I scurried around the table and carefully took the gun from Grandma Mazur. I shook out the bullets and shoveled all my stuff back into my shoulder bag.
“Look at that broken plate,” my mother said. “It was part of the set. How will I ever replace it?” She moved the plate, and we all stared in silence at the neat round hole in the tablecloth and the bullet embedded in the mahogany table.
Grandma Mazur was the first to speak. “That shooting gave me an appetite,” she said. “Somebody pass me the potatoes.”
ALL IN ALL, Bernie Kuntz had handled the evening pretty well. He hadn’t wet his pants when Grandma Mazur shot off the chicken privates. He’d suffered through two helpings of my mother’s dreaded brussels sprouts casserole. And he’d been tolerably nice to me, even though it was obvious we weren’t destined to hit the sheets together and my family was nuts. His motives for geniality were clear. I was a woman lacking appliances. Romance is good for frittering away a few evening hours, but commissions will get you a vacation in Hawaii. Ours was a match made in heaven. He wanted to sell, and I wanted to buy, and I wasn’t unhappy to accept his offer of a 10 percent discount. And, as a bonus for sitting through the evening, I’d learned something about Ziggy Kulesza. He bought his meat from Sal Bocha, a man better known for making book than slicing fillet.
I tucked this information away for future reference. It didn’t seem significant now, but who knows what would turn out to be helpful.
I was at my table with a glass of iced tea and Morelli’s file, and I was trying to put together a plan of action. I’d made a bowl of popcorn for Rex. The bowl was on the table by me, and Rex was in the bowl, his cheeks puffed out with popcorn, his eyes bright, his whiskers a blur of motion.
“Well Rex,” I said, “what do you think? Do you think we’ll be able to catch Morelli?”
Someone tapped on my front door, and both Rex and I sat perfectly still with our radar humming. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Most of my neighbors were seniors. No one I was especially chummy with. No one I could imagine knocking on my door at nine-thirty at night. Mrs. Becker, maybe, on the third floor. Sometimes she forgot where she lived.
The tapping continued, and Rex and I swiveled our heads toward the door. It was a heavy metal fire door with a security peephole, a dead bolt, and a double-thick chain. When the weather was nice, I left my windows wide open all day and night, but I always kept my door locked. Hannibal and his elephants couldn’t have gotten through my front door, but my windows were welcome to any idiot who could climb a fire escape.
I put the splatter screen to my fry pan over the popcorn bowl so Rex couldn’t climb out and went to investigate. I had my hand on the doorknob when the tapping stopped. I looked through the peephole and saw nothing but blackness. Someone had a finger on my peephole. Not a good sign. “Who’s there?” I called.
A whisper of laughter filtered through the door frame, and I jumped back. The laughter was followed by a single word. “Stephanie.”
The voice was unmistakable. It was melodic and taunting. It was Ramirez.
“I’ve come to play with you, Stephanie,” he sang. “You ready to play?”
I felt my knees go slack, felt irrational fear swell in my chest. “Go away or I’ll call the police.”
“You can’t call
My parents have never been able to understand my need to be independent. They’re convinced I live a frightened, lonely life, and no amount of talking can persuade them otherwise. In truth, I’m almost never frightened. Maybe sometimes by gross multifooted insects. In my opinion, the only good spider is a dead spider, and woman’s rights aren’t worth dick if they mean I can’t ask a man to do my bug squashing. I don’t worry about serial skinheads bashing down my door or crawling through my open window. For the most part, they prefer to work the neighborhoods closer to the train station. Muggings and carjackings are also at a minimum in my neighborhood and almost never result in death.
Until this moment, my only truly worrisome times had been those infrequent occasions when I woke up in the middle of the night fearful of invasion by mystical horrors… ghosts, bogeymen, vampire bats, extraterrestrials. Held prisoner by my imagination gone berserk, I’d lay in bed, barely breathing, waiting to levitate. I must admit, it would be a comfort not to have to wait alone although, aside from Bill Murray, what good would another mortal be in the face of a spook attack, anyway? Fortunately, I’ve never done a total head rotation, been beamed up, or had an Elvis visitation. And the closest I’ve come to an out-of-body experience was when Joe Morelli took his mouth to me fourteen years ago, behind the eclair case.
Ramirez’s voice cut through the door. “Don’t like having unfinished business with a woman, Stephanie Plum. Don’t like when a woman run away from the champ.”
He tried the doorknob, and for a gut-cramping moment my heart leapt to my throat. The door held, and my pulse dropped down to prestroke level.
I did some deep breathing and decided the best course of action was simply to ignore him. I didn’t want to get into a shouting match. And I didn’t want to make things worse than they already were. I shut and locked my living room windows and drew the drapes tight. I hurried to my bedroom and debated using the fire escape to go for help. It felt foolish, somehow, lending more weight to the threat than I was willing to concede. This is no big deal, I told myself. Nothing to worry about. I rolled my eyes. Nothing to worry about… only a criminally insane, two-hundred- and-fifty-pound man standing in my hall, calling me names.
I clapped a hand to my mouth to squelch a hysterical whine. Not to panic, I told myself. It wouldn’t be long before my neighbors would begin to investigate, and Ramirez would be forced to leave.
I got my gun out of my pocketbook and went back to the door for another look. The peephole was uncovered, and the hallway seemed empty. I put my ear to the door and listened. Nothing. I slid the bolt and cracked the door, leaving my megachain firmly attached and my gun at the ready. No Ramirez in sight. I unhooked the chain and peeked out into the hall. Very peaceful. He was definitely gone.
A splot of some noxious substance sliding down the front of my door caught my eye. I was pretty sure it wasn’t tapioca. I gagged, closed the door, and locked and chained it. Wonderful. Two days on the job and a world-class psycho had just jerked off on my door.
Things like this had never happened to me when I’d worked for E.E. Martin. Once a street person had urinated on my foot, and every now and then a man would drop his pants in the train station, but these were things you expected when you worked in Newark. I’d learned not to take them personally. This business with Ramirez was a
