Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel by Janet Evanovich(2)

Ranger pulled out of the restaurant lot, stopped for a light, and his hand went to my knee and traveled north.

“Um,” I said.

He cut his eyes to me. “Is there a problem?”

“Your hand is moving up my leg.”

“And?”

“We’ve talked about this.”

“Not lately,” Ranger said.

“Has anything changed?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“Is that a definite ‘Well, then’?”

“Afraid it is.”

“Too bad,” Ranger said.

Thirty minutes later, Ranger parked behind my apartment building and walked me to my door.

“Call me if you get lonely,” he said.

“I have you on speed dial,” I told him.

A barely perceptible smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, he gave me a light kiss, and he left.

Truth is, I would have liked to invite him in, but that wouldn’t have been the smart thing to do. Not that I always do the smart thing, but tonight I’d managed to keep from grabbing him and ripping his clothes off. Two points for Plum.

I let myself into my apartment and went to the kitchen to say hello to my hamster, Rex. Rex lives in an aquarium on my kitchen counter and sleeps in a soup can. He was running on his wheel when I looked in on him.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

Rex blinked his round black eyes at me and twitched his whiskers. That’s about as complicated as our conversations ever get. I dropped a peanut into his cage and he jumped off his wheel, shoved the peanut into his cheek, and scurried into his soup can with it.



My cousin Vinnie’s bail bonds office is on Hamilton Avenue. It’s a one-story storefront building with some parking spots by the back door. Vinnie has an inner office where he hides from people he’s stiffed, pissed off, infected with herpes, or previously incarcerated. Vinnie looks like a weasel in a pimp suit. His wife, Lucille, is a saint. His father-in-law, Harry the Hammer, owns the agency and didn’t get his nickname because he was a carpenter.

Connie Rosolli, the office manager and guard dog, was at her desk when I walked in.

“How’d it go last night?” she asked.

“It was good. Ranger walked up to Gardi, yanked him out of his chair, and cuffed him. Very smooth.”

“And?”

“That was it.”

“No naked Ranger in your bed?”

“Nope.”

“Disappointing,” Connie said.

Tell me about it. “Anything new come in for me?”

“I have a failure-to-appear. High money bond. Jimmy Poletti.”

“He owns all those car dealerships, right? He shoots his own commercials. ‘Make a deal with Jimmy!’ ”

“Yeah, turned out some of the deals were taking place in the back room and involved underage girls imported from Mexico.”

I took the file from Connie and paged through it, stopping to look at Poletti’s mugshot. Very respectable. Sixty-two years old. Face a little doughy. Thinning gray hair. Crisp white dress shirt and striped tie. Nice dark blue suit jacket. Looked more like a banker than a car dealer.

“Boy,” I said, “you never know from looking at someone.”

The front door banged open, and Lula stomped in. At 5′ 5″, Lula is a couple inches too short for her weight. She’s a black woman who changes her hair color like other women change their underwear, and her fashion preferences run to tiny spandex skirts and tops. Almost always she overflows out of the skirts and tops, but it seems to work for her.

“I just got a traffic ticket,” Lula said. “Do you believe it? What’s this world coming to when a woman can’t even drive to work without this harassment?”

“What’s the ticket for?” Connie asked.

“Speeding,” Lula said.

I looked over at her. “Were you speeding?”

“Hell, yeah. I was doing forty-three miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone and Officer Picky pulled me over. There should be a law against thirty-mile-an-hour zones. My car don’t want to go that slow. It’s painful to drive thirty miles an hour.”

“I’ve got donuts,” Connie said, gesturing to the white bakery box on her desk. “Help yourself.”

Lula’s face brightened. “That helps perk up my mood. I’m taking one with sprinkles. And maybe one with chocolate icing. And look at this one with the pink gooey stuff oozing out of it.”

Lula bit into the one with the sprinkles. “What happened last night with you and Mr. Tall, Dark, Handsome as Hell, and Hot?”

“He captured Gardi. No shots fired.”

“And?”

“There’s no ‘and.’ ”

“Say what? There’s no ‘and he got naked and waved his magic wand’?”

“Nope,” Connie said. “No magic wand. She didn’t get to see the wand.”

“Well, you know he got one,” Lula said. “How come he didn’t wave it and make her a happy princess?”

Connie and Lula looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for an explanation.

“It was a job,” I said. “It didn’t involve his … wand.”