attached.”
“And I could date other men.”
Morelli was starting to look annoyed. “Have you been dating other men?”
“Maybe.”
“As long as it isn’t Ranger,” Morelli said.
“I don’t think Ranger dates.”
The idea of Ranger dating was pretty strange. I’ve seen him in bars, stalking skips. And I’ve had dinner with him on occasion, but I couldn’t imagine him calling a woman up for a date. I suspected he had a small list of nonthreatening, cooperative women who he visited late at night when the mood struck.
“Whatever it is Ranger does, I don’t want him doing it with you,” Morelli said. “He’s a nut. And he’s dangerous.”
“He’s mellow now,” I told Morelli. “He’s a businessman.”
Morelli looked out at the black Mercedes. “Do you know where he gets these cars?”
“No. Do you?”
“No, but I doubt it’s a legal source.”
I wasn’t even sure it was a human source. It was like the cars were beamed in from space.
“Are we fighting?” I asked Morelli.
“No. We’re discussing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I yelling?” Morelli asked. “Is my face purple? Are the cords in my neck standing out? Am I waving my arms around?”
“No.”
“Then we’re not fighting.”
I kicked my shoes off in the kitchen and peeled my socks off. “Were you working tonight?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know about Mr. Jingles and the funeral home?”
I went out to get a pizza and ran into Eddie coming off his shift. He got to help wrangle Mr. Jingles into the animal control van.”
Eddie Gazarra is a uniformed cop who’s married to my cousin Shirley-the-Whiner. He’s a nice guy with a white-blond buzz cut and a big mouth.
I unzipped my jeans. “I need to get out of these contaminated clothes. I don’t want them in my bedroom. Are you going to stand here and watch me get undressed?”
His brown eyes almost completely dilated to black. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to watch you get undressed. And I’m going to watch you take a shower. And then I’m personally going to towel you down.”
Oh boy. Oh boy!
I dropped my jeans, stepped out of them, and Morelli’s phone rang. Morelli didn’t take his eyes off me. He didn’t answer his phone. He didn’t check the readout. The phone kept ringing.
“Your phone,” I said.
“It’ll stop.”
There was a moment’s pause while the phone disconnected. And then the phone buzzed with a text message and buzzed a second time.
“You might as well read it,” I said. “It’s not going away.”
Morelli glanced at his phone. “I’ve got a text message from dispatch and a text message from my boss.” He punched a number in and waited.
“Yeah?” Morelli said when the connection opened.
His attention moved from me to a spot on the floor. He listened for a full minute before raising his head and looking back at me.
“I’m on it,” he said. And he slid his phone into his pocket.
“Well?” I asked.
“I have to go. Two guys in suits and ties were just found facedown in the Regal Diner parking lot. They were behind the Dumpster in an area reserved for employees. Hands tied. Single bullet in the back of the head.”
“Execution.”
“Yeah.”
“Have they been ID’d?”
“Not that I can tell you. Ranger monitors all our communication. I’m sure you can get it from him. All I can say is that they weren’t from the neighborhood.”
“Boy, this is too bad,” I said. “I was planning on being incredibly sexy after I got clean.”
“That’s rotten,” Morelli said. “You were the one who told me to take the message.” He took a step toward me and pulled back. “I’d kiss you, but you smell like my gym bag.”
I locked the door when Morelli left, removed the rest of my clothes, and stuffed them into a black plastic garbage bag. I sprayed my sneakers with deodorizer and hoped for the best. I took a shower and washed my hair twice. I got dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts and called Ranger.
“Babe,” he said.
“Who were the two suits dumped behind Regal Diner tonight?”
“Victor Kulik and Walter Dunne. A couple lawyers who work in mergers and acquisitions for a venture capital company. It’s the same company that bought the bail bonds agency from Harry. Wellington.”
“Thanks.”
“You stole money from Chopper and Sunflower so you could give it back to Sunflower and bail Vinnie out, didn’t you?”
“Who me?”
“Anyone else would have just killed the alligator,” Ranger said.
“How do you know?”
“I know everything.”
“And you’re modest.”
“No,” Ranger said. “I’m not modest.”
And he disconnected.
NINETEEN
MOST MORNINGS, I’M rushed and my refrigerator is empty and I take breakfast where I find it. This morning, I was flush with food from my supermarket stop, so I had orange juice, coffee, and a bowl of Rice Krispies for breakfast. I gave Rex a chunk of apple, some hamster crunchies, and fresh water. I checked my e-mail. I lined my eyes with a very thin line of smoky black and brushed on a smidgen of mascara. My sneakers still smelled a little, but, fortunately, they were far from my nose.
I’d taken the lucky bottle out of my bag last night, and I had it sitting on my kitchen counter. If I was to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t all that great a bottle. And I wasn’t sure why Uncle Pip left it to me. I liked Uncle Pip, but I wasn’t any closer to him than a lot of other relatives. Why he singled me out to have his lucky bottle was a mystery. I held the bottle to the light, but I couldn’t see inside. I thought I heard something when I shook the bottle, but it was very faint. Hard to tell if it was bringing me luck. I didn’t get trampled by stampeding cows, eaten by an alligator, or shot while robbing a funeral home, so maybe the bottle was working.
I put my dishes in the sink, told Rex to be a good hamster, and I set off for my parents’ house with my garbage bag of stink-bomb clothes. There are washers and dryers in the basement of my building, but I’m pretty sure trolls live there.
My grandmother was sitting with her foot up on a kitchen chair when I walked in.
“How’s the foot?” I asked.
“It’s a pain in the keister. I’m tired of hearing clomp, clomp, clomp. And it takes me a half hour to go up the stairs. And it hurts if I walk on it too much, so I’m sitting around going nuts. I’m not used to sitting around.” She
