“Help!” I yelled. “HELLLLLLP!”
Morley hauled me up by my armpits and held me at eye level, my feet at least nine inches off the ground. “Dumb white bitch,” he said, giving me a couple vicious shakes that snapped my head back.
“F-f-fugitive apprehension agent,” I said. “Y-y-you’re under arrest.”
“Nobody’s arresting Morley,” he said. “I’ll kill anyone who tries.”
I flailed my arms and swung my legs, and my toe mysteriously connected with Morley’s knee.
“Ouch,” Morley yelled.
His big ham hands released me, and he buckled over. I staggered back a couple feet when I hit the ground, knocking into Ranger.
“Hey, big boy?” Ranger said.
“I thought it might distract him.”
Morley was curled into a fetal position doing shallow breathing, holding his knee. “She broke my knee,” he said on a gasp. “She broke my fucking knee.”
“Think it was your boot that distracted him,” Ranger said.
A happy accident.
“So if you were standing there the whole time, why didn’t you help me?”
“Didn’t look like you needed any help, babe. Why don’t you run around and get the car while I baby-sit Mr. Morley. He’s going to be slow walking.”
It was almost ten when Ranger brought me back to my parents’ house on High Street. Poochie, Mrs. Crandle’s two-hundred-year-old toy poodle, was sitting on the porch across the street, conjuring up one last tinkle before he called it a night. The lights were off next door in Mrs. Ciak’s house. Early to bed, early to rise, made old Mrs. Ciak wise. My mother and grandmother obviously didn’t feel like they needed any help from a few extra winks, because they were standing with their noses pressed to the glass pane in the storm door, squinting into the darkness at me.
“Probably been standing there since you left,” Ranger said.
“My sister is normal,” I said. “Always has been.”
Ranger nodded. “Makes it all the more confusing.”
I waved good-bye to Ranger and headed for the porch.
“There’s still some butterscotch pudding left,” my mother said when I opened the door.
“Did you shoot anyone?” Grandma wanted to know. “Was there a big to-do?”
“There was a little to-do,” I told her. “And we didn’t shoot anyone. We almost never shoot people.”
My father leaned forward in his chair in the living room. “What’s this about shooting?”
“Stephanie didn’t shoot anyone today,” my mother said.
My father stared at us all for a moment, looking like he might be contemplating the advantages of a six-month tour on an aircraft carrier, and then he returned his attention to the TV.
“I can’t stay,” I said to my mother. “I just stopped in so you could see everything was okay.”
“Okay?” my mother shouted. “You go out in the middle of the night, chasing criminals! How could that possibly be okay? And look at you! What happened to your pants? Your pants have a big hole in them!”
“I tripped.”
My mother pressed her lips together. “So do you want pudding, or not?”
“Of course I want pudding.”
I opened my eyes to a perfectly black room, and the skin-crawling feeling that I wasn’t alone. I had no basis in fact for the feeling. I’d been dragged from sleep by some deep intuition. Possibly the intuition had been triggered by the rustle of clothing or a sweep of air. My heart knocked against my ribs as I waited for movement, for the scent of another person’s sweat, for a sign that my fears were true.
I scanned the room but found only familiar shapes. The digital readout on my clock said five-thirty. My eyes cut to my dresser at the sound of a drawer slamming shut, and finally I picked out the intruder.
A pair of sweats sailed through the air and hit me in the head.
“If we’re going to work together, you’ve got to get into shape,” the intruder said.
“Ranger?”
“I made you some tea. It’s on your nightstand.”
I switched the light on. Sure enough, there was a cup of tea steaming on my nightstand. So much for the illusion of Stephanie Plum, keen-sensed bounty hunter.
“I hate tea,” I said, sniffing at the noxious brew. I took a sip. YUK! “What
“Ginseng.”
“It’s weird. It tastes awful.”
“Good for your circulation,” Ranger said. “Helps oxygenate.”
