“Yeah, but if these people were smart, they wouldn’t be working in a junkyard at the end of the world.”
No argument there. It wasn’t so much the junkyard as it was the proximity to Hell. Connie’s cousin Manny Rosolli owned the junkyard. I knew him in a remote sort of way, and he seemed like a nice man. And since 80 percent of Connie’s family was mob, this gave Manny a certain amount of security in spite of the precarious location.
I found the trailer that served as an office and asked for Andy, the son of Grandma’s friend Mrs. Kulicki. I was told he was stacking cars, and I was directed to the part of the lot where cars were stored when they came out of the compactor. Fortunately, the compactor wasn’t currently in use, so I was spared the sound of cars getting crushed to death.
It was easy to find Andy since he was the only one there. Plus, he was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit with his name embroidered in black. He was a gangly tattooed guy with multiple piercings. I was guessing nineteen or twenty years old.
“You got a ankle bracelet on, too?” Lula asked him.
“This isn’t prison clothes,” Andy said. “It’s so the crusher guy can see me, so I don’t get a car dropped on me.”
“I’m looking for Joyce Barnhardt,” I told him.
“You might have a hard time finding her,” he said. “She could have got compacted. I was cleaning up, and I found her driver’s license on the ground, along with a smashed lady’s high heel shoe and a lipstick. You’d be surprised what gets shook loose after the crusher. There’s all kinds of stuff falling out of these cars when they get picked up and stacked.”
“Where’s the car now?”
“Dunno. No way to tell which car it came from.”
“Did you tell the police?” I asked him.
“Nope. I told the office. But they said when it comes to suspecting bodies in the crusher, we have a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”
“What happened to the license and the shoe?”
“Threw them away. The license was all torn and bent, and the shoe was a mess and it smelled real bad. Anyway, the office said no one ever comes to claim stuff that’s been shook from the crusher.”
“Probably, the junkyard’s doing big disposal business since they put the surveillance cameras up at the landfill,” Lula said. “I bet you could bring a cadaver dog here, and he wouldn’t know where to go first.”
SEVEN
“I’M HUNGRY,” LULA SAID, pulling out of the junkyard. “What would Ranger eat for lunch? I bet he’d be up for a bucket of fried chicken.”
“He usually grabs a sandwich at Rangeman. Roast beef on multigrain. Or a turkey club.”
“I could do that. What else does he eat?”
“An apple sometimes. And water.”
“Say what? Is that it? How could he live on that? What about chips? What about a root beer float? And how many of those roast beef sandwiches does he eat for lunch?”
“One sandwich. No chips.”
“That’s un-American. He’s not stimulating the economy like that. I’d feel it was my patriotic duty to at least have chips.”
Lula stopped at a deli on the first block of Stark.
“This looks sketchy,” I said. “The window is dirty, and I just saw a rat run out the front door.”
“I’ve been here before,” she said. “They give you a half-pound of meat on your sandwich, and they throw in pickles for free. If I’m only gonna have one sandwich, this is the place.”
It looked to me like they threw in food poisoning for free, too. “I’ll pass.”
“You have no spirit of culinary adventure. You need to be more like that snarky guy on the Travel Channel. He goes all over the world eating kangaroo assholes and snail throw-up. He’d eat anything. He don’t care how sick he gets. He’s another one of my role models, except he needs ironing.” She took her big silver Glock out of her purse and handed it over to me. “You wait here and don’t let anyone take my car.”
I hefted the Glock, aiming it out the window at an empty street corner. My own gun was smaller, a Smith & Wesson.45 revolver. I’d gotten it from Ranger when I first started doing bond enforcement and Connie had asked him to mentor me. He was scary tough and mysteriously complex back then. He isn’t so different now. He’s abandoned his Special Forces camo fatigues for Rangeman black, he’s dropped the ghetto accent and lost the ponytail as his business needs changed, but he’s still a tough guy with lots of secrets.
Lula hustled out of the deli with a large plastic food container in one hand, a massive wax paper-wrapped sandwich in the other, and a two-liter bottle of soda under her arm.
“He put all my free pickles right into the sandwich,” she said, sliding behind the wheel. “And I got some homemade potato salad instead of chips. It was half price.”
Oh boy. Bargain potato salad from the Rats-R-Us. “The potato salad might not be a good idea,” I said.
Lula opened the lid and sniffed. “Smells okay.” She dug in with her plastic fork. “Tastes okay. Got a tang to it.” She unwrapped her sandwich, ate half, and washed it down with some soda.
I tried not to grimace. I didn’t want to ruin her eating experience, but I was getting queasy inhaling the meat and mayo fumes. I had my window down and my head halfway out when the Lincoln pulled up alongside.
Lancer made a gun with his hand, index finger pointed at me. “Bang,” he said.
I still had Lula’s Glock in my lap. I raised it and pointed it at Lancer, and he drove away.
“What was that about?” Lula asked.
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m getting real tired of hearing
I tell Ranger nothing. Ranger isn’t a talker. Ranger reveals very little and doesn’t encourage verbal spewing on the part of others.
“On the way home from Hawaii, I accidentally picked up a photograph of a man,” I said to Lula. “I didn’t know who he was or how I got the photograph, so I threw it away. Turns out it’s one of a kind, it’s tied to national security somehow, and now I’m the only one who knows what the guy looks like. The FBI is searching for the guy, and the two morons who just drove by are searching for the guy. And it’s possible there are other people searching for the guy.”
“And you say you’re the only one who knows what he looks like?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know where this guy lives?”
“I don’t know anything about him.”
“This makes you real special,” Lula said. “It’s like you’re a reality show, all by yourself.”
Lula finished her sandwich and her tub of potato salad, and we looked over my list of skips.
“I’m just not excited about any of this,” Lula said. “Now that I’m gonna be operating at Ranger level, I need more of a challenge. Where’s the killers and the serial rapists? How come we don’t have any of them? The best we got is Joyce, and she’s not looking so difficult. If she’s not dead, she’s out there with only one shoe and no driver’s license.”
Joyce was weighing on me. She wasn’t my favorite person, but I didn’t like thinking she’d been crushed and discarded.
Morelli answered with a sigh.
“Is that you?” I asked him.
“Yup.”
“Are you busy?”
