Finger Lickin' Fifteen (3 page)

THREE

A HALF HOUR LATER, Ranger and I were parked on the six hundred block of Stark Street. Stark Street starts down by the river, cuts through the center of the city, and runs straight to hell. Storefronts are grimy, decorated with gang graffiti and the accumulated grit of day-today life in the breakdown lane. Hookers stake out corners, knots of kids going nowhere strut the street, men chainsmoke in doorways, and pushers work the sidewalks.

Ranger was behind the wheel of a shiny black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows and fancy chrome wheel covers. No one could see us sitting in the SUV, and we were left unmolested as a sign of respect by the general population of Stark Street, who assumed the car belonged to contract killers, badass hip-hop gangsters, or high-level drug dealers.

The sun had set, but there was ambient light from streetlights and headlights and doors opening into bars. Enough light to determine that Marbles wasn’t on the street.

“I don’t see anyone who looks like a runner,” I said to Ranger.

“The kid in the oversize sweatshirt, white T-shirt, and homeboy jeans.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s making deals.”

“And?”

“And this block belongs to Marbles. The kid would be dead if he wasn’t working for Marbles. Marbles isn’t a charitable kind of guy.”

“Maybe Marbles sold his real estate and left town.”

“Not his style. He’s in one of these buildings, conducting business. Besides owning drugs on the six hundred block, he also manages a couple hookers. Marbles read the memo on diversification. I ran into him two years ago, and he was operating an all-night dog-grooming and cockfighting operation. The cockfighting didn’t involve poultry.”

It took me a couple beats to figure that out. And even then, how the heck did a guy go about it? Was it like thumb wrestling? I was debating asking about the rules and regulations of cockfighting, but just then the kid in the sweatshirt ambled into a building halfway down the block.

“He’s going back to the mother ship,” Ranger said.

Mostly, Stark Street is filled with narrow redbrick town houses, two to four stories tall. Small businesses in varying degrees of failure occupy ground floors, and the upper floors are given over to cramped apartments and rented rooms. At odd intervals on the street, you might find a garage or a ware house or a funeral home. The kid went into a four-story brick town house. All the windows had been painted black.

Ranger and I left the Escalade, crossed the street, and followed the kid into the building. The foyer was dimly lit by a bare bulb in an overhead fixture, the walls were entirely covered with graffiti. A door labeled HEAD MOTHERFUCKER opened off the foyer.

Ranger and I exchanged glances and went directly to the Head Motherfucker door. Ranger pushed the door open, and we looked inside at what at one time had probably been an efficiency apartment but was now a rat’s nest office. The desk was piled high with papers, empty fast-food boxes, a laptop computer, a multiline phone, and two half-filled cups of coffee. There was a chair behind the desk and a two-seater leather couch against a wall. Nobody home.

We left the office, closing the door behind us. We returned to the foyer and took the stairs to the second floor, where a dull-eyed wannabe junior gangsta sat on a plastic lawn chair. He was hooked up to an MP3 player, and he had a small wooden table beside him. There was a cigar box and a roll of tickets on the table.

“Yuh?” he said. “You want a ticket for the night or just for a run-through?”

“Run-through,” Ranger said.

“Twenty bucks each. Forty each, if you want a jumpsuit.”

“Just the run-through ticket,” Ranger said.

“You know the rules? You collect a ticket from the dude without no mess, and you get a kewpie doll. You’re gonna be on the third floor.”

Ranger and I climbed the stairs to the third floor and stood in the hallway.

“Do you have any idea what he was talking about?” I asked Ranger.

“No. Knowing Marbles, it could be most anything.”

There were two doors that opened off the hallway. The doors were labeled PUSSY and MOTHERFUCKERS.

“I’m taking the Motherfucker door,” I said to Ranger.

“No way. That’s my door.”

“Well, I’m sure as hell not taking the Pussy door.”

“It’s just a door, Babe.”

“Great. Then
you
take it.”

Ranger moved to the Pussy door and shoved it open. He walked through the front room and looked into two other rooms. “It’s an apartment. Looks like it was decorated by someone on ’shrooms. No one home.”

