Hard Eight

“Oh yeah? You think it would take a miracle? Well, I’ll show you a miracle. You two losers be here at nine tonight, and we’ll take this guy down.”

Vinnie pulled his head back inside his office and slammed the door shut.

“Hope he’s got cuffs,” Lula said.

I gave Connie the body receipt for Laura Minello and waited while she wrote my check. We all turned and looked when the front door opened.

“Hey, I know you,” Lula said to the woman who walked into the office. “You tried to kill me.”

It was Maggie Mason. We’d met her on a previous case. Our relationship with Maggie had started out bad, but had ended up good.

“You still mud wrestling at The Snake Pit?” Lula asked.

“The Snake Pit closed down.” Maggie did a shit happens shrug. “It was time for me to get out anyway. Wrestling was fun for a while, but my dream was always to open a bookstore. When the Pit folded I persuaded one of the owners to go into business with me. That’s why I stopped in. We’re going to be neighbors. I just signed a lease on the building next door.”

I WAS SITTING in front of Vinnie’s office, in my wrecked car, wondering what to do next, and my cell phone rang.

“You gotta do something,” Grandma Mazur said. “Mabel was just over, for the fortieth time. She’s driving us nuts. First off, she bakes all day, and now she’s giving the stuff to us because she hasn’t got any more room in her house. She’s wall-to-wall bread. And this last time, she started crying. Crying. You know how we don’t do good with crying here.”

“She’s worried about Evelyn and Annie. They’re the only family she has left.”

“Well, find them,” Grandma said. “We don’t know what to do with all these coffee cakes.”

I drove to Key Street and parked across from Evelyn’s house. I thought about Annie sleeping in her bedroom upstairs, playing in the small backyard. A little girl with curly red hair and large serious eyes. A kid who was best friends with my niece, the horse. What kind of a kid would buddy up with Mary Alice? Not that Mary Alice isn’t a great kid, but let’s face it, she’s a couple inches off average. Probably Mary Alice and Annie were both on the outside looking in, needing a friend. And they found each other. Talk to me, I said to the house. Tell me a secret. I was sitting there, waiting for the house to say something, and a car pulled up behind me. It was the big black Lincoln with two men in the front. I didn’t have to think too long or hard to figure out it was Abruzzi and Darrow.

The smart thing would be to take off and not look back. Since I had a long history of rarely doing the smart thing, I locked my door, cracked the window on the driver’s side, and waited for Abruzzi to come talk to me.

“You’ve got your door locked,” Abruzzi said when he walked over. “Are you afraid of me?”

“If I was afraid of you, I’d have the motor running. Do you come here often?”

“I like to keep an eye on my properties,” he said. “What are you doing here? You aren’t planning on breaking in again, are you?”

“Nope. I’m just sightseeing. Strange coincidence that you always show up when I’m here.”

“It’s not a coincidence,” Abruzzi said. “I have informants everywhere. I know everything you do.”

“Everything?”

He shrugged. “Many things. For instance, I know you were at the park on Sunday. And then you had an unfortunate accident with your car.”

“Some moron thought it would be cute to put spiders in my car.”

“Do you like spiders?”

“They’re okay. Not as much fun as bunnies, for instance.”

“I understand you hit a parked car.”

“One of the spiders took me by surprise.”

“The element of surprise is important in a battle.”