04 Four to Score (31 page)

“Stop!” Leo shouted. “Stop right where you are.”

He'd dropped the box he'd been carrying, and he was aiming a semiautomatic at me. And he was looking much more professional with a gun in his hand than Sugar had looked.

“You touch that back door, and I'll shoot you,” Leo said. “And before you die I'll chop your fingers off.”

I stared at him bug-eyed and open-mouthed.

Betty rolled her eyes. “You and those fingers,” she said to Leo.

“Hey, it's my trademark, okay?”

“I think it's silly. And beside, they did it in that movie about that short person. Everyone will think you're a copycat.”

“Well, they're wrong. I did it first. I was clipping fingers years ago in Detroit.”

Betty retrieved the box Leo had dropped, carted it into the kitchen and set it on the counter. I read the printing on the side. It was a new chain saw. Black and Decker, 120 horsepower, portable.

Eek.

“You're not going to believe this,” I said, “but there's a dead guy in your cellar. Probably you should call the police.”

“You know when things start to go wrong, it all turns to crapola,” Leo said. “You ever notice that?”

“Who is he?” I asked. “The man down there.”

“Nathan Russo. Not that it matters to you. He was my partner, and he got nervous. I had to settle his nerves.”

My phone rang inside my shoulder bag.

“Christ,” Leo said, “what is that? One of those cellular phones?”

“Yeah. I should probably answer it. It might be my mother.”

“Put your bag on the counter.”

I put it on the counter. Leo rummaged through it with his free hand, found the phone and shut it off.

“This is a real pain in the ass now,” Leo said. “Bad enough I have to get rid of one body. Now I have to get rid of two.”

“I told you not to do it in the cellar,” Betty said. “I told you.”

“I was busy,” Leo said. “I didn't have a lot of time. I didn't notice you helping any to get the money together. You think it's easy to get all that money?”

“I know this is a sort of dumb question,” I said. “But what happened to Eddie?”

“Eddie!” Leo threw his hands in the air. “None of this would have happened if it wasn't for that bum!”

“He's just young,” Betty said. “He's not a bad person.”

“Young? He ruined me! My life's work . . . pooof! If he was here I'd kill him, too.”

“I don't want to hear that kind of talk,” Betty said. “He's blood.”

“Hah. Wait until you're out on the street because your no-good nephew blew our pension plan. Wait until you need to get into a nursing home. You think they're gonna let you into assisted living on your good looks? No sirree.”

Betty put her grocery bag on the small kitchen table and started to unpack. Orange juice, bread, bran flakes, a box of three-ply jumbo-sized trash bags. “We should have gotten two boxes of these trash bags,” she said.

This made me swallow hard. I had a pretty good idea what they were going to do with the trash bags and chain saw.

“So go back to the store,” Leo said. “I'll start downstairs, and you can go get more bags. We forgot to get steak sauce anyway. I was gonna grill steaks tonight.”

“My God,” I said. “How can you think of grilling steaks when you've got a dead man in your basement?”

“You gotta eat,” Leo said.

Betty and Leo were standing with their backs to the side window. I looked over Leo's shoulder and saw Lula bob up and look in the window at us, her hair beads flopping around.

“Do you hear funny clicking sounds?” Leo asked Betty.

“No.”

They both stood listening.

Lula bobbed up a second time.

“There it is again!”

Leo turned, but Lula was gone from the window.

“You're hearing things,” Betty said. “It's all this stress. We should take a vacation. We should go to someplace fun like Disney World.”

“I know what I heard,” Leo said. “And I heard something.”

“Well, I wish you'd hurry up and kill her,” Betty said. “I don't like standing here like this. What if one of the neighbors comes over? How will it look?”

“Downstairs,” Leo said to me.

“And don't make a mess,” Betty said. “I just cleaned down there. Choke her like you did Nathan. That worked out good.”

It was the second time in twenty-four hours someone had pointed a gun at me, and I was beyond scared. I was vacillating between cold, stark terror and being truly pissed. My stomach was hollow from fear, and the rest of my body was spastic with the need to grab Leo by his shirtfront and rap his head against the wall until his fillings fell out of his teeth.

I imagined Lula was scrambling to help, calling the police. And I knew what I needed was to stall for time, but it was hard to think coherently. I was sweating in Betty's forty-degree kitchen. It was the cold sweat of someone facing death badly. Not ready to go.