I opened the Motherfucker door and stepped inside. The door closed behind me, neon red, green, blue, and white strobe lights activated and flickered across the front room, and hip-hop boomed from overhead speakers. I opened a door. Closet. I opened another door and a crazy-eyed, woolly-haired, scrawny guy in too-big pants and too-big shoes shouldered a gun at me from across the room.

“Gonna put a cap up your pussy ass,” he said.

And
POW
.

I felt the bullet hit my shoulder, knock me back an inch or two, and something splattered out across my chest.

“What the?” I said.

“Run, Pussy!”

“What?”

“Run!”

And
POW
. I got shot again.
POW
.
POW
.

An arm wrapped around my waist, and I was lifted off my feet and whisked out of the room and back into the hall. Ranger kicked the door closed and set me down.

“What? Why?” I asked.

“Paintball. Are you okay?”

“No! It hurt. It’s like getting hit with a rock. Why on earth do people do that? You’d have to be crazy.”

“It’s a game,” Ranger said. “Usually. This version is more like shooting sitting ducks.”

I checked myself out. I was completely splattered with blue, pink, and yellow paint. It was in my hair and on my shoes and everywhere in between. There was no paint on Ranger.

“You don’t have a drop of paint on you,” I said. “Why is that?”

Ranger smiled, liking that he hadn’t gotten hit. “I guess they were hunting pussy.”

“But I walked into the Motherfucker room.”

“Yeah, but babe, you’re clearly pussy.”

“That is so sexist and
annoying
. These are my favorite sneakers, and now they’re ruined. I’ll never get this paint out.”

“I’m sure it’s water-based. Throw them in the washer.”

“I don’t have a washer.”

Ranger took my hand and tugged me toward the stairs. “Then throw them in your mother’s washer.”

“You wouldn’t be this cheery if
you
were covered in paint.”

He pushed my back to the wall and leaned in to me. “Would you like me to take your mind off your sneakers?”

I bit into my lower lip.

“Well?” he asked, kissing me just below my ear, making the little man in the boat pay attention.

“I’m th-th-thinking.”

Actually, I was thinking he’d have half my paint on him when he pried himself loose. And along with that I was thinking he felt great plastered against me. He was big and warm and strong.

A door banged open on the first floor and conversation carried up to us. Ranger listened for a moment and eased away. I followed him down the stairs and into the first-floor hall, where the kid in the white T-shirt and homeboy jeans stood talking to a stocky older man with wiry gray hair. Both guys looked up when we stepped into the hall. The kid froze in his tracks. The older guy spun around, ran to the office, and locked himself inside.

Ranger dismissed the kid and knocked on the locked office door. He waited a couple beats and knocked again. When there was no response to his second knock, he put his foot to the door and kicked it open.

“Jeez Louise,” I said to Ranger, knowing he could have finessed the lock and opened the door.

Ranger smiled. “Making a statement.”

The guy inside the office was behind his desk, waving his arms, his eyes rolling around in their sockets, popped out like marbles.

“This must be Marbles,” I said to Ranger.

“Only one of them is real,” Ranger said.

“You broke my door,” Marbles said. “You’re gonna pay. You think doors grow on trees?”

“Bond enforcement,” Ranger said.

“That’s bullshit. You owe me for a door. And she owes me for playing. Does she have a ticket? Where’s her fuckin’ ticket?”

Ranger never shows much emotion. I saw him walk into a room once, knowing he was going to get shot and maybe die, and he was perfectly composed. Only because I’ve spent a decent amount of time with him did I know the limit to his patience. So I took a step back and gave him some room, because I knew he was done talking.

“And another thing . . .” Marbles said, finger pointed at Ranger, eyes all googly-woogly.

Marbles never finished the sentence, because in a matter of moments, he was on the ground and cuffed. Ranger dragged Marbles to his feet and set him in his chair. Marbles opened his mouth to speak, Ranger looked at him, and Marbles clamped his mouth shut.

“You have a choice,” Ranger said to me. “We can take him to the station and get him booked in, or I can have one of my men do it, and I can take you home so we can get you out of your clothes.”

“
We
can get me out of my clothes? Are you planning on making it a group activity?”

“Figure of speech, Babe. I don’t need help getting you undressed.” He answered his cell phone, listened for a moment, and disconnected. “Change in plans,” he said, yanking Marbles out of his chair. “There’s been another break-in. We’ll take Marbles with us and pass him off on site.”

