shelf, grabbed a gallon can of oil, and swung blind. I connected with something that got a grunt out of Manfred.

“Fuckin’ bitch,” Manfred said.

I hauled back to swing again, and Ranger lifted the can from my hand.

“I’m on it,” Ranger said, cuffing Manfred.

“Jail’s better than another three minutes with her,” Manfred said. “She’s a fuckin’ animal. I’m lucky if I can ever use my nuts again. Keep her away from me.”

“I didn’t see you come down the stairs,” I said to Ranger. “It was a whiteout.”

“Any special reason you grabbed the flour?”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

Manfred and I were head-to-toe flour. The flour sifted off us when we moved and floated in the air like pixie dust. Ranger hadn’t so much as a smudge. By the time we got to the Rangeman SUV, some of the flour had been left behind as ghostly white footprints, but a lot of it remained.

“I honestly don’t know how you manage to do this,” Ranger said. “Paint, barbecue sauce, flour. It boggles the mind.”

“This was all your fault,” I said.

Ranger glanced over at me and his eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch.

“You could have taken him down in the apartment if you hadn’t spent so much time staring at his naked girlfriend.”

Ranger grinned. “She wasn’t naked. She was wearing a shirt.”

“You deserved to fall off that fire escape.”

“That’s harsh,” Ranger said.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked him.

“Do you care?”

“No,” I said.

“Liar,” Ranger said. He ruffled my hair and flour sprang out in all directions.

Manfred said something to Ranger in Spanish. Ranger answered him as he assisted him into the backseat of the Explorer.

“What did he say?” I asked Ranger. “He said if I let him go, I could have his girl.”

“And your answer?”

“I declined.”

“You’ll probably regret that as the night goes on,” I said to him.

“No doubt,” Ranger said.

RANGER AND I had Manfred in front of the docket lieutenant. It was a little after ten, and things were heating up. Drunk drivers, abusive drunk husbands, and a couple drug busts were making their way through the system. I was waiting for my body receipt when Morelli walked in. He nodded to Ranger and grinned at me in my whiteness.

“I was at my desk, and Mickey told me I had to come out to take a look,” Morelli said.

“It’s flour,” I told him.

“I can see that. If we add some milk and eggs, we can turn you into a cake.”

“What are you doing here? I thought you were off nights.”

“I came in to cover a shooting. Fred was supposed to be on, but he got overexcited at his kid’s ball game and pulled a groin muscle. I was just finishing up some paperwork.”

Mickey Bolan joined us. Bolan worked Crimes Against Persons with Morelli. He was ten years older than Morelli and counting down to his pension.

“I wasn’t exaggerating, right?” Bolan said to Morelli. “They’re both covered with flour.”

“I’d tell you about it,” I said to Bolan, “but it’s not as good as it looks.”

“That’s okay,” Bolan said. “I got something better, anyway. The rest of Stanley Chipotle just turned up at the funeral home on Hamilton.”

We all stood there for a couple beats, trying to pro cess what we’d just heard.

“He turned up?” Morelli finally said.

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Someone apparently dumped him on the doorstep. So I guess someone should talk to the funeral guy.”

“I guess that someone would be me,” Morelli said. He looked at his watch. “What the hell, the game’s over now, anyway.”

“I need to get back to Rangeman,” Ranger said to me. “If you have an interest in Chipotle, I can send someone with a car for you.”

“Thanks. I don’t usually get excited about seeing headless dead men, but I wouldn’t mind knowing more.”

“I can give her a ride,” Morelli said. “I don’t imagine this will take long.”

EDDIE GAZARRA WAS standing in the funeral home parking lot, waiting for Morelli. Eddie is married to my cousin Shirley-the-Whiner. Eddie is a patrolman by choice. He could have moved up, but he likes being on the street. He says it’s the uniform. No choices to make in the morning. I think it’s the free doughnuts at Tasty Pastry.

“I was the first on the scene,” Gazarra said when we got out of Morelli’s SUV. “The drop was made right after viewing hours. Morton shut the lights off, and ten minutes later, someone rang the doorbell. When Morton came to the door, he found Chipotle stretched out and frozen solid.”

Eli Morton is the current owner of the funeral home. For years, Constantine Stiva owned the place. The business has changed hands a couple times since Stiva left, but everyone still thinks of this as Stiva’s Funeral Home.

“Where is he now?” Morelli asked.

“On the porch. We didn’t move him.”

“Are you sure it’s Chipotle?”

“He didn’t have a head,” Gazarra said. “We sort of put two and two together.”

“No ID?”

“None we could find. Hard to get into his pockets, what with him being a big Popsicle.”

We’d been walking while we were talking, and we’d gotten to the stairs that led to the funeral home’s wide front porch. I recognized Eli Morton at the top of the stairs. He was talking to a couple uniformed cops and an older man in slacks and a dress shirt. A couple guys from the EMT truck were up there, too. The body wasn’t visible.