“I don't g-g-get it,” I said to Leo. “Why are you doing all this killing?”

“I only kill when I have to,” Leo said. “It's not like it's indiscriminate. I wouldn't have killed that sales clerk, but she pulled Betty's ski mask off.”

“She seemed like such a nice girl, too,” Betty said. “But what could we do?”

“I'm a n-n-nice girl,” I said.

“We didn't even get any information from her,” Leo said. “I cut off her finger to show I was serious, and she still wouldn't talk. What kind of a person is that? All she said was that Maxine was in Point Pleasant. Big deal. Point Pleasant. Maxine and twenty thousand other people.”

“Maybe that was all she knew.”

Leo shrugged.

I did a panicked search for another question. “You know what else I don't get? I don't get why you scalped Mrs. Nowicki. Everybody else had their finger cut off.”

“I forgot my clippers,” Leo said. “And all she had in the house was this dinky paring knife. You can't do real good work with a paring knife. Not unless it's supersharp.”

“I keep telling you, you should take ginko,” Betty said. “You don't remember anything anymore.”

“I'm not taking any damn ginko. I don't even know what ginko is.”

“It's an herb,” Betty said. “Everybody takes it.”

Leo rolled his eyes. “Everybody. Unh.”

Lula bobbed up at the window again. And this time she had a gun in her hand. She squinted and sighted and BAM! The window shattered, and a rooster pot holder hanging from a hook on the opposite wall jumped in place.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Leo said, dodging aside, whirling around to face the window.

“Drop your gun, you punk-ass old coot,” Lula yelled. “You don't drop your gun, I'm gonna bust a cap up your ass!”

Leo shot at the window. Lula returned fire, taking out the microwave. And Betty and I dove under the table.

Sirens whooped in the distance.

Leo ran for the front door, where there was more gunfire and a lot of cussing from both Leo and Lula. Police strobes flashed through the front windows, and there was more shouting.

“I hate this part,” Betty said.

“You've done this before?”

“Well, not exactly like this. It was much more orderly last time.”

Betty and I were still under the table when Morelli came in.

“Excuse me,” Morelli said to Betty. “I'd like to speak to Ms. Plum in private.”

Betty crawled out and stood and looked like she didn't know where to go.

I crawled out, too. “You might want to detain her,” I said to Morelli.

Morelli passed her off to a uniform and glared at me. “What the hell's going on here? I answer my page and it's Lula screaming how someone's shooting you.”

“Well, he didn't actually get around to shooting me.”

Morelli sniffed. “What's that smell?”

“Dead guy in the basement. Leo's partner.”

Morelli wheeled around and went downstairs. A minute later he came up smiling. “That's Nathan Russo.”

“And?”

“He's our friendly neighborhood funny money distributor. He's the guy we've been watching.”

“Small world.”

"There's a press down there, too. Under a tarp.

I felt my face crumple and my eyes fill with tears. “He wanted to kill me.”

“I know the feeling,” Morelli said. He put an arm around me and kissed the top of my head.

“I hate to cry,” I said. “I get all blotchy, and it makes my nose run.”

“Well, you're not blotchy right now,” Morelli said. “Right now you're white. The guy downstairs has more color than you.” He guided me through the house to the porch, where Lula was pacing, looking like she'd break out in hives any minute. Morelli sat me down on the step and told me to put my head between my legs.

After a minute the clanging stopped in my head, and I didn't feel like throwing up anymore. “I'm okay,” I said. “I feel better.”

Lula sat next to me. “First time I ever saw a white person who really was white.”

“Don't go anywhere,” Morelli said. “I need to talk to both of you.”

“Yessir, boss,” Lula said.

Morelli squatted next to me and lowered his voice. “You weren't in this house illegally, were you?”

“No.” I shook my head for emphasis. “The door was open. I was invited in. The wind blew the door . . .”

Morelli narrowed his eyes. “You want to pick one?”

“Which one do you like?”

“Christ,” Morelli said.

He went back into the house, which was now filled with cops. An EMS truck had arrived. No need for that. No one had been hurt, and the body in the basement would go home with the coroner in his body snatcher truck. Neighbors had collected on the sidewalk by the EMS truck. Others stood on porches across the street. Betty and Leo were sitting in two separate blue-and-whites. They'd be kept apart from now on and questioned independently.

