Drilling Briggs' door held a lot of appeal, but probably it wasn't practical to shoot up an apartment building for a guy who was only worth seven hundred dollars.
'No shooting,' I said. 'I'll get the key from the super.'
'That isn't gonna do you no good if you're not willing to shoot,' Lula said. 'He's still gonna have the security chain on.'
'I saw Ranger pop a door open with his shoulder.'
Lula looked at the door. 'I could do that too,' she said. 'Only I just bought this dress with them little spaghetti straps, and I wouldn't want to have a bruise.'
I looked at my watch. 'It's almost five, and I'm having dinner with my parents tonight.'
'Maybe we should do this some other time.'
'We're leaving,' I hollered through Briggs' door, 'but we'll be back. And you'd better be careful of those handcuffs. They cost me forty dollars.'
'We would have been justified to shoot our way in on account of he's in possession of stolen property,' Lula said.
'Do you always carry a gun?' I asked Lula.
'Don't everybody?'
'They released Benito Ramirez two days ago.'
Lula stumbled on the second step down. 'That's not possible.'
'Joe told me.'
'Piece-of-shit legal system.'
'Be careful.'
'Hell,' Lula said. 'He already cut me. You're the one who has to be careful.'
We swung through the door and stopped in our tracks.
'Uh-oh,' Lula said. 'We got company.'
It was Bunchy. He was parked behind us in the lot. And he didn't look happy.
'How do you suppose he found us?' Lula asked. 'We aren't even in your car.'
'He must have followed us from the office.'
'I didn't see him. And I was looking.'
'I didn't see him either.'
'He's good,' Lula said. 'He might be someone to worry about.'
* * * * *
'HOW'S THE POT roast?' my mother wanted to know. 'Is it too dry?'
'It's fine,' I told her. 'Just like always.'
'I got the green bean casserole recipe from Rose Molinowski. It's made with mushroom soup and bread crumbs.'
'Whenever there's a wake or a christening, Rose always brings this casserole,' Grandma said. 'It's her signature dish.'
My father looked up from his plate. 'Signature dish?'
'I got that from the shopper's channel on TV. All the big designers got signature this and that.'
My father shook his head and bent lower over his pot roast.
Grandma helped herself to some of the casserole. 'How's the manhunt going? You got any good leads on Fred yet?'
'Fred is a dead end. I've talked to his sons and his girlfriend. I've retraced his last steps. I've talked to Mabel. There's nothing. He's disappeared without a trace.'
My father muttered something that sounded a lot like 'lucky bastard' and continued to eat.
My mother rolled her eyes.
And Grandma spooned in some beans. 'We need one of them psychics,' Grandma said. 'I saw on television where you can call them up, and they know everything. They find dead people all the time. I saw a couple of them on a talk show, and they were saying how they help the police with these serial murder cases. I was watching that show, and I was thinking that if I was a serial murderer I'd chop the bodies up in little pieces so those psychics wouldn't have such an easy job of it. Or maybe I'd drain all the blood out of the body and collect it in a big bucket. Then I'd bury a chicken, and I'd take the victim's blood and make a trail to the chicken. Then the psychic wouldn't know what to make of it when the police dug up a chicken.' Grandma helped herself to the gravy boat and poured gravy over her pot roast. 'Do you think that'd work?'
Everyone but Grandma paused with forks in midair.
'Well, I wouldn't bury a
No one had much to say after that, and I felt myself nodding off halfway through my second piece of cake.
