Two for the Dough (Stephanie Plum 2)

“I make you nervous? That's good. You're the one who's fucking squirrelly, and I make you nervous.”

“Better watch who you're calling fucking squirrelly.”

“Let me tell you the difference between you and me,” Spiro said. "This is all business for me. I act like a professional. Somebody stole the caskets, so I hired an expert to find them. I didn't go around shooting my partner in the knee because I was pissed. And I wasn't so stupid that I used a fucking stolen gun to shoot him with and then got myself caught by an off-duty cop. I wasn't so fucking nuts that I thought my partners were plotting against me. I didn't think this was some fucking coup.

“And I didn't go wacko over sweetie pie here. You know what your problem is, Kenny? You get on an idea, and you can't get off. You get obsessed with shit, and then you can't see anything else. And you always have to be the fucking show-off. You could have gotten rid of Sandeman nice and quiet, but no, you had to hack off his fucking foot.”

Kenny chuckled. “And I'll tell you what your problem is, Spiro. You don't know how to have fun. Always the serious undertaker. You should try sticking that big-bore needle into something alive for a change.”

“You're sick.”

“Yeah, you're not so healthy yourself. You've spent enough time watching me work my magic.”

I could hear Spiro shift behind me. “You're talking too much.”

“Doesn't matter. Sweetie pie isn't going to tell anyone. She and her granny are going to disappear.”

“Fine by me. Just don't do it here. I don't want to be involved.” Spiro crossed the room, flipped the circuit breaker, and the lights flashed on.

Five crated caskets lined one wall, the furnace and water heater sat in the middle of the room, and a jumble of crates and boxes had been stacked next to the back door. It didn't take a genius to guess the contents of the crates and boxes.

“I don't get it,” I said. “Why did you bring the stuff here? Con is coming back to work on Monday. How will you keep this from him?”

“It'll be gone by Monday,” Spiro said. “We brought everything in yesterday, so we could take inventory. Sandeman was carrying the whole shitload around in his pickup, doing fucking tailgate sales. Lucky for us you saw the furniture truck in Delio's. Another couple of weeks with Sandeman running loose and nothing would have been left.”

“I don't know how you got it in, but you'll never get it out,” I said. “Morelli is watching the house.”

Kenny snorted. “It goes out the same way it came in. In the meat wagon.”

“For Christ's sake,” Spiro said. “It's not a meat wagon.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. It's a slumber coach.” Kenny stood up and yanked me to my feet

. “The cops watch Spiro, and they watch the house. They don't watch the slumber coach and Louie Moon. Or at least who they think is Louie Moon. You could put a hat on Bonzo the chimp and put him behind those tinted windows, and the cops would think it was Louie Moon. And good old Louie is real cooperative. You just give Louie a hose and tell him to clean things up, and Louie is busy for hours. He don't know who's driving around in his goddamn slumber coach.”

Not bad. They dressed Kenny up to look like Louie Moon, brought the guns and ammo to the funeral home in the hearse, parked the hearse in the garage, and then all they had to do was run the boxes between the garage and the back door to the cellar. And Morelli and Roche couldn't see the back door to the cellar. They probably couldn't hear anything in the cellar either. I didn't think it likely Roche would have bugged the cellar.

“So what's with the old lady?” Spiro asked Kenny.

“She was in the kitchen looking for a teabag, and she saw me cutting across the lawn.”

Spiro's face tightened. “Did she tell anybody?”

“No. She came barreling out of the house, yelling at me for stabbing her in the hand. Telling me I needed to learn respect for old people.”

So far as I could see, Grandma wasn't in the cellar. I hoped it meant Kenny had her locked in the garage. If she was in the garage she might still be alive, and she might be unhurt. If she was tucked away somewhere in the cellar, beyond my view, she was much too quiet.

I didn't want to consider the reasons for too quiet, preferring to squash the panic clawing at my stomach and replace it with some more constructive emotion. How about cool reasoning? Nope. I didn't have any of that available. How about cunning? Sorry, low on cunning. How about anger. Did I have any anger? Fucking A. I had so much anger my skin could hardly contain it all. Anger for Grandma, anger for all the women Mancuso'd abused, anger for the cops who were killed with the stolen ammo. I pulled the anger in until it was hard and razor sharp.

“Now what?” I said to Kenny. “Where do we go from here?”

“Now we put you on ice for a while. Until the house empties out. Then I'll see what kind of a mood I'm in. We have a bunch of options being that we're in a funeral parlor. Hell, we could strap you to the table and embalm you while you're still alive. That would be fun.” He pressed the tip of the knife blade to the back of my neck. “Walk.”

“Where?”

He jerked his head. “Over to the corner.”

The crated caskets were stacked in the corner. “To the caskets?”