FOUR

THE HOUSE WAS a big white colonial with black shutters and a massive mahogany front door. The grounds were professionally landscaped. A dusty and battered police cruiser and two gleaming black Rangeman SUVs were parked in the circular drive. Ranger parked behind one of the Rangeman SUVs, we got out, and Tank and Hal came forward to meet us.

I gave Hal my paperwork for Marbles, Hal got behind the wheel, backed the Escalade out of the drive and disappeared down the street.

“Same MO,” Tank told Ranger. “The clients attended a political fund-raiser, came home, and found money and jewelry missing.” He handed Ranger a list. “We interrogated the system and found it had been briefly disarmed and then reset.”

“Anything missing besides the money and jewelry?”

“Some electronics. They’re going through the house now, trying to make sure the list is complete.”

“I want Stephanie to walk through the house and look at it from a woman’s point of view. Make sure she has total access. Assure the owners her paint isn’t wet.”

Tank looked at my paint-splattered hair and clothes. He paused for a beat, but he didn’t smile or frown or grimace. “Yessir,” he said to Ranger.

I wandered around, checking out the kitchen with its professional-level appliances, marble countertops and splash plates, warming ovens and wine cooler. I thought it would be nice to have a kitchen like this, although most of it would go unused. All I actually needed was a butter knife, a loaf of white bread, and a jar of peanut butter. And can you fill a wine cooler with Bud Light?

The upstairs master bath had a crystal chandelier and a bidet. I knew the
purpose
for the bidet, because I had seen
Crocodile Dundee
about a hundred times, but I wasn’t sure how one actually
used
a bidet. I mean, does it shoot water up your cooter or do you splash it around? And I thought I might have issues with the crystal chandelier. I wasn’t sure I could do number two in a room with a crystal chandelier.

I’d looked at the list, so I knew what had been taken and what had been left. There was a safe in the master bedroom, but it hadn’t been touched. Madame’s jewelry had been easy access in a jewelry case on display in her walk-in closet. A couple thousand in twenties had been left on the dresser. All this stuff was gone. Plus two laptop computers from the home office, and a Patek Philippe man’s watch.

I wandered around in the house for a half hour while the police did their thing, and Ranger did his thing, and the burgled house owners, a conservatively dressed middle-aged couple, quietly sat in the living room, looking shell-shocked.

Ranger caught up with me in the front foyer. “Any ideas?” he asked me.

“The thieves only hit two rooms. The master bedroom and the home office. There was a woman’s rose gold and diamond Cartier watch on the kitchen counter. And there were four icons that looked priceless in a display case in the living room. All untouched. Is this always the pattern?”

“Yes. They disable the alarm for precisely fifteen minutes, and they move directly to the master bedroom and office.”

“Why fifteen minutes?”

Ranger did palms-up. “I don’t know.”

“No prints left on doorknobs?”

“None.”

“And they only hit residential accounts?”

“So far.”

“This house has two security keypads. Can you tell which was used?”

“They always enter and exit through the garage.”

“The garage in this house opens into a short hall that leads to the kitchen. That means they walked through the kitchen twice and didn’t take the watch.”

“Correct,” Ranger said.

“Do you have anyone working for you who’s OCD or superstitious?”

“Almost everyone. I’m going to have Tank take you back to Rangeman so you can get your car. I need to stay here for a while and then I have paperwork to complete.”

“So I’m off the hook with the undressing thing?”

“Rain check,” Ranger said.

I drove home and did my own undressing, lathering, and shampooing. When I flopped into bed, my hair was still multicolored.

I STOPPED AT the bonds office on my way to Rangeman. It was a little before nine in the morning, and the air was warm, and the sky was almost blue. It was Indian summer in Jersey.

Connie and Lula looked over when I walked through the door.

“What the heck happened to you?” Lula wanted to know. “You got tutti-frutti hair. Is this some new fashion statement?”

“No, this is the result of a paintball encounter on Stark Street. The good news is I apprehended Kenny Hatcher.”

“Your mother’s going to have a cow when she sees your hair,” Connie said. “You try water? You try paint thinner?”

“I’ve tried everything.”

“I like it,” Lula said. “You should add some more pink. Pink’s a good color on you. And by the way, have you been listening to the radio? There’s a big reward being offered to anyone who brings in the guy who whacked Stanley Chipotle.”

