One for the Money (Stephanie Plum 1)

“Only every detail. You're a real hot topic. I even know what you were wearing when you came in with Dodd. I take it your T-shirt was real wet. I mean real wet.”

“When you first started out as a cop, were you afraid of your gun?”

“I've been around guns most of my life. I had an air rifle when I was a kid, and I used to go hunting with my dad and my Uncle Walt. I guess guns were always just another piece of hardware to me.”

“If I decide to keep working for Vinnie, you think it's necessary for me to carry a gun?”

“It depends what kind of cases you take. If you're just doing skip tracing, no. If you're going after crazies, yes. Do you have a gun?”

“Smith and Wesson .38. Ranger gave me about ten minutes of instruction on it, but I don't feel comfortable. Would you be willing to baby-sit me while I do some target practice?”

“You're serious about this, aren't you?”

“There's no other way to be.”

He nodded. “I heard about your phone call last night.”

“Anything com

e of it?”

“Dispatch sent someone out, but by the time they got there Ramirez was alone. Said he didn't call you. Nothing came in from the woman, but you can register a harassment charge.”

“I'll think about it.”

I waved him off and huffed and puffed my way up the stairs. I let myself into my apartment, dug out an auxiliary phone cord, put a new tape in the answering machine, and took a shower. It was Sunday. Vinnie had given me a week, and the week was up. I didn't care. Vinnie could give the file to someone else, but he couldn't stop me from dogging Morelli. If someone else bagged him before I did, that was the breaks, but until that happened I intended to keep at it.

Gazarra had agreed to meet me at the pistol range behind Sunny's Gun Shop when he got off work at four o'clock. That left me with a whole day of snooping. I started out by driving past Morelli's mother's house, his cousin's house, and various other relatives' houses. I circled the parking lot to his apartment, noting that the Nova was still where I'd left it. I cruised up and down Stark Street and Polk. I didn't see the van or anything else that might indicate Morelli's presence.

I drove by the front of Carmen's building, and then I went around back. The service road cutting the block was narrow and badly maintained, pocked with holes. There was no tenant parking back here. The single rear door opened onto the service road. Across the way, asphalt-shingled row houses also butted up to the road.

I parked as close to the apartment building as possible, leaving barely enough room for a car to squeeze by me. I got out and looked up, trying to place Carmen's second-floor apartment, surprised to see two boarded and fire blackened windows. The windows belonged to the Santiago apartment.

The street-level back door was propped open, and the acrid odor of smoke and charred wood hung in the air. I heard the sweep of a broom and realized someone was working in the narrow corridor that led to the front foyer.

A trickle of sooty water tumbled over the sill, and a darkskinned, mustached man looked out at me. He cut his eyes to my car, and jerked his head in the direction of the road. “No parking here.”

I gave him my card. “I'm looking for Joe Morelli. He's in violation of his bond agreement.”

“Last I saw him he was flat on his back, out cold.”

“Did you see him get hit?”

“No. I didn't get there until after the police. My apartment's in the cellar. Sound doesn't carry good.”

I looked up at the damaged windows. “What happened?”

“Fire in the Santiago apartment. Happened on Friday. I guess if you wanted to be picky you'd say it happened Saturday. Was about two in the morning. Thank God no one was home. Mrs. Santiago was at her daughter's. She was babysitting. Usually the kids come here, but on Friday she went to their place.”

“Anybody know how it started?”

“Could have started a million ways. Not everything's up to code in a building like this. Not that this building's so bad compared to some others, but it's not new, you know what I mean?”

I shaded my eyes and took one last look and wondered how hard it'd be to lob a firebomb through Mrs. Santiago's bedroom window. Probably not hard, I decided. And, at two in the morning, in an apartment this size, a fire started in a bedroom would be a bitch. If Santiago had been home, she'd have been toast. There were no balconies and no fire escapes. All of these apartments had only one way out—through the front door. Although it didn't seem as though Carmen and the missing witness had left through the front door.

I turned and stared into the dark windows of the row houses across the way and decided it wouldn't hurt to question the residents. I got back into the Cherokee and drove around the block, finding a parking place one street over. I rapped on doors and asked questions and showed pictures. The responses were all similar. No, they didn't recognize Morelli's picture, and no, they hadn't seen anything unusual from their back windows on the night of the murder or the fire.

I tried the row house directly across from Carmen's apartment and found myself face to face with a stooped old man wielding a baseball bat. He was beady-eyed and hooked-nosed and had ears that probably kept him indoors when the wind was blowing.