“How ’bout a week and a half from Friday after next?”
“Je-sus, Mort—”
“Tonight? Tomorrow night? What’ve we got coming up? Last thing I want is to miss poker night with the boys.”
“Tomorrow night would be good. If that’s okay, I’ll let her know, let her start getting that pump primed.”
“That’s not a pump that needs priming, Jeri.”
“Maybe not, but trust me—she’ll be dancing on air.” She got her cell phone out, tapped the screen, got on with Holiday.
Dancing on air. That was nothing like my time in the IRS, so maybe I was making progress. I don’t remember dancing on air or making anyone else dance on air the entire time I was unloading people’s bank accounts, garnishing wages, threatening to take their homes, sell their children. Dancing on air wasn’t the image that came to mind in the morning when I laced up my jackboots to go out and rake in Uncle Sammy’s hard-earned dough. Uncle’s boys, of which I used to be one, had a lot in common with old-time muscle wielding baseball bats who raked in protection money to protect store owners from . . . from old-time muscle with bats who raked in the protection money. Gimme money or I’ll break your legs. That sounded familiar, except breaking legs was replaced with garnishing wages.
But how had I arrived at this place? I tried to follow the path that led from Holiday telling me to stuff my mirror in the bar two weeks ago to this point, this discussion with Jeri in her Porsche as we kept an eye on Leland and Julia’s love nest. I couldn’t do it. The path had too many twists and turns. But I did get something out of a few minutes’ thought while Jeri was on the phone with Holiday. What I got from this entire female tsunami rolling over me was—women are a hell of a lot more complicated than men.
Well, I’d already known that, so the truth was I hadn’t learned anything at all. The knowledge just got driven deeper into what I jokingly refer to as my brain.
“Okay,” Jeri said. “That really made her day. Let’s go look the place over.”
“Expecting to find what, exactly?”
“Won’t know until we find it. But a white Mercedes SUV in that garage out back with the VIN number we’re looking for would be a real winner.”
She started the Porsche and pulled into the driveway. The time was 6:20 p.m., the sky gray with clouds, a breeze making tree limbs sway, dislodging early fall leaves. I watched the house as we drew near. Nothing moved. Curtains were pulled across the windows. The love nest was empty. Even so, I loosened the .357 in its holster.
Jeri pulled up in front of a detached garage—a wide single-car structure circa 1957 with a flat-panel door, slightly warped, that would swing up and inward on twanging hinges—I knew the type.
We got out. I glanced at the house. Still no movement. From this angle I could see a door in the side of the garage and a single dirt-grimed window. Jeri and I went to the door. It was locked, but just like it says in the PI manual, that old lock yielded to the dumb-ass credit card trick, first time I’d ever tried it. Before we went in, I went behind the garage. Junk was piled against the back wall, and what might have been a good-sized woodpile was beneath a blue tarp. Another house stood three hundred yards away across an empty field of dry weeds, half-hidden by scraggly lilac bushes.
I went back to the door, shook my head at Jeri. We went in . . . and there was a white Mercedes SUV.
Sometimes life gives you a break.
“Got it,” Jeri breathed. “This is why we never saw it around town. She kept it out here.”
The car had been driven in with its hood almost touching the back wall. The sides of the place were taken up by shelves with junk on them: old coffee cans of screws and nails, shelf brackets, piston rings, rusty tools, moldering magazines. I pulled my gun and looked the place over while Jeri checked the VIN with her little flashlight. First she shined the light into the cargo hold of the SUV. “Back seats are down. There’s a bundle of rags or something in there.”
“VIN number,” I replied. Light in the garage was dim, coming through two windows clouded by dirt that had been building up since Eisenhower was president.
She shined the light through the windshield on the driver’s side, then grunted. “This’s it,” and maybe her words were the reason I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me, but it might have been that the garage floor was old soft dirt, almost like powder.
“Don’t move.” Julia’s automatic made a nasty ratcheting noise as she chambered a round. “You with the flashlight, get over here.”
I looked at her, framed in the doorway. The gun in her hand looked like a cannon, muzzle aimed at my chest. I felt my breathing stop dead. Her eyes bored into mine.
“Well, if it isn’t Mortimer Angel,” she said quietly.
“Mort.”
“Drop the gun . . . Mort. Now.”
It plopped into dirt near the garage wall.
Julia glanced at Jeri as Jeri rounded the back of the SUV. “That’s far enough, girl. Unless you want this big old boy to die right where he’s standing.”
Jeri stopped moving. She looked at me, then back at Julia. She was twelve feet from Julia, on the far side of the SUV. I was six feet from Julia. For a moment, all three of us stayed like that.
Why was it always me who kept Jeri from going after the one with the weapon? Why was I the chosen patsy? In Jonnie Sjorgen’s old mansion in August it was that psycho girl, Winter, with a deadly foil buried half an inch deep in my back, who kept Jeri at bay.
“This gun’s got a four-pound trigger pull,” Julia said. “I’ve got three on it already, so don’t
