One for the Money (Stephanie Plum 1)

I looked at my watch. It was almost nine. I couldn't get to Bernie before closing. Too bad. I was pretty sure if I had a daiquiri I could think much more clearly and probably figure out who tried to send me into orbit.

I turned the television on and sat in front of it, but my mind was elsewhere. It was scanning for potential assassins. Of my captures only Lonnie Dodd was a possibility, and he was in jail. More likely this had to do with the Kulesza murder. Someone was worried about me poking around. I couldn't imagine anyone being worried enough to want to kill me. Death was very serious shit.

There had to be something I was missing here. Something about Carmen or Kulesza or Morelli . . . or maybe the mystery witness.

An ugly little thought wriggled around in a back corner of my brain. So far as I could see, I was a genuine, mortal threat to only one person. That person was Morelli.

The phone rang at eleven, and I caught it before the machine picked up.

“Are you alone?” Morelli asked.

I hesitated. “Yes.”

“Why the hesitation?”

“How do you feel on the subject of murder?”

“Whose murder are we talking about?”

“Mine.”

“I feel warm all over.”

“Just wondering.”

“I'm coming up. Watch for me at the door.”

I tucked the defense spray into the waistband of my shorts and covered it with my T-shirt. I glued my eye to the peephole and opened the door when Morelli strolled down the hall. Every day he looked a little bit worse. He needed a haircut, and he had a week's worth of beard that probably had only taken him two days to grow. His jeans and T-shirt were street-person quality.

He closed and locked the door behind himself. He took in my scorched, bruised face and the bruises on my arm. His expression was grim. “You want to tell me about it?”

“The cut lip and the bruises are from Ramirez. We had a tussle, but I think I won. I gassed him and left him throwing up in the road.”

“And the singed eyebrows?”

“Mmmm. Well, that's a little complicated.”

His face darkened. “What happened?”

“Your car blew up.”

There was no reaction for several beats. “You want to run that by me again?” he finally said.

“The good news is . . . you don't have to worry about Morty Beyers anymore.”

“And the bad news?”

I took his license plate from the kitchen counter and handed it to him. “This is all that's left of your car.”

He stared down at the plate in shocked silence.

I told him about Morty Beyers's wife leaving him, and the bomb, and the three phone calls from Dorsey.

He drew the same conclusion I'd drawn. “It wasn't Ramirez.”

“I made a mental list of people who might want me dead, and your name was at the top.”

“Only in my dreams,” he said. “Who else was on the list?”