Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel(54)

“Buster needs to change his lock.”

“Yeah. And then he needs to get a condo in Panama where the shooter can’t find him, since there are only two poker players left.”

“Have you talked to Silvio Pepper?”

“He’s on my list.”

Morelli fed me a spoonful of chocolate ice cream, kissed me again, stepped away, and checked his phone for messages.

“I have to go,” he said. “Hopefully this won’t take too long. Save me some butter pecan.”

“You got it.”



Grandma Mazur called at seven-thirty.

“I’m at the funeral home,” she said. “I came with Marie Zajak, but she had to leave early on account of she had an irritable bowel attack. I was hoping you could give me a ride home.”

“When do you want to get picked up?”

“The viewing is over in a half hour. I thought it would be good if you waited for me on the side street like last time. I don’t see Bella here, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to sneak out the side door just in case. I heard a rumor that she was waiting at the front door with a pie.”

I parked on the street a couple minutes early, cut the engine, and looked around, on high alert for Vlatko. The sun was setting, and the side yard of the funeral home was in deep shade. People were walking to cars that were parked in the small lot to the front of the building and at the curb on Hamilton Avenue.

I heard a heart-stopping shriek that levitated me off the car seat. The shriek was followed by a lot of yelling and cussing, and then Grandma Mazur stomped into view. She was soaked from head to toe, and water dripped from the tip of her nose. She wrenched the passenger side door open, got in, and slammed the door shut.

“Take me home,” she said.

“What happened?”

“Devil woman turned a hose on me.”

I cranked the engine over and put the car in gear. “Are you sure it was her?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I guess the rumor about the pie was wrong.”

“She tricked me. I tell you, she’s evil.”

I watched to make sure Grandma got into my parents’ house without anything else going wrong, and then I went back to Morelli’s.

A half hour later Morelli came home.

“What’s new?” I asked him.

“An early ballistics report indicates the same weapon was used on Scootch, Ritt, and Poletti.”

“So all you have to do is find the gun.”

“Yeah, that’s all I have to do.”

I followed him into the kitchen. “Do you think these could be contract killings?”

“You’re thinking Buster hired someone to kill Scootch and Poletti when he was away from his apartment.”

“He could have called Scootch and Poletti and told them to come to his apartment, and when Scootch and Poletti got there the shooter was waiting for them.”

“Motive?”

“Get rid of everyone who could implicate him in the slave trade.”

“So you think Pepper is next?”

“Unless they’re working together.”

Morelli pulled the butter pecan ice cream out of the freezer and got a spoon out of the silverware drawer. “What about Briggs?”

“From what I can see, everyone hates him. Poletti tried to run him over, and Buster tried to kill him with a car bomb.”

“What about the rockets?”

“Wild card.”

“That’s as good as anything I’ve got,” Morelli said.

I got my own spoon and went to work on the chocolate chip ice cream. “I had an interesting night. I picked Grandma up at the funeral home after your grandmother turned a hose on her.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It’s going to take days for the Buick to dry out. She was soaked.”

“At least they aren’t shooting at each other like the Hatfields and McCoys.”

“Not yet.”





TWENTY-THREE


IT WAS SUNDAY, and Morelli and Bob had breakfast and took off to help Morelli’s brother, Anthony, put a swing set together for his kids. I waved them off, had a second cup of coffee, and called Lula.

“I’m going to visit Forest,” I said. “Want to ride along?”

“Sure,” she said. “Nothing much doing here.”

I took my big bag of dog food out to the car and drove to Lula’s apartment. I hadn’t heard from Ranger, so I had no idea what was happening with Vlatko. The possibilities sent a wave of nausea through my stomach, and I watched my rearview mirror, making sure I wasn’t being tailed by a guy with one eye and a sharp knife.

I picked Lula up and drove to Stark Street, slowing when we got to Buster’s building. The CSI van was parked curbside, and a single strip of yellow crime scene tape fluttered at the apartment’s front door.

“Did you hear about Jimmy Poletti?” I asked Lula.

“Hard not to hear. It was on every news station. They even interviewed his wife, who didn’t seem that broken up. Maybe she’s the one shooting all these guys. Maybe she has a bad hair day and she pops someone. And she could specialize in poker players. She might have been traumatized by a poker player when she was a kid.”