Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel Read online

  “And his friends?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t exactly have friends. He has associates. They all played poker together, and they hung out in the back room of the dealership on Route 41. It was like a social club. Bernie Scootch, Ron Siglowski, Buster Poletti, who’s a cousin, Silvio Pepper, and Tommy Ritt. I’m told two of them have disappeared. Bernie Scootch and Ron Siglowski. They could be with Jimmy or they could be dead.”

  “Do you think Jimmy’s cleaning house?”

  Briggs shrugged. “He tried to get me while I was crossing a street yesterday. Tried to run me over, but I got out of the way in time. He took a shot at me and missed. And then this morning someone sent a firebomb through my window.”

  “Are you sure it was Jimmy?”

  “It was Jimmy yesterday. I got a good look at him. I guess I don’t know about this morning, but I know he’s got rocket launchers and flamethrowers. He has a place in the Pine Barrens where he goes with the guys to shoot and blow stuff up. I don’t exactly know where it is.”

  “What was he driving yesterday?”

  “The Mustang. I rode in it once. It’s all tricked out. Black and silver. Real sweet ride.”

  “So where do you think I should start looking for Jimmy?”

  “If all he wanted to do was hide, I’d say the Pine Barrens until he could get out of the country. Since he seems to want to kill me, I’d have to go more local. Maybe the slum on Stark Street. Or maybe you want to look in the parking garage. See if there’s an RV with the air-conditioning running.”

  I folded up the map and tucked it into my messenger bag. “Let’s go.”

  “Are you sure you want to take me? I’ve got a big bull’s-eye painted on my back.”

  This was true. And it was the only reason I was even talking to him. Still, I didn’t want to hang him out there unless I absolutely had no other choice. No point putting myself in harm’s way of stray bullets, right? On the other hand, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving him alone in my apartment.

  “You can stay in the office while I go look for Poletti. I’ll drop you off and pick Lula up.”

  “No,” Connie said. “No way. No how. You can’t leave him here.”

  “I can’t take him with me,” I told her. “People will shoot at us.”

  “Why can’t you leave him in your apartment?”

  “He’ll buy pay-per-view porn and go through my underwear drawer.”

  We all looked at Briggs.

  “He can’t even reach your underwear drawer,” Lula said.

  “I can stand on a chair,” Briggs said.

  “How about we take my Firebird and lock him in the trunk,” Lula said.

  “How about we auction you off by the pound for a pig roast,” Briggs said.

  Lula shoved her hand into her purse and started rummaging around. “I got a gun in here somewhere.”

  “You can’t shoot him,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I need him to get Poletti. Anyway, you know you can’t just go around shooting people. It isn’t nice.”

  “Yeah, but he insulted me.”

  “You insulted me first,” Briggs said. “How’d you like to get locked in a trunk?”

  “People wouldn’t want to lock me in a trunk on account of I got a pleasing personality,” Lula said.

  “Maybe for a rhinoceros,” Briggs said.

  I stepped in front of Briggs to keep Lula from hurling herself across the room at him. “I haven’t got time for this. I need to get Poletti. We’ll take Randy with us, and we’ll disguise him somehow. A hat or something, and he can scrunch down in the backseat.”

  Ten minutes later Randy was in the backseat of my Explorer. He was wearing a platinum blond wig and large black-rimmed glasses. He looked like Andy Warhol if Andy Warhol was only three feet tall.

  Lula, looking like a ’ho all dressed up for Let’s Make a Deal, was riding shotgun. And weird as it might seem, she made it look pretty good. When I’m with Lula, I always feel like she’s chocolate cake with a lot of fancy frosting and I’m more in the ballpark of a bagel.

  FOUR

  I TOOK STATE Street to the parking garage and idled at the entrance. There was a lot of police activity on the second level. I leaned out my window, took a ticket from the machine, and rolled into a ground-level spot.

  “Stay here,” I said to Lula and Briggs. “I’ll go investigate and report back.”

  I took the stairs and walked to the back of the garage, where cop cars were angle-parked and yellow crime scene tape was already in place. I spotted Joe Morelli standing inside the taped-off area. He’s part of the Crimes Against Persons unit, mostly working homicide cases, so someone was probably dead on the cement floor.

  Morelli also happens to sort of be my boyfriend. He’s six feet tall and all lean muscle. He has a lot of wavy black hair, his brown eyes can be soft and sexy or hard and assessing, he’s got a dog and a toaster, and his grandmother is even crazier than mine. Today he was wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, jeans, and running shoes. He had his Glock clipped to his belt, and his hands were on his hips as he stared down at the guy sprawled on the pavement.

  I ducked under the crime scene tape and moved next to him. The guy on the ground was facedown in a pool of dried blood. He had a hole in the back of his head the size of a potato.

  “Holy crap,” I said to Morelli, “he looks like he’s been shot with a cannon.”

  “It’s the exit wound,” Morelli said. “Whoever killed him flipped him over. Half his brain is splattered on the silver Honda over there.”

  A wave of nausea rolled through me, and I felt myself break out in a cold sweat.

  “You’re kind of white,” Morelli said. “You’re not going to do the girl thing and faint, are you?”

  “ ‘The girl thing’? Excuse me?”

  Morelli grinned. “You’re such a cupcake.”

  I sucked in some air and made an effort to settle my stomach. So big deal if I am a cupcake. Seemed to me it was a lot better than being a bagel.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “Tommy Ritt.”

  “Oh boy. He’s one of Poletti’s poker buddies.”

  “And you’re after Poletti,” Morelli said.

  “Yes. That’s why I’m here. Poletti owns this property. I was hoping to find him holed up here in a Winnebago.”

  “Sorry, I haven’t seen any Winnebagos.” He turned his attention to me. “Mike Kelly said he saw you with Ranger last night.”

