“This isn’t a battle. I’m trying to put an old woman’s mind at ease by finding a little girl.”
“You must think I’m stupid. You’re a bounty hunter. A mercenary. You know perfectly well what this is about. You’re in this for the money. You know what the stakes are. And you know what I’m trying to recover. What you don’t know is who you’re dealing with. I’m toying with you now, but at some point the game will get boring for me. If you haven’t come over to my side by the time I get bored with the game, I’ll come after you with a vengeance, and I’ll rip the heart out of your body while it’s still beating.”
Yikes.
He was dressed in a suit and tie. Very tasteful. Looked expensive. No gravy stains on the tie. He was insane, but at least he dressed well.
“Guess I’ll go now,” I said. “You probably want to go home and get medicated.”
“Nice to know you like bunnies,” he said.
I cranked the engine over and took off. Abruzzi stood there, staring after me. I checked my rearview mirror for a tail. Didn’t see anyone. I wiggled around a couple streets. Still no tail. I had a bad feeling in my stomach. It felt a lot like horror. I drove past my parents’ house and noticed Uncle Sandor’s Buick was parked in the driveway. My sister was using the Buick until she saved enough money to get her own car. But my sister was supposed to be at work. I pulled in behind her and popped into the house. Grandma Mazur, my mom, and Valerie were all at the kitchen table. They had coffee in front of them but no one was drinking.
I opted for a soda and took the fourth chair. “What’s up?”
“Your sister got fired from her job at the bank,” Grandma Mazur said. “She got into a fight with her boss, and she got herself fired, on the spot.”
Valerie fighting with someone? Saint Valerie? The sister with the disposition of vanilla pudding?
When we were kids Valerie always turned her homework in on time, made her bed before going to school, and was thought to bear an uncanny resemblance to the serene plaster statues of the Virgin Mary found on Burg lawns and in Burg churches. Even Valerie’s period came and went with serenity, always arriving on schedule to the minute, the flow delicate, the mood swings going from nice to nicer.
I was the sister who got cramps.
“What happened?” I asked. “How could you get into a fight with your boss? You just started that job.”
“She was unreasonable,” Valerie said. “And mean. I made one tiny mistake, and she was horrible about it, yelling at me in front of everyone. And before I knew it I was yelling back. And then I got fired.”
“You
“I haven’t been myself lately.”
No shit. Last month she decided she was going to try being a lesbian, and this month she was yelling. What was next? Full head rotation?
“So what was the mistake?”
“I spilled some soup. That’s all I did. I spilled a little soup.”
“It was one of them Cup-a-Soup things,” Grandma said to me. “It had them itty-bitty noodles in it. Valerie dumped the whole thing onto a computer, and it seeped between the cracks and blew out the system. They just about had to shut the bank down.”
I didn’t want bad things to happen to Val. Still, it was kind of nice to see her screw up after a lifetime of perfection.
“I don’t suppose you remember anything new about Evelyn?” I asked Valerie. “Mary Alice said she and Annie were best friends.”
“They were school friends,” Valerie said. “I don’t remember ever seeing Annie.”
I looked over at my mother. “Did you know Annie?”
“Evelyn used to bring her around when she was younger, but they stopped visiting a couple years ago when Evelyn started having problems. And Annie never came to the house with Mary Alice. For that matter, I don’t think Mary Alice ever talked about Annie.”
