I drove the Mercedes to the parking area behind the bonds office, and Lula and Connie lugged the duffel bags out and put them on the backseat. Connie got in the front passenger seat and set her Uzi on the floor, between her feet. Lula squeezed herself onto the backseat next to the duffel bags filled with money. Lula had her Glock in her purse and a sawed-off shotgun wedged between her legs.
I had my gun with two bullets.
“Vinnie better appreciate this,” Lula said. “I’m expecting a raise. And I want a company car. Not just any car, either. I want a good one. And I want one of them tower of treats at Christmas. You know, where you get it in the mail, and it’s a stack of boxes with all kinds of shit in ’em.”
“I don’t want a raise,” Connie said. “I want to rescue Vinnie, and then I want to kick his perverted ass all the way from the bonds office to the hospital.”
I drove across town and turned up Stark Street. I had my eye on my rearview mirror. No Rangeman tail in view, but I knew Chet was following my blip on his screen. Connie and Lula were silent. We were all in alert mode. I rolled past the bar, took the next cross street for half a block, and turned into the alley.
Three goons were waiting outside the bar’s back door. No Vinnie. I crept down the alley and stopped at the bar. Connie powered her window down, and the men stepped forward. Connie poked her Uzi out the window, and the men stopped in their tracks.
“Do you have the money?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” Connie said. “Do you have Vinnie?”
“No. Why would we have Vinnie?”
“You recaptured him.”
“Not that I know of,” the guy said. “I’m just supposed to get the money from you. You give us the money, and we don’t blow up the bail bonds office with all of you in it, including Vinnie.”
“I need a moment,” Connie said to the men. And she powered her window up.
“What the heck is this?” Lula said. “I’m confused.”
Connie looked over at me. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think they have him,” I said.
Connie gave a curt nod. “That’s what I think.”
“So who’s got him?” Lula asked.
“Don’t know,” Connie said, “but if we give them the money, they won’t blow us up.”
Lula opened her door and dumped the money out on the pavement. “I want a receipt,” she said.
“I don’t got a receipt,” the one guy said. “Mr. Sunflower didn’t give us no receipt. And anyway, we’d have to count it to give you a real receipt.”
“Are you sayin’ I’m a cheater?” Lula said to him. “Because you better take it back if that’s what you meant to say. You be in for a world of hurt if you slander me.”
“Cripes, woman,” the guy said. “I just don’t got a receipt. Cut me some slack here.”
“Hunh,” Lula said, and she slammed her door shut.
“Guess we’re done here,” I said.
And I drove off.
“That was sort of a letdown,” Lula said. “I expected to get Vinnie back. Not that I even want him back, but we gave those guys a lot of money, and seems like we should get something. I need a doughnut. If you turn onto Broad, there’s a doughnut place.”
“You can’t solve all your problems with doughnuts,” I said. “If you keep doing that, I’m going to get fat.”
“There’s four ways to manage stress,” Lula said to me. “There’s drugs, there’s alcohol, there’s sex, and there’s doughnuts. I go with sex and doughnuts. I tried the other two and it wasn’t any good. You being in a dry spell, you might have to rely on doughnuts.”
I turned onto Broad, and a block later, I pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through. Lula got a bag of doughnuts, and Connie got a bag of doughnuts.
I took a doughnut from Connie’s bag. “So what do we think about Vinnie?”
“I think he’s dead,” Lula said.
“He hasn’t turned up,” Connie said.
Lula finished off her first doughnut. “He could be in the morgue.”
Connie shook her head. “All the cops know Vinnie. He’d get ID’d if he showed up dead.”
“Then they must have shot Vinnie full of holes like Swiss cheese and weighted him down with cement boots and thrown him off the bridge into the Delaware. Or they could have taken him to a butcher shop and chopped him up into little pieces and put him into the meat grinder,” Lula said. “I’m gonna eat this jelly doughnut next. I love jelly doughnuts.”
“So dead is one possibility,” I said. “What else?”
“Somebody else could have snatched him,” Lula said. “Somebody other than Bobby Sunflower.”
“Why?” Connie asked.
“I guess to get money, like Sunflower. It could be a copy-cat snatching,” Lula said.
“No one’s gotten in touch with us,” Connie said.
“Hunh,” Lula said. “That’s problematic.”
“There’s something else that I always thought was problematic,” I said. “If we’re assuming someone took Vinnie, how did they know he was in Mooner’s RV? Mooner picked Vinnie up at my parents’ house. And Mooner said Vinnie never left the RV.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Lula said. “This had to be one of them opportunistic crimes. Like someone decided to rob Mooner’s RV when Mooner went into the bakery, and they come across Vinnie and decided on the spur of the moment to take him, and then they killed him and put him in the meat grinder.”
“What’s with the meat grinder thing?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I guess I’m feeling like a burger for dinner, and I just keep thinking of meat grinders,” Lula said.
I drove down Hamilton and was happy to see the Love Bus was still in front of the bookstore. I maneuvered the Mercedes into a space at the curb and cut the engine.
“I want to talk to Mooner,” I said to Connie and Lula. “The pieces aren’t fitting into the puzzle.”
Mooner was at the door to the RV before I knocked. “I was hoping you’d come back,” he said. “I was wondering if I could plug into your electric. I’m, like, down on my battery, and the Cosmic Alliance doesn’t understand no juice.”
“Sure,” Connie said. “We’re all going down the drain anyway. You have to unplug when I leave for the night.”
“Understood. And no worries, I got my own extension cord.”
“Talk to me about Vinnie disappearing,” I said to Mooner. “Walk me through it again.”
“Well, like I said, we were groovin’. We were listening to some Dead and gettin’ mellow. I was, like, just drivin’ around spreading the word. And next thing, I spotted the bakery, so I wheeled the old bus into the lot.”
“Stop,” I said. “Picture the lot. Was it empty?”
“No. There were, like, two cars. The big car and the little car.”
“An SUV and a sportscar.”
“Correcto mundo.”
“Were the cars occupied?”
“Don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. I wasn’t paying attention. And suppose someone was, like, lying down on the seat taking a nap? I mean, I wouldn’t see them, right? So would that count?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, like, dude.”
“What was Vinnie doing when you left for the bakery?”
“He was riding shotgun. And I guess he was looking out the window. Except there wasn’t anything to see but the parking lot.”
“So Vinnie is in the RV in the shotgun seat and you’re walking into the bakery. Was anyone in the lot? Maybe going to their car?”
“No. The lot was empty except for me.”
“How about the bakery? Were there any customers in the bakery besides you?”
