whopped onto the blacktop and felt the air whoosh from my lungs.
I braced for the kill, but the dog just stood over me, tongue lolling, tail wagging.
“Good dog,” I said.
He licked my face.
I rolled onto my back and assessed the damage. Torn sweats, scraped hands and knees. Large loss of self- esteem. I got to my feet, shooed the dog back home and limped to the car where Mary Lou was waiting.
“You deserted me,” I said to Mary Lou.
“It looked like it might turn into one of those sexual things. I didn’t want to interfere.”
Fifteen minutes later I was in my apartment, dressed in my nightgown, dabbing antiseptic cream on my skinned knees. And I was feeling much better. Nothing like a totally infantile act to put things into perspective.
I stopped dabbing when the phone rang. Not Morelli, I prayed. I didn’t want to hear that he’d seen me running from his yard.
I answered with a tentative hello.
Pause on the other end.
“Hello,” I repeated.
“I hope that little discussion we had last time meant something to you,” the man said. “Because if I find out you’ve opened your mouth about any of this, I’m going to come get you. And it’s not going to be nice.”
“Maglio?”
The caller hung up.
I checked all my locks, plugged the battery on my cell phone into the recharger, made sure my gun was loaded and at bedside along with the pepper spray. I cringed at the possibility that Maglio might be involved. It wasn’t good to have a cop for an enemy. Cops could be very dangerous people.
The phone rang again. This time I let the machine get it. The call was from Ranger. Just reporting in, he said. Running tomorrow at seven.
I called Lula as promised and registered her for the program.
I was downstairs at seven, but I wasn’t in the finest form. I hadn’t slept well, and I was feeling tapped out.
“How’d it go yesterday?” Ranger asked.
I gave him the unabridged version, excluding my juvenile visit to Morelli’s backyard.
Ranger’s mouth tipped at the corners. “You’re making this up, right?”
“Wrong. That’s what happened. You asked what happened. I told you what happened.”
“Okay, let me get this straight. Elliot Harp flew off Mo’s car, bounced off the Firebird onto the shoulder of Route 1. You picked Elliot up, and put him in the trunk and drove him to the police station.”
“More or less.”
Ranger gave a bark of laughter. “Bet that went over big with the boys in blue.”
A taxi pulled into the lot, not far from where we were standing, and Lula got out. She was dressed in a pink polar fleece sweatsuit and pink furry earmuffs. She looked like the Energizer rabbit on steroids.
“Lula’s going running with us,” I told Ranger. “She wants to get in better shape.”
Ranger gave Lula the once-over. “You don’t keep up, you get left behind.”
“Your ass,” Lula said.
We took off at a pretty good clip. I figured Ranger was testing Lula. She was breathing hard, but she was close on his heels. She managed until we got to the track, and then she found a seat on the sidelines.
“I don’t run in circles,” she said.
I sat beside her. “Works for me.”
Ranger did a lap and jogged by us without acknowledgment of our presence or lack of.
“So why are you really here?” I asked Lula.
Lula’s eyes never left Ranger. “I’m here ’cause he’s the shit.”
“The shit?”
“Yeah, you know…the shit. The king. The cool.”
“Do we know anyone else who’s the shit?”
“John Travolta. He’s the shit, too.”
We watched Ranger some, and I could see her point about Ranger being the shit.
“I’ve been thinking,” Lula said. “Suppose there really were superheroes?”
“Like Batman?”
“That’s it. That’s what I’m saying. It’d be someone who was the shit.”
