Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel(9)

“Maybe a little.”

“The Yankees are playing Boston tonight. You could come over, catch the game, and spend the night.”

“No can do.”

“Okay, I’ll throw in a pizza.”

“Tempting, but no.”

“Working?”

“If only it was that simple. Briggs is staying with me.”

“You hate Briggs.”

I blew out a sigh. “I don’t hate him. I just find him enormously annoying. Poletti exploded his apartment. He needed a place to stay.”

The cop part of Morelli’s brain put the pieces together. “You’re using Briggs as bait to get Poletti.”

“I’d rather think of my generosity as a charitable act.”

“So why is this charitable act keeping you from spending the night with me?”

“I don’t trust him alone in my apartment. He’ll drink milk directly out of the carton and sleep in my bed.”

“Maybe I can arrest him for something, or you can get Ranger to shoot him. Nothing serious. A flesh wound that would send him to the hospital for a day or two.”

“Boy, you must really miss me.”

“It’s Bob,” Morelli said. “Bob’s desperate.”

Morelli slid his hand under my shirt, kissed me with some tongue action, and I felt heat rush through my stomach and head south. A cop on the other side of the garage yelled for Morelli, and Morelli broke from the kiss.

“Think about it,” Morelli said, stepping away, turning toward the crime scene. “Ranger would probably like the opportunity to shoot someone.”

I took the stairs to the ground level and returned to my Explorer.

“What’s going on up there?” Lula asked.

I put the car in gear and drove out of the garage. “Tommy Ritt is facedown on the cement, and his head has a big hole in it.”

“How bad is it?” Briggs asked.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to put Tommy Ritt back together again.”

“It’s Poletti,” Briggs said. “He’s freaking nuts.”

“Where we going now?” Lula asked. “I’m tired of sitting in this car with short stuff here. He’s kind of creeping me out in that wig.”

“I could take it off,” Briggs said, “but then Poletti might put a bazooka up your butt.”

Lula glared at him. “Is that a dig at my former profession? Because I wasn’t that kind of ’ho. That’s a specialty ’ho what does that.”

“Cripes,” Briggs said.

I took State Street to Stark Street and counted off blocks. The lower part of Stark wasn’t so bad, with legitimate bars, tenement-style apartment buildings, and mom-and-pop businesses. As the street went on it got progressively worse until it resembled a bombed-out war zone where only the rats and the crazies lived.

Poletti’s rooming house was on the fourth block of Stark. Not the worst part of Stark, but not the best either. Gang graffiti covered the buildings, and the stoop sitters were blank-faced druggies. I parked across the street from the rooming house, and we stared out at it. Three stories of grime-coated red brick missing a front door. One window on the third floor was painted black, and two windows on the second floor were cracked. Black soot around one of the third-floor windows suggested there’d been a fire. A rat ran out of the open doorway and scurried down the sidewalk.

“We should take a look,” I said. “And someone needs to stay with the car to make sure it’s not stolen.”

We all sat still as statues. Hard to tell if it was worse to stay with the car or go into the building.

“Okay, I’m going in,” I said. “And I’ll take Briggs with me.”

“Hunh,” Lula said. “How come I have to be the one to stay behind?”

“You’re the one with the gun.”

Lula looked at Briggs. “He don’t have a gun?”

“It got blown up in my apartment,” Briggs said.

I got out of the Explorer, and Briggs hopped out after me. We crossed the street and went into the small entrance hall of Poletti’s building.

“I knew it was a slum, but this is worse than I imagined,” Briggs said. “It smells like a warthog died in here.”

There were two doors on the ground floor. One had MANAGER written on it. I knocked on that door, and it was answered by a small Hispanic woman who was somewhere between fifty and ninety.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m looking for Jimmy Poletti.”

“Don’t know him.”

“He owns this building.”

“Good for him. Tell him my toilet don’t work.”

She attempted to close the door, but I shoved my messenger bag between the door and the frame.

“I’m legal,” she said. “I got a driver’s license.”

“Are you the building manager?” I asked her.

“The what?”

“It says ‘manager’ on your door.”

“No manager here. It must be wrong.” And she slammed the door shut.

I turned and hammered on the door across the hall. I heard a lot of scrambling going on in the apartment, and finally a crazy-eyed, emaciated woman answered the door. “There’s no butterflies here,” she said. “You got the wrong place.”