Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel by Janet Evanovich(60)

I knocked once, opened the door, and Briggs came forward, surrounded by prancing dogs.

“Groceries,” I said.

“What’s with the armed guards? You win the lottery?”

“Ranger thinks I need security.”

Briggs stood on a small step stool and emptied the bags.

“A book?” he asked.

“Yeah, remember before television and computers we used to do this thing called reading?”

The dogs were milling around in the kitchen, watching Briggs.

“How’s it going with the minions?” I asked him.

“Most of them have the leash figured out. Gracie is hopeless. She always wants to run. I have to find a dog park for her. Bernie should be a circus dog. He can walk on his back legs forever. The bony one with the white tip on her tail is a real picky eater, but if I put a little cheese in with her food she gobbles it. Give me a couple days and I’ll have her fattened up.”

“You like them!”

“Except for Blinky. He bit me in the ankle. I think he has trust issues.”

“I was going to help you walk them.”

“That would be great! Maybe you can run a little with Gracie. I can’t keep up with her.”

We got Gracie and three of the others hooked up and took them outside. Me, Briggs, four teeny-tiny dogs, and two heavily armed men. A new black Porsche 911 Turbo was parked next to the two Rangeman SUVs, and Ranger was standing beside it talking to his men.

“What’s up?” I asked Ranger.

“It’s a nice day. I thought I’d go to Atlantic City.”

“You weren’t going to sneak off without me, were you?”

“That was the plan.”

“Can I talk to you in private?”

I handed the dogs off to a Rangeman guy, and Ranger and I walked a short distance away.

“A sick psychopathic freak broke into Morelli’s house and left his gruesome message on the kitchen counter,” I said to Ranger. “I don’t like it. I don’t like that he wants to kill me. I don’t like that he wants to kill you. And I don’t like that Morelli is now involved. I want this creep found and eliminated. I’m in. I know what he looks like and what he sounds like and what he smells like.”

“What does he smell like?” Ranger asked.

“Burning sulfur.”

“I understand your emotion, but you’d serve no purpose today. You’d be a liability.”

“Gee, that’s so flattering. Let me get this straight. You only have me tag along when I serve some useful purpose, like being a dumb bimbo in a bar.”

“Yes.”

“You are such a jerk.”

“Babe.”

I was pretty sure this time “Babe” meant I was giving him a cramp in his sphincter.

He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me to his car. “She’s coming with me,” he said to his men. “Jose and Rodriguez, follow me. Stay a quarter mile back. Keep channel 1 open. Roger and Mario, help Briggs walk the dogs and then return to Rangeman.”

“I need my messenger bag,” I said to Ranger.

“Why?”

“Identification, lipstick, cellphone, and Morelli’s gun, which has bullets in it.”

“Get it.”



It takes about an hour and a half to get from Trenton to Atlantic City. For the most part it’s open highway, so if you’re riding in Ranger’s Porsche and he has his radar detector and laser scrambler up and running, you can make it in just over an hour.

We were flying low today, with Ranger in his zone, driving in silence. The Porsche had paddle shifters, but Ranger rarely used them. Not even Ranger could shift as efficiently as the Porsche computer.

I assumed that we were going to check on Viktor Volkov. I also assumed that Ranger had a full report on the trade show and that at some time in the near future he’d share that information with me. For the moment I wasn’t messing with his Zen by asking questions.

He turned off Route 30 onto Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard and then left onto Fairview, into a neighborhood that was upper class if you were using ghetto standards.

Viktor Volkov lived in a small cinderblock bungalow stuck between two other small cinderblock bungalows. Across the street was a two-floor cinderblock motel that rented rooms by the hour. Viktor’s house was painted a bright turquoise, his windows had iron security bars cemented into place, and a rusted-out junker car of indeterminate paint color was abandoned half on the road and half on what would have been, in a better part of town, a lawn. In this part of town it was hardscrabble yellow dirt.

Ranger parked at the end of the block, and we sat watching the Volkov house and its surroundings for a half hour. One car pulled into the motel. That was it for traffic. No activity around any of the houses. No cats. No dogs. No kids. No gunshots.

“According to my information,” Ranger said, “Volkov has a van that he uses for his business. I don’t see it here, so he probably isn’t home.”

We left the Porsche and walked to Volkov’s house. The front door and back door were both locked. No answer to our knocking. No answer when we called his cellphone. Ranger used a pick on the front door lock and had it open in thirty seconds.

The house was dark inside. Living room, eat-in kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom. Shabby furniture that you would expect in this level rental. Black heavy-duty plastic body bag in the second bedroom. Looked like there was a body in the bag.