Janet Evanovich - Takedown Twenty

Morelli’s ringtone sang out on my cellphone.

“I’ve only got a minute,” Morelli said. “Double homicide in the projects. Not sure when I’ll be done here.”

“Bingo!” Grandma yelled. “Stephanie got Bingo!”

I looked over at my card, and I looked up at the screen. Bingo.

“What did I win?” I asked Grandma.

“One of them slow cookers.”

“No money?”

“No. It wasn’t a money game. It was a potluck game.”

“I won a slow cooker at Bingo,” I told Morelli.

“You’re at Bingo?”

“Yeah, and I won!”

Two hours later I carefully stepped out of the firehouse and looked around. No big black cars with gun turrets. No thugs with Tasers. No scary Italian granny with an assault rifle. Good deal.

I dropped Grandma off at my parents’ house and took my slow cooker home. I parked in the lot to my apartment building, and Ranger’s 911 Turbo slid in next to me. I hauled the massive slow cooker box out of my car and saw Ranger’s mouth twitch at the corners, suggesting the beginning of a smile.

“I won it,” I told him.

“The perfect prize.”

“Scoff all you want, but I might use it. I’ve been thinking about taking up cooking. I made dinner the other night.”

“How’d that go?” Ranger asked.

“I exploded the vegetables in the microwave, but other than that it went pretty good.”

“You never disappoint,” Ranger said, taking the box from me.

He carried the box into my apartment and set it on my kitchen counter. Rex came out of his soup can to take a look, decided the box wasn’t all that interesting, and went back into his soup can.

“I think the Bingo connection is dead in the water,” I said to Ranger. “The women must have had something else in common.”

“Keep working at it. Do you need help with Sunucchi?”

“I might. He spends his nights with Rita Raguzzi. She has a house in Hamilton Township, and I think that’s the best place to grab him. It’s the only time Sunny isn’t surrounded by his posse.”

“This is shotgun Rita?”

“Yeah. It should be fun.”

“Good,” Ranger said. “I’m all about fun.”

“Since when?”

He pulled me into him and kissed me. There was some highly skilled groping and use of tongue, and on a fun scale of 1 to 10 it was an 11.

“Call me when you’re ready to do the takedown,” Ranger said.

I locked the door after him, took the slow cooker out of the box, and set it on my kitchen counter. I had no clue what I was supposed to do with it. I thumbed through the instructions and did a quick scan of the little recipe book that came with the cooker. It sounded simple enough. Throw a bunch of stuff in the pot and turn it on.

TWELVE

LULA ROLLED INTO the office five minutes after I did. Her hair was a big orange frizzball, and she had bags under her eyes.

“How was the date ?” Connie asked her. “You look like you got run over by a truck.”

“First off, there were no good corners left. I’ve never seen so many hookers. They’re all over the place. And then there’s a real impact on the trade being that the economy is in the toilet.”

“Did you make enough money for the Brahmin bag?”

“I didn’t make nothing. I stood out there until the sun come up and the only bite I had all night was some fool wanted a hand job and was gonna pay me in food stamps. I’m telling you there’s a lot of food stamps floating around out there. I mean, what the heck is this country coming to? Food stamps aren’t gonna buy me no genuine Brahmin, you see what I’m saying?”

“Maybe you don’t need a Brahmin,” I said.

“Of course I need a Brahmin,” Lula said. “You carry a Brahmin and everybody knows you got class and fashion flair. They got ads in Vogue .”

“Mary Treetrunk is still in the wind,” Connie said. “She’s not a big ticket bond, but she’ll get you pizza money.”

“What did she do this time?” Lula wanted to know.

“She got raided for having a pot farm behind her doublewide. And then when they tried to take her in she kicked one of the cops in the nuts and offered to kiss it and make it a lot better.”

“You see what I mean,” Lula said. “Everybody’s a ’ho these days. How’s a professional supposed to compete in the marketplace?”

I pulled Mary’s file out of my messenger bag and paged through it. “It looks like she’s still living in that patch of mud and scrub down by the river.”

“So far as I know,” Connie said. “She’s probably there even as we speak, planting a new crop of cannabis.”

“I’m not having her smell up my Firebird,” Lula said to me. “If we do this we gotta take your P.O.S.”

We’d busted Mary twice before, and neither time was pretty. She weighed upwards of two hundred pounds, she smelled like dead fish, and she was cranky about leaving her doublewide.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

I took Hamilton to Broad and turned onto the narrow rutted road that led down to Mary Treetrunk’s homestead. She owned a half acre of land that was part floodplain and part garbage heap. Her doublewide was rusted out and listing, propped up on cinderblocks. An electric line ran to the mobile home that was anything but mobile, and a satellite dish was precariously attached to the roof. A Ford Crown Vic was parked off to the side. A lot of years ago it had been a police car, but it was now a wreck. A pirate’s skull-and-crossbones flag had been tied onto the antenna.

“This here’s a mess,” Lula said. “I’m glad I dressed down today and I’m not wearing my Louboutins.”

Lula was wearing a shocking-pink tank top, a poison-green spandex skirt that came two inches below her ass, and gold sequined sneakers. If you put her in a room and turned the lights off, she’d glow in the dark.

“Are you still dressed from last night?” I asked her.

“Of course not. If I was dressed like this I wouldn’t draw no attention. As it was I could have stayed home. Did I tell you I’m thinking about getting a cat?”

“You’re allergic to cats.”

“Yeah, but I saw one in the pet store that didn’t have no hair, and they said it was a nonallergic cat.”

Lula and I got out of my car, the door to the doublewide crashed open, and Mary looked out at us.

“The store’s closed,” Mary said. “I haven’t got any damn merchandise. The damn police took it all. Get off my damn property.”

“Sounds like Mary’s not in a good mood,” Lula whispered to me.

I pulled flexi-cuffs out of my bag and stuffed them into my back pocket. Mary’s wrists were too large for ordinary handcuffs. “Mary’s never in a good mood.”

“It’s no wonder. I’m a big woman but I’m big in a beautiful way. This woman here is just plain too fat. She look like she got no muscle tone. She’s all lumpy.”

Mary squinted at me. “Do I know you?”

“It’s Stephanie Plum,” I yelled. “You need to get rebonded.”

“I don’t got time for that. It’s supposed to rain later today. I gotta get my plants in before it rains.”

“You aren’t putting in more cannabis, are you?”

“What do I look, stupid?” Mary said. “You can’t start a new crop outside at this time of the year. I got them little guys under grow lights in my doublewide. I’m setting out some cabbage.”

“This will only take an hour or two, and you’ll be released on bond again,” I told her. “And we can stop and get a bag of breakfast sandwiches on the way.”

“I could use a breakfast sandwich,” Mary said.

“Me too,” Lula said. “I wouldn’t mind a breakfast sandwich myself. And if we go to Cluck-in-a-Bucket we could add some fried chicken for a extra boost of protein. And maybe some biscuits with the chicken.”