Smokin' Seventeen

building’s back door, worrying about a Dave Brewer appearance, when I heard someone behind me gun a car engine. Regina! I jumped to safety, and she roared past me, sideswiping a beater Dodge that belonged to Mrs. Gonzoles’s loser son. One more dent in the Dodge wasn’t going to get noticed. I sprinted to the building while Regina circled, and I made it inside before she reached me on the second pass.

I took a deep breath and told myself things weren’t as bad as they seemed. Regina would get tired of trying to run me over, Nick Alpha would get arrested, Dave would eventually move on, and one of these days my reproductive system would get back to normal. I took the stairs and thought about Ranger naked, but I wasn’t in a swoon by the time I reached the second floor, so clearly I had a way to go on the path to sexual recovery. At least Dave wasn’t lurking in the hall when I peeked out from the stairwell.

THIRTY-SEVEN

MY CELL PHONE woke me up from a restless sleep.

“I’m at your door. I forgot my key.” Morelli said. “I’ve been knocking and ringing your doorbell. Where are you?”

“I’m here. Hang on.” I dragged myself out of bed and let Morelli in. “What time is it?” I asked him.

“It’s eight o’clock.” He set a bag and a container of coffee on my kitchen counter. “I brought you breakfast. I’m taking off for south Jersey. I want to see the crime scene before it gets dismantled. I’ll probably be gone for most of the day. I was hoping you could walk Bob around noon.”

“Sure.”

He gave me something halfway between a smile and a grimace. “You look like you had a rough night.”

“I had a horrible night. I couldn’t sleep. And when I did fall asleep I had awful dreams.”

“Let me take a guess. The dreams were about chickens.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Did Alpha get arrested?”

Morelli opened my coffee for me. “No. By the time the police got to the warehouse the evidence was scattered over a ten-mile radius.”

I looked in the bag and pulled out a container of orange juice and a bagel with cream cheese. “Thanks for bringing me breakfast. This was really nice of you.”

“Yeah, I’m a nice guy.”

He hooked his finger into the neckline of my cotton knit pajama top, looked inside at my breasts, and gave a small sigh.

“So near and yet so far,” he said.

He kissed me and left.

I dropped a chunk of bagel into Rex’s cage, and I ate the rest. I drank the orange juice and took the coffee into my bedroom to drink while I dressed.

A half hour later I was at the bonds bus.

“Where’s Lula?” I asked Connie.

“She said she’d be in late. Something about her hair.”

“It looks like the cockfighting isn’t going to get Alpha off the street. I’m going to need another angle.”

“I’m sure he’s involved in a lot of bad stuff, but the only other thing I know for sure is the security racket.”

“Do you have store owners’ names?”

“The first three blocks of Stark Street are controlled by Alpha. If a store is open and operating they’re paying for protection. If it’s burned to the ground, they aren’t.”

“That’s pretty straightforward. Would I have any luck if I approached the people who had their store torched?”

“If you could find them … and they were alive and functioning beyond a vegetative state.”

“Jeez.”

Mooner was on the couch, doing the Jumble. “Uncle Black,” he said.

I turned toward him. “Who’s Uncle Black?”

“He owns a comic book store on the second block of Stark. Uncle Black’s Books. He had to raise his prices to cover his payments, but then like the payments got raised. It’s a vicious cycle, dude. Uncle Black’s an unhappy man.”

“I need to talk to Uncle Black,” I said.

“You gotta be comic book worthy, or Uncle Black won’t talk to you. He’s focused. He’s got like comic book laserness. He’s like the comic book guru.”

“Wonderful. I’m the no-talent guru who’s going to get him off the hook to Nick Alpha. Let’s go.”

There wasn’t a lot of traffic on Stark at this time of the morning, and I was able to park in front of Uncle Black’s Books. I locked the Shelby, set the alarm, and followed Mooner into the store. Black’s Books was a small, dusty space, crammed with tables holding thousands of collectible comics in boards and plastic bags. The comics were in alphabetical order according to category. Lots of Spiderman, Superman, X-men. Not so many Betty and Veronica and Casper. Lots of comics I’d never seen.

“Whoa,” Mooner said, obviously gobstruck by a comic in a special display. “ ‘The Creeper versus the Human Firefly.’ Awesome, dude. Fucking awesome.”

“Maybe we should buy that one,” I said to him. “Would that break the ice with Uncle Black? How much is it?”