“I need to get my car at Cluck-in-a-Bucket,” Lula told him. “I gotta go cook up barbecue.”
Ramon glanced over at me. “Ranger would like me to take you back to Rangeman.”
“Sure,” I said. “Drop Lula at the Bucket and take me to the Batcave.”
RANGER WAS IN the shower when I got to the apartment. I flopped onto the couch, pulled a pillow over my head, and hoped when he came out he wouldn’t notice me lying there.
Pretend you’re in a good place, I told myself. You’re on a beach. Hear the waves swooshing in and out. Hear the seagulls.
The pillow got lifted off my face and Ranger looked down at me. “You can run, but you can’t hide,” he said.
“Just shoot me and get it over with.”
“Talk to me.”
“Ernie Dell.”
Ranger yanked me to my feet, pulled me into the hall and out the door. “He needs to find another hobby.”
Ranger is a master of control. He can lower his heart rate at will and walk past a bakery and never be tempted. On the surface, Ranger would appear to have no emotion. It’s anyone’s guess what rages below the surface. What I do know about Ranger is that he’s most dangerous when he’s dead calm. And right now he was pretty calm, except for having his hand clamped around my wrist.
Neither of us said a word in the elevator. Ranger guided the Turbo out of the garage, and I gave him directions to Ernie’s house. He looked relaxed at the wheel. No angry little lines in his forehead. No tense muscles working in his jaw. He also wasn’t talking. He was in his zone.
We drove down the alley behind Ernie’s house and parked in his driveway, Ranger still not saying anything, looking at the wreck of a haunted mansion in front of him. We got out of the Porsche and walked to the building’s back door. Ranger listened for a moment and knocked. No answer. Ranger knocked again.
There was a sound overhead like a window being raised. I looked up to see and Splooosh. I was doused head to foot with red paint.
Ranger was standing inches from me, and he didn’t have a drop on him. He was in black Rangeman tactical gear of T-shirt, cargo pants, and windbreaker, and he was pristine. He looked at me and did a small I can’t believe these things always happen to you gesture with his hands.
“If you so much as crack a smile, that’s the end of our friendship,” I said to him.
The corners of his mouth twitched a little, and I knew he was smiling inside.
“Babe,” he said.
“I’m a mess.”
“Yes, but we’re going to have fun washing this paint off you when we get back to my apartment.” He unholstered his gun and handed it to me. “Stay here and don’t move from this spot. If you see Ernie Dell, shoot him.”
“What if he isn’t armed?”
“He’ll be armed by the time the police get here.”
Ranger disappeared inside the house, leaving the kitchen door open. A minute later, I heard something crash overhead. The crash was accompanied by a loud grunt, as if the air had been knocked out of someone. I’d seen Ranger in action on other manhunts, and I suspected this was Ernie Dell getting thrown against a wall. There was a moment of silence and then more thumping and crashing. I looked inside, past the kitchen, and saw Ernie sprawled on the floor at the foot of the stairs. Ranger hauled him to his feet and wrangled him to the back door.
“What was all that crashing?” I asked Ranger.
“He slipped on the stairs.”
Ernie’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and he wasn’t looking happy. I was relieved to have captured Ernie, but it was annoying that it was so easy for Ranger to execute a take down and next to impossible for me.
“You have other talents,” Ranger said, reading my thoughts.
“Such as?”
He tucked my hair behind my ear so it wouldn’t drip paint on my face. “You’re smart. You’re intuitive. You’re resilient.” He thought about it for a beat. “You’re stubborn.”
“Stubborn is a good thing?”
“Not necessarily. I ran out of good things.”
A Rangeman SUV glided into the driveway and parked. Tank and Ramon got out and went pale when they saw me.
“It’s paint,” Ranger said to them. “Mr. Dell was feeling playful.”
Tank clapped a hand to his heart.
“Sweet Mother of God,” Ramon said.
Ranger handed Ernie over to Tank. “I’ll get the paperwork for you, and you can turn him in for Stephanie. And I need a thermal blanket from the emergency kit for her.”
Five minutes later, Ernie was shackled to the floor in the backseat of the Rangeman SUV and trundled off to the police station. This left me with two open files, and as far as I was concerned, Joyce was welcome to both of them. I kicked my shoes off at car-side, wrapped myself in the aluminum blanket from the emergency kit, and eased myself into the Turbo, next to Ranger.
“I’m trying not to drip,” I said to him.
“I saw the can in the upstairs bedroom. It’s water-based. It should wash off.”
“Why don’t you have any paint on you? It’s always me. Why isn’t it ever you?”
“I don’t know,” Ranger said. “But I like it this way.”
Ranger backed out of the driveway and drove toward Olden. I was soaked through with paint and wrapped in an aluminum foil blanket like a baked potato. I’d left my shoes in the driveway, and my feet were getting cold.
“Take me to my apartment,” I said to Ranger.
“Isn’t Lula there?”
“No. She’s cleared out.”
THIRTEEN
I LET MYSELF into my apartment and went to my kitchen first thing. It was sparkling clean, with only a few pale pink stains in the ceiling paint and a small chunk of the ceiling chipped away from the lid impact. The living room and dining room were nice and neat. No sign of Lula. Yay. Yippee.
The bedroom wasn’t nearly so happy. Lula’s clothes were still there. Okay, don’t panic, I told myself. Maybe she was in a hurry to go to brunch and just hasn’t come back to collect her clothes. I was holding a big plastic garbage bag that I’d taken from the kitchen. I stripped down and put everything, including the disposable aluminum blanket, into the garbage bag. There was a limit to how much paint you could wash out of a shirt, and my clothes were way beyond the limit.
I stepped into the shower and, after a lot of scrubbing and shampooing, finally emerged red-free. I fluffed my hair out with the dryer, swiped some mascara on my lashes, and dressed in a ratty T-shirt, washed-out jeans, and a denim jacket. Not a high-fashion day, since my laundry basket with all my clean clothes was still at my mother’s house.
I’d promised to test-drive more barbecue sauce tonight at my parents’ house. I called Lula for a ride and went down to the parking lot to wait for her.
Mostly seniors on fixed incomes lived in my building. There were a couple Hispanics and a young single mom with two kids, but everyone else had a subscription to AARP The Magazine. It was almost five, and half of my building was out taking advantage of the early bird specials at the diner, and the other half was in front of the television, eating a defrosted entree.
Lula barreled into the lot and came to a sharp stop in front of me. “Hop in,” she said. “I gotta get back to help your granny. We’re in the middle of saucin’ up some chicken.”
“Is this Mister Clucky’s recipe?”
