Hard Eight

I went into the kitchen and stared into the refrigerator for a while, but nothing materialized. No cake. No hot sausage sandwich. No macaroni and cheese magically appeared. I took a bag of chocolate chip cookies out of the freezer and ate one. You were supposed to bake them first, but that seemed like unnecessary effort. I’d talked to Annie’s best friend and that hadn’t given me a lot. Okay, so what would I do if I needed to protect my daughter from her father? Where would I go?

I wouldn’t have a lot of money, so I’d need to rely on a friend or relative. I’d need to go far enough that my car wouldn’t be recognized, and I wouldn’t run the risk of bumping into Soder or one of his friends. This narrowed the search down to the entire world, except for the Burg.

I was contemplating the world when my doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I’d just received a bag of snakes, so I wasn’t all that crazy about answering the door. I looked out my peephole and grimaced. It was Albert Kloughn. But wait a minute, he was holding a pizza box. Hello.

I opened the door and gave a quick look up and down the hall. I was pretty sure there’d been four snakes in the bag… still, doesn’t hurt to keep your eyes open for renegade reptiles.

“Hope I’m not disturbing anything,” Kloughn said, stretching his neck out to look around me into my apartment. “You aren’t entertaining or anything, are you? I didn’t know if you were living with anyone.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking about the Soder case, and I have some ideas. I thought we could, like, brainstorm.”

I looked down at the box he was holding.

“I brought a pizza,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d eaten yet. Do you like pizza? If you don’t like pizza I could get something else. I could get Mexican or Chinese or Thai…”

Please, Lord, tell me this isn’t a date. “I’m sort of engaged.”

He vigorously nodded his head. Up and down, up and down, like one of those dogs people put in their back car windows. “Absolutely. I knew you would be. Understood. I’m almost engaged, too. I have a girlfriend.”

“Really?”

He took a deep breath. “No. I just made that up.”

I took the pizza box from him and dragged him into my apartment. I got some napkins and a couple beers, and we sat at my small dining room table and ate pizza.

“What are these ideas you have about Evelyn Soder?”

“I figure she’s with a friend, right? So she had to get in touch with the friend somehow. She had to tell her she was coming to stay. I figure she did this on the phone. So what we need is a phone bill.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“Good thing you brought a pizza.”

“Actually, it’s a tomato pie. In the Burg they call it a tomato pie.”

“Sometimes. You know anyone at the phone company? Anyone in the billing department?”

“I figured you’d have the contacts. See, that’s why we’re such a good team. I have the ideas. And you have the contacts. Bounty hunters have contacts, right?”

“Right.” Unfortunately, not in the phone company.

We finished the pizza, and I brought out the bag of frozen cookies for dessert.

“I heard you get cancer from eating raw cookie dough,” Kloughn said. “Don’t you think you should bake this?”

I ate a bag of raw dough a week. I considered it to be one of the four major food groups.

“I always eat raw cookie dough,” I said.