Look Alive Twenty-Five (Stephanie Plum #25)(51)

“I see you got your old lady with you,” Eddie said. “You want her inked?”

“Not today,” Ranger said. “I’m looking for Victor Waggle.”

“Good luck, bro. Nobody ever knows where to find that dude. He floats.”

“Does he have friends?” Ranger asked.

“Everyone’s his friend, and no one’s his friend.”

“I need a place to start.”

“The Snake Pit.”

“Been there,” Ranger said.

“His manager is around the corner on State.”

“Manager’s dead,” Ranger said.

“I hadn’t heard. Was it recent?”

Ranger nodded.

“Victor’s gotta be broken up about that,” Eddie said. “They had some kind of a project going. A movie or a TV show.”

“Does Victor have a lot of tattoos?” I asked. “It sounds like you talk to him frequently.”

“It’s the snake,” Eddie said. “His fans all want the snake around their neck. Victor gets a commission for everyone he brings in here. I do one or two a week.”

“Let me know if you see him,” Ranger said.

They did another ritual goodbye thing, and we left the shop.

“You didn’t even pay him off,” I said.

“I helped him get rid of some parasites last year.”

“Ringworm?”

“Fire and personal injury insurers.”

“Will they continue to leave him alone?”

“They’re out of business. They’ve relocated.”

I wasn’t always sure what that meant with Ranger. It could mean they moved to North Carolina, or it could mean they were encased in cement at the bottom of the Delaware River.

“Where do we go from here?” I asked.

“Rangeman. I want to do some research on Leonard Skoogie. It won’t take long.”

Ranger grabbed a kale smoothie from the control room kitchen and took it to his office. If I’d been at the deli I would have tried the Spam Chip Burger. Since I was at Rangeman, I settled for grilled chicken in a spinach wrap. I ate at one of the small bistro tables in the kitchen area and watched the handful of men who were answering phones and watching monitors. Conversation among them was minimal and too soft for me to clearly hear. Once in a while something would beep or a blue diode would flash on a desktop. I finished my wrap and went in search of a cookie. No cookies in sight. The triathletes who worked at Rangeman ate fruit for dessert. I wasn’t up for fruit so I went back to Ranger’s office.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Leonard Skoogie and Ernie Sitz were college roommates. Six months after graduation, Skoogie moved to L.A. and bounced around as an extra, a production assistant, tried script writing. Got a job as a producer for a game show that was cancelled three days after he started. Represented one of the women who was a prize presenter on the show. Got her a few small acting roles. Acquired a second actress. Two years into his career as a talent agent he was arrested for procuring prostitution. He got off with a wrist slap and moved to New York. Eventually he found his way to Trenton and resumed his friendship with Ernie Sitz. It looks like he made a decent income from repping bands for frat parties and magicians for kids’ birthday parties, but so far as I can tell he’s never had a real success. And his three failed marriages were costly to dissolve. He partnered up with Sitz to produce a play, but it closed off Broadway.”

I’m a bounty hunter, barely scraping by, so I’m no one to judge, but it sounded to me like Leonard Skoogie was chasing a dream he had no chance of catching.

“Did you pull information on Sitz?”

“In an odd way, Sitz is a mirror image of Skoogie. He’s made a career of reinventing himself. He’s got a history of making bad choices in wives, business partners, and semi-legal investments. He ran from a racketeering charge that would have been difficult to prove and abandoned the one good piece of real estate he ever owned.”

“The deli?”

“Yes.”

“Speaking of the deli . . . we should get back there before the wrong person tries to take the garbage to the dumpster.”

Ranger closed his computer, stood, and stretched. His T-shirt rode up exposing three inches of abs, and I almost had an orgasm.

We took the elevator to the garage, and Ranger chose his Porsche 911 Turbo. There were no parking places in front of the deli, so he drove to the alley and parked in the small back lot.

“Tempting fate?” I asked him.

“I don’t think there’s much risk to us or the car.”

Lula and Stretch were yelling at each other when we walked in. Stretch had a spatula in his hand, and Lula was armed with a squeeze bottle of ketchup.

“He assaulted me,” Lula said.

“I didn’t assault you,” Stretch said.

“You whacked me with the spatula!”

“That was to get your attention. You always got those earbuds in your ear. You don’t hear anything anybody says to you. And if that isn’t bad enough you were singing. Loud.”

“That is true,” Raymond said. “And you are not such a good singer. It is like someone stepping on cats.”

“That’s ’cause I was singing to Janis Joplin, and she does a lot of screaming,” Lula said. “I wouldn’t have to sing if things weren’t so boring around here. No one’s ordering sandwiches. I haven’t got anything to do.”