Turbo Twenty-Three (Stephanie Plum #23)(23)

“Not my bad,” Butchy said. “I didn’t put him there. And when I loaded the truck there wasn’t no room for a dead guy. That truck was full up to the doors. Someone got away with some ice cream. My thinking is that Zigler was just a placeholder. He was put there to take the attention away from the fact that someone’s stealing ice cream.”

“Right, and maybe it was aliens stealing the ice cream,” Gus said.

“Exactly,” Butchy said. “It was most likely them Mexicans just come over the border.”

Gus and I exchanged glances.

“This is what I got to work with,” Gus said. “He’s dumb as a box of rocks.”

Butchy sucked on his cigarette. “Haw,” he said, blowing out a cloud of toxic smoke.

Gus gave me a list of ice cream orders. “You can read, right?”

“Yep.”

“I always gotta ask these days. You never know. We have to pack the truck for delivery, and we have to put the ice cream in according to drop-off order. It’s all color-coded, and if you start at the top of the list you can’t go wrong. Sometimes the trucks go out to warehouses for fulfillment. When we do those trucks we load pallets, and we use the forklift. This truck is doing local deliveries, so the orders have been shrink-wrapped and we gotta move them on dollies. You’re gonna take a dolly into the warehouse freezer and stack it up as best you can with your orders. Then you’re gonna push it out here, and Butchy is gonna load it into the truck. We got two dollies, so while he’s loading you can go back and get more orders. When he turns blue from being in the freezer truck you’ll swap jobs with him until he thaws out.”

There was a yellow forklift parked on the far side of the loading dock and two things next to it that I assumed were the dollies. They looked like something from the Home Depot garden section. A wide, flat shelf on heavy-duty castors with handles attached to both ends.

I stuffed the list of orders into my jeans pocket and took a dolly for a test drive. I wrestled it around to the door leading to the hallway and shoved it down the hall to the freezer. The freezer door had a numerical lock on it. Bummer. I returned to the loading dock and asked Gus about the lock.

“Just punch in zero, zero, zero, zero,” Gus said.

“That’s the code?”

“Yup. Think you can remember it?”

“Me and everyone else.”

“Now you’re catching on. We try to keep things simple here. Otherwise I gotta do everything myself.”

“I can’t get locked in the freezer, can I?”

“Good question. No. The door opens from the inside.”

I returned to the freezer, punched the code in, and rolled the dolly through the door. The door closed behind me, and my heart did a little flip. I tried the door and it opened. Good deal. I wasn’t going to freeze to death. Three-quarters of the freezer was devoted to shrink-wrapped ice cream on pallets. The remaining space contained smaller quantities of the color-coded shrink-wrapped orders. I started at the top of the list and loaded the dolly. By the time I got the dolly loaded my fingers were cold and aching, and my nose was running. I towed the dolly out of the freezer and paused for a moment, stamping my feet and rubbing my hands together. I needed Uggs and gloves and a sweatshirt. I’ll be better prepared next time, I thought. The follow-up thought was that I hoped there wasn’t a next time.

I pushed the dolly down the hall, maneuvered it through the loading dock door, and handed it over to Butchy. I got the second dolly and repeated the drill. Butchy didn’t seem inclined to swap jobs, so we kept going until the last order was placed in the truck a little before eleven.

“Now what?” I asked Butchy.

Butchy lit up. “Now we hang out and wait for Gus to come back. He’s got a bad prostate. He takes lots of pee breaks. He says it just dribbles out. Pathetic, right?”

“I wish I didn’t know that.”

Butchy sucked on his cigarette. “I go like a racehorse. I got a real fire hose.”

Butchy was a scrawny guy with an eagle’s beak nose, bad skin, bad teeth, and a bad haircut. He was in his late teens to early twenties. The fact that I now knew he had a fire hose did nothing to enhance my opinion of him.

The hallway door opened, and a man came out dressed in a bright green clown suit. He was wearing an orange wig that was a cross between Ronald McDonald and Carrot Top. His nose was covered in red greasepaint. He was the Jolly Bogart clown. When I was a kid he was the highlight of my day. Even if I didn’t get ice cream I loved to hear the truck come down the street playing the Jolly jingle.

“Hey,” Butchy said to him.

“Yeah,” Jolly said. “Where’s my shit? Is it in the truck?”

“Gus hasn’t come out with it yet,” Butchy said. “He’s trying to drain the lizard.”

“Cripes, how long’s he been in the can?”

Butchy looked at his watch. “Half hour.”

Jolly blew out a sigh, and his shoulders slumped. “This is gonna mean an extra fifteen minutes in the clown suit. Could it get any worse?”

“The clown suit looks comfortable,” I said.

“Right,” Jolly said. “Nice and baggy. Gives my boys room to breathe, which is a good thing because the only fun they have is knocking against each other. You know what it’s like to try to get laid when you’re a clown? It’s not easy. The greasepaint won’t come off my nose. I glow in the dark. And you know what I gotta do all day? Smile at the rotten, smelly, snot-nosed little kids. I hate kids.”