Turbo Twenty-Three (Stephanie Plum #23)(40)

I called Connie and asked her to run a report on Stan Ducker and Kenny Morris.

“Do you want me to email them to you, or do you want to pick them up here?” Connie asked. “I’ll be here until three o’clock.”

“I’ll pick them up. If I don’t get there by three just leave them by the back door. Is Lula working today?”

“She’s here at the office. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s working.”

I hung up with Connie and called Eddie Gazarra.

“Do you still need a babysitter for tonight?” I asked him.

“No, it’s a wash,” Eddie said. “My youngest woke up with a stomach bug and is running a fever. I’m not all that unhappy. We were supposed to go to a baby shower. I’d like to get hold of the idiot who thought it was a good idea to have men invited to baby showers.”

I murmured condolences to the youngest and congratulations to Eddie. I disconnected, swiveled in my seat, and looked out at Ducker. He was surrounded by people wanting ice cream.

“Do you need help?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Try to get them into a line before I get trampled.”

I got everyone lined up, and Ducker collected the money and handed out the ice cream. The last person in line got the last Bogart Bar. He wanted two Bogart Bars, but there was only one left, so Ducker gave him a Bogart Kidz Kup for free.

“Done and done,” Ducker said, getting up behind the wheel.

“You sold everything?”

“We sold all the Bogart Bars, and there aren’t enough Kidz Kups left to worry about. Now we just have one more stop. I always get a lottery ticket when I’m done on Saturday. It’s a ritual. I go to the deli on Beverly Street, and I get a hot dog and a lottery ticket.”

I thought a hot dog and a lottery ticket sounded like a good idea. I was familiar with the deli. It was half bakery and half deli. Besides a hot dog and a lottery ticket I could also get a fresh-filled cannoli.

Ducker drove to the cross street and turned right onto Beverly. The deli was in the middle of the block, squashed between three-story row houses. Across the street was an empty lot that served as a repository for bags of trash, a discarded couch, and God-knows-what that lurked in the weeds and rubble of a demolished building.

He parked the ice cream truck at the curb in front of the empty lot. I hiked my messenger bag onto my shoulder and we crossed the street to the deli.

“You go ahead and get what you want,” Ducker said. “I have to use the men’s room.”

I got a cannoli and a hot dog and I went to the register. I bought a lottery ticket, paid for everything, and went to the door. I was about to walk outside when the truck blew up.

BAROOOM!

It was a sturdy truck, but the doors flew off and the whole thing jumped a couple feet off the ground. The deli’s plate glass windows rattled, and I felt the force of the explosion in my chest. An instant fireball consumed the vehicle. Clouds of black smoke billowed off the flames, and the acrid scent of burning tires penetrated the deli.

I was gobsmacked. I stood frozen at the door with my hot dog in one hand and my cannoli in the other.

Ducker came up beside me. “What the fuck?” he said.

“It was sitting there all by itself and it blew up,” I said.

I was actually having trouble breathing. My heart was pounding, and I was trying to push air out of my lungs. If the explosion had occurred fifteen seconds later I’d be dead. Morelli was right. I should stay far away from everything associated with ice cream.

“Someone blew up my truck,” Ducker said.

He sounded stunned, but when I turned to look at him he was grinning.

“Some sonnovabitch blew up my truck,” he said, dancing around in his clown suit. “This is my freaking lucky day. I’m golden. I’m hot.” He stopped dancing. “I need a lottery ticket. I gotta go buy a lottery ticket.”

The clerk was the only other person in the deli, and he was flat on the floor behind the counter.

“We’ve been bombed,” he said.

“Not exactly,” I told him. “It was the ice cream truck. I think you can get up.”

“I need a lottery ticket,” Ducker told the clerk. “And a hot dog.”

I could hear sirens in the distance, and people were venturing out of houses and businesses to check out the fire.

“Has it occurred to you that someone probably just tried to kill you?” I asked Ducker.

“I don’t think so,” Ducker said. “I’m the Jolly clown. Everyone loves me. I think someone was trying to kill you. You’re a bounty hunter. Everyone knows about you. And probably no one likes you. Except me. I like you a lot because you got my truck blown up.”

Bummer.

I called Lula and asked her to pick me up. There were police cars and fire trucks and ambulances in the street, so I told her I’d meet her at the corner. I ate my hot dog and cannoli, peeled off my clown suit, and got rid of the wig. Ducker stood in the street, talking to a couple cops. I didn’t see any reason for me to join in the discussion. I could give a statement some other time. So I left the deli and walked to the cross street to wait for Lula.

I couldn’t get the Jolly Bogart jingle out of my head. It had played on a constant loop the whole time I’d been in the truck. I looked back down the street and wondered if it was still playing. “Jolly, jolly, jolly, jolly.” Another pleasant memory from my childhood shot to hell. I’d only been in the truck for three hours, but after the initial shock of the explosion wore off there was some relief that it had been destroyed.