I did a fast scan of the cavernous space. Rows of boxes stacked one on another. Gallon tins of olive oil on wire shelves. More boxes. An eighteen-wheeler in the garage area. No Jason.
Brenda opened a door at the far end of the hall and yelped. “Jason!”
We all ran down the hall and looked into the room. Jason was working on his laptop. Slasher and another man were slouched into a couch, watching a small television.
“I’m sorry, boss,” Lancer said. “I couldn’t stop them.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t stop them?” the man said. “You have a gun, don’t you? Shoot them.”
Lancer hesitated.
The man stood, pulled a gun, and pointed it at Jason. “How about this, Brenda. How about I shoot your kid if you don’t go home. He’s doing good stuff for us here, so I’ll only shoot him in the leg.”
Brenda went beady-eyed. “Chester, you bastard. If anyone’s going to get shot, it’s going to be you.”
And before anyone could move, she fired on Chester, tagging him in the arm.
“Kill her!” Chester yelled. “Kill her!”
Lancer trained his gun on Brenda, and I tackled him from behind. We went to the floor, and his gun discharged two rounds. One zinged past Lula, and the second cut off two inches from her four-inch stiletto heel.
“
“You’re fine,” I said to her. “You just fell off your shoe.”
“I see darkness,” Lula said. “It’s closing in on me. There’s a tunnel of light. I see angels. No, wait a minute, there’s no angels. Shit, it’s Tony Soprano.”
It wasn’t Tony Soprano. It was Chester Billings, roaring like a wounded bull elephant, charging across the room at Lula and Brenda. He knocked the little gun out of Brenda’s hand and grabbed the rocket launcher. Somehow in the scuffle the rocket got launched,
“Fire in the warehouse,” Lancer said. “The rocket must have hit a propane tank.”
Smoke poured into the windowless room, and there was a rush to evacuate. Everyone ran into the hall and scattered. Lancer, Slasher, and Billings ran in one direction. Lula, Brenda, and Jason ran in another. I was the last out of the room. I stepped into the hall and the lights blinked off. I was confused in the dark, choking on the smoke. An arm wrapped around me, nearly lifting me off my feet, moving me in the opposite direction. It was Ranger.
“This way,” he said, pushing me down the hall to a fire door.
He shoved the door open, and we were out of the building. I could hear emergency vehicles screaming on the approach road.
“How many people were in the building?” Ranger asked.
“Six plus me.”
Ranger was connected to Tank in the other SUV. “Talk to me,” Ranger said.
I could hear Tank on speakerphone. “Lula disappeared into the woods behind us. I shouted at her, but she kept going. Five more people came out of the building and scattered. A woman and a young guy panicked and ran in opposite directions when a flaming chunk of roof landed next to them. The woman is hiding behind the Dumpster. We tried to get her, but she shot at us. The guy is out there somewhere. Looked like he had a computer. Three men jumped into a Mercedes and took off.”
“Everyone’s out of the building,” Ranger said to me. “Let’s move, unless you want to talk to the police.”
“No!”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me at a flat-out run across the lot, over a grassy median that separated Billings Gourmet Food from the neighboring business, Dot Plumbing. Two Rangeman SUVs sat at idle in the shadow of the Dot building. Ranger got behind the wheel of one, and the second followed us to the edge of the lot, lights off.
Flames were shooting from the top of the Billings warehouse. Police cars slid to a stop in the lot. Fire trucks rumbled in.
“Did you call the fire and police?” I asked Ranger.
“No. I didn’t have to. The explosion blew the roof off the building. It could be seen for miles. And my control room heard the fire alert go in from Billings’s security system.”
“I don’t see Lula’s car in the lot.”
“I had Hal move it. He’s on the road in front of us.”
Ranger pulled onto the service road and Lula jumped out of a clump of bushes, waving her arms and yelling. She had one shoe on and one shoe off, leaves were stuck in her soot-smudged pink-and-yellow hair, and her gold sequined tank top was blinding in Ranger’s headlights.
“It’s Lula Sunshine,” Ranger said, stopping to let her jump into the SUV.
“Holy cow. Holy crap. Holy moly,” Lula said. “That was freakin’ scary. And look what that idiot did to my shoe. These are genuine Louboutin knock-offs. Where am I gonna get another shoe to match this?”
Ranger turned onto Route 295, and Lula sat forward in her seat.
“What about my car?” Lula asked. “We can’t leave my baby here. It’ll get ashes all over it. That sucker went up like a whatdoyoucallit? An inferno.”
“Hal has the Firebird,” Ranger said. “He’s taking it back to Trenton.”
“Really? Wow. Hal’s a sweetie,” Lula said. “I’m gonna have to do something real nice for him.”
The corners of Ranger’s mouth twitched into a small smile.
“Gutter head,” I said to him.
That turned the twitch to a full-on smile.
A police car blew past us, lights flashing.
Lula had her nose to the window. “I think that was Brenda’s kid behind the wheel of the cop car!”
A half hour later, Ranger and I were parked in my lot. Lula was gone. She’d retrieved her Firebird and was meeting Hal at a downtown bar to show him her appreciation.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” I said to Ranger.
“I sent Hal and Rafael to keep an eye on you, and I went to check on a commercial account in Whitehorse. Rafael called to tell me Lula went in with a rocket launcher, so I skipped Whitehorse. I pulled into the lot seconds before you destroyed Billings Foods.”
“It was an accident,” I said.
He looked at my hair. “And?”
“Professional necessity. I had to get information out of a hairdresser.”
“I knew the explanation would be worthwhile.” He checked his watch. “I’d like to stay and seduce you, but I have to backtrack to Whitehorse. Someone managed to hack into the alarm system and clean out a computer store we’re supposed to be protecting.”
I squelched a grimace. I suspected I knew who’d done the hacking.
“How sophisticated are these hackers?” I asked him. “Suppose the photograph everyone was looking for had a code hidden in it? Like, could the photo look like Ashton Kutcher, but when you fed it into a computer it would break down into digital components? And those digital components could be a code a hacker could use to start a car? Is that possible or is it just fiction?”
“The technology is real. And it’s an increasing threat to my business. They’re not so much codes as messages that instruct another computer to perform a function, like starting a car or disabling a security system.”
I woke up the next morning thinking about Razzle Dazzle. I had my phone in my hand to call Morelli, and a text message buzzed in from him.
My equipment was loaded and charged and positioned in my bag for easy access. I stayed vigilant when I
