building and the street, taking the pulse of the area, his own heart rate probably somewhere around reptilian.
He punched a number into his phone. A man answered, and Ranger disconnected. “He’s there,” Ranger said. “Let’s go.”
We crossed the street, entered the building, and silently climbed to the third floor. The air was stale. The walls were covered with graffiti. The light was dim. A small rat scuttled across Ranger’s foot and disappeared into the shadows. I shuddered and grabbed the back of his shirt.
“Babe,” Ranger said, his voice barely audible.
There were two apartments on the third floor. Maureen Gonzales, Manfred’s girlfriend, lived in 3A. I stood flat to the wall on one side of her door. Ranger stood on the other side and knocked. His other hand was on his holstered gun.
A pretty Hispanic woman opened the door and smiled at Ranger. She was wearing a man’s shirt, unbuttoned, and nothing else. “Yes?” she said.
Ranger smiled back at the woman and looked beyond her, into the room. “I’d like to speak to Cameron.”
“Cameron isn’t here.”
“You don’t mind if I look around?”
She held the shirt wide open. “Look all you want.”
“Nice,” Ranger said, “but I’m looking for Cameron.”
“I told you he’s not here.”
“Bond enforcement,” Ranger said. “Step aside.”
“Do you have a search warrant?”
There was the sound of a window getting shoved up in the back room. Ranger pushed past Gonzales and ran for the window. I turned and raced down the stairs and out the front door. I saw Manfred burst out of the alley between the buildings and cross the street. I took off after him, having no idea what I’d do if I caught him. My self- defense skills relied heavily on eye-gouging and testicle rearrangement. Beyond that, I was at a loss.
I chased Manfred to Stark and saw him turn the corner. I turned a couple beats behind him, and the sidewalk was empty in front of me. No Manfred.
The only possibility was the building on the corner. There was a pizza place on the ground floor and what looked like two floors of apartments above it. The pizza place was closed for the night. The door leading to the apartments was open, the hallway was dark. No light in the stairwell. I stood in the entry and listened for movement.
Ranger came in behind me. “Is he up there?”
“I don’t know. I lost him when he turned the corner. I wasn’t that far away. I don’t think he had time to go farther than this building. Where were you? I thought you’d be on top of him.”
“The fire escape rusted out underneath me at the second floor. It took me a minute to regroup.” He looked up the stairs. “Do you want to come with me, or do you want to keep watch here?”
“I’ll stay here.”
Ranger was immediately swallowed up by the dark. He had a flashlight, but he didn’t use it. He moved almost without sound, creeping up the stairs, pausing at the second-floor landing to listen before moving on.
I hid in the shadows, not wanting to be seen from the street. God knows who was walking the street. Probably, I should carry a gun, but guns scared the heck out of me. I had pepper spray in my purse. And a large can of hair spray, which in my experience is almost as effective as the pepper spray.
I was concentrating on listening for Ranger and keeping watch on the street, and was completely taken by surprise when a door to the rear of the ground-floor hallway opened and Manfred stepped out. He froze when he saw me, obviously just as shocked to find me standing there as I was to see him. He whirled around and retreated through the door. I yelled for Ranger and ran after Manfred.
The door opened to a flight of stairs that led to the cellar. I got to the bottom of the stairs and realized this was a storeroom for the pizza place. Stainless-steel rolling shelves marched in rows across the room. Bags of flour, cans of tomato sauce, and gallon cans of olive oil were stacked on the shelves. A dim bulb burned overhead. I didn’t see Manfred. Fine by me. Probably the only reason I wasn’t already dead was that he’d left his girl’s house in such a rush, he’d gone out unarmed.
I cautiously approached one of the shelves, and Manfred stepped out and grabbed me.
“Give me your gun,” he said.
My heart skipped a beat and went into terror tempo. Bang, bang, bang, bang, knocking against my rib cage.
“I don’t have a gun,” I said.
And then, without any help from my brain, my knee suddenly connected with Manfred’s gonads.
Manfred doubled over, and I hit him on the head with a bag of flour. He staggered forward a little, but he didn’t go down, so I hit him again. The bag broke, and flour went everywhere. I was momentarily blinded, but I reached back to the shelf, grabbed a gallon can of oil, and swung blind. I connected with something that got a grunt out of Manfred.
“Fuckin’ bitch,” Manfred said.
I hauled back to swing again, and Ranger lifted the can from my hand.
“I’m on it,” Ranger said, cuffing Manfred.
“Jail’s better than another three minutes with her,” Manfred said. “She’s a fuckin’ animal. I’m lucky if I can ever use my nuts again. Keep her away from me.”
“I didn’t see you come down the stairs,” I said to Ranger. “It was a whiteout.”
“Any special reason you grabbed the flour?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
Manfred and I were head-to-toe flour. The flour sifted off us when we moved and floated in the air like pixie dust. Ranger hadn’t so much as a smudge. By the time we got to the Rangeman SUV, some of the flour had been left behind as ghostly white footprints, but a lot of it remained.
“I honestly don’t know how you manage to do this,” Ranger said. “Paint, barbecue sauce, flour. It boggles the mind.”
“This was all your fault,” I said.
Ranger glanced over at me and his eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch.
“You could have taken him down in the apartment if you hadn’t spent so much time staring at his naked girlfriend.”
Ranger grinned. “She wasn’t naked. She was wearing a shirt.”
“You deserved to fall off that fire escape.”
“That’s harsh,” Ranger said.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked him.
“Do you care?”
“No,” I said.
“Liar,” Ranger said. He ruffled my hair and flour sprang out in all directions.
Manfred said something to Ranger in Spanish. Ranger answered him as he assisted him into the backseat of the Explorer.
“What did he say?” I asked Ranger. “He said if I let him go, I could have his girl.”
“And your answer?”
“I declined.”
“You’ll probably regret that as the night goes on,” I said to him.
“No doubt,” Ranger said.
RANGER AND I had Manfred in front of the docket lieutenant. It was a little after ten, and things were heating up. Drunk drivers, abusive drunk husbands, and a couple drug busts were making their way through the system. I was waiting for my body receipt when Morelli walked in. He nodded to Ranger and grinned at me in my whiteness.
“I was at my desk, and Mickey told me I had to come out to take a look,” Morelli said.
“It’s flour,” I told him.
“I can see that. If we add some milk and eggs, we can turn you into a cake.”