“How big?”

“A million dollars. It’s from the barbecue sauce company he did all those advertisements for. Fire in the Hole Red Hot Barbecue Sauce. He was supposed to represent them in this cook-off coming up. And I’m gonna get that reward. I know what those guys look like. All I have to do is find them. So I thought I’d cut you and Connie in on it, and between us we could track them down and we’d each get a third of a million dollars.”

“I’m so there,” Connie said. “I could pay my mortgage off with that money.”

“What would you do with the money?” Lula asked me.

I didn’t know what I’d do. My mind was blank. The amount was incomprehensible to me. I could put a crystal chandelier in my crapper for that kind of money. I could buy a case of motor oil and feed it to my $700 car. I could download all the
3rd Rock from the Sun
episodes from iTunes. I could get the works on my pizza. I could buy new sneakers. I
really
needed new sneakers. I could probably buy a house, for crying out loud. Except I didn’t actually
want
a house. I had a hard enough time keeping people out of my apartment. If I had a house, the weirdos would be coming in every door and window and down the chimney like Santa. Plus, I’d have to cut grass and paint the porch and caulk the tub.

“I think this is about barbecue sauce,” Lula said. “Everyone knows it’s dog-eat-dog out there in barbecue land. You wait and see, someone didn’t want Stanley Chipotle in that barbecue contest. I looked into it, and he always wins those contests. He was the one who come up with Fire in the Hole Red Hot Barbecue Sauce. He invented that recipe, and when he’s in a contest, he has a secret ingredient he puts in. I’m tellin’ you, Stanley Chipotle’s killer is a sauce freak. So I figure we just gotta bust into the barbecue circuit and we’ll find the killer.”

“Bust into the circuit?”

“All I gotta do is enter the contest as one of them chefs. I bet I could even win.”

“You can’t cook.”

“That’s true so far, but that could change. I’m real good at eatin’. I got a highly developed palate. Especially for barbecue. I just gotta take some of my eatin’ talent and make it into cookin’ talent. Anyways, I only gotta come up with sauce. How hard could it be? I mean, you start out with ketchup and keep adding pepper until you feel it burnin’ a hole in your stomach.”

“I don’t think it’s that easy,” Connie said. “I watch these contests on The Food Channel, and you have to use the sauce on ribs and chicken and stuff. Can you cook ribs or chicken?”

“Not yet,” Lula said. “But I know I could be real good at it. Look at me. Don’t I look like a woman who could cook the shit out of chicken? I’m like a combination of Paula Deen and Mario Whatshisname. I’m just around the corner from bein’ the Mrs. Butterworth of barbecue sauce.”

“The cook-off is in a week,” Connie said. “Is there still time for you to enter? Do you have to qualify or something?”

“I don’t have to do nothin’ but sign up,” Lula said. “I already looked into it, and the idiot who’s runnin’ the cook-off used to be a customer of mine back when I was a ’ho. He was what you call a drive-by. He’d pick me up on my corner, and two blocks later, we’d concluded our business.”

“That’s more information than I need,” Connie said.

“Well, I’m just sayin’ so you get the picture.”

“I have to run,” I told them. “I’m late for work.”

“After we win the contest and capture the killer, none of us is gonna have to work,” Lula said. “We’re all gonna be ladies of leisure.”

IT WAS NOON, and Ranger’s men were moving around, breaking for lunch, so I left my cubicle and went to the kitchen area to mingle. Ella kept the large glass-fronted refrigerator filled with sandwiches, fruit, raw veggies, yogurt, low-fat milk, snack-size cheeses, a variety of fruit juices, plus individual cups of chicken salad and vegetable soup. Early in the morning, Ella supplemented this with a caldron of oatmeal and a chafing dish of scrambled eggs. The dinner offering was always some sort of Crock-Pot stew, plus a breadbasket.

Ranger almost always ate breakfast and dinner in his apartment. And lunch was usually a sandwich and piece of fruit from the common kitchen, taken back to his office. There were three small round tables set to one side of the kitchen. Each table held four chairs. Two men I didn’t know were eating at one of the tables. Hal and Ramon were at another. The third table was empty. I selected a sandwich and joined Hal and Ramon. I’ve known Hal for a while now. Hal isn’t the sharpest tack on the corkboard, but he tries hard. His nickname is Halosaurus, because there’s a stegosaurus resemblance.

