Three To Get Deadly

I shook my head. “No.”

“It turns out that all these murders are having a significant impact on crime. Drug sales are way down. Pharmaceutical representatives are booking flights for obscure southern towns.”

“Are you telling me Mo is a hero?”

“Let’s just say, he isn’t despised.”

Mrs. Steeger materialized at the back door wearing a coat and hat. She huffed down the porch stairs and across her yard. “Hmmph,” she said to me. “Still snooping, I see.”

My left eye started to twitch. I put my finger to my eyelid and sank my teeth into my lower lip.

Ranger grinned.

The superhero wasn’t afraid of the Antichrist. The superhero thought an eye twitch was funny.

Mrs. Steeger opened the door and stepped back, arms folded over her chest. “I’ll lock up when you get your car out,” she said to Ranger.

Guess she was worried we’d snitch some jugs of used motor oil.

Ranger handed me the keys to the Bronco. “I’ll drive the BMW, and you can follow.”

Normally a person would take his cars home. Since Ranger wasn’t normal I wasn’t sure where we were headed.

I held the tail through center city. Traffic was heavy and people walked head down into the wind on the sidewalks. Ranger turned off State onto Cameron and pulled into a small, attended parking lot. We were behind the state buildings, two blocks from Stark, in an area of quasi-government office buildings. Definitely not residential.

Ranger got out of his car and spoke to the attendant. The attendant smiled and nodded. Friendly. They knew each other.

I parked behind the Beemer and walked over to Ranger. “Are we leaving the cars here?”

“Benny will take care of them while I pick up my mail.”

I looked around. “You live here?”

“Office,” Ranger said, gesturing to a four-story brick building next to the lot.

“You have an office?”

“Nothing fancy. It helps to keep the businesses straight.”

I followed Ranger through the double glass doors into the vestibule. There were two elevators to our left. A tenant directory hung on the wall beside the elevators. I scanned the directory and could find no mention of Ranger.

“You’re not listed,” I said.

Ranger moved past the elevators to the stairs. “Don’t need to be.”

I trotted after him. “What businesses are we talking about?”

“Mostly security related. Bodyguard, debris removal, security consultation. Fugitive apprehension, of course.”

We rounded the first floor and were working our way up to two. “What’s debris removal?”

“Sometimes a landlord wants to clean up his property. I can put together a team to do the job.”

“You mean like throwing crack dealers out the window?”

Ranger passed the second floor and kept going. He shook his head. “Only on the lower floors. You throw them out the upper-story windows and it makes too much of a mess on the sidewalk.”

He opened the fire door to the third floor, and I followed him down the hall to number 311. He slid a key card into the magnetic slot, pushed the door open and switched the light on.

It was a one-room office with two windows and a small powder room. Beige carpet, cream-colored walls, miniblinds at the windows. Furniture consisted of a large cherry desk with a black leather executive chair behind the desk and two client chairs to the front of the desk. No gun turrets at the windows. No government-issue rockets stacked in the corners. A Mac laptop with a separate Bernoulli drive was plugged in on the desk. Its modem was hooked to the phone line. There was also a multiline phone and answering machine on the desk. Everything was neat. No dust. No empty soda cans. No empty pizza boxes. Thankfully, no dead bodies.

Ranger stooped to pick up the mail that had been delivered through the mail slot. He came up with a handful of envelopes and a couple flyers. He divided the mail into two stacks: garbage and later. He threw the garbage into the wastebasket. The later could wait until later. I guess there hadn’t been any now! mail.

The red light on the answering machine was going ballistic with blinking. Ranger lifted the lid and popped the incoming tape. He put it in his shirt pocket and replaced the tape with a new one from the top drawer of the desk. No now! messages there either, I suppose.

I took a peek at the lavatory. Very clean. Soap. Paper towels. Box of tissues. Nothing personal. “You spend much time here?” I asked Ranger.

“No more than is necessary.”

I waited for some elaboration but none was forthcoming. I wondered if Ranger was still interested in Mo now that he had his BMW back.

“Are you feeling vengeful?” I asked Ranger. “Does justice need to be served?”