where I’d be considered normal. Borneo, maybe. Atlantic City.”
Good grief. I was going to have to set off a roach bomb in my apartment after he left.
“Anyway, the big problem isn’t Lucille,” Vinnie said. “The big problem is Bobby Sunflower. You whacked one of his guys in the head, and you snatched me out from under him. He’s not gonna like it.”
“Would he have killed you if I hadn’t gotten you out of there?”
“For sure. I was a dead man.”
“All because you made some bad bets.”
Vinnie remoted the television on, flipped through about twenty channels, and gave it up. “Sunflower’s in trouble. He needs money, and he needs respect. He’s in the middle of a war, and he can’t show weakness.”
“What war? Who’s he fighting?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should go into therapy at one of those sex addiction places. Do you think that would get me off the hook?”
“Maybe with Lucille. I don’t think Harry’ll buy it.”
My arm was scraped and the knee was torn out of my jeans from the fall. It would have been a lot worse if we hadn’t crashed into the SUV. I limped out of the living room, closed the door on Vinnie, started to undress, and noticed I’d missed a call from Morelli on my cell phone.
“Hey,” Morelli said when I called him back.
“Hey, yourself.”
“Just checking to see if you’re home. Shots were fired at Sunflower’s apartment building tonight.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Good point,” Morelli said. “We also got a report of shots being fired from Vinnie’s house. Lucille said she was shooting at a rat.”
“That neighborhood’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
“Should I be worried?” Morelli asked me.
“Hard to say.”
Morelli disconnected, and I limped into the bathroom, where I stood in the shower until all the rust was washed out of my hair. When I was done, I looked at the shampoo bottle. Empty. My refrigerator was also empty. I needed money. I needed to make another capture.
VINNIE WAS BACK to wearing only his underwear. He was in my kitchen, unshaven, his hair spiked up from sleep, his eyes half open.
“Where’s the coffee?” he asked. “Where’s the orange juice?”
“I don’t have any,” I told him. “I need to go shopping.”
“I need coffee. Lucille always had my coffee ready.”
“There’s no Lucille,” I told him. “Get used to it. And after today, there’s no me. You can’t stay here.”
“Where will I go?”
“Stay with one of your friends.”
“I don’t have friends,” Vinnie said. “I have hookers and bookies. And my bookie wants to shoot me.”
“Do you have money?”
Vinnie flapped his arms. “Do I look like I have money? My wallet was left behind with my pants. Maybe we should go back and check out the lawn in front of my house to see if Lucille tossed out cash and credit cards along with my clothes.”
“What about the office? Don’t you keep petty cash? Doesn’t Connie have a corporate credit card?”
“We might have a small cash flow problem,” Vinnie said.
“How small?”
“We might be a million in the red, give or take a couple bucks.”
“What?”
“It’s complicated,” Vinnie said. “Bookeeping issues. We have too many outstanding skips.”
“I have a stack of skips in my bag that I’m working on, but I don’t think they add up to a million. And what about the bankers who underwrite you?”
“They aren’t answering their phones.”
Oh boy.
“You’ve got three minutes to get dressed,” I said to Vinnie. “I’m taking you to my parents’ house. When they get fed up with you, I’ll think of something else. At least you can get coffee there before my mother kicks you out.”
I debated calling ahead but decided against it. If I dumped him on my mother’s doorstep and drove away real fast, she’d have to take him in, at least for a while. If I called, she could say no.
Twenty minutes later, I idled in front of my parents’ house while Vinnie walked to the front door. On the rare possibility that no one was home, I didn’t want to just drive off. He didn’t have a cell phone to call me to come back. I saw the front door open and I laid rubber.
I drove by the office twice before I parked. I didn’t see the bashed-in SUV, and I didn’t see any angry-looking guys hanging out with guns drawn, so I figured things were quiet this morning. Connie was at her desk. Lula hadn’t arrived.
“You didn’t bring Vinnie with you, did you?” Connie asked. “I already had a visit from Bobby Sunflower this morning.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee. “He gets up early.”
“I guess he was motivated. He wants his money or he wants Vinnie. He said if he didn’t get either of those things by Friday he was going to eliminate the office.”
“Eliminate it?”
“Like from the face of the earth.”
“Could be worse,” I said. “According to Vinnie, this office is about a million in the red.”
Connie froze for a beat. “Vinnie said that?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you know?”
“I don’t do the books. Vinnie has an accountant for that.”
“Maybe we should talk to the accountant.”
“The accountant’s dead. He got run over by a truck last week. Twice.”
“That’s not good.”
“No,” Connie said. “It’s really not good.”
“Does Sunflower know we were the ones to spring Vinnie?”
“Yeah, but I think it’s too embarrassing to let go public. And I think he’d rather have the money than to see us shot full of holes.”
I drank some coffee and took a doughnut from the box on Connie’s desk. “So we need to raise money.”
“It’s up to a million two.”
“Chopper is a pretty high-bond. The toilet paper guy isn’t worth much, but he might be easy to capture.”
“Butch Goodey is worth something,” Connie said. “I thought he skipped to Mexico.”
“I heard he got back last week, and he’s working at the meatpacking plant.”
Butch Goodey is 6?6? tall and weighs about three hundred pounds. He’s wanted for exposing himself to thirteen women over a period of two days. He said they were lucky to get to see Mr. Magic, and he blamed it on a sex- enhancement drug that gave him a thirty-two-hour erection. The judge who set Goodey’s bond asked for the name of the drug, wrote it on a piece of paper, and slipped the paper into his pocket.
“I’ll put Goodey at the head of the list,” I said.
Lula swung into the office. “At the head of what list?”
“The catch ’em list,” I told her. “We need to make money today.”
“So we’re going after Butch Goodey? I thought he was in Mexico.”
“He’s back. He’s working at the meatpacking plant.”
“I hate that place,” Lula said. “It gives me the creeps. You drive by with your windows open, and you can hear cows mooing. You’re only supposed to hear stuff like that on a farm. I mean, what the heck’s the world coming to when you can hear cows mooing in Trenton? And who the heck would work at a meatpacking plant anyway?”
“Butch Goodey,” I said.
The meatpacking plant was down by the river, south of town, on the edge of a residential area that was blue-