“You’re my new favorite person,” Ramon said. “You got me out of that cubicle. I was dying in that cubicle.”

“It’s not my favorite job, either,” I said, “but I needed the money.”

I unwrapped my sandwich and examined it. Multigrain bread, pretty ruffled green lettuce, thin-sliced chicken, a slice of tomato, slices of hard-cooked egg, and salad dressing that was for sure low fat. It looked good, but it would look even better with bacon.

“No bacon,” I said, more to myself than to Hal and Ramon.

Hal grinned. “Ranger thinks bacon is the work of the devil.”

“Sometimes I walk past Ella’s apartment, and I smell bacon frying,” Ramon said. “I think she makes it for Louis.” He looked over at me. “Have you ever seen Ranger eat bacon?”

“No,” I said. “Not that I can remember.”

“I think sometimes he cheats and goes to eat with Louis,” Ramon said.

“No way,” Hal said. “Ranger’s pure.”

Both men looked at me.

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m not commenting on that one.”

Hal flushed red, and Ramon gave a bark of laughter.

I finished my sandwich and pushed back from the table. “I’m going for a walk around the building. Is there anyplace off-limits for us worker people?”

“Only the seventh floor. No one would mind if you went into the men’s locker room, but there could be a lot of wood if you stayed too long. And then Ranger would probably fire us all,” Ramon said.

“I don’t want to get anyone fired.”

“That’s good,” Hal said, “because everyone here wants to keep their job.”

“Not everyone,” Ramon said.

I cut my eyes to him.

“You were on the job last night,” he said to me. “I’m sure you know the problem.
Everyone
in the building knows the problem.”

“Then why isn’t the problem solved?” I asked him.

Ramon did palms-up. “Good question. If I knew, I would tell immediately. And so would Hal. And before this happened, I would say every man in the building would tell and would lay down their life for Ranger.”

“Maybe it’s not in the building,” I said to Ramon.

“I would like to believe that.”

I glanced at Hal. “What do you think?”

Hal shook his head. “I don’t know what to think. It used to be we were a team here, and now we’re all pulled up inside ourselves. It’s creepy working with people who are looking at you funny.”

I stood and gathered my trash off the table. “I’m sure Ranger has it under control. He doesn’t seem overly worried.”

“I saw Ranger jump off a bridge into the Delaware River in January once. He was going after a skip, and he didn’t seem overly worried,” Ramon said. “He handed me his gun, and he did about a sixty-foot free fall into black water.”

“Did he get the skip?” I asked him.

“Yeah. He dragged the guy out and cuffed him.”

“So he was right not to be worried.”

“Anyone else would have fuckin’ died. Excuse the language.”

I wandered out of the kitchen, walked past my cubicle and down the hall to Ranger’s office.

“Knock, knock,” I said at his open door.

He looked up from his computer. “Babe.”

“Do you have a minute?”

“I’ve got as much time as you need.”

I knew he wasn’t just talking about conversation, and there was a quality to his voice that gave me a rush. And then, for some inexplicable reason, I thought about Morelli. Morelli didn’t flirt like Ranger. Morelli would say
sure
and then he’d look down my shirt to try to see some boob. It was actually very playful, and it felt affectionate when Morelli did it.

Ranger relaxed back in his chair. “I’m pretty sure I lost you for a couple beats.”

“My mind wandered.”

“As long as it always comes back.”

I repeated my conversation with Hal and Ramon.

“This business runs on trust,” Ranger said. “Ninety-five percent of the time, the work is mundane. When it rolls over into the other five percent, you need total confidence that the man watching your back is on the job. Knowing there’s an unidentified weak link in the organization puts stress on everyone.”

I left Ranger and walked through the building. I couldn’t listen at doors or rifle through files, because I was always on camera. I peeked into the conference rooms and strolled halls. I stuck my head into the gym but stayed away from the locker room. The garage, the practice range, some high-security holding rooms were below ground, and I didn’t go there. The men I encountered gave me a courteous nod and returned to work. No invitations to stay and chat.

I returned to Ranger. “You have a well-oiled machine,” I told him. “Everything looks neat and clean and secure.”