Janet Evanovich - Takedown Twenty

“I can’t believe you abandoned us and now you’re working here,” she said. “I’m forced to be driving Vinnie around. My car’s gonna have a grease spot on the headrest. How am I ever gonna get that out?” She looked down at the case with the sausages and organ meats. “Holy cannoli, is that a tongue? That’s the biggest freaking tongue I ever saw. It’s like it’s all swelled up. I’m getting hot looking at it. Can you imagine what a tongue like that could do?”

“It’s a cow tongue,” I said.

“No wonder cows are so contented.”

“Did you want something?” I asked Lula. “Lunch meat? Hot wings?”

“No. I just came in to see you, and see how you’re doing.”

“My nose feels a lot better.”

“Are you going to Bingo tonight?”

“No. This job gets out late.”

“It don’t sound like such a good job to me,” Lula said. “And that apron you’re wearing is yikes . You need to go to the kitchen store and get yourself something with ruffles.”

Ranger called at noon. “What’s with the butcher shop?”

“I quit the bonds office and took a job as a butcher.”

“Babe,” Ranger said. And he hung up.

By four o’clock Randy had hacked up half a cow and gone through a lot of peach schnapps. I saw no indication that the schnapps affected him, with the possible exception of increasing the ruddiness in his cheeks. Hard to tell if the ruddiness came from the schnapps or from taking a cleaver to Ferdinand the Bull.

“Do you live close to the store?” I asked him.

“I live a quarter mile away in an apartment over the laundromat. It’s real convenient when I want to do laundry, only thing is my floor vibrates if all the dryers are going at once.”

“Is that the laundromat on King Street?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a nice laundromat. I use it sometimes. Maybe I’ll use it tonight and come visit you.”

“You mean you’d come in to my apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

“You could show me how to cook something,” I told him. “A hamburger or a pork chop.”

“I was planning on steak tonight.”

“I’d love to learn how to cook steak. I won’t even go home to get my laundry. We can go straight from the store.”

“I guess that would be okay,” Randy said. “Is it a date?”

“No. It’s a cooking lesson.”

“Maybe it could turn into a date someday.”

“Sure. Anything’s possible.”

Okay, so I knew that wasn’t possible, but it was a small fib for a good cause. I wanted to look around Randy’s apartment to see if he had Venetian blind cord stashed somewhere.

I started cleaning up before the shop closed. By eight we were picking out steaks, and we were on the road by eight-thirty. I followed Randy and parked in the laundromat lot. I got out of the CR-V and looked up at the second-floor apartment. There were Venetian blinds on the windows. I cautioned myself not to get carried away. Lots of people had Venetian blinds on their windows, and most of those people weren’t killers.

We trudged up the stairs, Randy unlocked his door, and we carted our dinner inside. Randy had a grocery bag with the steaks and a loaf of sourdough bread, and I had the half-empty bottle of schnapps.

He had a brown leather couch and a matching recliner positioned in front of a large flat-screen television in his living room. He had a floor lamp and a tray table by the recliner. The floor was hardwood with a worn-out tan area rug under the furniture. No curtains.

The kitchen was almost as large as the living room. The appliances were old but obviously worked. The walls were lined with shelves holding cans of tomato paste, spices, oils, canisters of flour and sugar, steak sauce, garlic, apple juice, soy sauce, kidney beans, ketchup, and more. One section of shelving was given over to glasses and dishes. Another to pots and pans. There were two small cabinets over the counter on either side of the sink, and a small square wood table with four chairs was set into a corner of the kitchen. There were salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table.

“This is nice,” I said. “It’s comfortable.”

“It’s okay. I don’t spend much time here. The shop is open six days a week, and I get home late. I make dinner and then I watch television.”

“What about Sundays?”

“I go to yard sales. I collect things.”

I looked around. His apartment was bare-bones. “Where do you keep the things you collect?”

“In a garage behind the deli.” He put a cast iron grill pan on the gas cooktop and turned the oven on. “Do you want a drink?”

“Sure.”

He poured out two tumblers of schnapps. “All I’ve got is schnapps,” he said. “I hope that’s okay.”

I took a sip of the schnapps and felt the burn all the way to my hoo-ha. I figured it was about a hundred proof.

“Boy, that’s good stuff,” I said, blinking back tears.

“I got started drinking it when I worked in the slaughterhouse. It keeps you warm when you’re working in the freezer all day carrying whole hogs around on your back.”

“Good to know.”

“Yeah, if you want to be a butcher, schnapps is the way to go.”

He turned the burners on, then unwrapped the steaks and put them on the grill on top of the stove. He shook salt and pepper on them and added some hot sauce.

“I like my steaks good and salty, and then I give them some kick with the hot sauce,” he said. “I start them out on the grill, so they get seared and marked, and then I turn them over. If you didn’t know better you’d swear they got done outside on a grill.”

I sipped some more schnapps and looked down at the steaks.

“Yep,” I said. “They look grilled all right.”

“We’ll let these sit here and burn a little and then we’ll finish them off in the oven. I’ll set the table and you can put the bread on a bread board and get the butter out of the refrigerator.”

The refrigerator contained a pound of butter, a quart of milk, and schnapps. No vegetables. No juice. Just bottles and bottles of schnapps.

“I guess you like your schnapps cold sometimes,” I said to Randy.

“It’s awesome cold. I keep some in the freezer too.”

I looked in the freezer. It was packed wall-to-wall with schnapps and vanilla ice cream. I was starting to like Randy. I didn’t care if he killed old ladies, I was thinking he was okay. I looked at my glass and realized it was empty. Good deal. I could try some frozen schnapps.

I set the butter and the bread on the table and opened a bottle of the frozen schnapps. I filled our glasses, and we toasted the steaks.

“They’re ready to go into the oven,” Randy said. “All you do is pop them in, grill and all. You put them in, and I’ll slice the bread.”

“I don’t see any potholders.”

“Use a towel. There are kitchen towels by the sink.”

I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the end of the grill. I pulled the grill off the burner, slid the grill into the oven, closed the oven door, and then realized I’d caught the end of the towel in the open flame and the towel was on fire. I had a moment of panic before my schnapps-soaked brain thought to toss the towel into the sink. I tossed the towel, missed the sink, and set a roll of paper towels on fire. Randy grabbed the schnapps bottle, poured it over the flaming paper towels, hoping to douse the fire, and after that it was mayhem.

Two hours later I was in the street with Randy and a fire department investigator, explaining how the fire started. In the interest of transparency, I have to say it wasn’t the first time I’d been in this position. Grandma and I had burned down a funeral home a while ago, and it had been much more spectacular.