One for the Money (Stephanie Plum 1)

My heart contracted so hard I was afraid my eyeballs might pop out of my head. I stared at Gazarra for a full minute, waiting for my blood pressure to ease out of the red zone, imagining capillaries bursting throughout my body.

“How will they know when I'm boinked?” I asked through clenched teeth. “Maybe he's boinked me already. Maybe we do it twice a day.”

“They figure you'll quit the case when you get boinked. The winning time is actually when you quit the case.”

“You in the pool?”

“Nope. Morelli nailed you when you were in high school. I don't think you'd let a second boinking go to your head.”

“How do you know about high school?”

“Everybody knows about high school.”

“Jesus.” I swallowed the last piece of my last donut and washed it down with coffee.

Eddie sighed as he watched all hope for a part of the donut disappear into my mouth. “Your cousin, the queen of nags, has me on a diet,” he said. “For breakfast I got decaf coffee, half a cup of cardboard cereal in skim milk, and a half grapefruit.”

“I take it that's not cop food.”

“Suppose I got shot,” Eddie said, “and all I had in me was decaf and half a grapefruit. You think that'd get me to the trauma unit?”

“Not like real coffee and donuts.”

“Damn straight.”

“That overhang on your gun belt is probably good for stopping bullets, too.”

Eddie drained his coffee cup, snapped the lid back on, and dumped it into the empty bag. “You wouldn't've said that if you weren't still pissed at the boinking stuff.”

I agreed. “It was cruel.”

He took a napkin and expertly flicked powdered sugar off his blue shirt. One of the many skills he'd learned at the academy, I thought. He sat back, arms folded across his chest. He was 5' 10" and stocky. His features were eastern Slavic with flat pale blue eyes, white blond hair, and a stubby nose. When we were kids he lived two houses down from me. His parents still live there. All his life he'd wanted to be a cop. Now that he was a uniform he had no desire to go further. He enjoyed driving the car, responding to emergencies, being first on the scene. He was good at comforting people. Everyone liked him, with the possible exception of his wife.

“I've got some information for you,” Eddie said. “I went to Pino's last night for a beer, and Gus Dembrowski was there. Gus is the PC working the Kulesza case.”

“PC?”

“Plainclothesman.”

This brought me up straight in my seat. “Did he tell you anything more about Morelli?”

“He confirmed that Sanchez was an informant. Dembrowski let it slip that Morelli had a card on her. Informants are kept secret. The controlling supervisor keeps all the cards in a locked file. I guess in this case it was released as necessary information to the investigation.”

“So maybe this is more complicated than it would first appear. Maybe the killing tied in to something Morelli had been working on.”

“Could be. Could also be that Morelli had romantic interests in Sanchez. I understand she was young and pretty. Very Latino.”

“And she's still missing.”

“Yeah. She's still missing. The department's traced back to relatives in Staten Island and nobody's seen her.”

“I talked to her neighbors yesterday, and it turns out one of the tenants who remembered seeing Morelli's alleged witness has suffered sudden death.”

“What kind of sudden death?”

“Hit and run in front of the building.”

“Could have been an accident.”