“Thanks for coming to my rescue,” I said to Lula. “Boy, you really nailed that pot holder.”

“Yeah, only I was aiming for Leo. Sorry I didn't call you in time. I kept getting interference. Lucky I got through to Morelli right away.”

At the end of the block a black Jeep screeched to a halt and a naked man jumped out.

“Goddamn!” Lula said. “I know that naked motherfucker.”

I was on my feet and running. The naked motherfucker was Eddie Kuntz! Eddie saw the crowd in front of his house and immediately scurried behind some shrubbery. I skidded to a stop directly in front of the shrub and stared. Kuntz was tattooed head to toe with colorful messages like “pencil dick” and “woman beater” and “I like to be buttfucked.”

“Ommigod,” I said, trying hard not to be obvious about comparing messages with equipment displayed.

Kuntz was rabid. “They've been holding me hostage. They tattooed my entire body!”

Lula was next to me. “Think they been generous with the pencil dick,” she said. “Think you're more a stubby eraser.”

“I'm going to kill her,” Kuntz said. “I'm going to find her and kill her.”

“Maxine?”

“And don't think you're getting your thousand dollars, either.”

“About the car you just got out of . . .”

“It was that other bounty hunter. The one with the knockers. Said she'd picked up a police call on her scanner and was heading over here. She picked me up on Olden. That's where Maxine dumped me off. Olden! In front of the Seven-Eleven!”

“Do you know where Maxine was going?”

“The airport. All three of them. They're in a blue Honda Civic. And I take that back about the thousand. You bring that cunt to me, and I'll make you goddamn rich.”

I whirled around and ran for the Firebird.

Lula was pounding pavement behind me. “I'm on it,” she was saying. “I'm on it!”

We both jumped in the car, and Lula rocketed away before I even had my door closed.

“They'll take Route One,” she said. “That's why they dropped him off on Olden. They were heading for One.” She cornered Olden with two wheels touching pavement, took the turnoff and hit Route I north.

I'd been so excited I'd forgotten to ask which airport. Like Lula, I'd just assumed it was Newark. I looked over at the speedometer and saw it hovering at ninety. Lula put her foot to the floor, and I braced myself and turned my face away.

“They got that little prick good,” Lula said. “I almost hate to pick Maxine up. You gotta admire her style.”

“Creative,” I said.

“Damn skippy.”

Actually, I thought the tattooing might be a little excessive. I didn't like Eddie Kuntz but I had to wince at the thought of Maxine needling him head to foot.

I was looking for the blue Honda, and I was also looking for Joyce. Wouldn't you know, Joyce would happen on Eddie Kuntz. If there was a naked man anywhere near Joyce, she'd find him.

“There they are!” I yelled. “On the side of the road.”

“I see 'em,” Lula said. “Looks like Maxine got stopped by the cops.”

Not the cops. They got stopped by Joyce Barnhardt, who'd stuck a portable red flasher on the roof of her Jeep. We pulled in behind Joyce and ran to see what was happening.

Joyce was standing on the shoulder of the road, holding a gun on Maxine, Mrs. Nowicki and Margie. The three women were spreadeagled on the ground by Joyce with their hands cuffed behind their backs.

Joyce smiled when she saw me. “You're a little late, sweetiepie. I've already made the apprehension. Too bad you're such a loser.”

“Hunh,” Lula said, slitty eyed.

“You've got three people cuffed, Joyce, and only one of them is a felon. You have no right to manhandle the other two women.”

“I can manhandle whoever I want,” Joyce said. “You're just pissy because I got your collar.”

“I'm pissy because you're being an unprofessional jerk.”

“Careful what you say to me,” Joyce said. “You get me annoyed and you and lard butt might find yourselves on the ground with these three. I've got a couple more cuffs left.”

“Excuse me,” Lula said. “Lard butt?”

Joyce trained her gun on Lula and me. “You've got thirty seconds to get your fat asses out of here. And you should both look for new jobs, because it's clear I'm the primo bounty hunter now.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “We don't deserve to have a cool job like bounty hunter. I've been thinking maybe I'd get a job at that new place just opened, Lickin' Chicken. They tell me you work there you get to eat whatever you want. You even get them biscuits when they're fresh out of the oven. Here, let me help you get these women into your car.”