  “It was business.”

  Morelli continued to look at me with what I call his cop eyes. They’re hard and unwavering. An emotionless stare he uses to extract confessions from killers in the interrogation room.

  “Not going to work,” I told him. “I have nothing to confess.”

  That got another grin. “You know all my tricks.”

  I raised an eyebrow, and his grin widened.

  “Randy Briggs showed up on my doorstep this morning,” I said. “He claims Poletti tried to run him down with his Mustang and took a shot at him. And then someone shot a firebomb into his apartment.”

  “I heard about the apartment. I didn’t know it belonged to Briggs. What’s his connection to Poletti?”

  “He was Poletti’s accountant.”

  “Ow. Not a healthy job choice. Did Briggs stop by to tell you he was on his way to Argentina?”

  “Something like that. I don’t suppose you have any idea where I might find Poletti?”

  “Not at the moment,” Morelli said, “but I’ll let you know if something turns up. We’ll be looking for him too. He’s a person of interest in this shooting.”

  “He’s driving a tricked-out black and silver Mustang. And he’s probably packing a rocket launcher.”

  Morelli ducked under the tape with me and walked me to the stairs. “Bob misses you,” he said.

  Bob is Morelli’s big orange, floppy-eared, shaggy-haired dog.

  “I miss him too.”


  Morelli pulled me behind a van and wrapped his arms around me. “How about me? Do you miss me?”

  “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.”

  “I’m not looking for butterflies,” I told her. “I’m looking for Jimmy Poletti.”

  “Poletti confetti,” she said. “Poletti confetti.” She spied Briggs standing behind me and leaned forward for a closer look. “Nice doggy,” she said, patting him on the head.

  Briggs growled at her, and she jumped back into the apartment and slammed the door shut.

  There were four doors at the next level. Two of them were open, and the apartments were trashed. Soiled, lumpy mattresses on the floor. Garbage everywhere. Used drug paraphernalia. A bunch of giant roaches lying sneakers up. Probably overdosed. It looked like someone had had a bonfire in one of the units.

  “They weren’t cooking hotdogs and marshmallows here,” Briggs said.

  I knocked on one of the closed doors, and a moment later a shotgun blast blew the top half of the door apart.

  “Holy crap,” Briggs said, diving to the floor.

  The door opened and a totally tattooed guy looked out. Hard to tell his age. Somewhere in his twenties, maybe. I was flattened against the wall with my heart beating hard in my throat.

  “Did Jiggy send you?” he asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Fucking Jiggy.”

  I inched my way toward the stairs. “I might have knocked on the wrong door.”

  Briggs got to his feet and straightened his wig. “You could have killed us, asshole,” he said to the tattooed guy.

  “I would have been doing you a favor,” the guy said. “That’s the worst wig I ever saw.”

  “I’m in disguise,” Briggs said. “Do you know Jimmy Poletti?”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “He looks like a fat middle-aged car salesman and slum owner,” Briggs said.

  The guy shook his head. “Don’t think I know him.”

  “Who lives in the apartment next to you?” I asked.

  “About forty Guatemalans,” the guy said. “They make noise all night long. They’re almost as bad as the damn dogs.”

  “You got a dog problem?” Briggs asked.

  “Feral Chihuahuas. There’s a whole pack of them. They’ll eat you alive.”

  I trudged up the stairs with Briggs several steps behind me. Four more units here, but three of them were charred, gutted, and closed off with boards hammered across their doorways. The fourth unit’s door was ajar. I stepped in and looked around. One room plus bath. A fridge like you might find in a dorm. Fridge door open. Not plugged in. A double mattress that had been ripped to shreds. A single sneaker about a size 12 and mostly chewed. This was the room with the window painted black.

  “
Looks like the Chihuahuas were here,” Briggs said.

  We took the stairs to the street, and we gasped when we saw the Explorer. It was up on cinderblocks, missing all four wheels and some of its innards. No one was around. Just the picked-clean car sitting at the curb all by itself.

  Lula was inside, slumped behind the wheel, head back, eyes closed, mouth open. I didn’t see any blood. She wasn’t moving. I wrenched the driver’s side door open, and Lula snorted and opened her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Yep. It’s like a ghost town here. Nothing going on.” She looked straight ahead, out the windshield, and saw that the hood was up. “What’s with that?” she asked.

  “Someone stripped the car while you were asleep,” Briggs said. “Boy, are you stupid.”

  Lula got out and stared at what was left of the Explorer. “That’s just rude. I rest my eyes for a minute, and Mr. Sneaky Thief comes along. These people have no respect. They took our wheels. What’s with that? Anyone could see I was in the car and needed those wheels to get home. How am I supposed to get home without wheels?”

  Briggs stood on tiptoes and looked under the hood. “They took more than wheels.”

  I called Connie and asked her to come rescue us.

  “Can’t,” Connie said. “Vinnie isn’t here, and I can’t leave the office.”

  I couldn’t ask Joe. He was working. I didn’t want to ask my father. My mother would have a cow if she knew I was on Stark Street. That left Ranger. He was also working, but he had a lot of flexibility. And if he couldn’t personally rescue me, he could send one of his men.

  “Babe,” he said when I called him.

  “Someone took my wheels.”

  “Your car is on the fourth block of Stark Street.”

  Ranger has the annoying but sometimes life-saving habit of hacking into my cellphone and placing tracking devices on my car. So Ranger knows where I am 24/7.

  “Yes, and I’m with my car, but my wheels are apparently someplace else.”

  There was a moment of silence, and I knew he was smiling. Ranger finds me amusing.

  “I’m with Lula and Randy Briggs,” I said. “And I could use a ride to my parents’ house so I can get Big Blue.”

  “I’m in the middle of something, but I can send Hal. He’s in the neighborhood.”